Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill to Return to Parliament
On Friday 16th of May, Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill will return to the House of Commons after passing many weeks being scrutinised in Bill Committee sessions. The Committee is a group of MPs with a variety of views on the topic who discussed the legislation line-by-line and proposed amendments to improve the Bill.
Four key amendments were passed by the committee, all of which I believe strengthen the Bill and make it workable in the real world. These are in addition to the strong safeguards already in the Bill.
The most publicised change is the introduction of a judge-led commission and multidisciplinary panels to replace a single judge overseeing the process. This adds further expertise to ensure a terminally ill person’s decision is their own, free of coercion or pressure. The Committee accepted Kim Leadbeater's amendment to establish a Voluntary Assisted Dying Commission, chaired by a High Court judge or retired judge, to oversee applications. Panels will include a senior lawyer (who could also be a High Court judge), psychiatrist, and social worker – ensuring that each case is reviewed with the appropriate depth and expertise.
There has also been an addition to make training on coercion mandatory for all professionals involved in the process and the Bill now also explicitly requires that patients must be informed of their full end of life options, including palliative and hospice care. It guarantees multiple opportunities for reflection and the right to change their mind at any point.
The Committee also put in place stronger protections for disabled people, including a new Disability Advisory Board to ensure that the impact of the Bill on disabled people is robustly and regularly monitored and independent advocates to support people with disabilities.
As I have outlined here before, I support this Bill. Whilst most terminally ill people have a perfectly normal death, with symptoms managed by medical care, I believe every dying person should have the right to an assisted death to allow them choice and freedom from fear. Even with the best modern medicine, a proportion of dying people will have unpleasant deaths that could be prevented with an assisted death. People like Sophie, who I have got to know during the passage of the Bill. Sophie has stage 4 breast cancer and is allergic to opioid painkillers. She fears that her allergy to drugs like morphine leaves her with very few options to ease her passing and would like to be able to have a medically assisted death. Sophie is desperate to live but has accepted that she will die early and simply wants to make it easier for everyone. She does not want her teenage daughter to remember her dying in unrelieved pain.
The current system of a blanket ban on assisted dying leaves too many terminally ill people unable to enjoy the time they have left and this legislation is essential to help people who can’t be helped by palliative care.