Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Baroness Jay of Paddington Excerpts

Friday 13th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Deben (Con)]

One problem with using the word “compassionate” is that it is a mechanism for suggesting that one’s own answers to these issues are compassionate and other people’s are not. I happen to think that the most compassionate way of dealing with this is, first, to have a society in which we have palliative care of the highest standard for everybody. Then, if you have that, it may be that some would believe that it would be better for them to make a choice to kill themselves. This is what we are debating: not the principle but how you do this. I have given a clear statement of what my principled views are, but I am talking now about the facts of this issue. First, you have to show that you have proper palliative care. Secondly, you have to accept that there will be, in accordance with the Bill, the opportunity for people to decide. Who should make that decision? The problem is that, if you have proper palliative care, that will continue—or it ought to continue. All the information that those people have should be given to the people who are making that decision.

My noble friend is absolutely right: there are those who feel that this is a compassionate answer. I suggest that, if they feel that, the opportunity to make that choice should not be in the hands of people who are actually looking after them. I have tried to explain that, first, it makes many people more frightened of hospitals; secondly, it confuses their relationship with doctors; and, thirdly, it is very difficult to see that all those people who are looking after people will want to be involved in this. Fourthly, this begins to get closer to what the people who support the Bill demand should be carried through. We are trying to find an answer and, if the sponsors of the Bill do not like this particular answer, perhaps they can come forward with a proper programme for how to do this, instead of leaving it to the vagueness which our own Select Committee said was unacceptable.

[Baroness Jay of Paddington (Lab)]

My Lords, it seems to have become a regular feature of these Committee sittings that the noble Lord, Lord Deben, and I disagree—but I think we disagree with courtesy, and I hope we disagree on the basis of real understanding. However, it is extraordinary that we have got to this stage in the Bill and he does not seem to accept that those on this side of the House—or rather, those of us who support the Bill, as it is not an “on this side of the House” issue—are in favour of palliative care. We have always been in favour of palliative care and have always said that the two go together.

I have not had the honour of serving in the other place, as the noble Lord has done, but I have had experience of sitting on other Select Committees of your Lordships’ House on this particular matter—not the immediately past one, but on others—where we looked in detail and travelled to those places where assisted dying is in place. There is absolutely no evidence that assisted dying, when introduced, does anything other than improve palliative care, because it improves the understanding that people have of discussions about end-of-life care, death and the general issue, which can be debated more openly.

I am not trying to take the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, any further, but one of the things that has concerned us in this Committee is that there is so much emphasis in so many of these amendments on the detailed administration—the noble Baroness used the word “nitpicking”, which noble Lords did not like—and the very small print, and so much less focus on those people who are actually going to hope to take advantage of this legislation: patients and people who are dying, and people who are reaching the end of their life. I remember that in a previous debate my noble friend Lady Hayter said this, but I have been rather shocked by the emphasis, for example, on the bureaucracy and structure of the commission and so on, which has not emphasised the position of those people who are dying.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, I remind the House of the extraordinary common sense of the noble Baroness, Lady Cass, who pointed out that there may well be a lack of suitable doctors of one sort or another, and they may have to put up with what actually is the reality.