Project FAQs

The exploring public views on assisted dying project is being run by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics (NCOB). The NCOB commissioned the social research agency Hopkins Van Mil (HVM) to design, organise, and facilitate a series of quantitative surveys and a Citizens’ Jury for the project. HVM partnered with:  

• The Sortition Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation whose mission is to promote and institute sortition (random selection) in empowered citizens’ assemblies and juries. It is responsible for recruiting people to take part in the Jury and aim to ensure the Jury is broadly representative of the English population.  
• M·E·L Research is a specialist independent market, social and behavioural research and insights consultancy. It is responsible for delivering the two surveys.  

 The project is being funded by a grant from the AB Charitable Trust. The AB Charitable Trust receive regular updates on the progress of the project but are not involved in how the project is designed and delivered, or its outputs.  

There is a gap in qualitative evidence about public views on assisted dying in England and the reasons the public considers important in forming their views. 

 Most available data about public perspectives on assisted dying in England are based on opinion polls which often do not explore or capture the relevant complexities involved in the debate. When we engaged with experts across the UK Government and the health policy sector, we heard that nuanced and robust evidence on public opinion on the topic would be a welcome contribution to informing the debate on assisted dying.  

No, we will not be publishing a Nuffield Council on Bioethics (NCOB) opinion on assisted dying, or the ethics of assisted dying, as part of this project. Our focus is on supporting an informed public conversation on the topic, and publishing the findings from our public engagement and survey work.

There is no universally agreed terminology when discussing the debate on assisted dying.  A range of terms are used internationally, and different people have preferences for different terminology. We refer to the definitions described in this Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology briefing note on assisted dying, which uses “assisted dying” as an umbrella term for “the involvement of healthcare professionals in the provision of lethal drugs intended to end a patient’s life at their voluntary request, subject to eligibility criteria and safeguards. It includes healthcare professionals prescribing lethal drugs for the patient to self-administer (‘physician-assisted suicide’) and healthcare professionals administering lethal drugs (‘euthanasia’).”  

The terms used throughout our project, and in associated publications, are not intended to endorse or reflect any particular NCOB stance on the law on assisted dying.  

The Advisory Board was recruited to represent a range of backgrounds, including technical expertise and knowledge in public engagement and diversity, equity, and inclusion. It is comprised of both Nuffield Council on Bioethics Council members and external experts. An open recruitment process was run to select external members to the Advisory Board and selected on basis of their previous contributions to the community and their known ability to be impartial and to provide an objective voice to advise, check and challenge the engagement activities. 

Prior to commencing their role, all Advisory Board members were asked to complete and sign two forms:

1. A standard Declaration of Interests form used by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics on all its projects, which captures a range of interests that may be considered a conflict of interest to the role.
2. An additional Declaration of Interests form to capture the following information:  

Non-financial interests or financial interests related to assisted dying  

• Details of any interests, including previous employment, membership of relevant organisations (e.g., campaigning organisations), political activity, campaign activity, grants, voluntary positions, and other interests that may be considered or perceived to influence my decisions or to be in conflict with my role within the NCOB’s assisted dying project. 

Any other publicly accessible information related to assisted dying 

• Publications, blogs, articles, audio or visual media, publicly written or expressed opinions, and other relevant written materials that may be considered or perceived to influence my decisions or to be in conflict with my role within the NCOB’s assisted dying project. 

Indirect interests related to assisted dying 

• Where an individual has a close association with an individual who has a financial or non-financial interest (personal or professional). For example, close family members, friends, or business partners that may be considered or perceived to influence my decisions or to be in conflict with my role within the NCOB’s assisted dying project. 

All interests that were declared for the Advisory Board can be found here. In addition, Advisory Board members were asked to declare any conflicts of interests at their first meeting on 24 November 2023. None were declared. This has been recorded in the minutes of the meeting . 

Danielle Hamm, Director of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, was previously employed as Director of Compassion in Dying (left in November 2014). As this could be perceived as a conflict of interest, Danielle chose to actively recuse herself from the project – delegating all advisory and decision–making responsibility to our Associate Directors for the entirety of the project including survey and Citizens’ Jury design, development and delivery. This included, for example, not participating in project team discussions, regular meetings with the commissioned project partners, Advisory Board and Content Group meetings. Since data collection for the project has now concluded, Danielle has become a spokesperson for the project. 

