Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Debate between Kit Malthouse and Toby Perkins

2nd reading
Friday 29th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[Kit Malthouse]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman, and what a surprise it is that the conversation about palliative care has started. We were not having that conversation before this Bill came forward. The evidence from the Health and Care Committee, published only in February this year, shows that palliative care and assisted dying go hand in hand.

[Mr Perkins]

rose—

[Kit Malthouse]

I will not give way.

Improvements also go hand in hand; medics from across the world told us that the two things are complementary. In Australia I discussed this issue with a palliative care doctor who was against the introduction of assisted dying when they were contemplating it. She now finds it an invaluable tool, and she embraces it as something that her patients want and need. My concern is that if the Bill is turned down, as it was in 2015, the conversation about palliative care will wither, as it has done for the past 10 years.

I want to share a story that has particularly affected me. Mark Crampton was a former police chief inspector who was suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. His COPD became too much for him, so he informed his family that he was going to take his own life. He took his oxygen tank and mask and late one night went out and sat on a railway embankment. He wanted a death that was instant and quick, and that he could rely on. He waited until 2 in the morning—heartbreakingly, he had worked out when the last train was going, so he would minimise disruption to the public—and then took his life in lonely circumstances in the middle of the night. By not passing the Bill, we would deny to Mark supervision, conversation, access to doctors, periods of reflection, advice. Even if he had been through all that and decided it was still too much, the Bill would give him a much better end than he actually achieved. Members should be clear, as I say, that whatever happens to the Bill, terminal people will still take their lives.

I have to say to the hon. Member for Brent West (Barry Gardiner), who says that hundreds of people dying in agony every year is a price worth paying for the good of society, that I find that an appalling prospect. A society that looks away from these people —like those in the Public Gallery who are living in terrible fear of what will face them, or who have watched their families die in fear—and says that that is okay for the good of the whole is a terrible, terrible prospect. We have a duty to assist them, as other countries around the world have done, and to find a way to make them comfortable in the end.