A landmark Bill to legalise assisted dying – decried by its critics as assisted suicide – for terminally ill people in England and Wales comes back to the House of Commons on Friday for a crucial vote, the final time MPs will be able to debate it.
There have been recent signs of seepage of some political support away from the proposal amid lobbying by its opponents and criticism from psychiatrists. Supporters of Labour MP Kim Leadbeater’s private members’ bill, however, are confident it retains the backing of enough MPs to pass a third reading vote on Friday.
If Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill passes the free vote – it is not being whipped along party lines and MPs can vote with their conscience – it will go to the House of Lords where peers may seek to amend it further.
In the meantime, however, its critics have ramped up an emotive “air war” of negative briefing against the Bill, hoping to pull off a surprise last-minute victory to scupper it in Friday’s vote.
Leadbeater’s Bill comfortably passed a previous vote last November by 330 votes to 275, after which it was presumed its progression was inevitable. Since then, however, the Bill has been watered down at committee stage, while a handful of its previous supporters have switched sides.
Leadbeater’s original proposal would let a terminally ill person with six months to live to seek drugs from a doctor to end their life – it would require the approval of a second doctor.
Crucially, however, it would need final sign-off from a high court judge, a safeguard Leadbeater said made it the most stringent such regime in the world – several of the Bill’s backers cited this safeguard for why they voted for it.
During committee stage, however, court administrators raised concerns about the impact on the operation on the judicial system of judge sign-off. The committee reviewing the proposal stripped out the judge clause in favour of final sign-off from a three-person commission of a psychiatrist, social worker and senior legal figure, which could be a retired judge.
Critics argue this significantly weakened its safeguards, while Leadbeater says it has strengthened it. Other opponents such as bishops, some of whom sit in the House of Lords, reject the whole principle of assisted dying. Some disability rights campaigners and advocates for elderly people also oppose it.
[ Assisted dying: ‘If I cannot consent to my own death, who owns my life?’Opens in new window ]
Despite a deluge of negative briefings about the Bill in UK media, only three MPs so far have publicly switched sides to oppose it – Reform UK’s Lee Anderson, former Reform member Rupert Lowe and George Freeman, a Tory MP who said he feared a “suicide culture”.
It has been speculated that former Tory minister David Davis might also no longer back the Bill, but so far, there is little evidence of the scale of switching needed to defeat it. Polls also suggest a majority of the British public is still in favour of the principle of assisted dying.
In recent days however, opponents of the Bill were heartened when the Royal College of Psychiatrists said it could not back the proposal in its current form. The body raised nine objections, including a lack of psychiatrists to sit on panels and fears assisted deaths might be granted over the physical effects of treatable mental illnesses, such as anorexia.
Members of the Scottish parliament recently gave initial backing for a proposal to introduce assisted dying there, while Jersey and the Isle of Man plan their own regimes in 2027. If Leadbeater’s Bill passes, a further vote in the Senedd in Cardiff would also be required for it to become law in Wales.
First, however, it must scale the hurdle of its third reading vote in Westminster on Friday.
