Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord Macdonald of River Glaven Excerpts

Friday 12th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Macdonald of River Glaven (CB)]

My Lords, when this question was last before your Lordships, I opposed any alteration to the present law, but I have changed my mind because I have come to believe that our present arrangements are discriminatory and hypocritical. These arrangements benefit one group by conferring upon them effective immunity from prosecution for assisted suicide and damage the rest by withholding that same immunity on what looks like an arbitrary basis.

To explain this, let me go back to my five years as DPP, when around just 100 cases involving assisted suicide came across my desk. We did not prosecute a single one of them. In some cases, this was because the bodies had been cremated in Switzerland and there was no firm evidence of cause of death. This meant that our first test for prosecution—that a realistic prospect of conviction existed—was not met. In other cases, bodies were repatriated for burial, and we had a cause of death—usually massive barbiturate poisoning. Here, the evidential test was clearly met. However, even where it is, there is a second test to consider, because prosecutors are given the discretion to determine whether a prosecution would be in the public interest. In each case, we decided it would not. Why? At a basic level, we felt that a mother, father, son or daughter asked to accompany a loved one to Zurich faced a choice that no jury would regard as real—what to do: to take your terminally ill, suffering daughter yourself and to stay with her while she died, or to leave her to be taken by somebody else? Even presupposing a rational English jury, following proper directions of law from a rational English judge, we believed that that jury would never convict a mother or father in that situation. In all likelihood, they would regard the intrusion of the criminal law into such grief as an abomination.

Since my time, my successors have invariably followed this reasoning except in cases of exploitation or other venality, which were never present in cases I considered. Indeed, my immediate successor, Sir Keir Starmer, was even required by the then judicial committee of your Lordships’ House in its last judgment before becoming the United Kingdom Supreme Court to publish guidance on the factors prosecutors would consider in determining where the public interest lay in assisted suicide cases. Like me, Sir Keir had resisted this step on the grounds that it would constitute the DPP issuing guidance to the public on how to break the law and get away with it.

But that is where we are. We all know that if you assist a suicide in Switzerland and avoid anything the DPP has categorised as an aggravating feature, you may be investigated but you will never be prosecuted. Of course, there are cases where improper pressure, greed or wickedness are involved, but these would remain serious crimes even were this Bill to pass. These few cases aside, it means that the reality is that the vast majority of assisted dying cases abroad have, in effect, been decriminalised, with notable help from the old judicial committee and no involvement from Parliament as a legislative body. That, in itself, is strange, but what is worse is that this dispensation—this de facto right to die—applies only to those with the physical ability, the wherewithal, family and friends willing to risk breaking the law to help them, and the knowledge to do so. Those who are too ill to travel, who do not have the wherewithal, who cannot find anyone to help them or who are simply unaware of the extreme unlikelihood of prosecution are left to suffer in the UK. They are abandoned by a state that is unwilling to put the current law into practice yet equally reluctant to ensure the benefit of its studied inactivity is available to all. In my view, this represents an abuse of the cardinal principle of equality under the law and it can be addressed only by provisions of the sort contained within the Bill.