We appointed Hopkins Van Mil who partnered with M·E·L Research and the Sortition Foundation to design, organise, and facilitate a three-stage process of survey activities and a Citizens’ Jury: 

1. Conducting a nationally representative quantitative survey of the English population to explore and capture current attitudes towards assisted dying. These initial survey results were used to inform the recruitment stratification criteria for the Citizens’ Jury.
2. Facilitating a Citizens’ Jury to explore the views and deliberations of an informed ‘mini-public’ regarding: the current law on assisted dying in England; the circumstances where assisted dying should or should not be permissible, and the ethical, social, and practical considerations that the public considers important in forming their views and their deliberations. 
3. Conducting a second nationally representative quantitative survey of the English population to gather views on the recommendations and findings made by the Citizens’ Jury.  

The funding we received for this project is best suited to running a series of surveys and a Citizens’ Jury in England. This is the first Citizens’ Jury looking at the English population’s views on assisted dying.

In September 2024 we published an interim report including the recommendations from the Citizens’ Jury. Alongside this report, we published the information and evidence that were used to inform the deliberations at the Citizens’ Jury. 

In early 2025, we will be publishing a final report that analyses both the survey and Citizens’ Jury findings. 

The survey fieldwork was conducted online. Invitations to participate were sent to members of the Dynata online panel. Dynata are the preferred panel partner of M·E·L Research, who collected and analysed the survey responses.  

We appointed deliberative specialists Hopkins Van Mil, who partnered with M·E·L Research and the Sortition Foundation, to design and facilitate the public engagement and survey activities. The delivery partners were responsible for designing and running surveys, which provided statistical confidence that the findings broadly represent the views of the English population. 

During the data collection for each survey, the composition of the survey sample was controlled using quotas. These quotas were set based on the following characteristics, with population targets set using 2021 Census data for England: 

• Age (5x age bands) 
• Gender 
• Ethnicity 
• Socio-economic group (SEG) 
• Geographic region 

After the completion of fieldwork, the profile of the cleaned data set was reviewed by these variables. To correct some minor under and over representation, weights were applied by gender, age, ethnicity, disability and region. This weighting process ensures that the resulting data set is representative of the population of England.  

As a sample of the English population responded to the survey questions, the results are subject to a margin of error around various estimates. This means that, given the random nature of the sampling process, we can be confident that the actual result lies somewhere within the margin of error. For these sample sizes of 2,000+ we can be 95% certain that the actual value will fall 2.2% either side of the results reported. 

During the fieldwork, the responses from participants were checked and removed if they failed any of the following quality criteria: 

• Took under 3 minutes to complete the survey. 
• The respondent inputted random characters/numbers into open-ended questions. The quality of the responses to text-based (open) questions is a key indicator of response quality (i.e. engagement with the survey subject matter). 

Respondents were asked to provide a postcode to enable responses to be accurately attributed to a region of England. Any discrepancies were corrected based on the postcode provided.  

The data was collected, analysed and weighted by M·E·L Research, a member of the Market Research Society, who fully adhere to the MRS Code of Conduct. This project has been delivered to ISO 9001:2015, 20252:2019 and 27001:2013 standards. 

M·E·L Research tabulated survey responses by respondent demographics and by key attitudinal responses (e.g. support or opposition for a change in the law on assisted dying).

The data tabulations produced included statistical significance testing at a 95% level of confidence (based on the t-test).

Variations in opinion identified through this statistical testing are shown in the M·E·L Research analysis reports.

Both surveys contained questions in which survey participants could respond with text, using their own words. These responses were reviewed and grouped into themes by the M·E·L Research team. No A.I. based text analytics were used in this process. 

In response to this emotive subject matter, some survey respondents wrote extensive responses. These may have been allocated to more than one theme in the analysis. As a consequence, it is possible for the percentages in the reporting of these questions to exceed 100%.  

No, all those who completed survey 1 were excluded from the sample section process for survey 2.

A Citizens’ Jury is a form of deliberative ‘mini-public’ and is a tool for engaging citizens on a wide range of policy issues. Citizens’ Juries consist of a representative group of citizens randomly selected to deliberate on a particular issue and provide recommendations to inform public policy. They place members of the public at the heart of processes. They emphasise the importance of consensus, collective decision-making, and deliberation.  

Inherent to the process is providing a robust and balanced range of perspectives and information and structured deliberations on specific questions, so that jurors are fully informed and base their recommendations on the evidence and reasoning they have heard. As a result, they can prove especially effective when addressing contentious issues, such as assisted dying, where knowledge is disputed and there are significant ethical and social implications.  

Citizens’ Juries help to address the gap between public opinion (captured through polling and surveys) and public judgment (a carefully considered view that citizens come to after engaging with a subject and hearing an overall balance of expert evidence). Citizens’ Juries can be a helpful tool to explore and consolidate public judgment and means that the recommendations they propose can help inform decision-makers. 

