The country’s former top prosecutor has warned that the assisted dying ban is failing to protect vulnerable people as figures reveal the majority of cases are never scrutinised by the Crown Prosecution Service.
Sir Max Hill said that “large numbers of deaths occur behind closed doors with no foreknowledge by anybody and no post mortem scrutiny either”.
The former director of public prosecutions, who led the CPS from 2018 to 2023, has insisted that the assisted dying bill, which returns to the Commons today, will make people safer as he urged MPs to “finish the job” and pass the legislation.
His comments come as new analysis of government figures by campaign group Dignity in Dying show that only one in six assisted deaths of British people were reviewed by the CPS.
Of 559 cases of aiding a suicide reported to police between April 2015 and March 2026, only 99 were referred to prosecutors. Other assisted deaths may go completely undetected if no one ever makes a report to the police and campaigners believe up to 650 dying people end their own lives every year.
More than 60 per cent of reported cases were dropped by police because of evidential difficulties, often because the ban has driven people behind closed doors or overseas to a facility like Dignitas.
“I have always argued that a more up to date legal regime will afford more protection for the vulnerable than the current regime, which has been in place for more than six decades,” he told The Independent.
He said the “numbers just don’t stack up”, adding: “So you have to envisage a very, very large number of people at the end of their lives suffering from terminal illness for whom palliative care, however valuable, doesn’t afford a solution to their pain and suffering, and who with no safeguards whatsoever are currently bringing their lives to an end.
“And the current regime only ever provided scrutiny after the death, which to my mind was always too late.”
Encouraging or assisting a suicide is currently a crime punishable by up to 14 years in prison under the Suicide Act 1961.
If passed, the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill would allow adults in England and Wales, with fewer than six months to live, to apply for an assisted death subject to the approval of two doctors and an expert panel.
MPs will once again debate and vote on the law on Friday after it ran out of time in the Lords in April due to the number of amendments put forward by peers.
Sir Max said the legislation will provide transparency and scrutiny, crucially, before the death has occurred.
“That has got to be a greater protection for terminally ill adults, but particularly for those that the ‘no’ campaign would argue are vulnerable,” he said.
“Currently, they may come to the end of their life in circumstances which are never investigated and that can’t be right. The bottom line here is that maintaining the status quo is not the answer.”
He said the legislation running out of time left “deeply unsatisfactory unfinished business”, adding: “Parliament needs to finish the job.”
Allegations of assisting a suicide are among rare cases which must be personally reviewed by the DPP when they reach the CPS . Guidelines, issued by Sir Keir Starmer when he was in the role, mean that prosecution is less likely when someone acted out of compassion.
Sir Max reviewed 27 assisted dying cases during his five-year tenure as the country’s top prosecutor with only one proceeding to prosecution.
Others involved grieving spouses, usually a marriage of many decades or long term partnership, who been under police investigation for nine to 18 months by the time the case reached his desk. The misery for those surviving partners was “regrettable”, he said.
He is joined by a string of recent DPPs who have also called for assisted dying reform, including Dame Alison Saunders and Lord Ken Macdonald of River Glaven. Former prime minister Sir Keir Starmer voted in support of the bill last year.
Sir Max added: “So we have got a continuous run of four of us who have had common experience and we have all reached the same view. Surely that is, at the very least, an indication that leaving this to prosecute or not in the hands of one unelected official, whilst that might have been sufficient in 1961, isn’t good enough now.”
The bill remains highly controversial, with the government remaining neutral and allowing MPs to vote according to their consciences, rather than along party lines.
Current prime minister Andy Burnham will not take part in Friday’s crucial vote on the revived bill so as not to “unduly influence the debate”. In July, he said that he believes the funding of palliative care needs to be fixed before consideration can be given to legalising assisted dying.
Those in opposition to the legislation have raised “significant concerns” about protections for the vulnerable against coercion and access to high-quality end of life care.
Labour MP Ashley Dalton, who has terminal cancer, said the bill is “unsafe and unworkable” and argued that palliative care should be fixed first.
Meanwhile, Tory leader Kemi Badenoch said she would again vote against the bill, arguing scrutiny in the House of Lords should “not be dismissed as obstruction”.
