Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord Frost Excerpts

Friday 5th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I rise to introduce Amendment 23 in my name. This amendment obviously goes with the thrust of some of the other amendments that have already been proposed and deals with some of the issues that have come up in this debate. It takes a slightly different route from the others by simply adding a new criterion, paragraph (e), to Clause 1, and would therefore restrict access to assisted dying support to two well-defined and well-understood categories of people: British citizens and those with indefinite leave to remain.

The purpose of couching it in this way is twofold: it is designed to do two things. First, it is designed to provide a way of cutting through the eligibility problem that we have been discussing and the ambiguity of some of the definitions by providing two very clear definitions that avoid the border issues and potential uncertainties of meaning in some of the other definitions. It could be read, as I have drafted it, together with the criteria of ordinary residence—in other words, you must satisfy both these criteria to be eligible for assisted dying support—or we could simply remove the ordinary residence criteria and rest entirely on the fact that you have to be a British citizen or have indefinite leave to remain. Both of those are well-understood categories: they are not susceptible to debate and they are both easily proven. That is the advantage of looking at it in this way.

The other purpose is to provide a very clear barrier, for similar reasons, to death tourism for people who obtain short-term visas, or no visa at all, for the purpose of obtaining an assisted death. It would stop England and Wales becoming destinations for this. I want to briefly summarise why we want to avoid that: the reasons have been taken slightly as read in this discussion, but I want to recall them, although not in great depth.

First, without such a provision as my amendment would provide, it becomes more difficult to enforce the safeguards, whatever they are, that end up in this Bill, for example on past medical history and mental health capacity. It can be difficult to obtain international medical records, they are not always written in exactly the same way and they can, from some countries, be relatively easily forged or faked. It is also difficult to confirm that somebody who has a short-term relationship or no relationship with the UK is not being coerced by people abroad or has consistent capacity. So there is that angle to it.

Secondly, there is also the risk of diplomatic complication, taking in non-permanently resident foreign citizens to commit what may be an offence in their home jurisdiction. Some countries will probably feel more strongly about that than others, but the risk exists and this would exclude it.

Thirdly, there are pull factors, an obvious problem that we are very familiar with in the UK: the global appeal of the English language, the ease of registration with a GP, and, as I have said, the laxity of some of the definitions.

Fourthly, there are resource constraints: our healthcare system has finite capacity for end-of-life care, whoever ends up providing it. This amendment ensures that those who end up being eligible are those with a very clear connection to the UK, either with citizenship or the clear right to remain here for as long as they wish.

Finally—

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend is making interesting points, but I am somewhat worried. He is particularly well-equipped to recognise that there are possibly as many as 1.5 million people from the European Union in this country with pre-settled status who are neither British citizens nor have indefinite leave to remain. There are also probably somewhere between 300,000 and 400,000 Irish citizens living in this country who have neither of these qualifications.

[Lord Frost (Non-Afl)]

That is certainly true. The noble Lord makes a good point. The principle that is in my amendment could be expanded to take in other well-defined categories. I will be more convinced about the Irish category than the EU pre-settled status, given this issue was not anything like an issue when we negotiated the EU treaties that created that status, but that is for discussion if the principle is agreed.

Finally, I will just note that the amendment I have put forward reflects norms elsewhere, notably in Australia and New Zealand. It is quite closely based on Section 9 of the Victoria Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2017, which, whatever its manifold other weaknesses, is at least clear on this point. I will stop there and look forward to the discussion and the views of the sponsor. I offer this amendment as a potential way of providing more clarity and reducing the level of ambiguity in what is obviously going to be a very important provision in the Bill.

[Lord Goodman of Wycombe (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak very briefly in support of Amendment 23, which was spoken to by the noble Lord, Lord Frost, bearing in mind that amendments in Committee very often are probing amendments to test the view of the sponsor.

It is important to recognise at the start that it is, in fact, not clear from the Bill whether the NHS will provide voluntary assisted dying services. This was a point in relation to which the Bill was criticised very heavily by the Delegated Powers Committee, on which I sit. But it clearly is the intention of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, that it should, and I want to assume for the purposes of this debate, very briefly, that it will.

