Meeting of the Parliament 06 November 2025
I thank everybody in the chamber who supported my members’ business motion. During the week that saw the start of stage 2 proceedings on the Deputy Presiding Officer’s Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill, it is good and proper that the Parliament takes a moment to consider end-of-life poverty in Scotland. Regardless of members’ views on the bill, it has been made clear from the discussions in the Parliament and across the country that we are all united, by a massive majority, in wanting the best possible support for those who are suffering with terminal illness.
Ensuring dignity in the final months and days when someone is suffering from a terminal illness should be a paramount consideration for the Parliament. No one needs to die in poverty, spending their final moments worrying about bills, how to afford their final meal or the implications for their loved ones. Unfortunately, as the preliminary data from Marie Curie’s 2025 report shows, dying in poverty is still the norm in too much of Scotland. We want to believe that we live in a land where everyone dies in the comfort of their own bed, surrounded by family and friends, in a peaceful, dignified and pain-free way, but a staggering one in four working-age people and one in six pensioners with a terminal illness die in poverty every year in this country. We can all agree that that is completely unacceptable.
Scotland remains such an unequal society in so many ways—most notably, in relation to income—and a closer look at the figures shows that areas such as my home city of Glasgow are affected the most, with one in three working-age people dying in poverty. A legacy of deindustrialisation, austerity and social neglect has led to too many of my constituents spending their whole lives, from the cradle to the grave, in poverty—indeed, it is a life sentence before they are even born. Where there should be dignity and support, instead, there is a constant, exhausting and overwhelming battle that does not end until their untimely passing.
In the past couple of weeks, there has been news of a credit union’s funeral plans being pulled at a moment’s notice by a completely unscrupulous provider, which shows that, even in death, some people are stripped of the dignity of the funeral that they might have planned. The fear of the pauper’s funeral still looms large in this country. It is the final indignity—a funeral being stripped from elderly, low-income Scots with no recourse. I hope that we can at least change that.
The terrible overlap of class and health inequalities was brought home to me, as I have mentioned previously, when I visited the Marie Curie hospice at Stobhill hospital—the hospital where I was born. I met a lady there who was suffering from terminal throat cancer. She had grown up in Bridgeton and had had a difficult upbringing—she had been involved in drug taking and various other things. She had two young boys and had just got her life back on track, or so she thought. She had had a persistent cough and a sore throat, and she went to the doctor umpteen times to try to get help. She was sent away with painkillers and told that it was just an infection. By the time she got a referral and was diagnosed, she had incurable throat cancer. She was in her late forties.
I walked around the hospice—as members of the Scottish Parliament, we often visit such places—and was suddenly confronted with this most horrendous, shattering story. What do you even say to someone in that situation? She felt that she had been robbed of her life because, due to her upbringing, she was not taken seriously and was unable to advocate for herself. She was suffering a terminal illness; she was going to die.
What were the implications for her? What about her young kids? It was a really difficult conversation, but we tried to turn it into something positive by talking about the impact that she had had on her children and how they were doing really well. We tried to gather some degree of positivity from the situation. She made the point that, if she had grown up in Bearsden rather than Bridgeton, she might still be alive today. I got a call just the day afterwards to say that she had passed away.
In many ways, we need to think about the reality of the avoidable deaths that happen every day in Scotland because of this economic and social problem, and about the lack of equality.