Sir Keir Starmer has slapped down Wes Streeting after he claimed there is no budget for assisted dying.
The health secretary last week said he is concerned MPs made the wrong choice by voting through Kim Leadbeater’s historic legislation last week.
But asked about his remarks while on the plane to the Nato summit in The Hague, the prime minister – who voted for the Bill – decisively hit back, saying: “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”, he added.
While Cabinet ministers were asked to avoid weighing in too heavily on the debate, as MPs were encouraged to vote with their consciences rather than on party lines, Mr Streeting became a vocal critic of the bill in the lead up to the vote.
Posting to Facebook after opposing the legislation in the Commons, he warned that legalising assisted dying would take “time and money” away from other parts of the health service.
The health secretary said better end-of-life care was needed to prevent terminally ill people feeling they had no alternative but to end their own life.
Mr Streeting also said he could not ignore the concerns “about the risks that come with this Bill” raised by the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the Royal College of Physicians, the Association for Palliative Medicine and charities representing under-privileged groups.
“Gordon Brown wrote this week that ‘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. Neither is there real freedom to choose if, as many fear, patients will feel under pressure to relieve their relatives of the burden of caring for them, a form of coercion that prioritising good end-of-life care would diminish.’ He is right”, he 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.
“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.”
But he said his Department of Health and Social Care “will continue to work constructively with Parliament to assist on technical aspects of the Bill” as it goes through the House of Lords after clearing the Commons with a majority of 23 votes on Friday.
Assisted dying campaigner Dame Esther Rantzen urged peers not to block the landmark legislation.
Dame Esther told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I don’t need to teach the House of Lords how to do their job.
“They know it very well, and they know that laws are produced by the elected chamber.
“Their job is to scrutinise, to ask questions, but not to oppose.
“So yes, people who are adamantly opposed to this Bill, and they have a perfect right to oppose it, will try and stop it going through the Lords, but the Lords themselves, their duty is to make sure that law is actually created by the elected chamber, which is the House of Commons who have voted this through.”
Dame Esther, who turns 85 on Sunday and has terminal cancer, acknowledged the legislation would probably not become law in time for her to use it and she would have to “buzz off to Zurich” to use the Dignitas clinic.
As it stands, the Bill would allow terminally ill adults in England and Wales, with fewer than six months to live, to apply for an assisted death, subject to approval by two doctors and a panel featuring a social worker, a senior legal figure and a psychiatrist.
