Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Debate between Lindsay Hoyle and Lola McEvoy

Report stage
Friday 20th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Lola McEvoy (Darlington) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Spen Valley (Kim Leadbeater) and celebrate her courage and kindness throughout this whole process.

I agree with many in the House that the status quo is unacceptable—that is why most of us are here—and I urge colleagues who, like me, are in favour of the principle of choice at the end of life to vote today not on the principle, but on how the Bill will work in practice. This is not an opinion poll, and there are very real trade-offs. Without palliative care parity across the UK, this new way to die offers a replacement, not a real choice. I am pleased to have the support of the former Prime Minister, the right hon. Gordon Brown, as well as a huge number of medical professionals, on these arguments.

I was brought up around death, and I am still smiling. I know about good palliative care because my dad would take me to the hospice to meet his patients that he had grown to love. As a child, I remember him getting promoted to a new nurse consultant role. They were experts in their field of nursing and were promoted to fill the gap in expertise in making decisions on crucial palliative care and pain relief. My dad’s positional and relational power to give confidence around decision making and to support less experienced but more senior staff in essential decisions around life and death meant that those decisions could ease a lot of people’s passing. When decisions are delayed, the patient suffers unnecessarily, and we have heard that happen in the stories and many cases of poor palliative care that have shaped this debate today.

In the interests of time, I will skip to my final point. The practical reality of what we see today is that, without radical improvements to palliative care, a joined-up digital system, and clear recorded centralised data on when and how we talk to patients about the treatment they are getting, and about what that means—not just for the length of their life, but for the quality of their life—we will continue to have a postcode lottery. With a finite number of experts in our NHS, this decision to bring in this new way of dying will simply deprioritise addressing the gaps in the provision of good-quality palliative care, which will affect most of us, in favour of offering a new option to the minority of people who will be eligible. That is not in line with my values, and that is why I cannot vote for it.

[Mr Speaker]

I call the shadow Minister.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Lindsay Hoyle and Lola McEvoy

Tuesday 15th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I call Lola McEvoy.

[Lola McEvoy (Darlington) (Lab)]

T2. Will the Secretaryof State meet me to discuss a cross-departmental pilot in my constituency, bringing together the Department for Work and Pensions, the Department for Education and the Department of Health and Social Care, to tackle some of the immediate pressures that face child and adolescent mental health services in my area, and the impact on schooling, the local work force and family outcomes?

[The Minister for Care (Stephen Kinnock)]

By cutting mental health waiting lists and intervening earlier, we can get this country back to health and back to work. There are 2.9 million people who are economically inactive, a large proportion owing to mental health issues. Many people can be helped back into work through talking therapies. We will put a mental health professional in every school and roll out 8,500 specialists. I would be happy to meet my hon. Friend to discuss the matter further.