Assisted Dying

Tobias Ellwood Excerpts

Monday 29th April 2024 Westminster Hall

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

I invite Members to look around. Westminster Hall is packed; extra seating has been brought in. I will wager—with apologies to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions—that there are more colleagues here than there are in the main Chamber. This is a big day.

As chair of the APPG on bereavement support, I very much welcome this debate and I congratulate Esther Rantzen and the whole of the Dignity in Dying campaign on bringing this issue to our attention today. We rightly call this place the mother of all Parliaments and we are a proud global exemplar of how policy is debated, advanced and so on, but on this issue the people have had to nudge us in Parliament by way of the petition that brings us all here today. However, I do believe that we are starting to do justice to it by the quality of this debate, in which I am pleased to participate.

We must now have the courage to take this issue further, because the legislation is out of date. Under the Suicide Act 1961, anyone involved in assisting another person’s death could be subject to a 14-year custodial sentence. The world has changed since 1961. First, medicines significantly extend life, so we keep people alive longer, but their quality of life is not necessarily the same; and of course, as we are illustrating here today, attitudes are changing. A poll suggests that 77% of people in Bournemouth are supportive of changing the law.

Since the establishment of Dignitas in Switzerland in 1998, some Britons have chosen to travel to Zurich and pay £10,000 to £15,000 in order to say goodbye to their loved ones on the family’s terms, and I understand that for the last decade, the Crown Prosecution Service has not charged anyone for assisted dying. The law as it stands is not working; it is not enforced. The UK Parliament has not kept up with the contemporary thinking in Britain, or, as we have heard, with other countries—France, New Zealand, Australia, Spain, Austria, Holland, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and, of course, Switzerland. The world’s position is changing and modernising, and we must do the same here.

The current system fails on three counts. First, with a terminal illness, there is the potential to experience pain and mental hardship as the body slows and loses strength. Secondly, it obliges families and loved ones to witness that deterioration, causing its own stress. Finally, as I heard from members of Dignity in Dying just an hour ago, there is the added anxiety of not knowing for sure whether there will be a knock on the door from the Crown Prosecution Service. We can and must do better.

Debates come and go in Parliament—policy is discussed, and it is all written up in Hansard—but occasionally there are big days when the public are watching and we remember where we are and what is said. Today is one of those days. Let us make today’s debate count. Let this be the start of a process that gives real choice to those who are terminally ill. It is time to change the law, with Government legislation.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.