Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord Bailey of Paddington Excerpts

Friday 19th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bailey of Paddington (Con)]

My Lords, I rise, with deep concern, to oppose this Bill, not out of indifference to suffering but because I fear that it will place the most vulnerable at the greatest risk. We should be clear: this is not just assisted dying; it is assisted suicide. Far from offering genuine choice, it risks becoming a pathway to people struggling with poverty, poor care or depression seeing it as their only option. This is not dignity and it is not compassion.

I have been written to by many members of the public, as we all have. I want to put on record their voices. They are worried about where the Bill is leading us. I cannot cover all the points they raised but I will cover a few.

There is no requirement for suffering: the Bill does not require a person to be in pain or distress. The only requirement is an irreversible illness and a prognosis of six months. Extraordinary as it may seem, there is no consideration of palliative care or pain relief. A person could qualify even if they are not suffering at all. For my own community—a working community, a poor community—this is deeply troubling. Many face hard financial realities and social pressures every day, and adding a law that allows assisted suicide without any requirement for suffering could turn hardship into a reason for death itself. This is where coercion is born.

Research in Oregon shows that nearly one in 10 people who opted for assisted death did so partly because of financial pressures. We cannot allow a situation where people feel forced into death because they cannot afford life. Coercion is not only about another person’s influence; it can also be about the crushing weight of poverty, isolation, fear, and loneliness. Listening to the great speech made by my noble friend Lord Banner, the Bill already has mission creep built in.

Research by the Marie Curie Palliative Care Research Department found that prognoses can be accurate only 23% of the time. Many patients given six months to live survive and even thrive for years. In a community such as mine, which struggles, the danger is doubled; such a prognosis may make people feel the pressure to give up too soon because of financial worries. This combination could be lethal. To legislate with such weak foundations is reckless.

This Bill cannot and should not pass into law. It is built on a flawed assumption and will expose the most vulnerable in our society to irreparable harm. We are told that it is about choice. But it could lead the poor, the sick, the isolated, the terrified, the people who have grown up relying on the system—not people such as us in this Chamber, who have benefited from it, but the people who rely on it, trust it and believe in it—to see this as a burden, a pressure, and even a duty to take their own life.

We cannot expose the poorest people in this country, the people most dependent on we in this Chamber to do the right thing for them, to this poorly thought-out legislation. It will devastate communities—communities that many of us have never been to and do not understand. We will be enacting something that will become a myth in those communities. We will be pre-legislating for people’s early deaths because their lives have been hard.

As the Bill stands, instead of working for vulnerable people, it will make more people vulnerable. We must choose life over fear.