Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Baroness Butler-Sloss Excerpts

Friday 18th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, I strongly agree with the last sentence of the noble Lord who has just spoken. I oppose the Bill but think it is extremely important that it should go to Committee. I declare that I am a vice-president of the Exeter and east Devon Hospiscare.

Many people, as many as 70% to 80%, support the Bill, according to the statistics. However, there must be many noble Lords around the House who, like me, have received an enormous quantity of mail about this. The interesting thing is that 95% of the mail that I have received has been against the Bill, expressing very considerable concerns or giving examples of why the writer is worried about the Bill. It is also interesting to remember that most of the royal colleges—in particular the Royal College of General Practitioners, whose members are the most likely to be involved in this—and the British Medical Association are against the Bill.

I did not read the Supreme Court decision in Nicklinson as in any way supporting the Bill. What it said of course, as previous speakers have said, is that we in Parliament should look at the issue. The President of the Supreme Court made the interesting point that the Bill would not help the applicant, Mr Nicklinson. Indeed, it would not help those who are most disadvantaged and crippled by serious disease or injury—for instance, those with locked-in syndrome. Anyone who could not administer it himself or did not have some device that, by a flicker of the eyelid, would do it, would not actually be helped by this Bill. From listening to the debate, which has been utterly fascinating and deeply moving, it is quite clear that we in this House are looking at a very difficult balance, which requires very careful safeguards.

My view is that the safeguards in the Bill itself are utterly inadequate. The safeguards that so many people have asked about need to be in primary legislation and not left to a Secretary of State to produce in regulations. I will just very quickly go through some of the points where the Bill is defective. How on earth are people going to find a doctor to be the attending doctor if their own GP is opposed to doing it—and the college of GPs is opposed? You will almost certainly not find a doctor who knows the patient. Then you have to find a second doctor, and both of them have to be in the minority group of those who support assisted dying and are prepared to help to kill. Is there not the real danger that there will not be an exhaustive assessment of the determination to die or a proper look at how vulnerable the individual is or at whether they may feel they have an obligation to die as they have got to an age where their family would like to have the money rather than paying for them? In order to find compliant doctors, will we end up with a sort of tick-box system?

There are also no criteria about mental ability to make the decision. How do you decide whether someone is in the first stages of Alzheimer’s? Will there be an assessment by a psychiatrist? There is nothing there. There is no register of lethal drugs and no audit of doctors carrying out assisted dying. The question marks are there and should be addressed in the primary legislation. It is absolutely clear from the commission of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, that this is certainly seen by most people as the first step.