Kim Leadbeater

I am going to finish. There will be stories of suicide attempts, post-traumatic stress disorder, lonely trips to Switzerland, police investigations, and everything else we have all heard of in recent months. As the Commission on Assisted Dying said in 2011, 14 years ago: “The current legal status of assisted dying [in the UK] is inadequate and incoherent. It outsources a healthcare issue abroad, especially to Dignitas, instead of the Government and Parliament assuming responsibility.” That was 14 years ago, and we are in exactly the same position today. Things have got to change. As the Government’s impact assessment states, the Bill will improve equity of choice, ensuring that terminally ill adults from all socioeconomic backgrounds can access end-of-life options within a regulated and safe framework. I will draw my comments to a close. There are essentially two ways in which we can look at the situation we are in. We can look at it through a legal lens. As legislators, we have a duty to change the law where it is failing, and when the last four Directors of Public Prosecutions tell us that the law needs to change, surely we have a duty to listen. We need scrutiny before people die, not after. Most importantly, there is the human lens, which is how I approach most things. Giving dying people choice about how they die is about compassion, control, dignity and bodily autonomy. Surely we should all have the right—