Meeting of the Parliament 09 December 2025
I will be fairly brief in setting out my hope that there is broad consensus on the LCM before us. I would like to hope that, as the cabinet secretary said, regardless of the range of views on the merits of legislation here in the Scottish Parliament or at Westminster, very few people would want advertising to play any role at all in the issue of assisted dying legislation or any equivalent legislation at UK level for England and Wales.
As others have said, the issue has been debated in both Parliaments in relation to both pieces of legislation. When we debated the LCM, my additional concern was that we should ensure not only that we are clear that we do not expect and do not want to allow advertising to play a role, but that we do not inadvertently make provisions against advertising that would inhibit the provision of factual information about services or, indeed, arguments about the policy merits of the legislation or how services should be delivered. When we considered the LCM in committee, I asked the cabinet secretary whether it was his expectation that the restrictions that we are talking about would apply to advertising alone, and he agreed.
We considered a range of possible restrictions in the Scottish legislation, and I had similar concerns that some variants of what was being proposed might have been more of an inhibition on the expression of legitimate opinions about assisted dying or, potentially, on research or the provision of factual information.
As we go forward, we need to ensure that we pay due attention to both aspects of that concern, either by working with colleagues in the UK Parliament to ensure that the legislation there is in fit shape or by scrutinising Liam McArthur’s bill in this Parliament at stage 3. We must ensure that we not only do not allow advertising to play a role in a way that none of us would be comfortable with, but that we do not inhibit legitimate debate—nor that we allow the use of material on social media, for example, to influence or put pressure on people to make a decision in either direction.
17:45