Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Debate between Baroness Keeley and Baroness Finlay of Llandaff

Committee stage
Friday 30th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Keeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak on face-to-face consultation; my Amendment 483 on this is in a later group.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, it was briefly made possible for the making of a will to be witnessed by videolink rather than in person. This change could have been made permanent, but instead the Government decided that the videolink provision should cease from January 2024. The law is now again that the witness must have a clear line of sight of the person making the will. Are these precautions any less important when assessing whether someone truly wants an assisted death and is not being coerced than when establishing what should happen to their assets afterwards?

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Keeley, has already alluded to the issue of wills, so I will not go to that, but there is another legal precedent, Devon Partnership NHS Trust v the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care in 2021, when the High Court ruled that under the Mental Health Act, the phrases “personally seen” and “personally examined” require the clinician and approved mental health professional to be physically present with the patient for detention assessments. Following that, NHS England reviewed its guidance. That underscores the legal and clinical importance of physical co-present evaluation when decisions carry high consequence.

Secondly, during Covid I chaired the National Mental Capacity Forum and ran fast-track online seminars for those who were doing remote assessments because of the problem of people in care homes. It was a very difficult time and that was a public health necessity. Since then, some remote consultations have certainly continued, as we have already heard. However, the qualitative studies of remote mental health care during the pandemic found that a lack of face-to-face contact compromised risk assessment and therapeutic insight.

Systemic reviews have noted significant difficulty establishing a therapeutic relationship, identifying risk, and with challenges in picking up non-verbal communication and building rapport coming through as recurrent themes. They caution how remote assessments can be less effective in capturing complex, subtle behaviours, non-verbal distress, agitation and contextual pressures, which are crucial in determining voluntariness and in detecting distress or coercion. Clinicians and carers have reported that non-verbal cues were often unavailable or obscured in remote interactions, particularly telephone consultations but also by video. Even when remote assessments were used only to triage risk, delaying face-to-face evaluation, the effects slowed down accurate identification of deteriorating conditions.