Coroners (Determination of Suicide) Bill [HL]

Baroness Berridge Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 28th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, I begin by thanking the right reverend Prelate for bringing his Private Member’s Bill for the third time before Parliament. If he believed in luck, I would say “third time lucky”. I am pleased to see that the Bill has been widened beyond gambling being recorded as a relevant causative factor in a death by suicide.

I wish to briefly address one of the reasons given previously by His Majesty’s Government as to why this sensible piece of legislation is not possible and one of the implications for our cultural understanding of suicide. His Majesty’s Government have said that if we introduce a statement of relevant causative factors for deaths by suicide then we would have to introduce it for all the causes a coroner might state for a death—namely, misadventure, unlawful killing, accident et cetera. However, suicide as a cause of death stands alone and needs to be treated separately, as it is the only cause of death that will be affected potentially by any introduction of assisted dying or assisted suicide legislation. No one would suggest that we would have assisted dying by way of misadventure or accident; sadly, I think we might end up with unlawful killing. Why would the Government not want to assist parliamentarians to have this evidence when next considering such legislation, which, I might add, I strongly oppose?

The right reverend Prelate outlined the comments from the coroner in the inquest into the tragic suicide of Molly Russell. I have high hopes for the Online Safety Bill and the duty of care it will create to ensure that, when on the internet, children and vulnerable adults do not have access to the type of material Molly viewed. However, any provision, if legalised, on assisted dying or assisted suicide would of course be on the internet, so legislation is also going to have to create a miraculous Chinese wall to ensure lawful assisted suicide information is kept away from other footage, such as that which Molly viewed.

We know from the work done, particularly by the right reverend Prelate, that we would need to potentially block from gambling sites, or prescribe limits on, links to any lawful assisted suicide website. I hope this brief description of this information on the internet outlines the difficulties we would have in this task. I think it might be impossible, but without the causes and factors behind suicides, as outlined in this Bill, it is definitely impossible.

Further, this data would enable more detailed analysis of the role of mental health in deaths by suicide. I am currently serving on the pre-legislative scrutiny committee of the draft mental health Bill. The current Mental Health Act sits on the hard-won moral tectonic plate that suicide is not criminal but to be prevented and not encouraged or aided. Under the Mental Health Act, even when you have capacity—a factor I think many people do not realise—the state can detain you when you are ill and can forcibly treat you to avoid you committing suicide. Recently, a healthy 23 year-old woman in Belgium chose to be euthanised although she was physically fit and well but was mentally unwell after being in the vicinity, although uninjured physically, of a terrorist incident. The data on causes of suicide that this Bill asks for will enable parliamentarians to consider, when looking at assisted suicide, whether it should be given on the basis of psychiatric illness alone. It is a controversial proposal.

The Government have always maintained that assisted dying or assisted suicide is a conscience issue for parliamentarians, but I would argue that not collecting this data is perilously close to the Government leaning in favour of such legislation. A recent peer-reviewed article by Dr Jones, in volume 11 of the Journal of Ethics in Mental Health, found that some assisted dying legislatures have seen increased non-assisted dying suicide rates. It is therefore essential for legislators to have such data to assess the risk of increasing the rates of suicide in England and Wales through the introduction of any such legislation.

It is a hard-won principle that the state should protect its citizens from harm, whether from foreign states, third-party actors, other citizens or themselves. I fear that we might tamper with this moral tectonic plate without the necessary data. So I hope that His Majesty’s Government will give the Bill the time in the other place that it needs to become law.