Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Baroness Jay of Paddington Excerpts

Friday 24th April 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest, as past chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which ended on 1 December last year. I say that because it is pertinent to the remarks I will make. I gave evidence to the Select Committee in the other place as long ago as 2024. While the Equality and Human Rights Commission took a neutral position on the principle of assisted dying, it found several flaws with this particular Bill.

After we started proceedings on the Bill on 22 January this year, I, with the support of 60 or so other Peers, wrote to the noble Baroness, Lady Merron, asking for a revised equality impact assessment, because the original one was by then so out of date and so much new information had come to light during our deliberations. The Bill itself had changed so enormously from when it was first tabled, so we thought it was important to get more up-to-date assessments of what the Government thought the impact of the Bill would be.

The noble Baroness, Lady Merron, very generously wrote back to me very quickly on 29 January. She recognised that these were important considerations but declined a revised impact assessment. However, she promised that, once the Bill became an Act, the Government would review all the impacts of the Bill. In other words, we were being asked to legislate blind—to move amendments without knowledge of what the impacts might be. That is an essential requirement of an Act of Parliament or primary legislation. We were asked to legislate blind. While I understood the Government’s position and their neutrality, that has been the effect of where we have been. It may be one of the reasons we have had so many amendments that some noble Lords find time-wasting.

I want to turn to one important thing in my final observation. I will not speak for long, but I want to impress upon the House the responsibility that we have when the state is asked to sanction—indeed, assist in—the taking of life rather than saving it. This is particularly so when so many other jurisdictions appear today to have stretched the ethics of where that balance should lie. That may not have been where they started out, but that is where they find themselves decades later. I believe that it is right that we in the UK, with our particular constitutional arrangements, take care and apply the due diligence that careful scrutiny seeks.

If we have people who find that the level of their suffering is so intolerable, I completely accept that perhaps we should think of a way of death for those people. I say that only to re-emphasise what the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, said what seems an aeon ago but was only a few hours earlier: autonomy without protection is not freedom; it is a risk. I will go further: it is a risk that we as legislators should not in good conscience allow to pass to be exploited by the unscrupulous. I believe we have discharged our duties, but that is not to say that this should be the final word on this most difficult and contested ethical issue. I hope that the proposers will take note of the good faith that we have all employed and try better next time, as I believe they may well be entitled to.

[Baroness Jay of Paddington (Lab)]

My Lords, like the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, I was a Member of the House when we looked at the original Bill introduced by the late Lord Joffe in 2004. I have also been Leader of this House and, over the decades, I have never experienced quite the extraordinary exploitation of the procedures—one could almost say the sometimes rather relaxed procedures—of this House as on this Bill. Today, for example, I thought we were perhaps going to start again dealing with the House of Lords Act 1999. I have been through all the convolutions of Brexit, but never—I repeat “never” and, indeed, “exploitation”—have I seen the relaxed procedures of this House so negatively exploited. That is something we need to return to, and I echo the concluding remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Cashman.

I have a very big concern about the content and quality of some of the topics of the hundreds of amendments we have seen. It is about the way in which, as many noble Lords have referred to today, they have ignored the concerns of the people for whom the Bill is directed: terminally ill adults. My noble friend Lady Berger asked for examples of the way in which our lack of compassion had been demonstrated. In the interests of time, I will not go into any in particular, but I refer her to the 27 February discussion in Committee, when we spoke for some hours about the composition and the structures of the commission assessing people’s ability to take assisted dying. There was enormous emphasis on the activities of the commissioners and their convenience, et cetera, but scant regard was paid to the concerns of those people for whom this service was being offered: those who might be frail, bed-bound or concerned about their personal and emotional situation. We dealt almost exclusively with bureaucracy and administration. That, frankly, has been the tone of so much of the debate.

