Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Debate between Lord Markham and Lord Deben

Committee stage
Friday 12th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords, the moments in the Bill that most concern me are when it gets nearest to saving money. There are several occasions on which that appears to be the case, particularly when talking about people for whom many have no sympathy at all, and when you are talking about a service in which we all know we are failing. It cannot be true that any Member of this House believes that our prisons are as they should be. Yet we imprison more and more people. We imprison twice as many people as the French or the Germans. I still do not understand why we cannot take this seriously, but we still go on doing it.

First, can one really think that someone in prison circumstances finds it possible to make the same kind of decision as people who are not? Just simply, those circumstances are the pressures, the crowding and the fact that you are not in any company that you would have chosen. I do not believe that those are the circumstances in which the Bill’s proponents meant for decisions of the sort we are talking about to be made.

The second issue is: what about the pressures there? We have been talking about the concerns of those who find themselves under pressure. Do we really believe that there will not be many prisoners for whom the whole issue will be presented as, “You will be better off and we will be better off if you make this decision”?

The third issue is surely this: we know that prisoners have much worse healthcare than people outside prison. Therefore, the fact that they are told that they have but six months to live is much more difficult than it would be if they were in normal circumstances. I put it no more sharply than that, but it does seem to be true.

Fourthly, earlier on, we were talking very strongly about the difficulty that the Government are willing to fund this when they are not funding palliative care for very large numbers of people in the country. I therefore come back to my deep concern that it will become so much easier for people to die than to continue.

The right reverend Prelate, whose experience is remarkable and whom I admire enormously for her work in the prisons, has reminded us of how old the prison population is and how much older it is becoming. I just do not think that those of us in this House who really believe that our major job in this Bill is to protect the vulnerable can possibly agree that people in prison should be included under the Bill. We should take them out.

[Lord Markham (Con)]

May I just offer a different perspective on this? It has been an interesting debate. One of the main reasons I am supportive of assisted dying is kindness—kindness to the people who are scared about the inevitable end of their life and kindness in that they face a lot of pain. They see assisted dying as a way of relieving themselves from that pain.

In this debate, are we saying that people in prison are not deserving of that kindness? People in prison have been deprived of their liberty because of the crimes they committed, and that is the punishment that they have been given in the face of the law. That is the debt being paid to society. But are we saying at the same time that they do not deserve the same kindness that we would give to others and that they should face pain because they are in prison, whereas others should not? That is my perspective on this.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Deben (Con)]

I did not realise that the noble Lord was intervening on me, but I will just say that, for me, it is very difficult to have that argument. Kindness is absolutely the central point of everything that I believe in, so I am very vulnerable to that question. But the truth is, the Bill does not talk about pain at all. There is nothing in the Bill about pain. This is about a totally different circumstance. One of the problems in the country as a whole is that many people who support the Bill do so because they think it is about pain.

We could have a Bill about pain, but then we would come back to the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, that that is not what the Bill should have been. The Government should have said that they would give a free vote on a government Bill on this subject, rather than slipping it in in a wholly different way.

However, we are faced with what we have, and in that case it does not seem kind to say to people who are under all sorts of pressures and who are particularly vulnerable that this is a choice they should make. If we want kindness, we should be saying to the Government, “Get the Bill withdrawn and introduce a government Bill that is properly thought through where we can have the real debate that the public as a whole want us to have. You can still have a free vote”, but it should never have been put through in this way.

[Lord Markham (Con)]

If I may respond on the pain point, I have spoken to lots of people who are terminally ill and heard their evidence. Again, I recommend that as many people as possible hear them because they have heartwarming stories. For them—not all the time, but a lot of the time—it is because they want to have that choice at the end so they do not have to face that pain. That is a key reason for them. The Bill says that you have to be within six months of the end of your life, but then you have the choice within that. For some people, the thought of that pain, and the experience of that pain, is the real reason why they want an assisted death. My point is that I believe prisoners should have exactly that same right so that they have the possibility to avoid that pain.