My noble friend Lady Coffey raised at the start of this debate a problem, which was the question of whether someone might seek to obtain residency under the terms of the Bill in order to obtain what has been referred to as death shopping. This is clearly a problem. The virtue of the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Frost, is that it would deal with this, imperfect though the amendment may be. I would like to hear from the sponsor of the Bill, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, what his view is of the problem raised by my noble friend Lady Coffey. I think he accepts that death tourism is a problem. Is his view, like that of my noble friend Lord Lansley, that residency remains the only sensible way of determining these matters? If it is, why has he put the additional safeguard into Clause 1 of the Bill? Or, if he thinks residency is not sufficient, what additional safeguards might he be able to offer? I look forward to hearing from him when he responds to this debate.

Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord Frost Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 19th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, I am against the Bill, because it is legally and practically defective in many ways, as many other noble Lords have already said. I am against it for philosophical and religious reasons too. For the first time ever, a Bill seeks to give a person of sound will and mind the right to act contrary to a fundamental element of the ethical tradition that has been fundamental to this country—Judeo-Christian morality, and the view that our life is not our own possession to dispose of as we see fit, nor to be taken from us by others, even at our own request.

Noble Lords may ask, as many have done so already, why this should matter to them. They say that they are not religious and that they do not share that ethical system. We have heard some noble Lords say that they have the right to free choice, autonomy over their own life and to protect the dignity, as they see it, of those close to them. I want to briefly explain why I do not think this argument is sufficient and why even those of no religious belief should still be concerned by the prospect of going down the road set out in the Bill.

As I see it, the problem is that the values used to justify the Bill—those of ensuring dignity and preserving autonomy and personal freedom—are also derived from that Judeo-Christian ethical system. As my noble friend Lord Roberts of Belgravia reminded us last week, there have been in the past, and there still are today, many societies that do not fully share those values. They are not self-evident, however much many of us would wish they were.

The Bill is proposing to dismantle part of that inherited ethical system by allowing the state to engage in killing innocent people at their request. Once we have dismantled one part of that system, because we think we know best, what then is the status of the rest of that moral and ethical system? Once you have introduced utilitarianism into our society’s decisions, where do you stop? The ultimate destination of this journey is a utilitarian society with a utilitarian Government, one where there are no free-standing, inherited moral principles of any kind, only the principles that we think we are clever enough to create.

The problem is that in such a society none of us is really safe. The only protection for any of us then are the collective wishes of society, whatever they are at any given moment. In such a society, the rights of those who are inconvenient—the disabled, the ill, the elderly or maybe those who are just unpopular—have no robust defence and are potentially vulnerable. Any of us might one day fall into any of those categories. At that point, your only protection against the general will of society comes from an appeal to the same ethical system that you have just decided is merely contingent, capable of being disposed of if it is inconvenient. Noble Lords may think, as I do, that human dignity and autonomy and freedom are important, but what if the general will of society does not? What ground do you have to stand on there? That is why it is so dangerous to continue dismantling this ethical code, as the Bill does.

I urge noble Lords to think hard about whether we are really confident that we are the generation that is so sure of its judgment and so wise, knowledgeable and confident that we can create a good society on foundations not that we have inherited but which we ourselves have designed. Are we so sure of all those things that we can casually cast aside 2,000 years of our moral tradition and tell ourselves that it does not matter? Noble Lords should look around our country and ask themselves that question. I do not think so, and this is why I hope the Bill will founder.

Covid-19 Inquiry

Lord Frost Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, I am glad that we have the chance to debate this first inquiry report, because there is a lot to say. We all have our own experience of the pandemic, and we have heard some earlier. My own experience is bracketed by two events. It was bracketed at the end by my own resignation from government. I think I am the only person in HM Government, either a Minister or official, to have stepped down in protest at pandemic handling, specifically against vaccine passports and the prospect of a further lockdown in December 2021. At the beginning, it was bracketed by having watched the near-collapse of the government machine in Downing Street in early 2020.

In my view, there has been much largely unreasonable vilification of Ministers’ and officials’ behaviour over the pandemic period and I want to put on record that personally I cannot forget the courage of those who turned up to work in those difficult days, believing at that time that they were risking serious illness or even death. Those people deserve commendation for doing everything that they could at that point to live up to their responsibility to the nation and keep the Government going.

Between those two points, while I was trying to run a trade negotiation, I saw a lot of the decision-making on the pandemic. I have not been asked about any of this by the inquiry; so be it. Like others, I am not particularly impressed by what I have seen of the workings of the inquiry so far, and I cannot share the warm words that I have heard earlier today. The inquiry’s conduct so far seems to have lacked something, both in seriousness and in real intellectual curiosity about the pandemic. I hope I am proved wrong as subsequent reports emerge, but I fear that this one rather bears out my concerns and I want to begin by saying why.

