Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Friday 19th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I am aware that many noble Lords will, knowing that my life has been spent as a Methodist minister in pastoral work, have reached an assumption that they know what I am going to say. It is not necessarily the case. I have tried, knowing that that awareness would exist, to give my best attention to the material that has flooded our way over the last month, of which I have tried to make sense in as rational a way as I possibly can.

If I have a qualification for speaking in a debate of this kind, it is simply my experience of the phenomena we have been describing: beginning when symptoms present themselves, people moving through to diagnosis and then to treatment, and then seeing the last days and the end of a particular person’s life, dealing with all the emotions released after the death among the nearest and dearest of the person who has died. Being with people directly affected by the phenomena that we are talking about is a long curve.

Families are not necessarily good places. Within families, there are those with views that put pressure on people for money, and others who take a much more humane view of things. Sometimes, there is blame after the death—the view that things could have been done better and that this and that should not have been done. Choice is not an individual making a decision, forensically separate from all the circumstances and contexts within which that happens; rather, they are surrounded by complexity and predisposed attitudes. Therefore, I wish that we could look again at what we think we mean when we say “choice”. The choice for the person who needs or wants to die is not, for the most part, a choice exercised in isolation from other factors.

I am delighted that the noble Baroness, Lady Berger, and my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer have come to an agreement about a Select Committee to look further at the sorts of issues and phenomena that we are describing, concerned with and taxed with in a debate of this kind. Her letter, along with her associates, was the lodestone for my making sense of all the material I was wrestling with. I am glad that we received a subsequent letter to suggest there may be a proper place where we can look into the proper worries that have been expressed here in this Chamber. I wonder whether 7 November is too near the starting point, but we can look at that in due course.

All I know is that a person who is dying may want to or may not want to and may be led to want to or averted from wanting to. There are near and dear people who turn out to be quite problematical in the total pastoral situation. This is not an easy matter.

At the end of the day, I will vote, I suppose, with all of us now that this situation is emerging, for the amendment. I cannot dismiss from my head what a senior doctor said: “This will change the practice and culture of medicine in ways that no amendment of this Bill can prevent”.