Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Debate between Lord Lemos and Lord Mawson

Committee stage
Friday 23rd January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lemos (Lab)]

I apologise but I must remind noble Lords of the guidance of the House, which is that noble Lords should not summarise or repeat others at length. I know I try to find a different way to say this every week, and broadly speaking I fail. I also realise that noble Lords have spent a lot of time preparing their remarks, but it is my duty to remind them of the guidance of the House.

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

I love your Lordships’ House because it is the place where all this detail comes on to the Floor of the House. Debates like this, even though they are complicated and difficult, are always encouraging to people like me. The people involved in this, even though they take very different positions, I like a lot. I sat in the debate in June down the Corridor, and I heard lots of emotional stories on both sides of the debate, and good points and all that, but it did not have the level of detail that we are dealing with in this House. This is encouraging to me.

My life has been spent in the East End of London on housing estates, dealing with practical issues in a very grey area of the world and often, if I am honest, the dysfunctionality in practice and in detail of the NHS on housing estates. I have had to deal with the GP who is doing female circumcisions in his surgery that none of the systems had even noticed, and the GP who had bought a cheap fridge from B&Q and given out 10,000 illegal injections, and no one had noticed because there was lots of ideology about race that was preventing anyone from coming to terms with the detail of that.

My colleagues and I really got into the health system, as the noble Lord, Lord Deben, knows, following the death of a young woman called Jean Vialls from cancer in appalling circumstances with a disabled mother, a mentally ill dad and two children sleeping in the same bed. The NHS systems, processes and machinery absolutely failed to deal with that stuff. We would not have built the Bromley by Bow Centre, which now has 55,000 patients—it is starting to operate across the country with a whole programme that I now lead—if it had not been for the noble Lord, who, as the then Secretary of State, intervened in a very serious practical matter following a senior-level inquiry at the London hospital and enabled us to build the first working model of an integrated health centre that tried to deal with this complexity.

The NHS, in my experience—I am dealing with it with colleagues across the country—is broken. It is in a great deal of difficulty, in my experience. Our GPs are overwhelmed by bureaucracy and a whole range of things, and they are excellent people. My point in saying this, because I come from the world of practicality—

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lemos (Lab)]

I am sorry to intervene again but I invite the noble Lord to address the amendment directly.

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

I was just going to do that. I address the amendment because I worry that, while the amendment and the idea of a navigator seem very straightforward intellectually, I am trying to suggest that in the real practical world out there, when you engage with it, as my colleagues and I have done over the last 40 years, you see something quite different.