I am aware of the Chief Whip sitting there with his stopwatch, but I want to refer briefly to the other major and concerning omission from our discussions, which is the lack of any sort of detailed discussion about the international evidence and experience of assisted dying. I remind the House that more than 30 jurisdictions in the world have now satisfactorily introduced ways to give their citizens the choice of an assisted death. These places include our close neighbours in western Europe, major Commonwealth countries and American states, as well as the capital city of Washington and the District of Columbia. Some of those jurisdictions have voted very recently to establish new systems. In the western state of Oregon—which the Select Committee on which the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, and I sat some years ago visited to establish the realities of the situation—assisted dying has been in place for nearly 30 years. I have no doubt that there have been some difficulties and some mistakes as these different places have developed their own plans—there always are when major changes in social policy are introduced on anything—but no assisted dying laws have been repealed. None of them has been challenged at that level. There has been no collapse in palliative care. Indeed, with proper choice at the end of life, palliative care has often been improved. That is certainly the case in the state of Oregon. To disregard or distort international experience, as the debates in this House have done recently, or to suggest that only the Westminster Parliament can produce a legally proper system is, in my view, a dangerous form of arrogance.

In conclusion, this is the fourth assisted dying Bill that I have taken part in and there have always been profound differences of principle, but in none of the others was there the atmosphere of unpleasant tension and antagonism at a personal level that has characterised recent sessions. Indeed, 10 years ago, when my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer introduced his similar Bill, the Times reported our proceedings extolling the serious, calm authority of the debate and congratulating the House of Lords on its deliberations as a demonstration of Parliament at its best.

I very much regret that we have today to take note that the current proceedings have greatly damaged the reputation of the House. I can only hope, like other noble Lords, that when a future assisted dying Bill returns—and it most certainly will—the issue of choice for the terminal ill will be both constitutionally and compassionately considered by this unelected second Chamber.

[Lord Wolfson of Tredegar (Con)]

My Lords, this has, I can say without qualification, proven to be one of the most contentious Bills that has come before your Lordships’ House in this Session and perhaps, indeed, in any Session. One of the reasons why it has been so contentious is that it is so important. No one can deny that the Bill, if passed, would result in a profound change in the relationship between the individual and the state. It is therefore, obviously, a very important Bill.

The fact that it is such an important Bill has meant that noble Lords across the House, whether for or against the principle of assisted dying, have taken the scrutiny of the Bill very seriously, as they rightly should. I suggest that there is both a general and a specific reason for that. The general reason is obvious— it is part of our unique constitutional role to scrutinise legislation in detail. That is why we are here. It is why our procedures are both substantively and essentially different from those of the House of Commons; I will not get into whether they are better or worse, but they are certainly different. The specific reason is that many MPs voted for the Bill not only in the knowledge but also on the express basis that it would be properly scrutinised here. Indeed, it was noted by several noble Lords at Second Reading, including in my own speech, that some Members of the House of Commons voted in favour of the legislation because they supported the underlying principle of the Bill trusting that this House would undertake the heavy task of detailed scrutiny in due course.

Detailed scrutiny is separate from the question of the principle underlying the Bill. You can be for or against the principle of assisted dying and you can be for or against the Bill, but they are not the same thing. I know that there are some noble Lords who are and will always be against assisted dying on principle. Some of them have made that clear in their speeches. They would therefore be against any legislation that legalised assisted dying. But there will be others, and perhaps many, who are not against the principle of the Bill but are none the less anxious to ensure that we pass a Bill that is safe, contains proper protections and, importantly, is workable in practice.

Whether one is for or against this Bill, it is regrettable that your Lordships’ House has not been able to reach a conclusion on it one way or the other. I feel uncomfortable that the Bill has run into the sand rather than being either sent back to the House of Commons in an amended form or voted down. I would have preferred either of those options to where we have ended up, where the Bill will simply be lost when the Session ends.

The primary reason for the large number of amendments, many will say, is the large number of questions that the Bill, as drafted, left open. Many amendments raised complex issues, as those of us who have been at all the Committee days will know. It is understandable that there was a large number of amendments; some were designed to effect change and some were probing amendments designed to introduce greater clarity. However, regardless of how many amendments there have been, whether or not to legalise assisted dying is clearly a question that the public would like Parliament to answer.