Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Daisy Cooper Excerpts

Friday 20th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Olney]

I will not give way, sorry. Assisted dying under this legislation cannot be implemented without psychiatrists, but they would be acting outside the advice and guidance of their professional body.

[Daisy Cooper (St Albans) (LD)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Sarah Olney]

I am not giving way. Will there be sufficient psychiatrists prepared to implement the provisions of this legislation, against the advice of their professional body, to ensure that enough panels can be convened for the purpose of facilitating assisted dying? It is hard to see how there could be.

[Daisy Cooper]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Sarah Olney]

I am not giving way. By contrast, many decisions are expressly reserved for politicians. Should the limited resources of the NHS be used to deliver an assisted dying service, or should it be possible to offer the service as a profit-making enterprise? What information should be collected and reported about assisted dying? Who should oversee and regulate its practitioners? Members of Parliament are to have no say over any of those matters at all. Those are all powers to be reserved to the Secretary of State, to be decided behind closed doors. Once again, this legislation grants these responsibilities to people who do not want them.

Neither the current Health Secretary nor the current Justice Secretary are supporters of this Bill. After today, the House of Commons will be shut out of further decision making on this Bill, even though many of the decisions still to be made are rightfully ours to make. The lack of professional consensus or acceptance of the requirements of this legislation, coupled with a lack of political scrutiny of many of its more important provisions, creates an unstable foundation upon which to build an assisted dying service. For such a service to succeed, it needs professionals willing to deliver it, who can have confidence that they are acting within the law and will be supported by their professional peers and by society at large. I do not see how this legislation can deliver that.

It is instructive to compare this piece of legislation with the Abortion Act 1967. That, too, was a private Member’s Bill, brought to this House by the Liberal MP David Steel, but it was preceded by a medical advisory committee chaired by the president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, which approved the Bill. The professionals who would be needed to enact the legislation had indicated their support for the Bill before it reached the Commons. The Bill only delegated one power to the Secretary of State. The legislation was hotly debated then as now, but once it was passed, it came into force within six months.

Remarkably, with the exception of amendments required to bring it into line with successive Human Fertilisation and Embryology Acts and to extend its provisions to Northern Ireland, the provisions that the Abortion Act brought into law have remained almost entirely unchanged in 58 years—until just this week, in fact. The careful consideration of the issues that took place before the legislation came to the Commons, combined with the fact that all its provisions were included within the primary legislation to be debated and voted on in one go, has enabled a settled consensus to develop around abortion provision in this country, in contrast to other jurisdictions. It has enabled vulnerable women to seek the help they need and given healthcare workers the confidence and support they require to meet those needs. That is what we need, if we want to deliver a successful assisted dying service, and this legislation cannot deliver that.

If Members want assisted dying, vote against this Bill and make the most of the moment to press for a better approach that can deliver a sustainable framework, accepted and supported by the medical profession, and in which the public can have confidence. If people’s lives are going to be ended prematurely as a result of this legislation that we pass, we cannot take risks. We cannot afford to pass this Bill.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith (Chingford and Woodford Green) (Con)]

I have not spoken so far in these debates, but I have listened and attended on pretty much all occasions. I am moved to speak today because I am concerned. This is the point that the hon. Member for Lewisham North (Vicky Foxcroft) made, but what is this debate today about? This debate is not about the principle of what we believe in when it comes to assisted dying—whether we are opposed to it or in favour of it. We had that debate on Second Reading. As the Mother of the House, the right hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott), made very clear—in what I must say was an excellent speech—and as others have too, today’s Third Reading debate is about what we are about to pass on to the House of Lords, which will become law. And the single question we have to ask ourselves is: is this genuinely workable now?

The hon. Member for Spen Valley (Kim Leadbeater), who moved the motion, knows that I have a high regard for her—I have worked with her on other things—but I honestly have to say that I simply cannot see how we in this House can pass this piece of legislation through to the other House, in the vague hope that somehow it will do better than us and make changes such that it will become a workable piece of legislation, and that is because this is a private Member’s Bill. If a Government were to introduce a Bill like this, we would see a great deal more input and a huge amount more checking with all those bodies. For example, we were told on Second Reading that the safeguards and protections we were sending to Committee would somehow become the most robust and strongest in the world. In fact, in Committee they got weakened, not strengthened, and that is the problem in all this.

[Daisy Cooper]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way on that point?

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith]

If the hon. Lady will forgive me, I understand that many others want to speak, so I am going make a bit of progress if she does not mind.

The other important point, when we think about what our vote today is all about, is the behaviour of the professional bodies that have been consulted on this, which have come out for the most part very strongly opposed to this legislation.

[Daisy Cooper]

Every medical college has retained a neutral position. By my count—[Interruption.] I will go on. By my count, two or three medical colleges have said expressly that they welcome specific amendments to the Bill, and all MPs will have received the letter from senior psychiatrists, who include a former president of the college, who said:

“We believe the draft legislation is workable, safe and compassionate.”

