Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord Carter of Haslemere Excerpts

Friday 12th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Carter of Haslemere (CB)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Merron, stated in this House on 4 September last year, that the Government’s commitment is

“to ensure that any debate on assisted dying … will take place in a broader context of access to high-quality palliative and end-of-life care”.—[Official Report, 4/9/24; col. 1151.]

Well, here we are having that debate. Has access to palliative and end-of-life care improved so much in the past few months? The experts say not. We have heard—but it bears repeating—that the evidence shows that 100,000 people die each year in the UK with unmet palliative care needs. Fewer than 50% have input from a specialist palliative care team in their last three months of life.

The Bill sidesteps this crucial issue because, as was pointed out by the noble Lords, Lord Lamont and Lord Grabiner, it contains no requirement that a person who is suffering from a terminal illness must also be suffering intolerable pain. Under the Bill, anyone given a prognosis of six or fewer months to live would be eligible for assistance to die, regardless of whether they are experiencing pain. Some of these people will require palliative care in any event, but if the focus of the debate were instead on relieving intolerable pain and suffering, then it would be more apparent that we should be legislating for wider access to higher-quality palliative care, not a state-assisted death regime.

As the Health and Social Care Committee heard, patients in countries with assisted dying who request help to die frequently change their mind if provided with proper palliative care. Evidence from Oregon, for example, showed that 46% of patients who received substantive palliative care changed their minds about an assisted death, compared with just 15% who did not receive such palliative care. Yet the Bill does not require a person to receive palliative care before electing an assisted death, merely that they be given the opportunity to discuss it. There is therefore a strong case for the huge sums that would be spent on state-assisted deaths to be spent instead on improving access to specialist palliative care.

Yet the intention seems to be quite the opposite. The impact statement sets out the tens of millions of pounds currently spent on care, state pensions and benefits that would be saved if this Bill were enacted. Is this really a relevant consideration? If so, we need to re-examine our priorities here. We should be encouraging those who are ill, depressed or struggling in any way to believe that life is a precious gift and worth living. We should be treating them as individuals who never cease to be important, even in frailty or decline, and that they deserve to have a dignified life in all its seasons by being cared for to the end, with the state meeting the full costs of that.

In speaking on this Bill, each of us will individually have searched our consciences, which is exactly how it should be. In searching mine and taking the line that I have, I have been guided by my Christian beliefs on life and on how life comes to an end.