Carla Lockhart: The safeguards in the ‘Assisted Dying’ bill are already being watered down

The last few weeks have fundamentally exposed the Assisted Dying Bill and it must now be rejected by Parliament.

There were concerns expressed at the outset about the rushed timetable and about the Private Members Bill process itself. Those concerns were not misplaced and if anything, they underestimated problems with both the legislation and the process.

It is testament to the skills of the small number of MPs on the Bill Committee with concerns about the bill that they have been key to exposing its flaws despite the attempts to close them down. What those members have faced within that committee has been a case study in bad Parliamentary practice.

The concerns of people, including groups representing disabled people have been dismissed as “noise” by the bill’s supporters. The National Down Syndrome Policy Group right has taken issue with that characterisation given they have published a letter outlining the concerns of 61 separate groups representing the interests of disabled people.

The Chief Medical Officer for England Sir Chris Whitty has recently corrected evidence he gave to the Committee. He initially stated the Mental Capacity Act required someone to have a higher level of mental capacity when making a decision such as to end their life than it would for them to choose for example to undergo minor surgery. He has now admitted this was wrong, but unfortunately his initial, inaccurate evidence was used to reject an amendment to the bill which would have strengthened safeguards around deciding upon the mental capacity of someone to choose assisted suicide.

The “strongest safeguard in the world” of High Court assessment of applications was abandoned despite pledges that would not happen. Its replacement isn’t just inadequate but is deeply troubling. Instead of judicial oversight, it is proposed to be replaced with a panel which has no requirement to sit in public or even to take evidence under oath. In effect the decision-making process has been downgraded from the High Court to a secretive quango. The opportunity to challenge a decision of that panel would exist only in circumstances where an application for suicide has been refused. That means the relatives of someone, regardless of the circumstances, would have no right to challenge a ruling where suicide has been approved.

Many proponents of assisted suicide refer to it as an alternative to the pain and suffering someone may face in their final days. It is an emotive and potentially powerful argument that assisted suicide is there to avoid sometimes intense suffering. There was finally an admission during line-by-line scrutiny of the bill however that this legislation would allow someone to access assisted suicide for the purposes of saving their family money. Providing they were judged to have the capacity to make that decision they could choose to end their life because of a real or perceived financial burden that might be placed upon their family.

Indeed, there were even attempts to dress this up as some kind of a positive, because the individual in question would have had “autonomy” over that decision. Such processes are a world away from proclamations that the bill was about avoiding intense pain and physical suffering in the final days of someone’s life.

This admission by the proposer of the bill is important for two reasons.

Firstly because there were amendments proposed which sought specifically to prevent assisted dying from being granted to someone just because they didn’t want to be a burden. Those amendments were rejected.

Secondly, the data exists internationally from countries where assisted suicide has been introduced and the number of people seeking death because they feel like a burden has risen significantly.

Even those who may agree with the principle of assisted suicide should be deeply concerned about the details contained within a Bill that has been rushed and not gone through the normal parliamentary processes. They are impacts that, like the ending of someone’s life, cannot be reversed.

Carla Lockhart, DUP MP, Upper Bann