Citizens’ Juries use voting as an integral part of the final stage of the recommendation development process. Voting is used to sense check where Jurors are in their thinking, to understand how near or far they are from reaching a consensus, and to understand where there is clear agreement or disagreement on a topic.  

Expert facilitation and support are key to running a voting process that helps to explore creative dissent, address conflict resolution, and facilitate consensus building, without the voice of the minority being silenced. Facilitators also bring critical skills for ensuring that the Jury group functions well and that the deliberative space is used to its full potential.  

The overarching questions the Jury considered are: 

1. Should the law in England be changed to permit assisted dying? What are the most important reasons in favour of permitting assisted dying? What are the most important reasons against permitting assisted dying? 
2. If the law is changed to permit assisted dying in England, what should it include? What should it exclude?  
3. If the law is not changed to permit assisted dying in England, are there any recommendations or changes to assisted dying policy that should be made? 

The Citizens’ Jury was designed, organised, and facilitated by Hopkins Van Mil, a social research agency specialising in deliberative methods.

Maintaining the integrity and robustness of the deliberative processes Hopkins Van Mil runs is essential. It ensures participants understand the complexity of the issues at hand and that a neutral, structured and safe environment is created in which to discuss the topics that matter to people throughout society. This applied equally to the Citizens’ Jury exploring public views on assisted dying.

Hopkins Van Mil’s senior expert facilitation team supported the Jury process creating an appropriate space for Jury members to explore the topic and share their views without being influenced or led in any way. Facilitators were asked to share any conflicts of interest in advance, none were identified. The Advisory Board and the independent evaluator observed the process throughout, providing an additional check and balance.  

We commissioned Hopkins Van Mil, specialists in deliberative social research, to design, organise, and facilitate the Citizens’ Jury. It partnered with the Sortition Foundation to design and run the recruitment process for the Jury. The Sortition Foundation is a not-for-profit company dedicated to promoting fair, transparent, inclusive, and effective deliberative processes. It uses a democratic lottery algorithm to give everyone in the population of interest an equal chance of taking part. 

In February 2024, a random sample of 7,000 households across England received an invitation letter inviting anyone aged 18 or over who is living in that household to register their interest in participating in the Citizens’ Jury – by either completing a simple online form or using a freephone number. From those who registered their interest, the Sortition Foundation used a lottery to select 34 people, overrecruiting by four to ensure a final 30 members of the Jury who represent a ‘mini-public’ of the English population. The selection criteria also included attitudes towards assisted dying.

The Sortition Foundation used its software to perform the random stratified selection, to match specified demographics (as listed below) from a pool of 147 registrants:  

• Gender (source: Office for National Statistics Census 2021 data) 
• Age (source: Office for National Statistics Census 2021 data) 
• Ethnicity (source: Office for National Statistics Census 2021 data) 
• Location in England (source: Office for National Statistics Census 2021 data) 
• Disability (source: Office for National Statistics Census 2021 data) 
• Education level (source: Office for National Statistics Census 2021 data) 
• Indices of multiple deprivation (source: Office for National Statistics Census 2021 data) 
• Attitudes towards assisted dying (source: NCOB survey Feb 2024. QA4: To what extent, if at all, do you agree or disagree that assisted dying should be legal in England?) 

 The full demographic breakdown of the Citizens’ Jury can be found here. 

The Citizens’ Jury participants were recruited to ensure that the mini-public was representative of broader attitudes on assisted dying in England, as well as traditional socio-demographic sampling such as age, gender, ethnicity, educational level and disability status. This is particularly important when addressing polarising complex and sensitive topics like assisted dying. This provision helps ensure that the Jury doesn’t over or underrepresent a certain attitude and instead broadly mirrors the attitudes of assisted dying of the wider English public as a baseline.

In February 2024, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics ran a nationally representative survey on assisted dying. It used up-to-date data (NCOB survey Feb 2024. QA4: To what extent, if at all, do you agree or disagree that assisted dying should be legal in England?) to inform the proportions of such attitudes. 

The Citizens’ Jury was designed to be accessible as possible and additional support was provided where feasible to enable those who are selected to take part.

• All members of the Jury received £440 in recognition of their commitment and a thank you for taking part.
• Internet-enabled digital devices and an internet connection were available to those who did not have access to a suitable device or internet connection.
• Hopkins Van Mil provided support to learn IT skills to participate in the Jury, including one-to-one phone calls and online introductory sessions.
• The in-person Jury sessions were held at an accessible venue with disabled parking available.
• Food and accommodation were also provided, and travel expenses were covered.
• All members of the Jury had access to a prayer room and quiet space during the in-person workshops.
• A specialist mental health professional was available to offer support to participants during the project period.
• Additional support – for example translation or childcare – was provided where needed.