Meeting of the Parliament 10 March 2026 [Draft]
I will reflect on much of what my colleague Michael Marra has outlined about the challenge in the bill around coercion and the need to try to deal with coercion at this late stage in the process. For many colleagues across the chamber, it is a significant hole in the bill that coercion and the potential for coercion have not been appropriately addressed throughout the process.
My amendments in the group seek to strengthen the safeguards to ensure that declarations under the legislation will be genuinely voluntary. The amendments would require that practitioners are satisfied that a declaration has been made without coercion or undue influence. The bill does not specify how coercion should be identified, nor would it ensure that practitioners have training or are able to access relevant expertise on coercion, which I will come to when we debate amendments in the next group.
My amendment 172 would require practitioners to take
“all reasonable steps to identify whether the person has been subject to coercion, pressure or undue influence”,
including through private assessment, consideration of social and caregiving circumstances and, where appropriate, consultation with safeguarding experts.
My amendment 156 would require that practitioners receive training on
“the identification of … coercion, undue influence and coercive control”,
including in contexts of
“dependency arising from illness, disability, age, social care needs or caring arrangements.”
I have sought to construct reasonable amendments that can command support. However, I recognise what my colleague Michael Marra said about how difficult it will be to identify coercion and how pressurising it could be for GPs to have to take that forward. For much of my life before I became an MSP I worked with people who have a learning disability, and I recognise many of the things that Mr Marra said about women’s experiences of coercive control. The people I worked with were often vulnerable and did not have a strong family network, and many of them had lived much of their lives in institutional settings before this Parliament sought to move people into the community and tried to give them a life with choice and control. Many of those people had become vulnerable through the institutionalising of the way in which they lived their lives. Many of them were vulnerable and would not be able to identify it to somebody if they were being coerced into doing something.
For me, that sits at the heart of the bill. It is about whether we can provide adequate safeguards for the most vulnerable people in our community and society and whether we can at least equip the medical professionals who will carry out assessments and deal with the issues to be able to do that in the most direct way possible. That would be in private and in a one-to-one setting, and they must be adequately trained to do that.
I put on the record that I have had interaction with the social work profession on many of the issues that are raised in amendments in the group, and I declare an interest as I am married to a registered social worker. It is clear that the social work profession is rejecting the bill not because of the issue at hand, on which it has a neutral position because social workers take different views on whether to support assisted dying, but fundamentally because, as it has pointed out, it is concerned that we appear to be forgetting about the important role that social work processes play in identifying coercion, coercive control, abuse and all the other issues that I have outlined.
I have met both Social Work Scotland and the Scottish Association of Social Work, and they are clear that they are very concerned about the lack of regard that is given in the bill to existing adult support and protection processes and to the creation of new processes. I acknowledge the amendments that Brian Whittle and others have lodged to try to sustain those social work processes and provide for them to be followed.
We need to take clear cognisance of the fact that the bill might not be able to square the circle on coercion by creating robust enough safeguards to protect the most vulnerable in society. Social work professionals, who are often tasked with the most difficult decisions in our society about children and young people, older people and people who have a disability are experts in their field. They are trained, they know their communities and they know all the risks that exist in that space and how to identify them. If they are saying that they do not have confidence in the bill, we have to sit up and take notice of that.