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The requirement for a High Court judge to approve assisted dying applications has been scrapped by MPs.
A committee scrutinising the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill voted on Wednesday to remove a clause which had been touted as the reason the proposed legislation for England and Wales would be the strictest in the world.
Anti-assisted dying campaigners said the move was a “grave weakening of the bill”, but those in favour called it a “welcome step forward”.
When introduced to parliament last year, the bill proposed that terminally ill adults 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.
On Wednesday, a majority of MPs on the 23-member scrutiny committee voted to remove the court-approval clause.
Kim Leadbeater, the MP behind the bill, has proposed to instead establish a voluntary assisted dying commissioner – a judge or former judge – to oversee the process and expert panels featuring a senior legal figure, a psychiatrist and a social worker who would decide on assisted dying applications.
Reacting to the news, a group of 26 MPs said in a joint statement that the move “breaks the promises made by proponents of the bill, fundamentally weakens the protections for the vulnerable and shows just how haphazard this whole process has become.”
They said the committee had scrapped judges in favour of an “unaccountable quango”, and raised concerns that the panel might hear in private.
Conservative MP Danny Kruger argued against the change on Wednesday, saying: “We don’t give powers of life or death to panels”.
He argued that the panel’s decision would be essentially judicial anyway, and asked that an impact assessment be provided on whether psychiatrists or social workers had the capacity to take on these responsibilities.
The amendment on the panel of experts will be voted on at a later stage – possibly later this month. It has been suggested some MPs who supported the bill at Second Reading last year could change their minds.
Mr Kruger suggested there were 60 MPs who previously specified the High Court safeguard as a reason for having supported the proposed legislation.
Of the expert panels suggested in its place, he told the committee: “It’s not a judicial entity in any sense. It’s a weird creature, neither one thing nor the other, a quasi multi-disciplinary team at the wrong stage of the process for the wrong purpose.”
He said the change drops a much-heralded “gold-plated” judicial safeguard, “totally transforms” the bill, and lamented that MPs had not had a chance to hear expert views on the suggested replacement.
Ms Leadbeater has insisted the amendments she has put forward will give her bill “additional patient-centred safeguards” by providing a “range of expertise” via the three-member panel, which she said “is a strength, not a weakness”.
She said she had “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.
Conservative MP Kit Malthouse said that he had changed his mind about the involvement of judges in the process, and now backed having an expert panel. He said that “we need to take care to tread lightly on people’s final moments” and not envelop their final days in “stress, bureaucracy and a sense of jeopardy”.
Conservative MP Matt Vickers said he was concerned about how the decisions of the proposed commissioner would be held accountable.
And former MP Tom Hunt, a campaigner against the bill, added: “This represents a grave weakening of the bill.
“These panels will be largely disconnected from the patients. There will be no requirement for those on the panel to meet the patient in person or question them. They will quickly become rubber stamping panels.”
However Claire Macdonald, director of My Death, My Decision said the move was a “welcome step forward”, adding: “We support the move towards a specialist panel that can provide expertise and fairness in assisted dying decisions.”
The committee’s line-by-line scrutiny of the bill continues before it returns to the House of Commons – most likely towards the end of April – for further debate and a vote.
Source: independent.co.uk
