Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 12th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, as we heard earlier, this past Wednesday was World Suicide Prevention Day. Suicide is always a tragedy, and its effects profoundly felt by whole communities as well as the immediate family. As legislators, I believe we have a responsibility to affirm every life as having inherent and equal value, regardless of age, health, disability or circumstances. I believe we need to seek to prevent suicide, not facilitate it.

We have a national strategy for reducing the number of lives lost to suicide but sadly, the suicide rate in this country is the highest it has been in over two decades. It is almost unfathomable, therefore, that in the very week we should be shining a light on suicide prevention, we are considering amending the Suicide Act 1961—in Clause 32—to make it legal for the state to give drugs to people to hasten the end of their own lives.

Proponents of the Bill have tried to argue that legalising “assisted dying” will somehow reduce the number of unassisted suicides, but there is robust evidence to suggest that it has the opposite effect. Backers of assisted suicide in the Australian state of Victoria claimed it would prevent 50 suicides of terminally ill people each year. They won the argument. But, since the law was changed, unassisted suicide among over 65s—the largest demographic of terminally ill people—has increased by more than 50%.

You can see why. If the state tells the sick and elderly that suicide is a valid way out, some of those who do not qualify under the terms of the legislation will still feel that they should take that same way out, because it has been normalised. Our commitment to suicide prevention as a society depends on a consistent message that every life has meaning and value and is deserving of protection. Suicide cannot be both something we try hard to prevent and something we assist in some cases. That is nonsensical. For the state to tell certain suicidal people, “You’re right. Your life isn’t worth living”, is an appalling message. It is the ultimate in hopelessness and the very opposite of compassion.

According to the Royal College of Psychiatrists, suicidal ideation in terminal illness typically resolves once a

“person’s physical pain or associated fear of it is alleviated”.

But the Bill ignores our duty of care to these people. It sanctions death by poisoning for those who, with the right palliative care and support, would otherwise often choose to live.

The Bill will put vulnerable people under even greater pressure to end their lives for fear of being a physical, emotional or financial burden on others. We see this in Canada, where the medical assistance in dying law has become, in the words of an ME sufferer called Madeline, a “brutal practicality” for people seeking to escape poverty and social isolation. One 37 year-old homeless man applied for medically assisted death because, in his words, he felt “useless” and thought he was “hurting society”. Another woman, in her 50s, asked to die because she could not get adequate housing. Who wants to live in a society like that? This utilitarian way of thinking becomes normalised once assisted suicide is legalised. Polling shows that over one quarter of Canadians now think that it should be acceptable for people to seek state-assisted death as a solution to poverty and homelessness.

The current law exists to protect those who might otherwise feel pressured into ending their lives, and that is why we must keep it. We should be seeking to strengthen people in hope, respect their agency and give them the care and support they need—not affirming them in their hopelessness and giving them drugs to kill themselves. We need to ask: is this Bill really the best we can do for society’s most vulnerable? The Bill cannot be improved; it must therefore fail.

Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts

Committee stage
Friday 30th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine (CB)]

My Lords, perhaps reference to the Companion will help reduce the noble Baroness’s confusion about my speech. The Companion says that, once the Chair has put the Question,

“a general debate on the clause may take place”.

I am highlighting problems with the clause. Clause 1 is the substance of the Bill and an equality impact assessment is fundamental to our understanding of whether it should stand part.

To come back to the letter, it refers to the possibility of generating comparative evidence on the wider matters, but that would not have produced sufficiently robust conclusions. The matter raised was that the EIA did not deal with any detail of all those certain protected characteristics because it focused on access to assisted dying. Access to assisted dying is not relevant to the safeguarding risks that we have all spent some eight days in Committee debating. The letter says:

“We intend to update both the Impact Assessment and the Equality Impact Assessment should the Bill receive Royal Assent, once detailed implementation work has been completed”.


That will be too little too late. It is of no assistance to Parliament in considering the Bill and its potential consequences. Indeed, the whole point of an EIA is that it is done before or at the time a decision is taken. I refer again to the Cabinet Office guide to making legislation. A failure to undertake a comprehensive EIA means a failure to comply with a public sector equality duty, as post hoc analysis cannot generally cure a failure to have due regard to equality implications at the time a decision is being made.

