Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Baroness Taylor of Stevenage Excerpts

Friday 19th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brennan (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, on Saturday last week the Times newspaper ran a centre-page editorial with the headline:

“The flaws of the assisted dying bill may prove irreparable”.


The editorial stated:

“It should not have fallen to the Lords to protect the public”.


What follows is, putting it kindly, harsh but, putting it bluntly, necessary to be done by this House or in some other way.

The Bill in its present form is not conducive to the common good, for the following reasons. First, we have no idea of its scope in medical terms. Cancer, cardiac, cerebral, immobility, mental—where is the end? Who is going to be trained in these different specialities? Which one is going to be preferred if preference is suggested by the Government? None of the royal colleges has plainly adopted support for the Bill. The psychiatrists are against it, particularly regarding the mental state of a patient to whom assisted dying is offered and what the effect would be. So the scope is big.

Who is going to pay for it? Is this part of the NHS budget? If so, how much? If it is private, how are the two going to divide? There’s a section in the draft Bill about advertising. Do we want to finish up with a system, private or public, of death clinics?

What do the professions say about this? Are doctors going to sign up to do this task, when they might have thought their job was to cure? Nursing staff who might help, or technical staff who might assist in the preparation of the poison or lethal dose of whatever is given to the patient to kill that person—what are they to do? This is putting people to death, whether they want it or not. In Clause 32, we find that we have to amend the Suicide Act, otherwise we will be legislating for unlawful killing, aiding and abetting the person who wants to die.

So the scope is enormous, the effect on the professions is unknown, and the cost, the effect on palliative care and so on could be deeply damaging to all our communities. This is a topic of in-depth complication and the highest level of importance, in which Parliament’s duty is to serve the people it represents here in these two Chambers, no matter what. We can start with the attempt by the noble Baroness, Lady Berger, to put coherence to it.

What about the Hippocratic oath? Several thousand years ago, Hippocrates said, “First, do no harm”. Doctors, and to a similar extent nurses, take that oath to serve us. How does assisted suicide fit into, “First, do no harm”?

I am concentrating on the difficulty because this is probably one of the most serious matters that can affect the public, brought forward to be considered by Parliament. In the House of Commons, both the Justice Minister and the Health Minister were against the Bill. The system rejected it. How on earth will this be resolved.

[Baroness in Waiting/Government Whip (Baroness Taylor of Stevenage) (Lab)]

I remind the noble Lord of the advisory speaking time.

[Lord Brennan (Non-Afl)]

If we vote, let us vote at some further stage when we have something serious, coherent and plausible to consider.