Wes Streeting: ‘No budget for assisted suicide in the NHS’

The Health Secretary has said there is ‘no budget’ for implementing assisted suicide in the NHS.

Wes Streeting warned that MPs made the wrong choice when voting through Kim Leadbeater’s assisted suicide Bill in the House of Commons, arguing that it would put more pressure on the already strained NHS.

An impact assessment on Leadbeater’s Bill estimated that staffing an assisted suicide service could cost over £10 million a year within the first ten years, while training costs alone could exceed £11 million in the first six months.

Money in short supply

Streeting said: “The truth is that creating those conditions will take time and money.

“Even with the savings that might come from assisted dying if people take up the service – and it feels uncomfortable talking about savings in this context to be honest – setting up this service will also take time and money that is in short supply.”

He added: “There isn’t a budget for this. Politics is about prioritising. It is a daily series of choices and trade-offs. I fear we’ve made the wrong one.”

Competition for resources

One cabinet minister commented: “Assisted dying is going to eat up a lot of our bandwidth and will undoubtedly mean we won’t be able to do some of the things we wanted to, given the massive competition for resources.”

Another said: “Rachel Reeves voted for assisted dying. I hope that means she has found the money for it.”

Labour MP Dame Siobhain McDonagh, warned that assisted suicide could become “the Trojan horse that breaks the NHS”.

However, Keir Starmer stated: “It is my responsibility to make sure the Bill is workable, and that means workable in all its aspects. I’m confident we’ve done that preparation.”

Underfunding hospices

Chief Executive of Hospice UK Toby Porter said: “You can’t but note a moral question mark over the assumption we all make — until we hear otherwise — that an assisted dying service will be fully state funded, whereas currently the palliative care provided by hospices is currently only 30 per cent state funded and 70 per cent funded by charity.”

He added that if there is no extra investment in palliative care “that will mean the needs of the 1 per cent will be prioritised over the needs of the 99 per cent.”