Change would see ‘gold-plated’ stage of assisted dying Bill dropped, says MP

Expert panels approving assisted dying applications instead of High Court judges would provide a “strength, not a weakness” to a new law, the MP behind the Bill has insisted.

But Kim Leadbeater was accused by Conservative Danny Kruger of dropping a much-heralded “gold-plated” judicial element to her proposed legislation as a committee scrutinised new amendments on Tuesday.

The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, when introduced to Parliament last year and voted through by a majority of MPs at Second Reading in November, proposed terminally ill adults in England and Wales with less than six months to live should be legally allowed to end their lives, subject to approval by two doctors and a High Court judge.

Last month, Ms Leadbeater revealed her proposals to scrap the High Court approval, to be replaced by an assisted dying commission and expert panels.

Opposition critics said proposed changes would result in it being “massively watered down”.

Ms Leadbeater had hailed the requirement as the main reason her proposed legislation was the strictest in the world.

But she later said she was suggesting the changes after having “listened carefully” to expert evidence in January on concerns around the pressure on judicial resources if each case was to automatically go before the High Court and on calls to involve psychiatrists and social workers in assessing mental capacity and detecting coercion.

The amendments propose the establishment of a voluntary assisted dying commissioner who would refer applications to multi-disciplinary panels.

The panels: including a psychiatrist; a social worker; and a legal member, a King’s Counsel, Court of Appeal or High Court judge, or someone who “holds or has held high judicial office”; would have the power to approve applications for an assisted death.

Other amendments could see the possibility to have a refusal reconsidered by a different panel and there is an option for panels to sit in private if the person seeking an assisted death requests this and the panel chair agrees.

Ms Leadbeater told the committee its job is to “strengthen the Bill, not to try and stop it, however strongly people may feel about the issue”.

She added: “And a significant part of that strengthening is through additional patient-centred safeguards. And I firmly believe that the introduction of the assisted dying commission and the addition of the multi-disciplinary expertise and oversight which will be provided by these panels is a crucial part of that.”

Ms Leadbeater described the panels as “not a judicial entity”, in response to comments from Labour MP Naz Shah, who voted against the Bill in Parliament.

Ms Shah said the panels would be sitting as a “quasi-judicial body” but that two of the three members “will not necessarily have any experience of questioning witnesses and assessing evidence as part of the quasi-judicial process”.

Ms Leadbeater said: “This is not a judicial entity. This is a panel. It’s not a court. And actually that range of expertise is a strength, not a weakness.”

Mr Kruger, who is also opposed to the Bill, said Ms Leadbeater’s comments confirmed the judicial stage of the process “has been dropped”.

He said: “We’ve constantly been told that this Bill has been sort of gold-plated with a judicial stage of the application process. But we’ve now heard that there is not a judicial stage.

“And we’ve also heard this is judge-plus, this is somehow an improvement, a judge and others.

“There is no judge in the process. We should be clear about that – not necessarily, and very unlikely there would be.

“So, we’ve just heard conclusively that the judicial stage of this process, of this Bill, has been dropped.”

The committee of 23 MPs is undertaking line-by-line scrutiny of the Bill and will vote on various amendments before it returns to the House of Commons – most likely towards the end of April – for further debate and a vote.