Member

Amendment 182 and Amendments 261 to 264 in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, and my noble friends Lady Ritchie and Lord Hunt would require someone seeking an assisted death to have their palliative and end-of-life care needs assessed and care provided by an appropriate health or social care professional if the person requests it. These amendments would also place a duty on the Secretary of State and Welsh Ministers to make regulations about the provision of palliative and end-of-life care. There would need to be justification for the different levels of palliative care being offered, on the one hand, to terminally ill patients seeking an assisted death and, on the other, those in comparable situations where patients are not seeking an assisted death. The Government have some concerns, as I said earlier, about creating unequal access to palliative care, with the potential effect of prioritising resource for those who wish to pursue an assisted death rather than for those with the greatest clinical need.