Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill (Fourth sitting)

Jake Richards Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 29th January 2025 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

Jake Richards was not called for the last panel, so we will start with him.

[Jake Richards (Rother Valley) (Lab)]

Q Thank you for those introductory statements. I have a question for Mr Amin regarding the current operation of the Mental Capacity Act 2005, and how the Court of Protection approaches that issue. The Bill as currently drafted essentially defers to the Act, and I wondered if you have any reservations about that, or any thoughts that you could offer the Committee?

Yogi Amin: Reservations—no. In fact, I wholly recommend and support the idea as drafted to defer to the Mental Capacity Act for capacity assessments. I have been working in this area for over 20 years, before and after the Mental Capacity Act came in, and I have done cases all the way up to the Supreme Court, as well as day-to-day different cases around the country. It is well understood how capacity assessments are done, and it is ingrained into the practice of practitioners generally and of legal practitioners in the courts. Certainly when I give training to advocates, doctors and so on, it is well understood how to apply the test. That could be adapted for this particular decision, which is done here. In the past couple of years, we had a decision in the Supreme Court which settled how to approach the question of capacity, and to disturb that would concern me.

[Jake Richards]

Q To be clear, would it concern you because it would cause confusion?

Yogi Amin: It is a well settled and understood approach to the law, and producing a new one would throw up a whole new conundrum, where people would be questioning how to approach it, etc. It is not broken—it works well.

[The Chair]

That was a specific question to Mr Amin, but it is an important issue. Does anyone else wish to come in, briefly please?

Chelsea Roff: One thing I would like to highlight in our study is that all 60 people who died—young women, mostly—were found to have mental capacity to make the decision to end their life, so I worry that mental capacity will not be an effective safeguard to prevent people with eating disorders from qualifying under the Bill.

I also note that Oregon and California, where I am from and where we have found cases, have an additional safeguard to mental capacity. That is, if there are any indications that the person might have a mental disorder, that person must be referred for a mental health assessment. It is important not to make a false equivalence between mental capacity and mental health.

We could, for instance, have a person who has a prognosis of six months or less, but their wish to die is emerging from severe depression, from suicidality. We saw very high rates of suicidality and depression: 89% were depressed and nearly half chronically suicidal when they died. Physicians emphasised, still, that the wish to die was not emerging from a mental illness, despite them having diagnosed mental illness.