Thank you for contacting me regarding assisted dying.

Diary permitting, I will try to attend the reception being held on the 23 May. I fully appreciate the depth of your concerns about this issue and am aware that Coping with a terminal condition is an incredibly distressing and difficult time for both for the patient and their families.

As you may know, assisting or encouraging suicide is a criminal offence under Section 2 of the Suicide Act 1961. I am aware that the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) published guidelines primarily concerned with advising the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) prosecutors about the factors which they need to consider when deciding whether it is in the public interest to prosecute a person for assisting or encouraging another to commit suicide.

The House of Commons has discussed the DPP's guidelines and these were unanimously commended as being a compassionate and measured way of dealing with one of the most emotionally-charged crimes in the statute book. However, they do not change the law; assisting or encouraging suicide has not been decriminalised.

The DPP further clarified the CPS Policy on the likelihood of prosecution of health care professionals, to specify that the relationship of care will be the important aspect and it will be necessary to consider whether the suspect may have been in a position to exert some influence on the victim.

I believe the application of the law should be flexible enough to distinguish the facts and the circumstances of one case from another. To this end, the DPP's policy offers important and sensitive guidance.

I fully accept that suicide, assisting or encouraging suicide, assisted dying and euthanasia are all subjects on which it is entirely possible for people to hold widely different but defensible opinions. This is why the substance of the law in this area is not a matter of party politics but of conscience and any vote would be a free one should the law in this area ever be altered.

I accept that there are imperfections and problems with the current law, but I think that these can be dealt with sensitively and sensibly without having a new law that actually brings in euthanasia. Although the DPP's policy makes clear that assisting a person to die is still illegal, I am worried that by not prosecuting those assisting in the suicide of others we will encourage demands for legalising assisted dying and euthanasia. In my view, the lives of the terminally ill and the frail are of equal value to anyone else's and as such, they deserve equal protection under the criminal law.

I believe that we must ensure that people receive the most appropriate care personalised to their individual needs as they approach the end of their life.

Everyone would agree that terminally ill patients should receive the highest quality palliative support and end-of-life care, and that they and their families should be certain that their end-of-life care will meet all of their needs. With that in mind I welcome the Department of Health's End of Life Care Strategy which is intended to improve access to good quality palliative care and encourage the Government further to develop specialist palliative care and hospice provision.

Indeed, I have been delighted to visit St Anne’s Hospice and to support their inspiring work on numerous occasions as Cheadle’s MP. The generosity shown by our local community is a testament to the high esteem the hospice is held in by those whose loved ones have been cared for by St Anne’s.

I would like to thank you for taking the time to contact me regarding this.