Committee votes to remove crucial safeguards in UK’s euthanasia bill

On Wednesday, a Public Bill Committee debated and voted on several amendments to the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which aims to legalise doctor-assisted “suicide” for terminally ill adults in England and Wales. One of the amendments related to an essential element of the safeguarding regime within Kim Leadbeater’s proposed euthanasia programme – the court approval clause.

The majority of Committee members voted to remove the court approval clause, Clause 12, because the sheer number of forecasted deaths would leave the courts unable to cope.

Committee member Danny Kruger MP said that removing Clause 12 allows “assisted dying” to be offered to far more people and not just to those suffering intolerably and at the very end of their lives. ”The real intent of the Bill is for a far wider eligibility,’ he said citing forecast estimates of between 6,000-17,000 people euthanised per year.

RHODA WILSON

Last year, Kim Leadbeater introduced the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill in Parliament proposing that terminally ill adults with less than six months to live should be legally permitted to end their lives, provided they receive approval from two doctors and a High Court judge. However, on Wednesday, 15 Members of Parliament (“MPs”) on the 23-member Committee voted to remove the court approval clause. Leadbeater was one of the 15 who voted to remove Clause 12.

The majority of the Committee voted to remove this safeguard despite it being the clause which had been touted as the reason the proposed euthanasia legislation for England and Wales would be the strictest in the world and had convinced many MPs to vote for the Bill in its Second Reading in Parliament.

Read more: High court judge approval for assisted dying cases scrapped by MPs, Independent, 12 March 2025

Danny Kruger, MP for East Wiltshire, who had opposed the Bill on its Second Reading due to, among others, concerns about the lack of safeguards, is one of the MPs on the Committee. He feels that the court approval clause, Clause 12, was not strong enough. “There are all sorts of problems with it around capacity and the way it is constituted,” he said.

During the Committee session, he raised some important points about Clause 12 and why it should not be removed. The following are some of the points he raised but it’s worth taking the time to either watch or read the debate as we cannot cover them all.

Clause 12 was discussed during the Committee’s afternoon session. You can read the debate in Hansard HERE (afternoon session) or watch the debate on Parliament TV HERE (afternoon session).

Mr. Kruger noted that the court approval was a central clause of the Bill and was cited as an essential element of the safeguarding regime, “if not the most essential,” and it was presented to the House of Commons as such.

“We invited witnesses and had three days of evidence on a Bill whose core safeguard has now [or is about to be] fundamentally changed,” he said.

Noting that the clause was used to simply push the Bill through, he said, “The High Court stage was recognised as popular and as useful to the campaign to get the Bill through the House of Commons.”

“Assisted Dying” is Intended For Many More People Than The Terminally Ill

Court oversight was based on the presumption that “assisted dying” is intended for very few people. “For the most exceptional cases: people at the very end of their life, in desperate circumstances, in desperate pain and suffering. Very few people need it,” Mr Kurger said. “This was clearly communicated and understood by the public.”

However, Mr. Kruger believes removing the court approval clause reveals the real intent of the Bill: “Far wider eligibility than just that tiny group.”

“We have seen that through the rejection of a series of amendments that would have restricted eligibility specifically to that group – a group for whom we all understand the case for an assisted death; again, the public support it in those specific cases of people at the very end of their life, who are suffering intolerably. The Bill is not restricted to that group only, and that is why we need to redesign the system to enable this larger group to make use of it,” he said.

“What I am saying,” he said, “is that we have seen the rejection of a series of amendments that would have restricted eligibility, or ensured that only certain people would be eligible: those for whom we all understand the reason for the case for assisted death. Whether our amendments related to the burden, the pain or questions around capacity and coercion, our amendments would have restricted access to only the most desperate people.”

The restriction of access to euthanasia to only the most desperate people would make having a High Court stage appropriate as the High Court could have accommodated a low demand for euthanasia. However, “given the opportunity that the Bill affords to a larger group of people to gain access to assisted death, it has become obvious – I presume, in the mind of Government and others – that there is insufficient capacity in the court system to accommodate the regime being instituted here,” Mr. Kruger said.

