Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Debate between Baroness Berridge and Baroness Hollins

Committee stage
Friday 9th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hollins (CB)]

My Lords, I have added my name to several of my noble friend’s amendments and I would like to congratulate him on finding a solution that could allow the Bill to meet one of the sponsors’ original aspirations. The impact of Amendments 25 and 120 are many. One that may be attractive to the Committee would be that it would considerably shorten the Bill, as several clauses would be removed and hours of debate would probably become unnecessary.

The Bill states that it will

“allow adults who are terminally ill … to request and be provided with assistance to end their own life”

and refers to eligibility for

“lawful assistance to voluntarily end their own life”.

The Oxford Concise Medical Dictionary defines suicide as

“deliberately causing one’s own death”

and assisting suicide as

“the act of helping a patient to commit suicide by giving them the means … to do so”.

The Office for National Statistics similarly defines suicides as

“deaths resulting from intentional self-harm for persons aged 10 and over”.

Clause 32 on the criminal liability for providing assistance explicitly references the Suicide Act 1961, providing that assistance carried out in accordance with this Bill will be exempt from that Act’s offence of assisting suicide. This reinforces that the subject of the legislation under consideration is assisted suicide.

I am aware that many people would prefer the term “assisted dying” because of the stigma associated with the term “suicide”. The Bill rather contradicts itself by adopting the term “assisted dying” while attempting to modify these other statutory provisions that concern assisted suicide. That creates both conceptual and legal ambiguity. If Parliament is being asked to authorise assisted suicide, then it follows that such decisions fall within the proper domain of the courts. For that reason, among others, I support my noble Lord, Lord Carlile’s amendment that would replace the assisted dying review panel with a court-supervised process.

Amendment 120 appropriately moves decision-making from the medical to the legal sphere. Assisted dying is not a medical treatment; it is an act with profound societal implications, and it therefore requires, I suggest, judicial rather than clinical oversight. For that reason, I believe that it does not belong in the National Health Service. Under the proposed model, doctors would continue to provide expert medical evidence confirming diagnosis and prognosis, but the final authorisation would rest with a judge. That judicial scrutiny provides a stronger safeguard against errors, and enhances transparency and public confidence in the system by placing responsibility for these irreversible decisions in the courts, where I believe they properly belong.

Concerns about capacity in the courts, or potential delay and cost, do not outweigh the need for robust safeguards when decisions of life and death are involved. The appropriate response is to streamline court processes, not to lower the level of scrutiny. The same issues of capacity in taking on a new stream of work would, of course, apply in the NHS. A judge would provide a more independent assessment of an individual application than a panel, which is likely to comprise people who have chosen to do that work and have no track record of dealing with issues such as undue influence. It is regrettable that the other place abandoned judicial oversight in favour of an assisted dying review panel and commissioner, thus seriously weakening the safeguards that were originally envisaged. The assisted dying review panel is not, in its current form, fit for purpose. Its composition does not provide sufficient safeguards for vulnerable individuals, and there is insufficient clarity on how it includes expertise in palliative care, safeguarding and decision-making capacity. A court model would be preferable; without it, the panel would need to be substantially strengthened.

I also strongly believe that, without guaranteed access to a comprehensive multi-disciplinary specialist assessment of palliative, psychological and social care needs, neither judicial scrutiny nor an expert panel would be able reliably to identify inappropriate requests for an assisted death. Those preliminary assessments are the most essential safeguards to ensure that treatable sources of distress, or modifiable psychosocial factors, are considered before an informed decision can be made, both by the individual concerned and by the decision-makers. We will debate specialist multi-disciplinary assessments in the next group of amendments, and I look forward to returning to that.

I also support the amendments tabled by my noble friend Lord Carlile that seek to broaden the scope of safeguards referred to in Clause 1. At present, the Bill limits those safeguards to Clauses 8 to 30, which cover only the procedural steps. My noble friend’s amendments would extend the safeguard requirements to the whole of the Bill, ensuring that every substantive provision—not just the procedural elements—must be complied with before assistance to die can be lawfully provided.

I also support my noble friend’s Amendment 69 to strengthen the definition of “a terminal illness”. The amendment clarifies that a terminal illness must be

“an inevitably progressive disease which cannot be halted”.

The inclusion of “halted” is important; it ensures that eligibility is limited to conditions for which the disease trajectory cannot be stabilised or slowed through available interventions.

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly to two of the amendments in this group. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, for meeting me in relation to his proposals under Amendment 120.

This group also contains related Amendment 116, which would introduce the capacity test that the noble Lord expects the court to use. Within that amendment, in the clear and settled intention part of that capacity test, is the introduction of the phrase “undue influence or coercion”. That test is different from the rest of the Bill, which uses “dishonesty, coercion or pressure”. I am sure that the noble Lord is aware, as he has outlined, that undue influence has a particular meaning in civil law and is presumed within certain relationships.

Schools: Relationships and Sex Education

Debate between Baroness Berridge and Baroness Hollins

Tuesday 12th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge]

My Lords, all aspects of safeguarding are covered in the statutory guidance, Keeping Children Safe in Education, and issues to do with violence are considered, particularly within health education. We have also given specific guidance about sexual violence between young people to assist schools with that very delicate matter.

[Baroness Hollins (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as set out in the register. What support is being provided to special schools? Are teachers in special schools well prepared to deliver relationships and sex education in a developmentally appropriate way and in a way that will support pupils’ social, emotional and mental health?

[Baroness Berridge]

Yes, indeed, the attitude of the department is to embed SEND in every strand of the RSHE work, and we are working closely with the Sex Education Forum and NASEN to ensure that. We have also employed SEND experts to help with the development of the curriculum so that there will be specific resources in the school support package that I have outlined to assist teachers, most of whom have a child with SEND in their classroom.