That is what the courts consistently emphasise. R (Blundell) v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions 2021 noted that post-decision equality analysis is not sufficient to fulfil the duty, as it is supposed to be a real, open-minded consideration of the equality implications, conducted with substance and rigour, not a rearguard box-ticking exercise.

In concluding, I say to the Government that an accurate assessment of how the Bill impacts people who share each of the nine protected characteristics does not betray that position of neutrality. In fact, it is the converse: withholding information is not an act of neutrality but the opposite of that.

The Constitution Committee published a report on the Bill on 11 September, lamenting that supporting documents, including the EIA, “were issued late” or were not available. In the other place, Ministers gave the excuse that the Bill was “highly dynamic” and likely to undergo significant changes during scrutiny, so it was important to wait until the committee concluded its work so that

“we know what it is that we are assessing the impact of”.—[Official Report, Commons, Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill Committee 30/1/25; col. 282.]

Now we are told that there is insufficient evidence to produce conclusions that are sufficiently robust. I suggest that the Minister review what both the EHRC and the letter submitted by 59 Members of this House have asked her to do and come back with some more positive news at an earlier date.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I beg the indulgence of the Committee to raise what I think is an important point; I hope the Committee does not think it pedantic. I had not intended to speak but was prompted to by the excellent speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, and by my noble friend Lady Coffey’s reference to the lack of insight provided by the Government—I will not criticise the sponsor, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton. This—our deliberations, scrutiny and oversight of the Bill—is a moveable feast, so we need information in real time.

My specific point is not just about freedom of information but about Written Questions that the Government have received and not answered. On 1 December 2025 my noble friend Lord Kempsell asked His Majesty’s Government a very reasonable Question. He asked, with regard to the Bill and its impact assessment,

“what assessment they have made of the effectiveness of judicial approval as a safeguard in countries with assisted suicide regimes, including the proportion of applications refused in those countries and the reasons for refusal”.

Two months on, that Question has not been answered. That is unacceptable, because scrutiny and oversight require us to have all the information in our hands, including comparative legal, regulatory and medical regimes.

By comparison, the very sensible Question from the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate—I do not want to embarrass him because he is in the Chair—about the use of the Parliament Act was asked on 26 January and answered promptly on 29 January. The point is that there should be equality and a level playing field on Questions asked, irrespective of the position on the Bill of the noble Lord asking it.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

I am another Member who had not intended to say a single word on whether the clause should stand part; I am rather relaxed about it. The Government Whips must blame their noble friend Lord Rooker, who provoked me into commenting because I agree, once again, with every single wise word he said.

The noble Lord referenced the Delegated Powers Committee, of which he was a distinguished member at one point. I was the chair of the committee when we produced the Democracy Denied? report. It highlighted the fact that every Government over the past 30 years—Tory, Labour, Conservative-Lib Dem and Conservative again—took more and more powers away from Parliament via delegated powers. The delegated powers in the Bill are excessive and have rightly been criticised.

The noble Baroness is also right that no Government in any democracy in the world can function unless there are delegated powers; not everything can be in Bills. The questions here are: how many delegated powers are appropriate; and what will they contain? The trouble is that we have more than 40—48, I think—possible delegated powers, including Henry VIII powers. That seems excessive.

I pay tribute to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, for producing some amendments that would implement the delegated powers recommendations, but I think he knows that if he did not produce them, this House, on Report, would implement every single one of the delegated powers recommendations; we would gut those bits of the Bill that did not implement them. So, although he has generously provided some amendments regarding the delegated powers recommendations, he knows full well that this House will implement all of them in any case.

That is all I want to say on the Bill. Delegated powers under all Governments have been increasing and ought to be diminished. Although I have some concerns about the contents of the Bill, I have many more concerns about the 48 powers that will be written by civil servants in the Department of Health. At the moment, they are unable to tell the difference between a man and a woman; I do not want them writing up how I will die in future.