Mr. Kruger hasn’t seen any estimates of how many people Leadbeater’s euthanasia programme is expecting to kill and said that “it would be good to know whether the Government have done any estimation of the numbers we are looking at.” But he feels that the concern the High Court will not have the capacity to cope has been “driven by the desire for a system that can cope with many thousands of deaths per year. I have seen ranges suggesting between 6,000 and 17,000 deaths per year.”

“It is not simply a case of averting those desperate cases of people who help their relatives to die by going to Switzerland or who assist them in committing suicide in other ways – we heard from Max Hill that only a handful of cases cross his desk every year. It is clearly the intention to greatly widen the scope beyond that desperate group. It is unclear what the overall number is, but my strong sense is that we are looking at many thousands, and for that reason, it has been decided that the High Court would not have the capacity to cope with this,” he said.

Canada’s medical assistance in dying (“MAiD”) programme was introduced in 2016 for adults with a terminal illness and was later extended to include those without a terminal illness and the disabled in 2021. As of 2023, MAiD accounted for about one in twenty Canadian deaths, with 15,300 out of 320,000 total deaths being “medically assisted.” The estimated population of Canada is 40 million. The estimated population of England and Wales is 60.9 million (mid-2023). What Mr. Kruger has heard, between 6,000 and 17,000 deaths per year, is probably underestimated, depending on how much pressure is exerted on people to take up the euthanasia option.

Mr. Kruger pointed out that with thousands of people being processed through the euthanasia programme each year, the review of free given consent and eligibility will become a rubber-stamp exercise.

“I think the Bill is profoundly flawed,” Mr, Kruger warned, “particularly if large numbers of people will be going through this system. Whether they are going through a judicial system or a panel system, there will be huge capacity constraints on the professionals involved, and we have transferred that responsibility and that problem from the judiciary to psychiatry and social work – unless, of course, it is a rubber-stamp exercise, which I fear it might be, but even then, we are still involving psychiatrists and social workers in a rubber-stamp exercise.”

Why it is Important to Have a Court Approval Stage

Mr Kruger explained to the Committee why it was so important to have a judicial stage/ “The value of a judicial stage is that it gave the doctors certainty and, indeed, protection for the process they were responsible for,” he said.

He explained, “The fact is that somebody has to be the judge – somebody has to take legal responsibility for the decision that is made. In the common law system, we do not give powers of life and death to panels; we give them to legally constituted bodies with judicial authority.”

Clause 12 is an essential safeguard, he said, but it is not strong enough. “We should strengthen [Clause 12], in the ways that I will now explain.”

We do need a court, and I think Parliament was right to demand this, or to support it. We have a comparable model in the Court of Protection, which applies when there are disputed decisions about whether to withdraw life support … With the Court of Protection, one is obliged to notify the family. So even there, when there is a decision to withdraw life support, the family is notified, but we have decided not to notify the family under this Bill. But anyway, the Court of Protection does provide an appropriate comparison.

Whether we are talking about the Court of Protection or the High Court, either would work if the system was set up right. The crucial thing, in my view, is that it needs a proper adversarial arrangement so that the judge can actually judge. The way that judges work in this country, under the common law system, is that they hear arguments and then make decisions.

Danny Kruger: Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill (Twenty-third sitting), UK Parliament, 12 March 2025

My suggestion is that there needs to be representatives of the applicant – who may want to appear themselves – but there also needs to be somebody who is putting the other side of the story: “Maybe this isn’t the right thing to do. Has the judge considered these parts of the evidence, or this aspect of the report from the assessing doctors?” That would be an appropriate procedure, which is completely consistent with how these important decisions are taken in other aspects of our system.

Danny Kruger: Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill (Twenty-third sitting), UK Parliament, 12 March 2025

In the British judiciary, the High Court of England is the appropriate body to make decisions about life and death. That is how it works in other major decisions of life and death. These are questions that go to court.

