Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Lord Purvis of Tweed Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 22nd October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)]

My Lords, it is a privilege for me to follow the noble Baroness. I commend the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, for her Bill and I too look forward to the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Davidson, with another Scottish perspective—because it is 17 years since my Bill in the Scottish Parliament to change the law in Scotland to allow a terminally ill patient greater power to determine the place, manner and precise time of their death.

During that time, much has changed, but some things have remained. As the noble Baroness said, 11 jurisdictions in the United States, New Zealand, five Australian states, Austria and Spain have changed their laws. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, I have visited Oregon. I did it then and I have studied the annual report on its legislation closely every year since. The well-managed, careful legislation, with suitable transparent oversight and mature discussion of its operation among the population, will have its 25th anniversary next year.

What has remained? In the absence of a clearly regulated, transparent legislative framework with judicial oversight here, we maintain the position that, if you have been given a prognosis that your life now has a limited time, you have the legal right to ask medical staff to deliberately withhold food and hydration until you starve to death. Patients might be pressurised, either by family members or by feeling that they are a burden, and they ask for medication, food or hydration to be halted and to be permanently sedated until they die. There is no legal test about mental capacity or whether financial pressure is being brought to bear on them in these last moments of their life.

Doctors may decide themselves, without consultation or recourse to legal approval, to provide lethal medication under the morally ambiguous doctrine of double effect, or place the person into continuous deep sedation. An extensive and comprehensive review in 2008 found the prevalence of patients dying under continuous deep sedation at 17% of all deaths—the highest in Europe.

I respectfully disagree with those who will argue today to continue a system that lacks transparency and accountability, with limited judicial oversight and scarce public reporting. Every Member of this House will have been touched by the care, the professionalism and, in many cases, the love of those who work in our care sector and NHS, including in my family right now in the current situation—but we cannot carry on with a system that gives the balance of rights to others at the end of their life, not the person themselves.

One of the most respected Members of the Scottish Parliament, a Deputy Presiding Officer and the MSP for Orkney, Liam McArthur, is carefully and consensually bringing forward a coalition that will likely now bring a majority for legislative change in Scotland. This will allow the people of the nation where I live the legal protections, rights and dignity of control which, for far too long over these 17 years, has been denied them. I support the Bill.