Chris Whitty to give evidence to MPs on assisted dying bill committee – UK politics live

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Professor Sir Chris Whitty to speak to MPs about assisted dying bill

Good morning. The main political event of the week will be Rachel Reeves’ speech tomorrow on promoting growth, and this morning she and Keir Starmer have been meeting business leaders over breakfast in the centre of London to discuss what it will say. It is not clear yet how impressed the audience were, but the pictures look good.

Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves meeting business leaders over breakfast in central London

A week ago Starmer was giving a speech in Downing Street on his response to the Southport killings, and one of his arguments was that the authorities need a wider definition of terrorism to include people like the Southport killer, Axel Rudakubana, who was not treated as a terrorist because he was not ideologically motivated, but who committed a crime that spread as much terror as any conventional act of terrorism. But today you will have woken up to the news on the BBC that Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, has rejected an internal Home Office report calling for the official definition of terrorism to be widened.

The actual situation is complicated. Overnight Policy Exchange, a rightwing thinktank, published a report which included some leaked details of the internal Home Office report, commissioned by Cooper after the Southport killings, with critical commentary. The report is called “Extremely Confused”, which gives a fair view of its assessment of the report, and one of its authors is Andrew Gilligan, a former adviser to Boris Johnson. The paper includes quotes from the leaked report, but Policy Exchange has not published the whole document. Nevertheless, the Policy Exchange report has been widely written up, particularly in Tory papers critical of what the internal Home Office report is saying, and Cooper briefed against it in response.

Here is Rajeev Syal’s report.

There is bound to be more on this later today.

But the main interest this morning may be the start of evidence sessions for the public bill committee considering the assisted dying bill. Prof Sir Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, is up first. Whitty has not said much in public about the bill, but last year he and other chief medical officers issued a joint letter saying that, even if the bill does become law, that must not undermine good palliative care. They said:

Whatever parliament decides, we believe the medical profession will be unanimous on two things: that we must not undermine the provision of good end-of-life care for all including the outstanding work done by palliative care clinicians; and that individual doctors and other healthcare workers should be able to exercise freedom of conscience as, for example, happens with abortion care currently. This will, we are sure, be common ground for all sides of this complex societal decision.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.25am: MPs on the public bill committee considering the assisted dying bill start taking evidence from witnesses about the bill, starting with Prof Sir Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England. He and other leadering medical experts give evidence this morning. More witnesses give evidence after 2pm, including Sir Max Hill, the former director of public prosecutions.

9.30am: Keir Starmer chairs cabinet.

9.30am: The ONS publishes figures showing by how much the population is expected to grow.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

11.30am: Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

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Q: Are you happy with the provision in the act that assisted dying should be available to someone with only six months to live?

Whitty says he would be happy with that, provided that six months is seen as a “central view. He says it is generally easy to say that someone might die in the foreseeable future, but “whether it’s five months or whether it’s seven months is a lot harder”.

He says it should be accepted that, although the bill would apply to someone with six months left to live, that must be seen as an estimate, not a precise prediction.

Whitty says bill should not include deadline for when NHS would start delivering assisted dying

Whitty says he thinks the best safeguards are simple safeguards. “Over complicating actually usually makes the safeguard less certain, to be honest,” he says.

Rebecca Paul (Con) asks how long the NHS should be given to prepare for the act coming into force.

Whitty says there is a difference between the act technically coming into force, and assisted dying services actually being provided.

On the latter, he says he would be opposed to the bill including a deadline saying when services have to start being delivered. But there should be “a reasonable expectation that the NHS and others should be involved in trying to make plans for this as fast as possible”.

Whitty says, for “the majority of people”, it is very clear whether or not they have capacity to make a decision about their health.

He says having a mental health condition does not, by itself, means someone lacks capacity.

Whitty says he is glad the assisted dying bill would work alongside the Mental Capacity Act. He says doctors understand the act very well, and if doctors are applying the act to decide if a patient has capacity to make decisions about their health, they will come to the same conclusion. It is “well established” legislation, he says.

Whitty says it would be difficult to include in assisted dying bill list of illnesses that can be terminal

Sarah Olney (Lib Dem) says the bill does not give a list of illnesses which could be terminal. Would it be possible to produce such a list?

Whitty says he thinks this would be difficult.

He says a patient may have cancer, but that on its own might not mean they would be certain to die.

So the fact they have cancer is not in itself, a demonstration that they are going to die, and in fact, majority will not. Almost 80% of people with breast cancer diagnosed tomorrow will still be alive 10 years later, for example.

Equally, there are people who may not have a single disease that is going to lead to the path to death, but they have multiple diseases that are interacting in the same person. They’re highly frail, and it is not the fact of one disease that’s the cause, but the fact of this constellation that is clearly leading them on a path inexorably to a death at some point in the foreseeable future.

Therefore, I think it’s quite difficult to actually specify these diseases are going to cause death and these diseases are not, because in both directions that could potentially be misleading.

Chris Whitty giving evidence to assisted dying public bill committee

Whitty says doctors sometimes have to give advice to people ahead of an operation, including that the procedure could lead to them dying. He says this to make the point that giving advice that covers end of life would not be unprecedented for doctors.

Q: What sort of training would doctors need if this bill becomes law?

Whitty says there are two types: training which is normal for doctors, and specific training related to this bill.

He says doctors are routinely taught about capacity. But that training might need adaption if the bill becomes law.

But there might also be a need for specific training, relating to how drugs are given to people to allow them to end someone’s life.

Prof Sir Chris Whitty is giving evidence to the public bill committee now.

He starts by saying that he is neutral on the bill. He says that he and other chief medical officers regard assisted dying as a societal question, and that it is for parliament to decide if it should be allowed, not them.

But he says he is there to answer technical questions.