Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Debate between Lord Deben and Baroness Berridge

Committee stage
Friday 30th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for laying such a broad amendment, and obviously I agree with much of what the right reverend Prelate said. It is interesting that this is coming straight after the debate on face-to-face conversations. We are all used to ticking the “I am not a robot” box, but AI now has the ability to create persons, and it is often very difficult if you are not face to face to judge whether the person on screen is actually a person. I cannot believe we have got there quite so quickly.

However, it is also important to consider about public confidence and understanding at the moment. This is, as we keep saying, such an important life-or-death decision. There is a lack of understanding and people are potentially worried about these implications, often with regard to employment but also other purposes. For instance, as I was preparing this, it made me reflect, as the noble Baroness, Lady Gerada, said, on how your GP uses AI. When Patchs told me recently that the NHS guidance was that I should not take an over-the-counter drug for more than two weeks, I queried it.

However, only yesterday, I thought: was that answer actually from my GP or was it from an AI tool sitting behind the system? We really need to be careful with the level of public understanding and awareness of its use. This use of AI is also one step on and connected to Clause 42, which relates to advertising. I am grateful that the noble and learned Lord is going to bring forward some amendments on that clause. I hope that the connection with AI, as well as the Online Safety Act 2023, have been considered. If I have understood the noble and learned Lord correctly, I am disappointed that we have had no assurance that those amendments will be with us by the end of Committee, when the noble and learned Lord gave evidence on 22 October last year and accepted that there was additional work to be done on Clause 42.

I said at Second Reading that the Bill is currently drafted for an analogue age. I am not wanting to take us back to some kind of quill and no-use-of-AI situation. Obviously, as other noble Lords have said, the Bill do not deal with the pressure or coercion not being from a human being. It also does not consider that coercion can now be more hidden with the use of AI. The Bill does not deal with people being able to learn to answer certain tools by watching YouTube. Therefore, we could be in a situation where someone who would not qualify if there was a face-to-face non-AI system could learn those answers and qualify.

There are also good studies to say that its use in GP practices has had some inaccuracies. In many circumstances, there is a lack of transparency and accountability in tracing where the decision has come from. We do not even understand the algorithms that are sending us advertisements for different shops, let alone how they could be connected to a decision such as this.

Finally, my biggest concern is that there will be a limited number of practitioners who will want to participate in this process. That has been accepted on numerous occasions in your Lordships House. I will quote from a public letter written on 12 June last year. All of Plymouth’s senior palliative medicine doctors were signatories to a letter warning us of the risks of the Bill and saying that the

“changes would significantly worsen the delivery of our current health services in Plymouth through the complexity of the conversations required when patients ask us about the option of assistance to die”.

That is relevant for two reasons. First, if we have a shortage of practitioners in parts of the country, such as the south-west if those doctors’ opposition to the Bill translates into not being involved, there may therefore be an increased temptation to resort to more use of AI. I hope that the noble and learned Lord or the Minister can help on this point.

Many of these systems—I am speaking as a layperson here—rely on data groups and information within the system: the learning is created from that. If you have a very small pool of practitioners and some form of AI being used, does that not affect the creation of the AI tool itself? I hope that I have explained that correctly. With such a small group doing it, will that not affect the technology itself?

[Lord Deben (Con)]

I come to this amendment with a good deal of suspicion. I am always worried when the House of Lords decides that it is getting worried about some new thing that is coming along, so we had better do something about it. The noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, explained that this was a broad demand in order that we should concentrate on the important bit. I recommend to those in the House who were not here for last night’s debate on super-clever AI to read it, because it explains why we should be concerned about this. If it will not embarrass him, I shall say that I hope the House will read with care the speech by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Hereford, which brought his scientific knowledge and moral concern together in a most interesting and perceptive way. If his quoting Saint Thomas Aquinas interests people, there is a remarkable book called Why Aquinas Matters Now, which is well worth reading in the context of this particular Bill.

Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill

Debate between Lord Deben and Baroness Berridge

Wednesday 19th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge]

If you attend a Catholic church, the authorised person is the registrar. No one comes from the local authority’s office. That person performs that public function and the registry office is not involved. It is the obligation of the priest to fill out the register and to return it quarterly to the local authority’s office. No local authority official is present at all. Interestingly, the Catholic Church expressed concern to the Joint Committee on Human Rights—I have heard this concern from other religious organisations—that unless we get clarity in the Bill religious organisations may consider not conducting these marriages at all because they believe the only way to protect themselves is to not be the registrar. That, of course, would have resource implications for the Government.

I am asking the Government to throw away the public function key—the key to actions under the Equality Act, the Human Rights Act and judicial review—and avoid this threat of litigation which would discriminate against some of the nation’s smallest charities. The Joint Committee on Human Rights has urged the Government to consider formulating a new clause to provide additional reassurance to any religious ministers or office holders who perform the dual function of officiating at a marriage in a spiritual capacity as well as performing the public function of the registrar under the Marriage Act 1949.

We have ended up in a situation, by responding quite rightly to the concerns of the established Church, whereby other Christian denominations and other faith groups believe that they do not now have the same level of protection as the Church of England and the Church of Wales. It is important that other religious organisations and individual ministers of other faith groups have the same level of protection as the Government have now afforded in this Bill to the Church of England and the Church of Wales.

[Lord Deben]

I want to try to bring two sides together on this issue. I hope people will recognise that I am entirely in favour of this legislation and I am a practising Catholic, so I understand exactly what has been said. I have great sympathy with what my noble friend Lord Lester has said about how this might be approached by the Government. Let me say two things to the Minister. First, there is a history here of promises made and broken, as my noble friend made clear. So even if this is absolutely okay, there is a feeling that it might not be okay and we have to recognise that fear.

Secondly, there is also a history of campaigning people who seek all the time to push their point further than is reasonable. For example, campaigners have recently argued that we should withdraw aid from youth clubs run by organisations that take a strong view about homosexual practice. That is a campaign that people have suggested—that if you take that view you should not get any help from the state for your youth club. I say to my noble friend that I understand the fears that people have on this issue.

The position of the Catholic Church is particularly difficult because we have a very odd and rather noble system in Britain that has come out of our history: to ensure that it was no longer true that only Anglicans could marry, we extended it to other people via the mechanism of enabling approved persons to act as registrars. There may be an issue here and it may be that the fears that people have are correct. However, I also recognise what my noble friend Lord Lester has said: sometimes, when we try to correct this, those of us who are not lawyers—and I am proud not to be a lawyer—add things that make it worse. That is the danger here. If we are not careful we will have a sort of argument of the deaf, with one side saying, “We want to do what you want, but if we do it that way we will actually make it more difficult for you”, and the other side saying, “You may say that but we’re still worried about it”.

I ask my noble friend to recognise that even those of us who are not just marginally but very much in favour of this legislation are concerned that we should be very careful about the nature of toleration. Unfortunately, “toleration” has become a very curious word. People talk about toleration as if it means tolerating views that you happen to agree with. One of the things that we have to do is produce legislation that enables a tolerant society to accept that some people have very different views. That is not helped, if I may say so, by some of the language used by people opposed to the Bill. Some disgraceful statements have been made by people who have really not come to terms with the fact that we live in a society that should be inclusive and accepting. The churches have sometimes spoken intolerably and intolerantly. However, the truth is that there is intolerableness and intolerance on the other side as well. I will give way to my noble friend .