Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord Blencathra Excerpts

Friday 12th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I am not opposed to assisted dying in principle but I am opposed to this appallingly drafted Bill, which is a travesty of a Private Member’s Bill. It is a massive 51 pages, with 59 clauses and three schedules, and is one of the largest so-called Private Members’ Bills ever introduced in Parliament. It is larger and more controversial than many government Bills, and should have proper scrutiny. Since we need proper government Bills to make laws on prison sentences, penalties for killing with knives or dangerous driving, serious drugs et cetera, it is wrong to pass a law on how people should die through the Private Member’s Bill procedure.

The Delegated Powers Committee has issued a scathing report on the excessive 38 delegated powers, including all the Henry VIII powers, and that report alone should be enough to condemn this Bill to the scrap heap. Then yesterday, the Constitution Committee criticised it. If this Bill passes, it will not be MPs and we Peers writing the law on how we die but civil servants in the Department of Health writing up all those 38 delegated powers. Quite simply, I do not trust the Department of Health to write one word on the implementation details. The department has so far failed to implement single-sex wards for women and it failed for many years to take action on the discredited Liverpool care pathway, where 3% of patients being expedited to death actually recovered. A department that apparently cannot tell the difference between men and women is not fit to write guidance on legislation on when people should die and the drugs used to kill them.

Every year, 550,000 people die of terminal illness in the UK. From my 42 years in Parliament, I am convinced that it is impossible for Parliament to draft a general law—even with thousands of pages of regulations—which can cover every possible individual circumstance relating to those 550,000 people. We as parliamentarians have to realise and accept our limitations. I can draft a foolproof law for myself but not for any of your Lordships’ situations, nor for half a million others. The variables are simply too great. There are numerous cases of people diagnosed with terminal cancer making a full recovery and living five to 20 years longer than expected, proving correct the famous Sir William Osler, the father of modern medicine, who said:

“Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability”.


Prognostic uncertainty is one reason why the Royal College of Physicians does not support the Bill.

This Bill will give lawyers the ultimate power to make the final decisions, not the doctors. We have all seen firms of lawyers pursuing fraudulent medical negligence cases in respect of our soldiers who fought bravely in Afghanistan and Northern Ireland, and corrupt immigration lawyers running fake cases. Almost every clause in this Bill can be used by lawyers on all sides of an assisted dying application to take the case to court, and all those regulations will be a judicial review paradise for lawyers. I will trust my doctor to do what is in my best interest on my deathbed on the basis of the medical mantra, “First, do no harm”. I will be damned if I let any lawyers decide how I die.

In 2016, I tried to help pass the Medical Innovation Act, also known as the Lord Saatchi Act, which aimed to promote innovation in medical treatments in England for terminally ill patients. I recall at the time that most doctors were in favour of it, but the lawyers were opposed since it would remove their ability to sue if the treatments did not work. My perception is that most doctors have serious concerns about this Bill, but most lawyers are in favour. I do not want lawyers to come within a million miles of decisions about how people should die.

We need to start again, possibly with a royal commission led by doctors who will set out the principles and all the safeguards required. Then, there needs to be proper public scrutiny on a draft Bill that a joint parliamentary committee can consider. Finally, we need a proper government Bill and to see drafts of all the regulations that will be made. We cannot buy a “pig in a poke”, which this Bill is, and hope that the regulations will be just all right on the night.