Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord Biggar Excerpts

Friday 12th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Biggar (Con)]

My Lords, we face a tragic dilemma. On the one hand, advocates for the disabled and several royal colleges voice persistent concerns about the risks of abuse that the Bill’s legalisation of assisted suicide would create. On the other hand, as we have heard, are dreadful cases of individuals suffering grievously, where those who help them find relief through suicide must endure police investigation.

This intolerable situation, we are told, would be solved by the Bill before us—except it would not. By limiting assisted suicide to the terminally ill, the Bill excludes those who are not dying but are still suffering grievously. Anyone supporting the Bill who intends that terminal illness should remain a prerequisite of eligibility, accepts that some people, tragically, have to suffer, and others have to endure police investigation, because the social dangers of wider access are just too great.

But if the Bill, despite its tragic imperfection and risks, is supposed to be tolerable, how come the legal status quo, with the same tragic imperfection and fewer risks, is not? If we were serious about reducing the quantity of human suffering, we would not focus on assisted suicide at all, reckoned to be chosen annually by up to 7,500 people after a decade. Instead, we would focus on ensuring the universal provision of adequate palliative care, which, as we have been told several times today, more than 100,000 fellow citizens every year need but do not get. We have known that for decades and done nothing about it.

Indeed, if we were to pass the present Bill before ensuring that, we would create an unjust inequality of autonomies. Some—typically privileged like us—would have a choice between decent palliative care and assisted suicide. But others—poorer and less white—would have to choose between grievous suffering and killing themselves. That is why two-thirds of the more than 5,000 people polled by Focaldata last November wanted end-of-life care sorted out first before any thought is given to assisted suicide.

It is also why the 2012 report of the Demos commission on assisted suicide, chaired by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, himself, stipulated as an “essential” condition of legalisation the universal provision of the

“best end of life care available”.

I refer noble Lords to pages 24 and 299.

Compassion is a virtue, but it needs to look in more than one direction and distribute itself equitably. Compassion that takes impatient and imprudent risks with the lives of the vulnerable is no virtue at all. To pass this Bill in the current state of palliative care provision would be, I think, unjust and imprudent, and I cannot support it.