Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Alistair Strathern Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 29th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[Danny Kruger]

Thank you very much. I do not want to have too much grumbling at the eight-minute moment. I will take my 15 minutes, with time for interventions.

I start by paying tribute to the hon. Member for Spen Valley (Kim Leadbeater) for her very powerful speech and the way in which she has led this campaign—with great respect, sensitivity and, to use a contested word, dignity. She and I knew each other before we were MPs, when we both worked in the charity sector. I like and admire her greatly, and I know that we have more in common than might appear today.

All of us in this House have this in common: we all share a deep concern about the experience of people dying or fearing death, pain and suffering. I bear heavily on my conscience the people whose lives will be prolonged beyond their wishes if I get my way and this Bill is defeated today. I will not disregard those people or minimise their anxiety. We will hear those voices in today’s debate—we have heard many of them already—speaking through hon. Members in what I know will be very moving speeches.

If I voted for this Bill, I would have on my conscience many more people whose voices we cannot hear—the people who would be vulnerable as a consequence of the huge changes that this Bill would introduce in our society and in the NHS. My view is that if we get our broken palliative care system right and our wonderful hospices properly funded, we can do so much more for all the people who we will hear about today, using modern pain relief and therapies to help everybody die with a minimum of suffering when the time comes. We will not be able to do that if we introduce this new option; instead, we will expose many more people to harm.

I will go through the Bill in a moment, but first I will say a word about process, in response to the points made by the hon. Member for Spen Valley. This Bill is simply too big for the time that it has been given, and I implore hon. Members not to hide behind the fiction that it can be amended substantially in Committee and in its later stages. The remaining stages of a private Member’s Bill are for minor tweaks, not the kind of wholesale restructuring that we would need if we were ever to make this Bill safe. Members who vote for the Bill today must be prepared to see it become law largely unamended. I suggest that if they have any doubts, the only responsible choice is to vote no, and let the advocates of assisted dying bring back a better Bill at another time.

[Alistair Strathern (Hitchin) (Lab)]

I deeply appreciate the respectful way in which the hon. Gentleman is making his point, but I stand before him not sure of how any colleague in this Chamber cannot have doubts whichever way they are voting today. It feels like there are two necessary harms that we are all forced to weigh up. If the hon. Gentleman is so certain that doubt should push people one way, I am deeply intrigued to hear why that is, when it is very clear that many people will continue to suffer unnecessarily if we reject this Bill.

[Danny Kruger]

I recognise that there are very many doubts on each side, and I fully respect the arguments that have been made by the hon. Member for Spen Valley. Of course this is a finely balanced debate, but the point about process is that this Bill is too flawed; there is too much to do to it to address in Committee. By all means, let us have this debate, but let us have that before a Bill of this magnitude is brought forward, The consideration of the Bill should be much more comprehensive.

Oral Answers to Questions

Alistair Strathern Excerpts

Tuesday 20th February 2024 Commons Chamber

[Alex Chalk]

The Department for Business and Trade is better placed to answer those specific points, but I would say two things. First, as a matter of sacred principle, if material comes into a prosecutor’s possession that might be considered capable of undermining the case of the prosecution, that material should be disclosed to the defence. That is one of the things that has been considered by Sir Wyn Williams’s inquiry. What did the Post Office know, when did it know it, and what did it do with the material before it? Across the House, we want to get to the bottom of those questions.

[Alistair Strathern (Mid Bedfordshire) (Lab)]

5. What assessment he has made of the effectiveness of the rapid deployment community payback pilots.

[The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Edward Argar)]

It is a pleasure to respond to my first question from the hon. Gentleman since his election.

As part of the Government’s antisocial behaviour action plan, community payback teams are working in partnership with 11 local authorities to rapidly clean up antisocial behaviour in the community. The pilots started in July 2023, and we are in the process of analysing the outcomes. Initial observations point to the pilots having been successful, with thousands of hours of reparative work being done by hundreds of people on probation within 48 hours of local authority notification, allowing the public to see justice done.

[Alistair Strathern]

These rapid-deployment community payback scheme pilots were supposed to pave the way for the accelerated roll-out of exactly the kind of swift, transparent restorative justice that victims of crime in my constituency are desperate to see. Unfortunately, I understand that, of a planned 20,000 hours of work, only 2,000 hours have been delivered by the pilots. Can the Minister reveal whether that is the case? If so, what can be learned from the clear barriers to success?

[Edward Argar]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, but the clue is in the word “pilot.” These pilots were carried out in 11 areas, over three months, in the run-up to Christmas, and 175 people completed around 2,000 hours of unpaid work. We are analysing the outcome of those pilots and, based on what that analysis says, I look forward to exploring how we can roll this out more widely across the country.