Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord Pannick Excerpts

Friday 24th April 2026 Lords Chamber

[The Archbishop of Canterbury]

My Lords, I shall briefly make some reflections. It is a great privilege to follow my friend, the noble Baroness, Lady Rafferty; I thank her for her contribution. I recognise the enormous amount of work that has gone into this Committee stage. I am grateful to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, for meeting me; I thank him for the time that he has given me.

Noble Lords will know that I oppose the Bill in principle, both as a priest and as a nurse, but it is clear that some things unify us. Whether we support the Bill or oppose it, we are unified by the fact that we want people to die in a dignified, pain-free and compassionate way, with the least possible fear. I also believe that we are unified in the belief that there needs to be investment in palliative care now. I welcome the new modern framework for palliative care that the Government have introduced, but recognise that financial investment still needs to occur.

We are also unified around the fact that if this Bill or topic comes back in some form, we need to do our work differently. There is no doubt in my mind that this is one of the biggest societal shifts that we are seeing or will see. Therefore, we need to take our role seriously, as we have done. There is something about our learning for this process and looking forward to how we do it differently when it comes back. I was very taken by the view of the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, of pre-legislative scrutiny, although I do not know the details. We should look seriously at that.

We are also united in knowing that this touches some of our deepest emotions. I am grateful to those who have shared their own experiences and stories; I have felt very humbled listening to them. For me, as a Christian, this is clearly an eschatological question, as my friend, the noble Baroness, Lady Rafferty, said. Of course, for me, as a Christian, death is not the end. There is hope in death and life everlasting. As we talk about these things that touch us deeply, we need to look after each other and ourselves and recognise that this process will have impacted us, as well as those listening.

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

My Lords, I assure my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, that I shall seek to avoid pure wind. I share the disappointment of so many in this House, and indeed so many outside it, that we have not completed our task of scrutinising this important Bill. Scrutiny means not just debating seven clauses of a 59-clause Bill over 13 days; it means completing Committee and Report, going to Third Reading and voting on our differences.

There are profound differences of opinion that people can quite properly and reasonably hold, but there has to be a choice as to which side you are on. Our failure—and it is a real failure, for whatever reason—is a stain on the reputation of this House, because the issues raised by the Bill are profound. They are important to people—people who are worried about death and those who are worried that they may be coerced into agreeing to assisted dying. The issues are highly contentious, and the Bill has been passed by the other place—the democratically elected place. That does not mean that we have to agree with it, but it certainly means that we have to come to a view and vote on these matters.

I, incidentally, have no doubt whatever that if we had reached Report and Third Reading, and if we had voted on this Bill, the overwhelming majority of this House would have voted in support of the Bill, thereby rejecting the destructive amendments that were put forward. I think the opponents of the Bill know that as well.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I acknowledge that those who have been campaigning for the Bill, inside and outside here, are well motivated. Many have watched a loved one die in great discomfort, even agony, and are informed by grief. Understandably, they do not want that for their loved ones or themselves. I also acknowledge that they are often driven by choice and autonomy, which are honourable virtues. Facing death, when illness threatens to remove bodily or cognitive control, can be daunting. As the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Prentis, so vividly and movingly described earlier, you can feel how people would therefore want to assert control at the end of their life.

I acknowledge that absolutely, but I want to refute something that keeps being thrown out regularly: the accusation that those of us who raise concerns about the Bill do not care about those campaigners and that we have never listened, or are not listening, to the terminally ill. To note, the terminally ill are not an undifferentiated identity group with a fixed view. Sadly, we will all know people who are terminally ill now. I can tell the House that those I know find that politicians’ enthusiasm for assisted dying—in preference to energy going into palliative care or hospices—makes them feel like a burden, and they are demoralised and dispirited.

It seems that some people are determined to undermine the motivations of those of us who tabled amendments, as though we are all part of some malign Machiavellian plot. Media reports this week—by the way, I must give credit to Dignity in Dying for its good comms and PR; its media work is second to none—have said that we in the Lords should hang our heads in shame. Actually, we should hold our heads up high. At the moment, it is fashionable in politics to look the other way—to see no evil, hear no evil, and so on—but we were charged with a huge task and a heavy responsibility. If there was to be a law that would mean that the state and doctors could help end the lives of the terminally ill, how could we pass that law without creating recklessly unsafe legislation?

This has not been some tactical coup, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hunter, implied. The task was to scrutinise the longest Private Member’s Bill on record—all without any guidance from Government Ministers beyond narrow, technical comments on legal and operational workability, not safety. Also, we were charged with the task of scrutiny not just because of our intrinsic role here but because MPs in the elected House told us that they were relying on our House to fix a flawed Bill.

Contrary to the point made earlier by the noble Baroness, Lady Gerada, what has become obvious is that the people who are not grounded in reality are those who support the abstract ideals of the sponsors. Once amendments try to pin down the practical, specific mechanisms of the Bill about how an assisted dying service would operate on the ground, worrying implications and unintended consequences are exposed. When the Health Minister, Stephen Kinnock, admits that the Government would need to reprioritise spending from NHS budgets to fund assisted dying, it is our duty not to stay shtum. We should not talk it out but we should be talking about it, because we should ask: which health services will be cut? Could palliative care get even less money? When the Royal College of Psychiatrists warns that the requirement for members to sit on AD panels would mean taking them away from overstretched, front-line mental health services, our job is not to ignore that but to ask: would that mean even longer waiting lists for those who are mentally distressed, or a reduction in people at the coalface of suicide prevention because they have been diverted into okaying the state assisting individuals in taking their own lives—that is, not suicide prevention? Such moral dilemmas hint at the fundamental shift in the—

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

No one in this House is suggesting that, as the noble Baroness puts it, we should keep shtum. We have had 14 days of debate on the Bill.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

Such moral dilemmas hint at the fundamental shift in the raison d’être of medicine that is required. A systemic shift will be needed to change the NHS constitution and redefine “medical treatment”. So I am grateful to this House, whether or not it has taken 14 days, that we heard the noble Lord, Lord Stevens, warn that the Bill’s open-ended Clause 41 would be a Trojan horse clause for fundamental change to the NHS by the back door, yet amendments to it have been sneeringly described as trivial, overly cruel and absurd.

Having sat through hours—days, even—on the Employment Rights Bill in this place, I thought that it was my responsibility to look at this Bill’s impact on workers’ rights. When I asked about two-tier conscience clauses that could leave out junior staff and ancillary workers such as porters and care workers if there were no system-wide opt-in model, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, batted my worries away. However, since my speech on that topic, I have talked to people, including prison officers, care staff and even a real-life porter—they were all trade union members, by the way—who thanked me for raising it and said that they had changed their minds after the debate because it had made them understand and reconsider the Bill’s broader impact. It seems a credit to the Committee that it has allowed people outside this Chamber to think about lawmaking beyond soundbites and emotive headlines.

My final words are to comment on who we, the alleged filibusterers, are. No disrespect, but we are a bit of a ragbag and not an organised ideological collective. I am in awe of my temporary comrades in arms, who have treated this process with diligence and moral seriousness. It is lazy and insulting to hear people being discussed in the media so disparagingly, or the suggestion that all the amendments were some conspiratorial plot. That is cynical misinformation and an undignified smear. So when—probably—or if any version of assisted dying legislation returns here, I hope that all sides will continue to read the small print, line by line, and that we will stop smearing each other and maybe work together on bringing through safe and workable legislation, if we must have the legislation at all.