7 in 10 Back Dropping Assisted Suicide Bill in Favour of Improving Palliative Care: Poll

Some 60 percent also agreed with former Prime Minister Gordon Brown that the NHS was at its ‘lowest ebb’ and that it was not the right time to change the law.

Pro-life campaigners gather in Parliament Square as Labour MP Kim Leadbeater's Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill is undergoing a second day of report stage in London, on June 13, 2025. James Manning/PA Wire

Seven in 10 people want the current assisted suicide bill replaced with a plan for improving palliative care, a poll indicates.

In a survey commissioned by Care Not Killing and published on Monday, respondents were told of concerns by medical royal colleges and disability rights campaigners regarding the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill in its current form.

They were then asked whether they agreed with the medics and campaigners that this bill should be scrapped and replaced with a plan to improve and invest in palliative care, to which 69 percent expressed support.

Public support for changing the law with any form of bill was shown to be limited when set against the current state of end of life care, with 65 percent telling pollsters that the government should fix Britain’s palliative and social care before considering the legalisation of assisted suicide.

Some 60 percent also agreed with former Prime Minister Gordon Brown that the NHS was at its “lowest ebb” and that it was not the right time to change to the law.

Whitestone interviewed 2,089 UK adults online between May 30 and June 1, ahead of a major vote on the bill on Friday.

Public Not Desperate for Law Change

Care Not Killing CEO Gordon Macdonald said the new poll “blows apart the arguments that the public are desperate for a so-called assisted dying law.”

He continued: “The public want the government and MPs to focus on fixing the NHS and palliative care which they know are broken. After all one in four Brits who would benefit from palliative care aren’t currently receiving it, while in many places services are piecemeal, part-time or facing cuts.”

The Private Member’s Bill (PMB) sponsored by Labour’s Kim Leadbeater would change the law in England and Wales, allowing terminally ill adults with fewer than six months to live the ability to apply for a medically-assisted death.

It passed at Second Reading on Nov. 29, 2024, with a majority of 55.

Pro-assisted suicide campaigners gather in Parliament Square as Labour MP Kim Leadbeater's Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill is undergoing a second day of report stage in London, on June 13, 2025. James Manning/PA Wire

Brown had first intervened in the discussion in an opinion piece written in The Guardian days before that vote, where he said that the NHS was at its “lowest ebb” and “this is not the right time to make such a profound decision.”

On Monday, he renewed his calls for prioritising end-of-life care, writing once more in The Guardian that passing the bill “would privilege the legal right to assisted dying without guaranteeing anything approaching an equivalent right to high-quality palliative care for those close to death.”

The former prime minister acknowledged the argument often cited that the terminally ill should not be denied the freedom to choose, “but there is no effective freedom to choose if the alternative option, the freedom to draw on high-quality end-of-life care, is not available.”

State of Palliative Care

Health Secretary Wes Streeting also said early on in the bill’s existence that he would be voting against it because end-of-life care in the UK is not good enough to give the terminally ill a “real choice.”

The level of concern over the disparity between adequate palliative care and a medic-assisted dying service was laid out at length during the Committee Stage of the bill’s scrutiny.

In January, the president of the Association of Palliative Medicine, Sarah Cox, told MPs that the current state of palliative care was “inadequate,” suggesting that a lack of access to end-of-life care could push the terminally ill to opt for assisted suicide.

According to Cox, 25 percent of people who die in the UK do not have the palliative care they need, estimating that figure to be around 100,000 people a year.

Cox, who has 30 years’ experience in palliative care, put to the committee, “I think the position that we would ask you to consider is this: ‘Is this the right time to be bringing in a law to give people a choice for assisted dying when they don’t have a choice to have good palliative care?'”

“I accept that there will be people—even with a very good palliative care system—who would still choose assisted dying. We do not currently have the very good palliative care system that we need,” she added.

Leadbeater has said it should not be seen as a choice between assisted dying and palliative care.

In her opening speech on the second day of debate at the Report Stage of her bill on June 13, Leadbeater said, “Palliative and end of life care and assisted dying can and do work side by side to give terminally ill patients the care and choice they deserve in their final days.”