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The minister spoke about people being allowed self-directed support following “collaborative discussion”. People are told, “You can employ somebody and take on all the difficulties that come with that. That is your choice—it is up to you—and here is some money to do that. Good luck.” That is not collaborative and does not allow self-directed support to be provided in an appropriate way. If that is happening, we are leaving people who require care to simply fend for themselves—we have heard that time and again from people with lived experience. The minister talks a lot about ensuring that we take account of lived experience and says that she speaks to people with lived experience, but that point does not seem to have been picked up, which I find concerning. It is clear that six weeks seems to be a decent amount of time to arrange for people to be given care, and we can define “critical need” in secondary legislation, as required.

I support Paul Sweeney’s amendments, because we should do everything that we can to ensure that people with a terminal illness are looked after as quickly as possible.

I press amendment 128.

I declare an interest as a practising NHS general practitioner.

We need to be absolutely clear about the bill’s timeline. We are three and a half to four years on from when the bill was introduced by Humza Yousaf. We are £30 million worse off than we were at the start of the process, and we have lost the bill’s principles. After the Government lodged amendments—we should remember that the bill was introduced four years ago—we had 48 hours to digest the amendments and make a decision about what to do. That is not a particularly acceptable timeline, given the amount of time and money that have been spent on the bill. Let us not forget that the bill’s second iteration involves 200-odd amendments and that the proposal for a national care service has been completely scrapped—we are not even talking about it any more. Describing the bill as a farce would be generous.

The minister has spoken about the bill representing reform, but reform in the social care sector would involve doing things that actually led to changes, so the bill does not represent reform to the sector. The Scottish National Party Government and the minister are simply trying to save face. That is why we are in this position. They have realised—as we have said all along—that a lot of the reforms, including Anne’s law and Frank’s law, could have been made straight away. If they had been made four years ago, people would not be waiting right now. The position that we are in is completely unacceptable, and the people of Scotland should rightly be very upset about how we have found ourselves in it.

I urge members to vote for Brian Whittle’s amendment 158, because we need to take real evidence on the bill, which is now totally different from what was originally set out. We need to go back, take proper evidence and ensure that we do the right thing. We should not legislate just for the sake of legislating.

I turn to death certification and how a health professional would go about filling in the relevant forms. We do not want to skew the death statistics. If someone has terminal lung cancer, for example, it is very important that that is captured in the data. What is the thought process on the way that you would like a health professional to fill in the forms?

We are short of time, given the number of questions that we have, but I have a final question. We heard from disabled people’s groups, who were very clear that nobody who is disabled supports assisted dying. That is the evidence that we heard from those groups. How can the bill ensure that, as we heard from disabled people, we do not allow vulnerable groups to be pressured into using it rather than accessing other forms of treatment?

Good morning. I refer members to my entry in the register of members’ interests. I am a practising NHS GP and chaired the medical advisory group on the bill.

Today is world cancer day. We had 35,379 new cancers registered in Scotland in 2021, which is an increase of 5.5 per cent from 2019 figures. Although I appreciate that not all cancers are terminal, some are. As we live longer and there are an increasing number of cancers, there will be more people who have terminal cancer.

We have heard about the palliative care sector being relatively underfunded. Those who provide end-of-life care are struggling at the moment. Given that we are struggling to cope with demand, there is a criticism that, without more money going into the sector, some people would turn to assisted dying because they cannot access palliative care. How do you respond to that?

Is there scope to have a discussion with Police Scotland in order to create, through secondary legislation, a process that medics could follow? It is important to say that there is a big difference between neglect or someone outright not doing their job properly, and someone doing their best where it is subsequently found that there are issues. Is there scope to discuss with Police Scotland and the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service the creation of a process that is robust enough to defend medics who use the process for assisted dying properly?

To move on to reporting, are you happy that there is enough in the bill to enable us to look robustly at what has happened over each year, which will feed into the five-year review? If you think that that is the case, what learnings have you taken from other jurisdictions that already undertake reporting? Let us not reinvent the wheel.

Do you think that we might need any additional information from the reporting that may be able to provide additional safeguards and reassurance?

We have heard from previous witnesses that by passing the bill, we will open the door to a slippery slope, mission creep or scope creep. They cite, as you have, Canada, Oregon and the Netherlands as examples. Do you think that that will happen here through legal challenges, and how do we safeguard against it?

I want to turn again to coercion, but to take a slightly different angle. I was concerned by the evidence that was given by Police Scotland about coercion. I will give you an example. Two doctors sign to say that a person can go ahead with the assisted death that they have chosen, and the person goes ahead with it. Later on, a family member, for whatever reason, decides to challenge that and says that there was coercion and other things going on.

The police said that there does not seem to be enough robustness in the process that medics would follow to be able to say that there was no coercion. Despite their best efforts, medics would be liable to be in trouble with the law if it was subsequently found that there was coercion. Is there a way of tightening up the provisions on coercion to deal with that?