Siân Berry

Many thanks, Sir Edward, for your firm chairing today, which I now look forward to. I sincerely thank the petitioners, and particularly Sophie Blake for all the work she does and for a very well put petition. I also thank Nathaniel Dye, and I had the genuine honour of meeting him and seeing his work before his death. I want to add a cross-party voice to the debate. The Greens were not whipped on the issue of assisted dying—we do not whip our Members in any debates—but all four Green MPs voted for this issue of conscience. However, that is not what we are here to debate today; we are here to talk about the process. I was so impressed with it and with the seriousness with which my colleagues and colleagues across the House took this issue. We made our decisions after so much debate and engagement with the Bill text and the amendments, and debates in our offices and with our staff. In our constituencies, we all spoke with constituents from a wide range of different groups. I spoke with young people, disabled people, faith groups, several terminally ill people and people caring for those who were terminally ill. This was serious work. I was a very new MP when the Bill went through its Second Reading, and I found it so inspiring. It is a sad topic, but I found the debate extraordinary. After all the debate in the House of Commons, which was unwhipped—by any party—and conducted with such seriousness on an issue of conscience, all that work led to a majority for the Bill. We all know what happened next: a refusal by the House of Lords to come to any kind of decision, and the effective blocking of any further consideration of this issue, into which we had all put so much work.