Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord Bishop of Newcastle Excerpts

Friday 12th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Newcastle]

My Lords, this is not the first country in which I have lived and worked during such a debate as this. I was a Bishop in New Zealand ahead of the referendum on a similar Bill there five years ago. I witnessed the arguments, heard the reassurances and have since followed its implementation, including the pressures on healthcare professionals and the unforeseen consequences from a lack of clarity around process.

Only recently, New Zealand published its five-year review of the Act, highlighting significant practical challenges, concluding that the review committee is ineffective as an oversight body and recommending reforms. Five years on from the passing of a Bill much like the one before us, it would be irresponsible not to take its findings seriously. Most strikingly, the report highlights confused principles for the service and even recommends that the New Zealand Government establish specific principles to underpin the Act. This is no small matter—to be five years into providing the service without clarity on the principles on which it was built. For legislation where the consequences of poor drafting are so high, it is alarming that such principles were not defined from the outset. Yet, almost a year into the passage of this Private Member’s Bill, we are still discussing core concepts, without sufficient detail on how a state-sponsored suicide service would be implemented. That should trouble us all.

In that regard, I will support the amendment put forward by the noble Baroness, Lady Berger, to enable at least more scrutiny by professional bodies. While such uncertainty remains about how the Bill would operate alongside our most important end-of-life care institutions, we should not legislate at this speed or in this way. Our first responsibility must be to ensure that palliative and end-of-life care is accessible and effective for all. Last week, I visited a hospice in Newcastle. I saw and heard at first hand how an affirmation of life and dignity matters for all of us. Proponents of the Bill say that it is about choice, yet I cannot see how this is true when it is both unsafe and unworkable in its current form.

Within the Judaeo-Christian tradition, the idea of being human begins with God, as my right reverend friend the Bishop of Southwark has asserted—the sense of transcendence that informs personhood. Our obsession with selfhood and individual choice belies our dignity and respect for others. In being human, we begin not so much with selfhood but with the idea of the other and of who we are in the realisation of community and society.

Surely, the moral imperative is to help people live. I recall the words of my Bishop, growing up in the north-east, David Jenkins—words now written on his tomb:

“God is. He is as He is in Jesus. So there is hope”.


It is this that deepens and enriches my vision of life and faith, a vision of hope in humanity shared with those of other faiths and none, which are inextricably bound together. I cannot support the Bill and urge other noble Lords to resist it too.