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

Neil Shastri-Hurst Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 5th March 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Rebecca Paul]

Obviously, I am speaking to the Bill as is. I do not want to presume the result of any vote. I assume none of us here knows how a vote may go.

All boxes checked, yet it is entirely possible that the margin of error could add up to the point where a doctor, when standing back and looking holistically at the situation, might feel there is sufficient risk to warrant not signing off. It is that niggle again—sometimes the sum of the parts is not the right answer. That is what amendment 257 seeks to do: to allow that the doctor that element of override discretion where there is a real risk that any of the eligibility requirements are not met.

My understanding is that the “real risk” test is taken from the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights. That Court has held that states are under a duty to protect an individual from suicide if they are aware of a real and immediate risk of suicide. Doctors are already required under the Human Rights Act to assess of when there is a real risk of suicide, so it is a familiar legal test, I believe. Ensuring that it applies to the eligibility criteria, in particular those dealing with autonomy and voluntariness, may strengthen the Bill, make it safer and help ensure compliance.

I will welcome the Minister’s views, however, on whether the test is the right one legally given the spirit of what the amendment seeks to do. I appreciate that this is a technical legal point, and I am not a lawyer. I am also open to the argument that “real risk” might not be the appropriate test for every one of the eligibility criteria, so again a view from the Minister would be helpful. If the Government and the promoter of the Bill accept that this test should apply to the issues of capacity, clear and settled will, voluntariness, and absence of coercion or pressure, I will be happy for the Government to table a tidying amendment on Report to limit the test to those matters. My intention is to press the amendment to a vote and I hope that the Committee will join me in supporting it.

[Dr Neil Shastri-Hurst (Solihull West and Shirley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your leadership, Mrs Harris.

I will speak to this octet of amendments and set out why I cannot support them. In my view, they are a classic example of legislative embroidery. If we wanted a better example, we could not find one. Sadly, they would achieve nothing but add a great deal of confusion to the situation.

Throughout the Bill, a clear set of criteria must be fulfilled in order to move from one stage of the process to another. To lay on, additionally, a frankly woolly and ill-defined legal test that has not been set out in in this legislation and that overrides those criteria, without any reasoning to underpin it or any sense of purpose behind it, is simply confusing. The test would make the Bill less operable in reality, and it undermines everything that comes before it—there is no purpose to having criteria that we have to move through if we are then to say, “Actually, that is null and void, because I have a sense that I am just not comfortable with it.” If one is not comfortable with one stage of the criteria, that is enough for it to fall or to be referred to someone else—for example, to a capacity assessment, as has been suggested. The amendment is legal nonsense. I see where it is coming from, but it is legal nonsense in how it is drafted, and it does not assist in making a more meaningful or operable Bill. Therefore, I cannot support it.

[Stephen Kinnock]

The amendments seek to ensure that an individual requesting assistance to die will not be able to do so if there is a real risk that the eligibility criteria have not been met.

The Bill provides in clauses 7, 8, 12, 13 and 18 that where the assessing doctor or court is satisfied that, in their opinion, the eligibility criteria that they are charged with assessing have been satisfied, they must complete the next relevant step required by the Bill. If, however, the assessing doctor or court are not satisfied that the eligibility criteria that they are charged with assessing have been met, they must not take the next steps set out under the Bill.

Our assessment is that, as drafted, this group of amendments could create uncertainty as to what the assessing doctors are required to assess. The amendment would add a separate, potentially overlapping requirement on the assessing doctors and the court to assess whether there were no real risk. That could create uncertainty for the assessing doctors as to what is additionally required. I hope those observations were helpful to the Committee.