Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Friday 12th December 2025 Lords Chamber

We have heard a lot of noble Lords talking about the reality of the situation. I have given cases and information that show the reality of the assisted dying Bill and of the life in which we live. I believe that the public need more clarity on all the different examples in these cases, to understand truly whether they support the Bill. I beg to move.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, in giving support to Amendment 22, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, I will also speak to Amendment 30C in my name and hers. These amendments would prevent serving prisoners—those on a hospital order and remanded— and bail defendants accessing legally assisted suicide.

This group is about people in vulnerable categories having access to assisted suicide, but it must be said that anyone with a terminal illness is, by virtue of that, in a vulnerable group. I frequently came across that word in relation to female offenders when I was asked by the previous Government to chair a review on how to strengthen their family and other relationships to prevent reoffending and intergenerational crime. Hence, it seemed very important to define it. From the Latin vulnerabilis, it means wounding or being susceptible to physical harm or damage and emotional injury, especially in being easily hurt and subject to attack.

We can argue about relative vulnerability, but my now rather extensive experience of visiting men’s and women’s prisons has brought home to me that many male prisoners and men on remand are also highly vulnerable, for similar reasons to women. Without excusing criminality and overstating causality, I know that a very large proportion have had multiple adverse childhood experiences. Three-quarters of boys in the youth estate grew up with only one parent, typically an overworked mother, and one-quarter of adult prisoners spent time in local authority care. I know that adversity can develop a deep seam of resilience in a young person or adult, but research shows that it is far less likely to happen without healthy supportive relationships. This is the very ingredient lacking in the lives of very many of those sitting in our prisons. A conservative estimate is that around half of prisoners do not receive visits from anybody outside.

Few of us can imagine the despair that settles in when people enter prison: the inner turmoil and the sense that their life has been ruined. Those on remand can feel stuck in limbo for months, given the severe backlogs in our criminal courts. Sentenced prisoners at least have some certainty. Detention in prison is the punishment, and the state has a duty of care while people are detained, which is why levels of self-inflicted death are of such concern to the Prison Service. The suicide rate for prisoners on remand is approximately 1.8 deaths per 1,000 prisoners, while the rate for sentenced prisoners is less than half of that—approximately 0.8 deaths per 1,000 prisoners. My review team worked out that the cost of the inquiry that followed each suicide was around £2 million in 2017’s money. In 2024, people on remand accounted for about 34% of all self-inflicted deaths in custody, despite being 20% of the population.

Noble Lords might ask: what does that have to do with assisted suicide? The duty of care we owe to remand and sentence prisoners should disallow a death sentence being carried out when they are already far more likely to be in the frame of mind that says that they just want to end it all when a terminal illness is diagnosed. We have an ageing prison population, and one that is full of historical sex offenders. That is the compassionate reason. We should be able to promise them excellent palliative care and not play into an understandably exaggerated desire to end it all quickly on their terms—their last act of control in a life that has spiralled out of control.

But there is a more hard-edged reason: compassion to victims. We do not want sentenced prisoners or people remanded in custody while awaiting trial to have access to assisted suicide to avoid justice. Jeffrey Epstein was officially ruled to have died by suicide in his cell while awaiting trial. There is also the famous case of Goering after the Nuremberg trials. Conspiracies abound, but the principle remains that, if terminally ill adults know they can be assisted with their suicide, this implies a possible moral hazard if the cost of committing a crime is dramatically lowered.

--- Later in debate ---

The second—

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

I thank the noble and learned Lord for giving way. I will comment on the other side of the argument, which is the moral hazard. This could be an extreme case, but I will give the example of somebody who has lung cancer and has within a year to live. They also have some very difficult relationships and have wanted to get rid of a certain person for a long time. If they get rid of them, they will be sent to prison but will be within having six months to live and can have an assisted death, which takes away from the victim, the victim’s family and others any concern that justice is done. By giving them an assisted suicide, justice would not be done in that case.

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton (Lab)]

I am not quite sure I understand the point. If the position is that I have six months to live and I want to kill somebody, which appears to be the example given, I am entitled to an assisted death whether I am in prison or not. It would probably take six months before the trial took place anyway. I am not quite sure what is the moral hazard that the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, has in mind, because the right to an assisted death would be there inside or outside of prison. So, I do not see what benefit would be obtained by excluding it from somebody in prison.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

If I may try and answer that, the moral hazard is that the victim would have seen a criminal convicted, but the criminal would not serve the sentence given to them by the courts and would instead have an easy way out. You could say that he has six months to live, but as we know, in many cases —Esther Rantzen, for instance, is one of them—it can go on for years. To end his punishment would not give justice to the victim—that is the point I am making.

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton (Lab)]

It is just such an obscure proposition that we should not determine our policy in relation to it.

Moving on to pregnant women, the amendments say that no pregnant woman should have the right to an assisted death and that everybody who wants an assisted death must have a pregnancy test. The noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, made it clear that the second was a probing amendment and not a serious proposition. In relation to pregnant women, I completely accept what is being said, particularly by my noble friend Lady Berger, about what the statistics show. Again, safeguards can adequately deal with this and I am not in favour of any change in relation to it. We should remember that what we are dealing with here is somebody who has only six months to live. Homeless people—