First, there is something unsatisfactory about producing a series of, in effect, interim reports rather than an overall judgment. Inevitably, the early reports will beg lots of questions. It is, after all, difficult to judge the first report without a clear understanding of what the inquiry’s view is on other important questions: the effectiveness of decision-making; the effect on the health service; the impact on the economy, and so on. Indeed, it is not even clear to me that we are going to get from the inquiry what we really need—a report on the costs and benefits of measures taken, factoring in the economic and social costs—and if the inquiry does not produce it, then the Government must.

Meanwhile, what we have is a report that tells us that much went wrong in pandemic preparation. Of course, the inquiry can reasonably reach that conclusion only if it is confident that deaths in the pandemic were worse than they might have been with better preparation. The report does not actually tell us that; it just assumes it. Perhaps the evidence will come later, in the future reports, but meanwhile we have the conclusions without any of the workings, and I find that methodologically quite unsatisfactory.

Let me turn to some of the conclusions and recommendations. I am going to be quite critical, but I want to begin with one important and positive aspect of the report: its criticism of groupthink and its recommendation about “red teams” in government. Groupthink was, as noble Lords have said, very obvious in some of these decisions. It is easier said than done to make red teams really effective, but I hope that new Ministers will take this recommendation seriously, and perhaps not only in this area of policy.

I have three concerns about the report’s conclusions and recommendations. The first, which has been touched on already, is its heavily reported conclusion that:

“The UK prepared for the wrong pandemic”.


The report uses those words in its executive summary but never repeats them in the main text, which makes one suspicious, of course, that they are there for popular consumption and not actual analysis. To my mind, and I am not the only one—I share my noble friend Lord Lansley’s reservations on this point—the report never makes clear why the inquiry has said this. It is certainly not obvious to me. After all, the 2011 strategy was expressly designed to address all respiratory viruses, and WHO advice from even this year says that Covid and flu

“spread in similar ways … Many risk factors for severe disease are common to both … Many of the same protective measures are effective against COVID-19 and influenza”.

So it is not clear why flu is in any way a bad proxy for the pandemic that we had.

To the extent that one can assess what is meant from the report’s verbiage, it is possible that what the inquiry means to say is that the Government were wrong to prepare for a pandemic of which the spread could only be mitigated and not contained or prevented. But the spread was not in the end contained or prevented, so it is still not obvious why the 2011 strategy was, in the inquiry’s view, such a poor one. Understanding this properly is crucial to future planning, and I am afraid that I do not think we do understand it properly on the basis of the report.

My second concern is about the recommendations for structural change. It is undoubtedly true, I fear, that, as the report says, Ministers and officials failed to learn from planning exercises or to implement their conclusions. I am afraid that is just normal life in Whitehall—a standard cultural feature and one we had to fight very hard to overcome when we were planning for a no-deal Brexit. But, of course, you cannot generally change the culture by just changing the structures. That is why I find it surprising that the inquiry focused so much on this in its proposal to scrap the lead department model and move responsibility to the Cabinet Office, a department widely recognised, I think, to be one of the least effective in government. I can see how people with little experience in public administration, such as most of those staffing the inquiry, might think that issues involving many government departments should be managed from the centre, but, after all, everything in government is cross-government, and not everything can be run from 70 Whitehall. I fear that the consequence of this recommendation will be to disempower departments which really have the expertise and the resources while producing no extra coherence or direction, only duplication.

For similar reasons, I also have concerns about the proposed independent statutory body that is recommended in paragraph 6.93. It is obvious that responsible Ministers need a good mechanism for consulting and remaining in touch with a wide range of experience in pandemic management—and, I would add, outside this country as well as within it—but I fear that the effect of creating what is, in effect, just another quango will in practice be to remove planning from politics altogether. We will have the same situation that we have in many areas now, when a quango makes recommendations which are just disconnected from the real choices that actual Governments have to make—choices about trade- offs on risks, about costs, about resource constraints—and yet Ministers end up by having no real choice but to accept those recommendations or be accused of overruling technical advice for political reasons. That is not satisfactory and will not help us get things right in future.

My third comment is on something the report does not say explicitly but which is quite obvious from reading it and certainly obvious to those of us who lived through it in government. That is that one major reason for complexity, duplication and uncertainty in the pandemic response was the complicating role of the devolved Governments. I doubt very much that anyone thought, back in 1998 when we created the devolved Administrations, that the devolution of public health as a competence would have the end result of travel bans between England and Wales, or Scotland operating, in effect, its own and different entry control system to third countries during the pandemic. The report hints at this problem by proposing that the new quango that I just mentioned should have “a UK-wide remit”. It understandably refrains from going into detail about why. I am not quite so constrained, and I think that proper management of public health in emergency conditions requires decisions to be taken at a national level for the whole country, that the Government should have brought in legislation to that effect in 2020 and that it should be made possible in future as soon as we can.

