Assisted Dying

Debate between Laura Farris and Tobias Ellwood

Monday 29th April 2024 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Laura Farris)]

I thank the hon. Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi) for opening the debate, and I thank the Petitions Committee and the 200,000 people who signed the petition. I pay particular tribute to Hanna Geissler and to Dame Esther Rantzen for the way that they have articulated their own very moving cases.

It has been a privilege to listen to this debate. I will say at the outset that it calls into conflict two fundamental values—the right to individual autonomy and the sanctity of life. It was genuinely a privilege to hear voices on both sides of the debate, even when the disagreement was profound, acknowledging the moral difficulties and challenges that we face on this as parliamentarians.

Before turning to individual questions, I will set out the Government’s position. Our view remains that any relaxation of the law is an issue of conscience for individual parliamentarians, rather than one for Government policy. In the tradition of all conscience matters where the Government maintain a neutral stance, that is typically achieved through a private Member’s Bill.

As others have observed, the last occasion when the House of Commons debated legislative proposals on this subject was in September 2015. Then, just under nine years ago, the Assisted Dying (No. 2) Bill was rejected on Second Reading, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey) pointed out, by 330 votes to 118. However, this is not an area where opinion is static, and nor is the composition of Parliament a static thing. It was because of the growing strength of feeling on this issue that the last debate on this subject took place in this Chamber, less than two years ago, on 4 July 2022. I recall that because I was there, and it too resulted from an e-petition, calling for a change in the law, that also attracted many signatures.

[Mr Ellwood]

My hon. Friend eloquently summarises the difficulties on both sides of the debate, but it has also been expressed today that perhaps there is not the sense of faith that a private Member’s Bill would do justice to the details that we have been discussing in depth here today. How we get around that, I do not know, but I am now of the mind—I did not come here thinking this—that this needs to be done in Government time, so that it can go through the full Committee process, and so that we can do our job. We have illustrated that we can do that here today, but I do not think that tacking this on through a private Member’s Bill is the process that we should be pursuing.

[Laura Farris]

I do not for a moment disagree that this is a subject that would require extensive time in the House. Everybody knows that we are now in the months leading up to a general election, and there is significant Government legislation already planned. However, with those caveats in mind, I hope that I can address more of the substance of the debate, which is what this is really about. I should add that, if it becomes the clearly expressed will of Parliament to amend or change the criminal law to enable some form of assisted dying, then, of course, as the Prime Minister has made clear, the Government will ensure that the legislation is delivered in a way that is legally effective. However, it is within the context of the Government’s neutral position that I wanted to set out and summarise the contours of this debate.

I could pay tribute to so many speakers, so hon. Members will forgive me, I hope, if I whittle the list down to a few. I will start with the hon. Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield), who talked about his father, and then talked about constituents. Similar points were made by my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie), who is no longer in her place. They talked about people with terminal diagnoses making the decision to take their own lives in circumstances that were premature because they anticipated reaching a point where they would no longer be able to do that.

The former Health Secretary, the right hon. Member for West Suffolk (Matt Hancock), said that, when he looked at the data, he saw that people with terminal diagnoses were twice as likely to commit suicide. The point was made powerfully by myright hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire (Kit Malthouse), and also by my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Sir David Davis), that we cannot disregard the fact that there is another route already taken by those with means: when they are at an early stage and have the resources, they can go to the Dignitas clinic. My right hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire called it “business class”, and we cannot ignore that.

It is also true to say, as many have observed, that the view of the medical profession has shifted or is shifting, with the BMA moving from a position of opposition to one of neutrality. In a “Moral Maze” programme on assisted dying for Radio 4, Michael Buerk said that he had recently chaired a series of medical conferences where doctors tried to reach an agreed position on assisted dying. The majority of doctors there said that they had not gone into the profession to kill people, but at the same time thought that they might choose assisted dying for themselves. The moral ambiguity was not lost on them.

Town Centre Safety

Debate between Laura Farris and Tobias Ellwood

Tuesday 5th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Laura Farris)]

I am glad to have this opportunity to speak and hope to set the record straight. Forgive me if I do not recognise the counsel of despair emanating from the Opposition Benches. The hon. Member for Nottingham North (Alex Norris) invites us to believe that there has been a catalogue of failure and that everything is getting worse, but the facts tell us something different. I do not pretend that everything is perfect—of course we need to protect our town centres and the people who use them, and I will come to all that in a moment—but for all the noise that these debates can generate, we do the public a disservice if we seek to distil everything into a row across the Dispatch Box without sometimes acknowledging the merits of the other side and the meaningful progress they have sometimes made.

[Mr Tobias Ellwood (Bournemouth East) (Con)]

On that conciliatory note, could we all just pay tribute to what the police do, because they are the focus of the debate? They put on the uniform in the morning and say goodbye to their loved ones not knowing how their day is going to turn out. As we argue about where things should go in future, perhaps we can all agree that they do such an important job for our society and that we owe them a huge debt of gratitude.

[Laura Farris]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that intervention. I accept without reservation that there is considerable courage and selflessness in being a first responder whose job and duty is to run towards danger when everybody else is running away from it.

Let me begin with the simplest facts. Since 2010, neighbourhood crime—the crimes that undermine the fabric of communities and make people feel unsafe in their homes and on their local streets—has fallen. The crime survey for England and Wales, which the Office for National Statistics described as

“the best estimate of long-term trends in crimes against the household population”,

shows that since 2010 overall crime levels are down by more than 50%. Violent crimes as a whole, which include crimes that involve any form of offensive weapon, are down by 52%. Theft overall, which includes domestic burglary and the theft of a vehicle—some of the most invasive thefts that go directly to a person’s sense of personal security—has almost halved since we came into office. Domestic burglary currently stands at its lowest ever level.