Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Baroness Coffey Excerpts

Friday 19th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Coffey (Con)]

My Lords, sadly, over 1,500 people will die in the UK today. Of those, nearly 500 will be from cancer. Death comes to us all, and of course we want to make sure that people have as comfortable a death as possible. But in the legislation before us, we are being asked to agree that someone be enabled to be given and use a concoction of chemicals to take their own life, and we are being asked to require the Government to provide services for that to happen.

I recognise that we have heard a lot of distressing stories of people suffering pain, intolerable pain, at the end of their life, and the suggestion is that by introducing assisted dying, or controlled suicide, that pain could be avoided. There is no reference to pain or suffering in the Bill. We have heard in the debate about polling. In other surveys, when it is explained that the assisted dying in the Bill is effectively controlled suicide, support falls. The BMA survey this year shows that support from GPs has fallen. The royal colleges have expressed their concerns.

I do not want to extend life unduly. In a week when the Government have introduced the Hillsborough law, I think of the legal case of Tony Bland, the 96th Hillsborough victim. That decision to stop artificially keeping him alive was the right one. I also support the concept of DNR. However, without going into too much detail, I have seen first-hand how the clinician/patient relationship can be frighteningly coercive, even for something as simple as sedated surgery for a broken hip.

I also think back with a shudder to the Liverpool care pathway. What an awful way to die. It had become commonplace. I raised this when I first entered Parliament, and gathered enough support from other MPs to get the Government to review and end that practice.

I have serious doubts about how, or indeed whether, we can get this legislation right to cover indirect coercion in particular. This indirect coercion is real: the feeling of being a burden; knowing you could save money for the NHS if you went that bit earlier; knowing you might be able to leave more money to your children, rather than pay care home fees. As such, I am genuinely concerned about how this may become commonplace here, as it is already in Canada. I will also raise other concerns in Committee, including the provision in Wales, given that the Welsh Senedd has voted against this—but I have to say that indirect coercion is my biggest concern.

I have followed the proceedings of the Bill since it was introduced in the Commons, and it has changed considerably since it was first introduced, so I welcome the proposal for a short, targeted Select Committee ahead of our consideration in Committee. One change that the Commons made on Report, which I welcome, was not to allow doctors to raise this option with a child, which the promoters of the Bill opposed. It got through against their desire.

Addressing the amendment of my noble friend Lord Forsyth, which I am pleased he has already indicated he will withdraw later, I need not dwell on the differences in processes between the Commons and Lords and their consideration, but I do not agree that this Private Member’s Bill should get particularly special treatment in your Lordships’ House. It has already received substantial support from civil servants. I am not questioning that, because I appreciate that they have to get this in a way that can be delivered, but as has been exposed by the two Select Committees that have already considered the Bill, that has led to an extreme number of regulations and unlimited powers. Both the MoJ and the Department of Health and Social Care have rejected my FoI requests asking which specific areas they had helped on.

I take noble Lords back some time, to a much shorter Bill of five clauses, with a majority of 275 in the Commons—not just the 23 this Bill enjoys—which, by the way, fell from Second to Third Reading; your Lordships stopped consideration in Committee. The Government then put that Bill in their manifesto at the election, and it passed eventually through both Houses. This Private Member’s Bill should not be turned into a government Bill now. It is going to take a lot of fixing, so I hope we will ask the Commons to start again, rather than let the Bill pass. But I assure noble Lords that I will be doing my best to scrutinise and to try to get something that may work—but I fear it may not.