I want to draw one broader conclusion. It is my concern that this report falls into the trap that so many inquiries fall into of believing that cleverer people, more information, more preparation, better planning, if done properly and rigorously, can solve problems; and that if those problems are not solved, that is, ipso facto, evidence of poor preparation. The report recommends, for example—some might think ambitiously—that:

“It should be a fundamental aspect of all risk assessment that the potential impacts on society and the economy are taken into account”.


You do not have to be a complete devotee of Hayek’s explanation of the knowledge problem to think it unlikely that even the most efficient Government are going to be able to foresee and respond to all “impacts on society and the economy”; there are limits to what planning can do.

Of course, we should do the best possible, but what is also needed is something else: an adaptive and a learning Government, one who can assimilate information, draw conclusions and alter course in the light of real-time developments. Unfortunately, we did not have that during the pandemic. Instead, I am afraid we had a culture of compliance and denial, making it impossible to learn from experience. When it decided to lock down in spring 2020, the machine kept doing the same thing on autopilot. It was not just unable to assess the trade-offs between lockdowns and the economy; it was unable to assess, assimilate and explain basic facts such as the fatality rate, the effectiveness of vaccines, their effect on transmission, the effect or lack of it of vaccine passports, the effectiveness of facemasks and much more. Above all, it failed to draw conclusions from the evidence and adjust its approach. Instead, until the whole Covid world collapsed in January 2022, the first and last recourse was always to lockdowns, like a brain-dead animal still moving with instinct as if it were still alive and thinking.

The Minister said in introducing this debate that the intention in future is to create a learning system which can respond. But unless you change the wider culture in society, that will be quite tricky. Plenty of individuals at the time resisted exactly that learning. The then responsible Ministers are some of them, but they were not the only ones. Most of civil society, trade unions and faith groups—including the Church of England—all pushed for the most risk-averse policies possible. All other political parties pressed for more and tougher lockdowns, more working from home, more public money and more debt. To take just one example, the current Prime Minister said in July 2021:

“Lifting all restrictions at once is reckless—and doing so when the Johnson variant”—


let us not forget that shameful use of language—

“is already out of control risks a summer of chaos”,

with “deadly consequences”. It never happened. Not for the first time, and probably not for the last, he turned out to be talking nonsense.

But others advising the Government at the time must also take responsibility. The second lockdown was publicly justified through figures and charts which were simply wrong when presented and shown to be so immediately afterwards. They never learned. Even as late as December 2021, these advisers were predicting disaster. The then Chief Medical Officer said on 16 December that large numbers of Covid patients ending up in hospital was a “nailed-on prospect” and that the UK was facing “a really serious threat”. The then and current head of the UK Health Security Agency said that omicron represented

“probably the most significant threat we’ve had since the start of the pandemic”.

Anyone who looked at the data from South Africa, as has been said, knew that these statements were wrong. We certainly know it now.

This behaviour could persist because there simply was no free political debate about these issues. Many Governments leaned on social media and tried to terrify citizens into losing their faculties in support of their approaches. We were not allowed to discuss obvious things such as the plausibility that the virus emerged from a lab in China. We learned what happened from the Twitter files and from Mark Zuckerberg’s letter of 26 August to the House Judiciary Committee in the US, which said that

“the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain Covid-19 content … I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today”.

As I keep saying, most disinformation and misinformation comes from Governments. That culture was set during the pandemic, and it needs to change.

That is why it is so important not just to avoid groupthink in government but to promote free debate more broadly. We in this country, in particular the Conservative Party, can be proud that in the end we broke through that cycle of risk-averse controls and repression. Debate in this Parliament could not in the end be stifled. We should be glad that Boris Johnson in the end reached his own judgment about lockdowns and refused to go with the flow. That decision broke the spell and the cycle of lockdowns. It showed the rest of the world that the control and prevention approach was fundamentally misconceived and that it would have been better to stick to the 2011 plan so criticised in this report. It showed that it was not necessary to keep repeating the same actions, expecting a different result. But by then the damage had been done. One thing that is surely clear, even from this quite unsatisfactory first inquiry report, is that we must never repeat it.