Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Debate between Lord Baker of Dorking and Lord Barber of Ainsdale

Committee stage
Friday 24th April 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

I recognise that there is that power, but it is very rarely used. That is the point I have been making all the time. Juries will not convict.

This has happened before in our history. There was a time when the law decided that youngsters as young as 10 or 12 could be hanged for stealing a pocket handkerchief. That fell away because juries would not convict. Similarly, I do not believe that the present law on suicide can in fact operate effectively, and therefore it should be changed.

[Lord Barber of Ainsdale (Lab)]

My Lords, I have spoken only once previously in the many long hours of debate on the Bill. That was at Second Reading, when I told the story of Daniel, the much-loved son of my noble friend Lord Monks, who, in the absence of any form of assisted dying in this country and faced with intolerable suffering, starved himself to death in 2024.

Like many others around our country, I had strong hopes that the Bill would have given, for the first time, people very close to the end of their lives some choice on how to leave this world. While remaining silent in the Chamber, it quickly became very clear to me that an additional voice was certainly not needed. I have been distressed and disturbed by what I have witnessed here.

As I was coming into this place a little over a year ago now, I was given to understand that we had two central responsibilities. Our job was not to seek to displace or overturn the elected House, but to act as a scrutinising and revising Chamber. So, how well have we carried out those responsibilities? As my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer reminded us, this is a Bill of 59 clauses. In Committee, after 120 hours of debate we have managed to scrutinise only seven of those clauses. The rest of the Bill, 52 clauses, has received no scrutiny whatsoever. As to our responsibility to propose revisions for the elected House to consider, there have been a handful of entirely non-contentious matters to which revisions have been made in Committee. Of course, substantive revisions would fall to be considered and voted on Report, and we have never come even close to reaching that point. In sum, we have abjectly failed in our responsibilities as a scrutinising and revising Chamber.

It became apparent very early on in Committee that the rate of progress was utterly glacial. My noble and learned friend proposed a Motion to the House, seeking additional time if necessary, and committing the House to completing consideration of the Bill in good order to return it to the Commons. Nobody voted against it, but nobody changed the form or the length of their contributions to these debates, even by a tiny amount, to make its objective achievable. All efforts by my noble and learned friend, as he reminded us, to establish more streamlined processes, came to naught.

There has been a catch-all justification that we have heard again today, offered by some of the Bill’s opponents, that it has always been a bad Bill in need of fundamental root-and-branch reworking from top to bottom as a result of insufficient earlier work and insufficiently detailed scrutiny. I reject that view, and I regard it as deeply disrespectful and an insulting slur on the sponsors of the Bill and all those highly expert advisers who have supported the sponsors at every stage of the Bill’s preparation. It rather ignores the very detailed consideration the Bill received in the elected Chamber, in many cases, with honourable Members—