Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Baroness Whitaker Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 19th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Whitaker (Lab)]

My Lords, I had not intended to join this long list of speakers, but it has become increasingly clear that it is right to register all testimony in support of the Bill. I was not at first in favour of it, as I thought it could result in the exploitation of elderly or infirm people’s vulnerability, but as I saw the evidence, particularly from people with disabilities, I came to the conclusion that this choice must be made available. Perhaps I should declare that I am a patron of Humanists UK, but my conclusion in this case was not determined by the admirable way in which it has set out a systematic exposition of the issues.

My views were further strengthened by experience. I am in my 90th year, and I have seen all too many of my friends, and their partners, put under all-consuming stress and suffering by having to postpone an inevitable death, in great and continuing pain and increasing loss of capacity. I well understand those feelings myself. I have seen instances of those caring for people in those last but often prolonged stages taken over by care, helpless compassion and powerless sympathy, of which their dying companion explicitly wanted to relieve them.

I too would like to be able to relieve my family, as well as myself, of intolerable suffering—so how could I deny it to others? I recall, in one of the many debates on this subject that we have had in your Lordships’ House, when the late, much lamented Baroness Warnock asked: why should not old people be allowed to be altruistic? I have spent a large part of my adult life putting the interests of my children at heart, and I do not see why I should stop now. This does not feel to me like altruism, just a continuation of normal service—I hope my children are not listening to this.

The last point I want to make is the part played by other people’s opinions. Like most of your Lordships, I have received very many letters and emails about this Bill. It was striking that almost all of those against were professionally informed, well-marshalled arguments—if often with unusually similar turns of phrase—and many coming from the same email address. By contrast, those for largely wrote from lived and agonising experience, some not very articulately, and in not very educated handwriting. All through my Civil Service career I was conscious of less powerful voices, less well organised, whom it was difficult to reach but who were in the majority—rather like the opinion poll evidence of national feeling in favour of assisted dying. This reflects, of course, the verdict of their elected representatives in the other place; people who we need to pay attention to. I would like to do that now, and make available the compassionate choice about the last, momentous event in people’s lives. I conclude that it is nationally important that this Bill should pass through all its stages.

Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Baroness Whitaker Excerpts

Committee stage
Friday 5th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Amendment 14 in this group seeks to expand eligibility for those of pensionable age who have retired from the UK and gone to live abroad. It is a probing amendment, of course; it is not my intention particularly to expand eligibility under the Bill. I am trying to raise a question of equity and fairness but also legal defensibility. I want to approach the issue from a slightly different angle. I endorse everything said by my noble friend Lord Lansley, the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, and the noble Lord, Lord Beith, in raising practical issues, but I want to approach it on a slightly different basis.

The intention of the sponsor, I think it is fair to say, is that in creating this Act we do not turn England and Wales into a sort of international capital for quick assisted death. That would be an appalling thing to happen. So we try to put some borders and parameters around it and say that this service is here for the use domestically of people who are established here. One way of looking at that is to put the criteria in about having been here for 12 months and so forth, and being ordinarily resident, and all of that. As I say, I agree that those things raise very serious practical issues, but it seems to me—here I tread very carefully, because I am not lawyer—that they raise legal issues as well. Are we to some extent fooling ourselves into thinking that we, although we are the legislature, can create these boundaries and that they will remain firm?

I am thinking about what the Minister said in her reply to the debate on the first group today, in which she was very careful to draw noble Lords’ attention to the fact that certain amendments in that group might be challenged under human rights law or on the grounds of the Equality Act. She said that she could not give assurances that they would not be challenged; that was her being cautious and proper in expressing the Government’s view while being neutral about the Bill. But that raises a flag. How many of the limits that we are discussing now would actually withstand legal challenge? I chose my own example on precisely those grounds.

What if you have lived all your life in this country and paid all your taxes in this country and reached your pensionable age and decided to retire to Spain, say? Unfortunate developments lead you to want to come back and you qualify under the Act for an assisted death; you have a terminal illness and six-month prognosis, and you want to come back to the UK to take advantage of that, maybe because it is not available in Spain or because you want to be with other members of your family—who knows, but you want to come back to do that.

Under the Bill, as I understand it, you would be excluded from doing that. But would a court agree that that was a firm parameter; in other words, would a court agree that the criteria we have established are sufficiently rational that they have a sufficient basis in other legislation, in their understanding of human rights or in practical considerations? There might be all sorts of reasons why courts might say, “Yes, these are rational limitations”. But it could equally be the case that the court would say, “No, that is an injustice. This person has paid their taxes all their life. They’ve only been gone from this country for a few months. Of course, they should be allowed to come back and take advantage of it; it is irrational to exclude them”. That is the point I want to raise.

The noble and learned Lord the sponsor of the Bill has to put in place criteria which not only sufficiently exclude the possibility that we are going to become an international shop for assisted death—which we would all agree with him is something that we do not want to see happen—but are sufficiently rooted that they will be defensible and durable in a judicial context. That is the matter that most concerns me, apart from the practical considerations, about this whole eligibility debate.

[Baroness Whitaker (Lab)]

My Lords, when considering this group, in particular, perhaps, Amendments 300A and 306A, I realised that the small number of noble Lords who have tabled most of the very large number of amendments to the Bill recognise compassion as their guiding intention. I hope they are being reassured by my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer’s comprehensive and expert reassurance on the many safeguards now inserted into the Bill—more safeguards, I believe, than in the legislation of any other country.

However, I am concerned that very extended delays will betray the hope of the woman who nursed both her parents through agonising and protracted deaths, and who now faces the same fate herself. She mourns the fact that her parents were never given the choice this Bill provides. Her words to me as a legislator were: “Have mercy”. Mercy is what this Bill is about, and noble Lords will surely seek the path to mercy. Surely only those whose motives are ideological would want to prevent this Bill from passing, rather than working out the best amendments on a reasonable timetable.

I remain profoundly uneasy at the prospect of Members of this House abrogating to themselves the right to deny the choice of mercy to that large majority of our fellow citizens who want this choice to be available, as reflected in the decisions of our elected representatives. “Have mercy” should be our watchwords.

[Lord Harper (Con)]

The noble Baroness referred to the two amendments that I have on the Marshalled List that I have not yet spoken to. She seemed to be ascribing motives to the amendments. She referred only to two amendments—the two amendments I have tabled—and she seemed to be suggesting they were designed to stop people accessing this service. I hope she will stay and listen to me when I explain what my amendments are about, and she will see that is entirely the opposite of what they are designed to do.