When Pat Malone gave evidence to the committee scrutinising my bill to give terminally ill adults choice at the end of their lives, his every word went to the heart of why the law has to change. Pat’s father died a horrible death as a result of pancreatic cancer. He begged Pat to help him die, something he could not do. Assisting a suicide currently attracts a sentence of up to 14 years in jail. When Pat’s brother contracted the same disease he couldn’t bear the thought of suffering in the same way, so he took his own life. His wife held his hand as he did so. Both she and her daughter, who was also in the house at the time, were then subjected to a months-long police investigation. When Pat’s sister found she had motor neurone disease she was determined to go to Dignitas, and died alone, far from home, without her loved ones to support her. I believe we have a duty to help families like Pat’s and to spare people a horrendous death when no other option is available to them. But we have to do it in a way that protects others from the risk of being coerced or pressured into a decision they wouldn’t otherwise take voluntarily. I’ve paid careful attention to all the evidence we have received, both orally and in writing, which is why I’m now proposing to make my bill even more robust, without making it so difficult to navigate that it would be too much of a burden for people in the last months of their lives to undertake. The advice from a wide range of witnesses, including medical professionals, lawyers, palliative care specialists, and experts in the fields of disability, coercive control and other disciplines, has been to introduce a multidisciplinary layer of protection. What they said to us makes sense, so later this week I’ll be proposing an amendment to create a voluntary assisted dying commission. It would be chaired by a high court judge or a former senior judge, thus retaining the judicial element in my bill. The commission would then authorise expert panels to look at every application for an assisted death. Those panels would have a legal chair, but also include a psychiatrist and a social worker, who will bring their own expertise in assessing mental capacity and identifying any risk of coercion. In short, I’m proposing what could be termed “Judge Plus”. The evidence we have heard from other jurisdictions that have already introduced tightly drawn laws like mine is that fears about vulnerable people being pressured into asking for an assisted death have rarely, if ever, been borne out in practice. Family and loved ones are far more likely to try to persuade a person not to do so. But I have promised to do everything I can to ensure my bill has the strongest safeguards anywhere in the world, and this change will meet that promise by making it even more robust than it was already. So I’m looking forward to the process of line-by-line scrutiny of the legislation that will start this week. But I’m very clear that we must keep at the front of our minds the terminally ill people and bereaved relatives such as Pat Malone who are being failed so abysmally by the legal quagmire they face now. Kim Leadbeater is MP for Spen Valley and sponsor of the assisted dying bill