Health Secretary still plans to oppose assisted dying Bill
Wes Streeting has said he still plans to oppose the assisted dying Bill but that MP Kim Leadbeater's work on it so far has been 'extremely helpful'.
The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill has undergone significant changes since it succeeded in an initial vote in Parliament in November, which the Health Secretary opposed.
The High Court safeguard has been dropped and replaced by expert panels, while the implementation period has been doubled to a maximum of four years for an assisted dying service to be in place should the Bill pass into law.
Ms Leadbeater, the MP behind the proposed legislation, and its supporters say the Bill has been strengthened and made more workable, but opponents have claimed the committee process was rushed and chaotic.
'I think what Kim Leadbeater has done is extremely helpful,' Mr Streeting told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
The Government as a whole is neutral on the question but has sought to work with Ms Leadbeater and MPs supporting and opposing the Bill to make it workable, he said.
'To make sure that, whatever our own views on the merits of the Bill itself, that the Bill is workable, so that if MPs and peers choose to pass the assisted dying Bill into law, that it is a workable law,' he said.
Asked if he would vote for it, he said: 'No, I won't be voting for it, but I do welcome the constructive approach that Kim Leadbeater has taken.'
Mr Streeting has previously suggested it could cost the NHS more if assisted dying is brought in.
He said it is 'fine' that other colleagues in the Government and the Department of Health and Social Care 'take a different view'.
'It's a free vote and and it will remain so as this Bill goes through,' Mr Streeting added.
He said Ms Leadbeater and supporters of the Bill are taking the right approach 'even if I might, respectfully, disagree with them on the merits of the Bill overall'.
The Bill returns to the House of Commons this month for further debate.
Eligibility for an assisted dying service under the proposal remains with only terminally ill adults in England and Wales with fewer than six months to live.
The Bill proposes someone fitting this criteria should be legally allowed to end their lives, subject to approval by two doctors and an expert panel featuring a social worker, senior legal figure and psychiatrist.
MPs are expected to vote on further amendments to the Bill at report stage on April 25.
If time allows, MPs could also vote on whether to approve the Bill at third reading – its final stage in the Commons – and decide if it is then sent to the House of Lords for further scrutiny.
Voting is according to conscience so MPs do not vote along party lines on this issue.
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And unresolved questions over levies such as fuel duty will also pile more pressure on the Chancellor. While Reeves's statement is meant to set in stone government spending plans for at least the next three years, her £40bn tax raid last year may not be enough to foot the eventual bill. The tax burden is already on course to reach a peacetime high, but JP Morgan and Capital Economics both believe that Reeves will have to raise taxes by more than £20bn in the Budget this autumn to cover her increased spending plans and fend off increasing pressure from Reform. 'The spending review contains few surprises,' says Elliott Jordan-Doak, at Pantheon Macroeconomics. 'The question is only how big tax hikes will be in October.' The Government hinted on Wednesday that council tax would rise sharply to pay for policing after Reeves cut the Home Office budget by 2.2pc. 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The plan set out by the previous Conservative government assumed real-terms funding increases of around 3.6pc per year. Johnson says: 'Aiming to get back to meeting the NHS 18 week target for hospital waiting times within this parliament is enormously ambitious – an NHS funding settlement below the long-run average might not measure up.' The plans also revealed the front-loaded nature of many of the settlements, with NHS capital spending set to remain flat in real terms for the rest of the decade after this year. The Office for Budget Responsibility, the Government's tax and spending watchdog, believes pressures from an older and sicker population will increase demand for NHS services by 1.1pc per year alone. 'The pressure to spend more on the NHS will still be great even after today's announcement,' says Jordan-Doak. Economists also questioned whether the health department's pledge to find £9bn in efficiency savings by the end of the decade was credible. 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