Danny Kruger: Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill (Twenty-third sitting), UK Parliament, 12 March 2025

Euthanasia Is the Wrong Thing To Do

“I do not believe in assisted dying; I think it is the wrong thing to do,” Mr. Kruger said. “But if we were to do it, we should have a proper multidisciplinary team at the outset – I sort of feel that that is where we have got to through these debates, and if the debates had happened properly and prior to the Bill being drafted, something more like this system might have been proposed.”

“My understanding is that all the bodies that represent palliative care professionals and end-of-life specialists are opposed to the Bill as it was and as it is,” he said.

Yet, 15 MPs serving on the Committee voted in favour of removing the safeguard that was central to restricting and limiting the euthanasia programme to those desperate people at the very end of their lives who have freely consented to being killed by a “medical professional.” These 15 MPs have betrayed the trust of not only the public but also of their fellow MPs.

The Hansard Society is maintaining a list of the amendments being made to Leadbeater’s euthanasia bill. The amendments made on Wednesday have not yet been recorded but it could be a useful resource to monitor what Leadbeater and proponents of her death panel are doing. You can see a summary of amendments up to 9 February HERE. The next Public Bill Committee sitting is scheduled for 18 March 2025. You can follow the Committee’s activities HERE.

See Related Article Below

The Ghoulish Haste of the Assisted Dying Bill

LAURA DODSWORTH

The UK’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill is being rushed through Parliament with unsettling speed. Whether you support or oppose assisted dying, this is no way to legislate on life and death. A bill of such gravity should be unhurried, careful, and dignified. Instead, the committee scrutinising it is racing through and what’s more is stacked in its favour, with only eight of 23 MPs actively dissenting. Amendments that could safeguard the vulnerable are being dismissed one after another. It is hard to avoid the impression that its proponents are ghoulishly determined to push it through at any cost.

The most recent glaring concern is the removal of a High Court judge from the decision-making process. Instead, approvals will be handled by a multidisciplinary panel, a change that has prompted 26 Labour MPs to warn that this ‘breaks the promises made by proponents of the bill’ and ‘fundamentally weakens the protections for the vulnerable’.

The requirement for a doctor to ask a patient why they wish to die has also been rejected. MP Rachel Hopkins dismissed the idea outright, saying, ‘So what?’ — as if a doctor’s role in suicide prevention were irrelevant. If autonomy means a doctor need not ask why someone wishes to end their life, what does that mean for suicide prevention? How can we tell some people that every life is precious while telling others their suffering makes death the best option?

Other crucial safeguards have been discarded. Proposals to include special protections for people with Down’s syndrome have been brushed aside. A mandatory cooling-off period for those with a terminal diagnosis has been rejected, opening the door to rushed decisions made under pressure or in moments of despair.

The arguments for assisted dying often focus on compassion, on the desire to prevent unnecessary suffering, but compassion can turn cold. No one is even required to assess whether a person seeking assisted dying feels like a burden, despite clear evidence that many disabled and elderly people experience precisely this fear. In fact some people think this is a perfectly valid reason to want to die.

What if the right to die becomes a duty to die. The experience in other countries shows that once assisted suicide is permitted, its boundaries are widened. What begins as a supposedly tightly regulated option for the terminally ill expands, making assisted suicide — or rather, euthanasia — more available, more accepted, and ultimately, more expected.

This bill also risks undermining palliative care. If assisted suicide becomes an accepted and convenient solution, will investment in pain management and end-of-life care diminish? The NHS budget will not be expanded but further divided. So, will we become a society that chooses to hasten death rather than ease the journey?

The passage of this bill, and the manner in which it is being forced through, undermines the dignity and sanctity of life. Some people want to rush death, and now they want to rush the discussion about death too. There is nothing compassionate about removing safeguards for the vulnerable. If we are to decide as a society whether assisted suicide should be legal, we must at least do it properly. This bill is not the way.

SOURCE: The Free Mind

Featured image: www.modernhealthcare.com (modified)

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