Meeting of the Parliament 30 October 2025
Today, we are being asked to write what is in effect a blank cheque to make it easier to choose to die than to live. I do not believe that voting to do that is a neutral act—it has consequences.
Scottish hospices have said that, if assisted dying is legalised, hospices could see their fundraising efforts impacted. The Royal College of Psychiatrists in Scotland said that it did not think that costs could be absorbed within existing budgets. The Royal College of General Practitioners said that
“Trying to add it on to a busy general practice would be very difficult”.—[Official Report, Health, Social Care and Sport Committee, 19 November 2024; c 8.]
I have not touched on the crisis in social care, which sees staff on low pay, and disabled people having to rely on incontinence pads for hours because there is no money to pay staff to go in often enough to change them; or the housing crisis, which sees 10,000 disabled people stuck in their own homes; or the fact that one in four people who need palliative care in Scotland does not get it. What would the costs of the bill mean for the opportunities to address all of that?
As we would expect, many of those issues were raised during the committee’s scrutinising of the bill. The committee concluded in its report that
“costs may ... vary significantly according to a number of factors.”
We do not know the cost of making the bill safe, but we do know that we cannot amend the bill to fix the crises in social care, housing or the national health service. The costs of doing those things are huge, and rightly so, because this is life or death.
Today, colleagues are being asked to support a blank cheque for assisted suicide, and whatever the costs of that are in the end, it means money diverted away from services that are designed to support constituents to live well to a service that makes it easier for them to choose to die.
I have said all along that the risks of the bill are real, and they are. The bill is proposed in a context in which the NHS is in crisis, social care is creaking at the seams and one in four people do not get the palliative care that they need. To change that context, we need fundamental changes in health and social care, housing and much more to improve the lives of our constituents. Spending money—a lot of it, according to evidence—on assisted suicide reduces money for other areas.
Voting for the resolution is therefore, I say again, not a neutral act. We would be licensing Governments to spend money on assisted suicide in a world where we so desperately need money in public services that help people to live. No matter how hard or intolerable life can be, there must always be hope for a better world—one where we have the right to practical assistance and support to lead ordinary lives.
I ask members to vote against the blank cheque to make it easier to choose to die and, instead, to continue to fight for a better world where we can all choose to live, and a world that supports us to do that well.
16:44