Oral Answers to Questions

Peter Bottomley Excerpts

Tuesday 12th September 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mike Freer]

We look carefully at why all cases are vacated; in fact, the biggest cause of vacation is often the non-availability of prosecution or defence counsel, not of legal executives.

[Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)]

May I put it to Ministers that the nine-month wait for granting simple probate is unfair on people trying to sell their parents’ home? I failed to get the probate service to work, and I have a constituent who has written to the Prime Minister. Will Ministers please sort it out?

[Mike Freer]

The time taken once all required documents are received is between six and nine weeks. We always advise that no one should take a decision on the sale of a property until probate is granted, but I can reassure my hon. Friend that despite a significant increase in applications, the service is recruiting and training up more than 100 new caseworkers to ensure that it delivers the service that my hon. Friend wants, as do I.

Assisted Dying

Peter Bottomley Excerpts

Monday 4th July 2022 Westminster Hall

[Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)]

I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi), who introduced this debate. I will not go through my list of family members, friends and constituents whose deaths I have been present at, or who I saw just shortly before their death; we can all do that and do it with sincerity. I am aware that my parents agreed to my brother’s life being ended after an accident when he could not live.

What I want to do is briefly to pick up two points about hospice end-of-life care and death on request—which is my neutral way of describing what we are talking about. In the Netherlands, people are not allowed to have death on request in or from a hospice; they have to ask to leave the hospice to have their life ended by euthanasia. Incidentally, the Dutch distinguish between euthanasia and assisted suicide, and nearly all are by euthanasia; they are not assisted suicides. The proportion of people and the number of people in Dutch hospices who ask to leave so that their life can be ended is very, very low; it is less than one in fifty.

Secondly, I have heard people say that people often commit suicide because they want their life to end and they cannot find another legal way of doing it. The Dutch rate of euthanasia—death on request—and assisted suicide is between 6,000 and 7,000 cases a year. The Netherlands has a population of about 17 million. If we translated their numbers to this country, we would have well over 25,000 people a year. How many suicides a year do we have in this country that we know about? Obviously, some are not classified as suicides, but the conventional figure is about 5,000 to 6,000. We are in effect being told, “Everything’s all right, because it’s been all right in the Netherlands. And by the way, expect death on request and euthanasia figures to be four times the level of our known suicides.” I do not sign up for that.

The last thing that I want to say is that some people say that two out of three suicides may be because people want to end their lives early because of some medical condition, or whatever. We are not talking about the depressions or the other things from which people often recover. I just put it on record that for every person who successfully commits suicide, there are probably 20 people who may have tried, one way or another.

If we seriously want to believe that bringing in legal euthanasia or assisted suicide—death on request—will drop the suicide rate, look at the Dutch. While their numbers of assisted deaths have gone up significantly—the law was passed in 2001 and enacted in 2002—from 2003-04 onwards, there has been a pretty consistent rise in the number of suicides in the Netherlands. The idea that changing the law will drop the suicide rate, or act as a substitute for effective end-of-life care, is, I believe, wrong.

The more often we debate this in the House of Commons, the better, as far as I am concerned. I am willing to acknowledge some points that people make, but most of my friends—not all—who had motor neurone disease did not ask for death on request. Most of the people who told me in advance that they were going to end their lives if they were in the last days of a terminal condition did not end their lives. We ought to be far more careful about the way we debate this. It is not a one-sided debate.