USDAW delegates overwhelmingly backed a motion calling for the legalisation of assisted dying in Britain at their annual conference today.

General secretary Paddy Lillis supported the motion on the condition that any provision has significant safeguards to protect vulnerable people, acknowledging the proposed change is “something that feels instinctively wrong to many people.”

Delegate Les Perry said: “If this would have been in power and in place, [my father] would not have suffered as much as he did.”

Opposing, delegate Vanessa Hanley said: “With late stage capitalism… do you really trust society not to turn this into a moral obligation: ‘do the right thing by your family’.”

Delegates resolved that the union’s national executive council will lobby the government to introduce a law “that enables adults who are terminally ill to be provided, at their request, with specified assistance to end their own life.”

MPs were last night set to debate the issue after a petition backed by Dame Esther Rantzen secured more than 200,000 signatures.

Dr Andrew Green, deputy chairman of the British Medical Association’s (BMA) ethics committee, called for assurances that legislation would provide doctors a choice to opt-in to carrying out assisted dying.

He told the Radio 4 Today programme: “The main requirement was that we would want doctors to be given a real genuine choice about whether and to what extent they would be willing to participate.

“There would need to be an opt-in arrangement. It wouldn’t be part of any doctor’s normal job to provide physicians’ assisted dying.”

The BMA has shifted from a position against assisted dying to one of neutrality.

He said: “As a representative organisation we have a duty to represent all those people’s views and that’s why we changed to a position of neutrality.”