Mr. Andrew Munro:

It is excessively challenging, given the countries where commercial surrogacy is allowed and their regulatory systems. They are not European Union states with strong rule-of-law systems where it can be guaranteed that certain things are happening. We would have great difficulty from this remove in certifying that a country in Asia, Africa or wherever else was applying standards. One would have to go out and carry out inspections and have an equivalence regime. There is not really a commercial surrogacy regime anywhere in Europe that provides this type of regulation. I suppose that informs the Government's policy choice in respect of commercial surrogacy domestically. I am not saying it cannot be done; I am just saying there are challenges there. I think the issues paper raises them in order that the committee can explore them and identify the risks and then try to identify how to get assurance that the standards we would like to see applied in country X are actually being applied and how we can ensure that the intending parents, the child and the surrogate mother are not being exploited, building systems around that. It is a bit like building health regulation here at home. I refer to all the standards we have had to raise here and in child protection. Looking at the architecture we have developed over the decades around the entirety of health and children regulation, those are the kinds of challenges being explored here.