Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord Harries of Pentregarth Excerpts

Friday 27th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, I have added my name to Amendments 359, 660, 665 and 681, as I believe they would ensure the widest possible protection for those people who, due to issues of conscience, are not able to participate in assisted dying. I specifically use “not able”, which is a different concept from that of autonomy and choice that underlies the Bill. “Not able” in matters of conscience is something we have not really considered in our law for a long time, but, if one casts one’s mind to conscientious objection to being involved in war, it is an important part of people’s rights to be able to say, “I am not able to participate in that”. There was some comment about the role of the porter. Everyone has that right of conscience—not choice, but conscience. One only has to watch “24 Hours in A&E” to see that that brief encounter with the porter, as an example, is such an important part of healthcare. We need to remember that everyone has freedom of conscience, not choice.

Of course, if the Bill explicitly provided the opt-in system, as my noble friend Lady Fraser mentioned, then the protections in these amendments would not be needed. I am afraid that I address the noble and learned Lord again about pre-legislative scrutiny. I admire the confidence with which he assures us, Bill in hand, that this is all sorted out; but until I am satisfied that the royal colleges, representing the people who are going to deliver this, are satisfied that the Bill is that clear, I am afraid these amendments need to be considered.

There are other jurisdictions where there are tighter protections for practitioners. In Oregon, even, the medical practitioner does not have to participate, document requests or provide information, but the language in the Bill is just “unwilling or unable”, which is a wider definition.

The noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan, has mentioned the case from Scotland, where they considered the conscientious objection clause in the abortion Bill, which was found to apply only to direct participation, not to the ancillary services these various amendments are trying to secure for individuals and organisations. I anticipate that there will be GP surgeries that will opt out because patients will want to know that whoever they get at the surgery does not support this.

The amendments would cover the situations I have been concerned about: the Secretary of State, the commissioners of services for assisted dying—if this is going to be an NHS service—and civil servants. I would be grateful if the Minister could confirm to us, either today or on our final day of Committee as currently scheduled, that the civil servants in all government departments who have had to work on the Bill have not been pressurised or required to work on it. The Bill may not yet be law, but it is good employment practice not to put any pressure on staff—noble Lords have given other examples—to make sure that they participate.

On the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Watkins, coroners still record verdicts of suicide. The Government still have a suicide prevention strategy. The Bill before us is amending the criminal law, called the Suicide Act 1961. I agree that we should act with compassion, but we have to be legally correct about what we are doing. There is potentially a wider issue there for the Government to take away if they want to change the name of legislation and the name of the strategy, but that is not for today.

[Lord Harries of Pentregarth (CB)]

My Lords, it has been a privilege to listen and learn and to try to clarify my mind regarding the various amendments. I wish that some of our critics in the press had been here this morning, because the amendments today go to the very heart of the Bill and we have had the opportunity of hearing from people on different sides of real expertise, including the noble Baronesses, Lady Gerada, Lady Hollins, Lady O’Loan and Lady Finlay. It has been a huge privilege for those of us who are not medical experts to be able to clarify our minds on this issue.

I hope the noble and learned Lord will be able to address the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Cass. She made points I had not heard before, and I do not know whether he had. She claimed that the Bill as drafted is not actually workable, and I very much hope he will be able to address that point.

I shall say three things. First, the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, suggested that the things we are talking about today should be left to the medical professions to regulate. However, what we have been debating today—whether we should have a public register or whether we should simply have an opt-out clause, which everyone agrees with, of course—is not just simply a detailed regulation, with due respect; it goes to the heart of the Bill and Parliament has to make its mind up about it.

Secondly, towards the end of her speech, the noble Baroness, Lady Gerada, who we listened to with great respect, mentioned the well-known fact that a number of doctors, when patients come to the end of their life, give very large doses of painkiller, which has the effect of shortening the patient’s life. From an ethical point of view, there is a fundamental difference, depending on whether one is a utilitarian or a consequentialist on the one hand, or whether one believes that certain things are fundamentally wrong. This has been mentioned two or three times in the debates over recent years. For the ethical tradition that is this country’s base, particularly for the medical profession, there is a fundamental difference between administering a poison to kill someone and administering a large dose of painkilling drugs that has the foreseen effect of also shortening their lives, which from a moral point of view is entirely legitimate.

Lastly, on the question of language—this has been mentioned before—I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Watkins, that many of us do not like to confuse what we are debating with assisted dying. However, we also respect what the noble Baroness says—that the language of suicide is unpleasant and really not appropriate. Personally, I like to use language that is as neutral as possible and talk about people taking their own life, which seems to me as neutral a language as we can get on this.

[Baroness Lawlor (Con)]

My Lords, I would like to introduce my Amendment 664. It is designed to ensure not only that no medical professional is obliged to participate in such training but that, in order to do so, the medical professional must give written consent. Professional training aims to show students not only how to apply their academic knowledge in practice but how to approach their role in their chosen profession. The second element has two levels. There is the day-to-day one, as summed up by the Cambridge clinical course under the labels “communication skills” and “patient management”: how, for instance, to deal with a patient who insists, contrary to the evidence, that they have cancer?

However, there is a second, higher level—an induction into the ethos of the profession. This level is of vital importance in training medical professionals, because they are dealing with human beings. Throughout this Committee, one of the most powerful messages has been that each individual is different and that one of the most precious skills of doctors, nurses and other medical professionals is to be sensitive to those differences when applying medical science in a particular case. There is no simple blueprint or checklist to guide them. Rather, they need to be guided by the ethos of the profession into which their training has induced them.

That is a strong reason why this amendment seeks to ensure that the training of health professionals related to assisted suicide needs explicit consent from participants. It implies that training for purposes of the Bill is treated as a separate activity within the course as a whole, requiring consent from the participants, and that there is neither compulsion nor pressure to participate. If assisting suicide or assisting death under this Bill is presented in training as just another element among others of what health professionals do, the ethos will be drastically changed. Instead of one based on supporting the ill, the frail and the elderly, of seeing in every life one worth living and improving health, a new ethos will grow. At first, it will be one of moral equivalence between encouragement and help to live and encouragement and help to die—one in which there is no ethical basis for the profession but everything depends on the apparent preferences of the patient. But soon, I fear, it will develop into something more sinister—an ethos in which medical professionals are servants of the state, deciding for the common good, as they believe, who is to live and who is to die.

A second reason for this amendment is the freedom of conscience of medical and other healthcare professionals.