Meeting of the Parliament 10 March 2026 [Draft]
This is the first of the few times that I will speak to the bill at stage 3. I start by saying how much I think that our debates on the amendments have shown the Parliament in a good light, in that we have all been able to talk across the issues. I thank the member in charge of the bill for making that possible.
My concern about coercion is one of the fundamental reasons why I struggle with the bill. How do we identify coercion, and how do we prevent it? Brian Whittle was entirely right in what he said earlier. How do we identify coercion when we no longer have the relationships between doctors and patients that we used to have, where a doctor knew so much about what was going on in their patients’ families?
How do we prevent coercion? I do not know. As we heard so powerfully from Michael Marra and Ruth Maguire, coercion can be subtle and it is often undetectable. It goes on, often by suggestion and repetition, without anyone really knowing what is happening, apart from the person who is inflicting it on somebody else.
In addition, there is the coercion that people put on themselves. We should be under no illusion about that. If someone gets an unfavourable diagnosis, one thing that they will think about is whether it might be easier to end their life than to put their family through everything that they might go through. Some people have supportive families who can break through those shackles and prevent them from coercing themselves into doing something that they might regret, but not everyone has such a family around them.
I have heard of people across the Highlands who are coerced by the fact that there is a lack of palliative care in the area where they live. The other day, I heard of somebody who, if the bill passes, would contemplate ending their life rather than going to Inverness, two and a half hours away from their family, where they might get the palliative care that they cannot get locally, because they could not bear to be separated from their family. To my mind, it is that lack of palliative care, coupled with the approach in the bill, that makes the issue of coercion so difficult.
We know that, in Scotland, 14,000 people a year are probably not getting the palliative care that they need. Why is that? It is because there is not enough palliative care provision and there is a huge lack of funding. If they cannot get palliative care through the state, many people consider funding such care themselves, but not everyone has the ability to do that. People often ask why they should do so if they know where they are going, and they ask whether it would not be better to give what little resources they have left to their children and their partner.
I am not sure that any of the amendments in this group that were lodged by Paul O’Kane, Michael Marra, Bob Doris, Brian Whittle, Jeremy Balfour and Ruth Maguire make me any less concerned about coercion. I fear that they do not. However, I wish those members success, because I absolutely believe that Parliament should do anything that it can to ensure that there is no coercion in such cases. In particular, I believe that we should consider amendments 177 and 180 and ensure that they are agreed to.
I do not want to make a big thing of this, but amendment 50 gives me a huge amount of concern because it proposes reducing the penalty for a summary conviction for coercion. How can that be right, given that many of us fear that the potential for coercion is one of the main problems with the bill?