Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Baroness Browning Excerpts

Friday 14th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, as a member of the Select Committee that the noble Baroness has just referred to, I think she ought to refrain from criticising something that the committee either said or thought. We merely took evidence. As we will see in the report, we did not make those observations personally.

[Baroness Browning (Con)]

My Lords, many years ago, in another place, I served on the pre-legislative scrutiny committee and was present taking what became the Mental Capacity Act through the House of Commons. When I came to your Lordships’ House in 2010, I was fortunate enough to secure a House of Lords inquiry to look post-legislatively at how the Mental Capacity Act was working. From the evidence we took at the time, we found that the ability of the medical profession—by which I mean not just doctors but all those across the piece, including social care workers—was not as ideal as it perhaps sounds in today’s Committee. Whatever is built into the Bill to assess either capacity or ability, there will need to be a heck of a lot of training for us all to feel comfortable that the professionals involved know how to go about their task.

I draw the Committee’s attention to the report last month of the National Audit Office, whose press release stated:

“The Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) and NHS England (NHSE) do not clearly understand what proportion of palliative and end-of-life care is delivered by independent adult hospices, and therefore, how much they are reliant on the sector, or what the real impact of government funding is”.


We have heard that palliative care is patchy. I know from my own recent experience with a close relative that, had I not been somebody capable of organising it myself, it would not have taken place. We are not dealing with finite disciplines in the debate on this group, and I caution the Committee that it is not as perfect out there as it sounds today.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, I declare that I was a vice-president of Hospiscare in Exeter. I am probably the only person in this Committee who has tried cases of capacity, again and again, both as a High Court judge and in the Court of Appeal. One case was so difficult that the Court of Appeal, where I was presiding, sat until 1 am. Noble Lords may not have thought that the Court of Appeal did that very often. It is important for your Lordships to realise that some cases that I tried were extremely easy to try—one in particular involved a Miss B, who was obviously competent—but other cases were extraordinarily difficult. One case—the one that we did until 1 am—concerned somebody with a needle phobia who was expected to need a caesarean, and she objected because she could not bear the idea of a needle. At one in the morning, we took the view that she did not have the mental capacity to decide on her caesarean. She was hugely relieved and had the operation without any trouble. But that was not a unique case—the time was, but not the problem.