A number of safeguards have been included in the Bill. Does the right hon. Gentleman recognise that additional safeguards have been included and have been welcomed by various royal colleges?

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith]

I simply do not agree with the hon. Lady on that reading. The professional bodies are completely divided, and most have come out in opposition to the nature of this legislation. It is all very well for her to say that, and I appreciate her right to say it, and I hope she gets to speak later, but I just do not agree with it.

As was said earlier in the debate, the whole issue of mental capacity is not dealt with properly in the structure of this Bill. The hon. Member for Spen Valley talked about this earlier, and she was absolutely right. Even the amendments that were proposed were not always accepted, and we are left now with some areas that will be deeply troubling. We simply cannot accept that the Lords must make these changes for us, for we have to make them first. That is the key.

The one big important area here—I absolutely agree with my constituency neighbour the Health Secretary on this—is that we talk a lot about choice in dying, but how is that choice informed if palliative care in the UK is simply not good enough? Again, the Mother of the House spoke about this, and there are so many people affected: the most vulnerable; the people furthest away from institutions; and the ones who understand least how to work the health service or their local authority, and who rely mostly on us to try and break through. They will be faced with this problem more than almost anybody else, because they look in fear on these institutions.

I helped to set up a children’s hospice, which I think was the first in London. There have been many more since, but children’s hospices, as we know, are really badly treated by Government spending, pretty much no matter who is in power. They have less than anybody else. Haven House, which I helped to set up and raise money for, has given a very strong quote, which I think represents much of what most of those hospices have said:

“We would fully agree that a change in the law would have very significant consequences for the delivery of palliative care services and would be challenging given the existing resource pressures that we face. The hospice sector is experiencing significant financial pressures and the exceptional palliative care services we provide are not financially sustainable. The introduction of assisted dying would create new and demanding requirements for palliative care services and hospices in particular. It is therefore vital, whether or not the current legislation is passed, that the government takes urgent action to resolve”

this matter.

That is the case today. We cannot just say, “Well, that’s not our problem. Palliative care can be changed.” The trouble is that we have been unable to make the necessary changes to palliative care because we take such parti pris positions. That is the problem we face.

I will end with this. I will vote against the Bill, mostly because I believe it is fundamentally unworkable and will lead to huge problems. We have seen what has happened elsewhere internationally—Canada, Oregon and various other places—where legislation slides and slides again as more and more amendments have to be made because these things are not workable. To those who have any doubt, I simply say this. This is Third Reading; it is not Second Reading—it is not an “in principle” debate. We had that debate, and now we have to decide whether we should send this unworkable piece of legislation to another place, which is unelected, to make the decision for us because we cannot come to a conclusion. We cannot let this go through.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mike Wood]

I am afraid that as the father of a 17-year-old daughter, I can identify with that question a bit too directly—although I should add that she does not suffer with anorexia. Of course, it would terrify any parent that that could ever happen.

[Daisy Cooper]

On that point, will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mike Wood]

No, I must continue—the hon. Lady has intervened multiple times.

The promoter of the Bill, the hon. Member for Spen Valley, has done well with some of the safeguards around coercion, but the arguments around coercion as we normally understand them from a legal point of view miss the point. We are talking not about where someone with improper aims and motives sets out to cause someone to take a course of action that they would not otherwise take but something much more subliminal. It may be the wish to avoid being a burden, or reading too much into the doctor’s suggestion when they raised assisted death as something to consider.

A few years ago I was seriously ill; at my most ill, the doctors said that I had a 90% chance of dying within weeks. When I regained consciousness, there was nothing that the doctors suggested to me that I argued over, whether it was a test, an angiogram or any other procedure. In my circumstances, if I had been in a position where assisted dying was a possibility, and the doctor had raised it entirely neutrally, I do not know how I would have interpreted it.

Some Members have spoken of placing a high value on life as if it is some preoccupation of the religiously obsessed. I am a Christian; I am a very middle-of-the-road Anglican. Although I do not take my faith lightly, my Church has never told me how to vote on an issue, and it will certainly not tell me how to vote on this one. I do appreciate, particularly with my own experience, that life is precious. But one does not need to believe in an omniscient and omnipresent God to hold the view that life is precious and that we should take measures to shorten it only very carefully.

As I said at the start, I do not believe that the Bill has got better. There are serious concerns about it. I genuinely do not know whether it is possible to put in adequate safeguards to ensure that assisted dying can be available for the cases where we would like to see it, but that would safeguard those difficult cases—the ones that the Mother of the House, the right hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott), spoke so powerfully about in her very impressive and meaningful speech. What I do know is that if there is a way, this Bill does not do it. That is why I will be voting against it.