Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill (Twenty-ninth sitting)

Rachel Hopkins Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 25th March 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Rachel Hopkins (Luton South and South Bedfordshire) (Lab)]

On my hon. Friend’s point about marking one’s own homework, does she agree that many public bodies do a self-assessment that is then looked at by the regulator? It is as important a part of the process of self-regulations as external inspection.

[Naz Shah]

As far as I have seen, no regulatory system has been proposed in regard to the Bill. I am happy to be corrected. Yes, in other instances we have regulators, but in this instance no regulator is specified. That is why I will come back to my argument about the amendment, but I value my hon. Friend’s intervention.

This is not how we regulate banks, which are overseen by independent authorities. We have seen what happens when there is light-touch regulation. Banks told us all that they were doing a great job until it turned out that they were not. There is an Independent Police Complaints Commission—I could go on, as the list is very long, but I hope we can all agree on the principle. When we regulate an important system in this country, we should not allow the people who run it to be the only people to tell us whether it is working as it should. Although we respect the highly skilled people who run our schools and police our streets, we have independent people whose job it is to check whether there are any major issues.

The assisted dying system created by the Bill is both complicated and, potentially, very dangerous. If the system gets things wrong, it will mean that people will be given lethal drugs who should not have had them. That is why I would strongly support keeping the chief medical officers as the people who run monitoring, investigating and reporting. Perhaps there could be a dual system in which both the CMOs and the VAD commissioner have some kind of role. That would at least be an improvement on allowing the assisted dying commissioner to say, “There’s nothing to see here.” In my view, the best choice would be to retain the system that the Bill started out with and keep the chief medical officers as the people with the main responsibility for oversight.

Members disagreed with my comparison of assisted dying with the scandal of what happened to the sub-postmasters and mistresses, but we have to think about what we have learned about the causes of that scandal. Under the law, Ministers had responsibility for the Post Office. Even though it was an arm’s length responsibility, they still had it. When complaints about the Horizon IT system, and then complaints about miscarriages of justice, started to come through to MPs, Ministers asked the experts in the field. Who were those experts? The executives who ran the Post Office and the engineers at Fujitsu who had set up and then run the Horizon system. What did those experts say for about 15 years? That there were no serious problems with Horizon, that the sub-postmasters and mistresses who said otherwise were lying and that all their convictions were safe. We know how that turned out.

That surely leads us to a clear lesson: we cannot ask powerful people who have created and are in charge of a system—in this case, the assisted dying system—to be the ones who report on it. I am not saying that we would see a deliberate cover-up, as there seems to have been in the Post Office scandal. What I am saying is that we all have unconscious biases and all of us are biased to think that the work we do is good and that there are no serious problems with it.

Amendment 382 significantly weakens the version of the Bill that was presented to the House on Second Reading. We are being asked to let the commissioner report on their own work. That makes it much less likely that we would be able to spot any problems with the assisted dying system at an early stage. I therefore urge Members to vote against the amendment.