Shadow Leader of the House Jesse Norman raises concerns that the Assisted Dying Bill is being rushed through, and that it is putting legislation before careful public debate, not public debate before legislation which is completely the wrong way round.
Jesse Norman (Hereford and South Herefordshire) (Con)
I am sure that the whole House will want to join me in wishing a very happy Thanksgiving day to all our American friends and family, and a happy big birthday today to the Clerk: the Joe Root of the parliamentary estate. Huge thanks to him for his stylish and expert first century—half-century, I should say!
Mr Speaker, a man of your wide culture and extensive learning will doubtless be familiar with the film “Mad Max”. I am no expert, but the image that it conjures up of a desolate, chaotic landscape with wreckage strewn everywhere is the perfect metaphor for the Government’s recent Budget.
Let us take hospices, for example. In Herefordshire, we are blessed to have the extraordinary St Michael’s hospice. St Michael’s supports hundreds of in-patients a year with end of life care, and thousands more as out-patients and with visits in the community. It has a dedicated staff, assisted by some 800 volunteers. This is extraordinary. I shudder to think what it would cost the state to provide that kind and quality of care—certainly more than £20 million a year. What has this Labour Budget done to St Michael’s hospice? The changes to national insurance alone will cost the hospice an extra £250,000 next year, but that is only part of it. At the same time, the Budget has directly and indirectly pushed up the wage bill by a further £450,000. That is £700,000 annually in extra costs—a vast amount for an organisation that offers incredible care, and actually saves the NHS £20 million a year. Hospices in almost every constituency will be affected, and so are the interests of almost every colleague in this House.
This disastrous outcome was clearly never intended by the Treasury. It is another completely unnecessary blunder with potentially tragic consequences. As with GPs, pharmacies and mental health and social care charities, no compensation whatsoever has been offered for this tax raid. When will the Government publish a proper impact assessment and explain why none has been offered?
There is a direct link here to the issue of assisted dying. In the words of the Health Secretary, no less,
“I do not think that palliative care, end-of-life care in this country is in a condition yet where we are giving people the freedom to choose, without being coerced by the lack of support available.”
That care is now being deliberately worsened by his own Chancellor. Personally, I feel strongly pulled in both directions by both sides, but one thing no one can be in any doubt about is that the Government have no business trying to rush this legislation through the House by proxy. The text of the Bill was published barely two weeks prior to our vote tomorrow. No impact assessment or legal issues analysis have been published. Far from public debate preceding legislation, legislation has preceded debate. That is completely the wrong way around.
We can be perfectly clear about this. All Members of Parliament were recently sent a dossier by the promoter of the Bill entitled, “Your questions answered”. Unfortunately, far from answering key questions, the dossier fails even to touch on a whole series of important issues. Those include the Bill’s impact on the medical profession and the relationship between medical staff and patients, its impact on the provision and regulation of the different drugs and drug cocktails required, the record to date and protocols to be used in case an initial attempt at assisted dying fails, and what the inevitable for-profit industry exploiting the new law will look like and how we should feel about it.
As the senior judge Sir James Munby highlighted, there are a host of questions about involving the judiciary in the process and the balance of probabilities test for coercion. Most profoundly of all, there is the question of what choice and dignity actually mean in different contexts. None of those matters is even mentioned in the dossier purporting to give the answers. Whatever one feels about the issue of assisted dying itself—as I say, I feel very pulled in both directions—this absence of debate, especially with so many new Members in the House, is a matter of the gravest public concern. As the House well knows, the Government themselves are all over the place on the issue.
In asking for an assessment of the Bill’s likely impact on the NHS, the Health Secretary was doing exactly the right thing: preparing civil servants and clinicians for what could be a huge change and asking them to look at a crucial question that has not even been addressed, let alone properly answered. As for the Justice Secretary, she was attacked by none other than her own Labour predecessor Lord Falconer of Thoroton for imposing her views, but his lordship somehow missed that she was also making the argument that it was inappropriate in principle for the state to get involved in what many term “assisted suicide”. That too is yet another issue that has barely been discussed. I ask the right hon. Lady whether she shares my view that it is a tragedy that colleagues are being asked to vote without full and proper consideration of the vital issues I have mentioned.