Kim Leadbeater Says Her Assisted Dying Bill Will Have “Strictest Safeguards In The World”
Kim Leadbeater joins campaigners in favour of legalising assisted dying outside Parliament (Credit: Matt Crossick/Empics/Alamy Live News)
4 min read
Labour MP Kim Leadbeater has promised that her bill to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults will have the “strictest protections and safeguards of any legislation anywhere in the world”, PoliticsHome can reveal.
Writing for The House magazine, Leadbeater said of her colleagues: “I believe when they study it in detail, they will see that the bill offers hope to those terminally ill people with a clear, informed and settled wish to have a better death, while at the same time protecting all those approaching the end of their life from coercion or pressure to make a decision that isn’t right for them.”
After topping the Private Members’ Bill ballot, the Spen Valley MP chose assisted dying as her topic. It had originally been the intention of new Labour MP Jake Richards to propose such a bill, but he came 11th in the ballot.
“My decision to introduce a bill offering choice at the end of life for terminally ill adults was not taken lightly,” Leadbeater wrote.
“I have been consulting very widely over the past few weeks, mainly because I’m not the sort of person who would embark on a task like this without delving deeply into the issue first. But, also, because I am clear that if we are to have a new law it must be a good law.”
Leadbeater's Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill will have its Second Reading on 29 November. It is expected to be published early this week.
Some have criticised the timing of the bill’s publication, believing it would have been preferable for quality of debate and scrutiny if the full wording had been released earlier.
But Leadbeater has made the case that MPs’ approval for the bill at Second Reading would lead to “extensive further debate and opportunities to amend the bill before a final decision on the basis of that detailed examination”.
One Labour MP who spoke to The House was undecided on how to vote but said they were considering the option of voting for the bill at Second Reading before voting against it at Third Reading.
The House understands that some Scottish Labour MPs are being swayed by the views of Pam Duncan-Glancy. The Labour MSP, who was the first permanent wheelchair user elected to the Scottish Parliament, believes that assisted dying would be “dangerous for disabled people”.
In an interview with The House, Alex Ruck Keene KC (Hon) – a barrister who worked on the team representing motor neurone disease sufferer Noel Conway in a landmark case that reached the Supreme Court – expressed concerns.
“The fact that this is coming through as a Private Members’ Bill, and there is no governmental initiative here, means there simply isn’t the material being generated to support parliamentarians to make a decision.
“By contrast with Jersey, where it is a governmental initiative, albeit following an in-principle choice which was taken, the governmental initiative there runs to nearly 300 pages of explanation. Including thinking through things like the presumption of capacity.
“I am immensely troubled, I have to say this. I think parliamentarians are being radically unsupported by the way in which the process is operating. Which is not a criticism of Kim Leadbeater,” Ruck Keene emphasised.
The barrister has put forward many questions about the implementation of an assisted dying law, including: how mental capacity would work; how limiting it to terminally ill people would be compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights; whether the NHS would be providing the assistance; and what the court’s exact role would be if people had to apply to the court to confirm their decision to seek assistance in death.
If these questions are not answered before the bill has passed, he warned: “It will keep people like me, lawyers, in business for years. That is not what you want. We need to work out the answers to these questions before rather than later.”
PoliticsHome Newsletters
PoliticsHome provides the most comprehensive coverage of UK politics anywhere on the web, offering high quality original reporting and analysis: Subscribe
