Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Baroness Bray of Coln Excerpts

Friday 19th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bray of Coln (Con)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to participate in this important debate and a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, and her excellent speech. I would like to add my words to those of many colleagues who have already spoken of their deep concerns about this assisted dying Bill, not out of a lack of compassion but because of a worry about the legal, moral and practical consequences of what it proposes.

Effectively, it says that the Government should take on a new role which requires them to lay out rules and procedures to facilitate what is in essence suicide with the co-operation of the medical profession. This would be a profound and troubling move. Once the state begins to legislate for the ending of life, however well intentioned, it takes on the responsibility for deciding when life is no longer worth living. At the moment, it would apply only to patients with terminal conditions and a prognosis of six or fewer months of life left. In other countries whose Governments have already gone down this route, the conditions of eligibility have been constantly widened over time to include non-terminal conditions. It is highly likely that, if this assisted dying Bill were to succeed, we would also in time see constant pressure to widen its scope.

I seriously doubt that the medical profession as a whole would wish to participate as a matter of course. Indeed, many in the medical profession have already expressed their concern. After all, doctors train to save life and to heal where possible. The Hippocratic oath remains “Do no harm”.

There is another crucial dimension here. In previous generations, patients often had much longer-standing relationships with their GPs, built on years of trust and understanding. A doctor who had supported a patient for years, often decades, might indeed ascertain their true wishes, knowing their history, their character and their needs. They would have been well placed to navigate end-of-life care sensitively, including when a patient was truly ready to go. However, as we all know, that reality has all but disappeared in today’s NHS, where quite often patients are lucky if they see the same doctor twice. This means that decisions about assisted dying could easily be made by professionals with little or no personal knowledge of the patient making the request, which must increase the risk of misjudgment.

Meanwhile, it is pretty clear to us all that the NHS is already under immense strain, as we have been hearing, with chronic staff shortages, long waiting times and huge gaps in palliative and end-of-life care. Surely, this additional procedure would create considerable new demands on staff and facilities, which could only throw doubt on the smooth and gentle manner of support that anyone would want for those undergoing the assisted dying process.

That leads me on to perhaps the greatest concern of all: how do we safeguard the process against coercion? How can we ever be certain that a person seeking assisted death is not doing so because they feel they are a burden on their family or society, or even on the system that is keeping them alive? The choice to die under conditions such as those is a fragile thing. It can be heavily influenced by illness, fear or, indeed, loneliness. No set of procedural safeguards could fully take account of that complexity, particularly without the input of a GP who properly knows the patient.

Surely the true mark of a compassionate society is not whether we give people a way out of life but whether we support them to live with dignity even when life becomes difficult. We need to ensure that sufficient funding is ring-fenced for high-quality palliative care with far greater access for all who need it, rather than legislating for death to become a treatment option.