Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord Polak Excerpts

Friday 30th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine (CB)]

My Lords, I want to pick up on two points made in this debate. First, if I heard the noble Baroness, Lady Gerada, correctly, when she advocated online meetings, she said that there is no distinction between whether the person requesting permission is in Torbay or Tenerife. That is a profoundly important legal point, which I hope the noble and learned Lord will cover in his summing up. If a person was in an online meeting in a foreign jurisdiction and it subsequently transpired that there was coercion—noble Lords have given several examples of how that could happen—from a foreign citizen, assuming the patient returned to the UK to carry out their wish to be assisted to die, what would be the legal position in the criminal law?

My second point relates to what the noble Baroness, Lady Berger, said about home assessments. I do not have the impact assessment to hand, but I recall that the number of people likely to seek assisted dying is not enormously large, running, say, to many thousands per year. Therefore, if only 10% of people were unable to have face-to-face consultations, surely the impact assessment should cover that small minority of people and the costs and practicalities of them requiring home assessments.

[Lord Polak (Con)]

My Lords, I support the amendments in this group, especially the one from my noble friend Lord Evans. I was not going to speak but I was moved by what the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, said about her father.

I am not a Luddite. My mother passed away in July 2023 from brain cancer, and this debate has reminded me of the Zoom call we had to look at the next stage of her treatment. I was here in London; my sister was with my mother in Liverpool, where she was lying in bed unable to speak. The nurse who was looking at the next stage of treatment for her was in Margate, had never met my mother, and was asking questions for over an hour to which mother could not reply. I have listened to this whole debate, and if we cannot put face-to-face consultation in the Bill, we are doing a great injustice to many people.

[Lord McCrea of Magherafelt and Cookstown (DUP)]

My Lords, earlier in the debate, the noble Baroness, Lady Jay of Paddington, intervened to say that she could not understand why, having talked so much, we had not actually talked about terminal illness. If the noble Baroness remains in her place, she will be here for the fifth group of amendments, on terminal illness, and there will certainly be a lot of discussion then of that issue. In fact, if we were speaking to that group of amendments now, we would be told by the Whip to address instead the amendments before us.

In the light of my experience as a minister, dealing with the general public from another side, I gently say to the noble Baroness, who was advocating for online assessments, that, if they are so perfect, why are so many mistakes made? Should we just dismiss those mistakes?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Polak (Con)]

My Lords, I apologise to the Committee for intervening, but I have waited—we are now in our eighth week, I think. I have three amendments coming up in the next group but one. I have to be in synagogue at 4.30 pm so I will not be able to speak to them, sadly; I had short speeches on them but I thought that, as a courtesy, I should let the Committee know that I will not be here to make them.

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton (Lab)]

The noble Lord notified me of that beforehand; I thank him greatly for his courtesy.

May I briefly refer to the contents of the debate? First, the noble Baroness mentioned devolution. I have nothing to add in relation to devolution, but it felt like she was aiming more at the Government than at me. I am very supportive of the Government in this respect, but I had to say something in relation to that.

I will focus primarily on what my noble friend Lord Rooker said. I do not say this without thinking about it. I have the greatest respect for my noble friend, having been in government—though not as long as him, because I was sacked three years before he was sacked, and he was sacked only because the electorate replaced the Labour Government with a Conservative Government. He survived throughout the whole thing.

My noble friend is, in broad outline, right when he says that Clause 1 contains the spine—the trunk—of the Bill. I believe that this moment very much represents an opportunity for us as a House to see whether there is a way to get through this in time to send the Bill back. I completely accept what my noble friend said about my responsibility for bringing forward, as quickly and as well as possible, the areas where he was kind enough to say that I had been clear about my amendments. So I welcome the door that my noble friend has opened. I am more than willing, in relation to each of the areas where I have identified that I am willing to move, to sit down and try to agree, as much as possible, what those movements should be. I am absolutely sure that we will not agree on everything, but we can determine the things on which we do not agree on Report. So I welcome enthusiastically what my noble friend said about the way forward.

May I deal briefly with what the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, said? Obviously, I am not responsible for either the impact assessment or the equality impact assessment. I must say, having read the points made by the commissioner of the EHRC, I think that the Government are right: it does not justify either a new impact assessment or a new equality assessment. The Government have been absolutely clear on why they think that, in principle, the Bill does not offend against the convention or the Human Rights Act. They have also been incredibly helpful, through Ministers, in saying where they think amendments might give rise to problems. It is perfectly legitimate for the Government to say, “We’re worried about amendments” but not to introduce a whole new assessment in relation to them.