Dan Jarvis: “Opt-out organ donation can help draw people together”

Liz Bates

Plans to introduce an organ donation ‘opt-out’ system will face their final hurdle in the House of Commons this week. With the nation and Parliament bitterly divided over Brexit, Dan Jarvis believes now is the perfect opportunity to pull together – and show how democracy can bring positive change. He talks to Elizabeth Bates



When former British Army Major Dan Jarvis tells you to get out of his way, you take notice. Thankfully the threat is not aimed at me, but at any MPs who might be considering blocking a pioneering piece of legislation he will bring back to the Commons this week.

“I think anyone would be extremely ill-advised to get in the way of this,” he says firmly, as we drink tea in his Westminster office.

The legislation he is so doggedly defending is the Organ Donation Bill, which will enter its final Commons stages on Friday. The Private Member’s Bill – which has been steered through by Labour MP Geoffrey Robinson – will change the rules of the organ donation system to presume someone consents to donating their organs unless they opt-out of the register.

With Robinson unable to guide the bill over the final hurdle due to ill health, Jarvis – who has championed the campaign from the start – is stepping in to oversee its remaining stages.

The Barnsley MP speaks with pride about an issue close to his heart, and puts the campaign’s success down to its ability to build cross party ties, and win early support from the Department of Health.

“I have to say that Jackie Doyle-Price [the health minister] has been brilliant. She has done a fantastic job of shepherding the bill through Parliament,” Jarvis says. “I’m just really sorry that Geoffrey is not going to be there on the day. But I am really proud that he has allowed me to – hopefully – carry the ball over the line.”

The changes would see people automatically enrolled on an organ donation register, which they can remove themselves from if they choose. It is a system similar to the one that has been operating in Wales since 2015 and seeks to address the urgent organ shortage that leads to hundreds of preventable deaths each year.

England has some of the lowest rates of consent for organ donation in Western Europe, with only around three in ten people signed up to the register. In 2016 more than 450 people died waiting for a compatible transplant that was not available in time.

Evidence from other countries suggests that moving to an opt-out system significantly boosts the number of organ donations. Spain has climbed the international league table and now has the highest donation rate in the world since it introduced a system of deemed consent, and the government estimates that up to 500 lives a year could be saved here.

For Jarvis though, the healing effect of the change could reach well beyond England’s hospital beds, to the political wounds inflicted on the country by Brexit.

Despite the conflict caused by the 2016 vote, he believes that Britain’s “decent majority” will prevail, and considers the NHS the ultimate unifying institution.

“The country feels really divided,” he says. “I think that part of the way we can heal the divides, at what is a very difficult time for the country, is an unselfish act. The way you can pull people together is by the way in which we behave and respond and interact with others.

“And actually for me organ donation draws all that together because it is a very unselfish act to commit to donate your organs in the event of your death.”

The Labour MP is all too familiar with the discord created by Brexit, having also taken on the job of Sheffield City Region Mayor last year – a role which covers a strongly Leave-supporting area.

He sees his mission in the post as one of delivering on the famous Brexiteer slogan ‘Take Back Control’, which so captured voters’ imagination in the post-industrial towns of South Yorkshire and beyond.

And central to that, Jarvis believes, is a sweeping programme of devolution and constitutional reform, which would replace the establishment structures that became the focus of political disillusionment almost two years ago.

“Devolution provides us with an opportunity to take back control, not from Brussels but from Westminster and Whitehall,” he says. “Brexit provides us with a CTRL-ALT-DELETE moment for the country. It provides us with a moment to refresh and renew our democracy.”

As part of that he suggests a radical overhaul of the House of Lords, which would see hereditary peers abolished and replaced with elected regional representatives, which Jarvis says could operate like a “senate of the nation”.

He explains: “One of the reasons I think people voted for Brexit is because, frankly, they didn’t feel that they had a stake – that globalisation had brought all sorts of benefits but not to them.

“So, obviously there is an important role for constituency MPs in terms of making sure that their areas are represented. But I think there is an important piece of work through a constitutional convention, to look at how we can make sure the rest of the country feels that it has a loud, clear, authoritative voice in this place. And one way you could do it, perhaps, is by converting the unelected second chamber into an elected senate of the nation.”

“One model,” he continues, “would be to draw in the Metro Mayors – that’s a way of doing it.”

Jarvis himself is test-case for such a scenario, having juggled his mayoral and parliamentary duties since spring this year. His colleagues who made the move before him – most recently Andy Burnham in Manchester and Steve Rotheram in Liverpool – chose to relinquish their Westminster seats.

So, when he broached the possibility of doing both he initially faced opposition from Labour bosses, but he believes in the model.

“It is an advantage, in the sense that I think there is a particular insight that I can offer to the Commons from also being a mayor,” he says. “The other mayors don’t have the ability to be in this place and to use the national platform that parliament is to speak up for their area.”

Jarvis says he is working closely with Burnham, Rotheram and others to give the north the national representation it has been lacking, and reveals that plans for a Council for the North, which would bring together regional leaders, are underway.

“A number of us met in Newcastle to discuss that,” he says.

“I think we are still trying to work through some of the detail of what that might involve, but I think we need some sort of mechanism that would draw the leaders of the North of England together.

“I think the North has got to cooperate and work together and that is our best chance.”

Cooperation is a theme that seems to run through every aspect of Jarvis’ political career, dominating his view of post-Brexit Britain and enabling the cross-party work that has brought his Organ Donation Bill to the brink of success.

And he is keen that others share his cooperative spirit when it comes to the crunch vote.

“I have got my fingers crossed that it will go smoothly on the day,” he says.

“With this place you never quite know… It would be a very brave parliamentary colleague who stood in front of a piece of legislation supported by the Prime Minister and supported by the leader of the opposition, and has widespread support from across the country. And because, above all else, it will save lives.”