Assisted suicide MP unveils ‘stacked’ committee to consider her Bill

Kim Leadbeater has assembled a “stacked committee” to scrutinise her assisted suicide Bill, critics have claimed.

The 23-member committee omits many key opponents to the Bill in the House of Commons while including those who are actively campaigning for a change in the law.

“It’s a bit of a shame Kim has ignored suggestions for the committee to include a number of opposing MPs,” one unnamed MP told the Daily Telegraph.

“Among the MPs passed over were doctors with real expertise in this space.

“Instead, we have a committee stacked 14-9 for the Bill, many of whom are newly elected MPs. It suggests the Bill’s supporters don’t want real scrutiny.”

The committee has been assembled following the success of Ms Leadbeater’s Terminally-Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill at its Second Reading when MPs voted by 330 to 275 in its favour.

The Committee Stage is supposed to involve close scrutiny of the Bill to ensure that its provisions are workable.

Already, the Bill has been severely and consistently criticised for including safeguards against abuses used in other jurisdictions but which critics say are futile or meaningless.

Although the committee includes Danny Kruger, the Conservative MP for East Wiltshire who spoke persuasively against the assisted suicide Bill during the Second Reading debate, the inclusion of a majority of assisted suicide activists has caused concerns among opponents of the Bill to increase rather than diminish.

The committee includes, for instance, Kim Malthouse and Jake Richards, co-sponsors of the Bill, as well as Dr Simon Opher.

Mr Malthouse, the Conservative MP for North West Hampshire, declared in September that the law against assisted suicide enshrined in the 1961 Suicide Act “must change in the name of love”, and has said more recently that the UK can learn from Canada, which changed its laws in 2016 and where one in 20 deaths are now the result of euthanasia.

Ms Leadbeater, the Labour MP for Spen Valley, made a series of misleading statements about the proposed safeguards in her Bill during the debate, one of which meant that she had to correct the record.

In the same debate, Dr Opher, the Labour MP for Stroud, dismissed entirely the serious concerns over patient coercion and the mass of international evidence to demonstrate the existence of slippery slope, or open door, to wider abuses, while suggesting that the law must change to protect doctors who were already killing their patients.

Mr Richards, the Labour MP for Rother Valley, has meanwhile talked down the efficacy and point of proposed legal safeguards involving the judiciary, saying that they might be dispensed with or used only in extraordinary circumstances.

According to reports, more than 50 MPs, including 38 MPs and 13 ministers, want fewer safeguards than are being proposed.

Two government ministers are on the committee – Stephen Kinnock, a health minister, and Sarah Sackman, a justice minister – but both of them voted in favour of assisted suicide even though Health Secretary Wes Streeting and Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood opposed it.

According to the Telegraph, notable omissions include Rachael Maskell, who has launched an independent palliative care commission and who spoke forcefully about the dangers of assisted suicide during the debate.

Ms Leadbeater said: “The Bill committee will bring together colleagues with differing views and valuable experience in order to give the Bill the detailed scrutiny it deserves and requires.”

She added that the inclusion of two ministers reveals “the level of engagement and commitment that such an important piece of legislation demands”.

The Bill will allow medical practitioners to assist in the killing of terminally ill adults deemed to have just six months to live, an offence at present punishable by prison.

Applicants must be resident in England or Wales and be registered with a doctor for at least a year. They must have mental capacity and have expressed a clear, settled and informed will, free from coercion, to end their lives with the assistance of a doctor. Two doctors and a High Court judge must approve their applications for doctor-assisted suicide.

Under the Bill’s provisions, doctors can suggest assisted suicide to patients but they cannot conscientiously object to helping a patient to secure such a death when he or she requests it. Instead, they must either deal directly with the application or refer any such patient to a doctor known to be willing to undertake the procedure.

Patients can appeal against a decision to refuse assisted suicide but no application can be lodged by relatives opposed to a person taking his or her life.

In April, the Bill will return to the Commons for its Third Reading when MPs will have a second chance to accept or reject the legislation. If they approve the Bill, it will begin its passage through the House of Lord to Royal Assent.

If successful, the first legal assisted suicides are likely to take place in England and Wales after about two years.

The vote at Second Reading was greeted with an outpouring of sadness from Catholic bishops and others who had campaigned vigorously to stop it.

RELATED: The fight against this appalling assisted suicide Bill is not yet over

Photo: Labour MP Kim Leadbeater, who proposed the landmark Private Member’s Bill on assisted suicide, meets fellow campaigners after a parliamentary vote was passed in support of the Bill, London, England, 29 November 2024. (Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images.)

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