Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord Goodman of Wycombe Excerpts

Friday 5th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Non-Afl)]

That is certainly true. The noble Lord makes a good point. The principle that is in my amendment could be expanded to take in other well-defined categories. I will be more convinced about the Irish category than the EU pre-settled status, given this issue was not anything like an issue when we negotiated the EU treaties that created that status, but that is for discussion if the principle is agreed.

Finally, I will just note that the amendment I have put forward reflects norms elsewhere, notably in Australia and New Zealand. It is quite closely based on Section 9 of the Victoria Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2017, which, whatever its manifold other weaknesses, is at least clear on this point. I will stop there and look forward to the discussion and the views of the sponsor. I offer this amendment as a potential way of providing more clarity and reducing the level of ambiguity in what is obviously going to be a very important provision in the Bill.

[Lord Goodman of Wycombe (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak very briefly in support of Amendment 23, which was spoken to by the noble Lord, Lord Frost, bearing in mind that amendments in Committee very often are probing amendments to test the view of the sponsor.

It is important to recognise at the start that it is, in fact, not clear from the Bill whether the NHS will provide voluntary assisted dying services. This was a point in relation to which the Bill was criticised very heavily by the Delegated Powers Committee, on which I sit. But it clearly is the intention of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, that it should, and I want to assume for the purposes of this debate, very briefly, that it will.

My noble friend Lady Coffey raised at the start of this debate a problem, which was the question of whether someone might seek to obtain residency under the terms of the Bill in order to obtain what has been referred to as death shopping. This is clearly a problem. The virtue of the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Frost, is that it would deal with this, imperfect though the amendment may be. I would like to hear from the sponsor of the Bill, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, what his view is of the problem raised by my noble friend Lady Coffey. I think he accepts that death tourism is a problem. Is his view, like that of my noble friend Lord Lansley, that residency remains the only sensible way of determining these matters? If it is, why has he put the additional safeguard into Clause 1 of the Bill? Or, if he thinks residency is not sufficient, what additional safeguards might he be able to offer? I look forward to hearing from him when he responds to this debate.

[Lord Harper (Con)]

My Lords, before I speak to my Amendments 300A and 306A, let me just pick up, briefly, a couple of issues that have been raised in the debate.

First, I was very pleased that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, said it was very important, in response to the noble Lord, Lord Beith, that we dealt with these border issues. He will remember that I spoke on that on the first day of debate, using my experience as a former Member of Parliament for a border constituency and I raised some of the very practical issues that there will be if we do not get that right. The noble and learned Lord will remember that when I was raising these issues, there were people on the other side of the argument who tried to shout me down before I had even finished. I am pleased, therefore, that he recognises that the issues I was raising are important and valid ones. To make sure these issues work properly, we have to worry about both the England-Scotland border and the England-Wales border.

Secondly, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, for the free legal advice he provided to me in answering the question about what the courts could do about a human rights challenge. I did not get an answer from the Minister, so I am grateful to have had it from him.

Thirdly, on the point that came up in the debate about Crown servants, if you are a Crown servant, you can retain your ordinary residence status when you are posted overseas—that applies to diplomats, members of the Armed Forces and civil servants. It does not usually apply, though, to people who work for the NHS, local government and so forth, but we do not have to worry about people who work in embassies.

Let me deal with the issues raised by the amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, because they are relevant to the nature of this service. He is absolutely right that, for primary care, we do not have the same test on residence that we do for secondary care. There is a reason for that. When we were putting in place the changes for secondary care in the Immigration Act, we considered whether we should implement similar changes for primary care—that was after he was Secretary of State for Health. We did not change that position because there is a very significant community benefit for allowing people, who are physically in the United Kingdom, to have access to primary care, so that they can access all sorts of services, particularly if they have a communicable disease or illness. We absolutely want them to seek early treatment, not just for their own benefit but for the benefit of everyone else. That is why we have wider access for primary care than we do for secondary care, which we limit to people who are ordinarily resident. We allow others to access it, but only if they pay for it.

I argue that, if this is to be provided on the NHS, this service should be treated more like how we provide secondary care, rather than how we provide primary care. It is more akin to that sort of treatment than primary care. That is where I respectfully disagree with the noble Lord.