Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Baroness Bray of Coln Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 19th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bray of Coln (Con)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to participate in this important debate and a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, and her excellent speech. I would like to add my words to those of many colleagues who have already spoken of their deep concerns about this assisted dying Bill, not out of a lack of compassion but because of a worry about the legal, moral and practical consequences of what it proposes.

Effectively, it says that the Government should take on a new role which requires them to lay out rules and procedures to facilitate what is in essence suicide with the co-operation of the medical profession. This would be a profound and troubling move. Once the state begins to legislate for the ending of life, however well intentioned, it takes on the responsibility for deciding when life is no longer worth living. At the moment, it would apply only to patients with terminal conditions and a prognosis of six or fewer months of life left. In other countries whose Governments have already gone down this route, the conditions of eligibility have been constantly widened over time to include non-terminal conditions. It is highly likely that, if this assisted dying Bill were to succeed, we would also in time see constant pressure to widen its scope.

I seriously doubt that the medical profession as a whole would wish to participate as a matter of course. Indeed, many in the medical profession have already expressed their concern. After all, doctors train to save life and to heal where possible. The Hippocratic oath remains “Do no harm”.

There is another crucial dimension here. In previous generations, patients often had much longer-standing relationships with their GPs, built on years of trust and understanding. A doctor who had supported a patient for years, often decades, might indeed ascertain their true wishes, knowing their history, their character and their needs. They would have been well placed to navigate end-of-life care sensitively, including when a patient was truly ready to go. However, as we all know, that reality has all but disappeared in today’s NHS, where quite often patients are lucky if they see the same doctor twice. This means that decisions about assisted dying could easily be made by professionals with little or no personal knowledge of the patient making the request, which must increase the risk of misjudgment.

Meanwhile, it is pretty clear to us all that the NHS is already under immense strain, as we have been hearing, with chronic staff shortages, long waiting times and huge gaps in palliative and end-of-life care. Surely, this additional procedure would create considerable new demands on staff and facilities, which could only throw doubt on the smooth and gentle manner of support that anyone would want for those undergoing the assisted dying process.

That leads me on to perhaps the greatest concern of all: how do we safeguard the process against coercion? How can we ever be certain that a person seeking assisted death is not doing so because they feel they are a burden on their family or society, or even on the system that is keeping them alive? The choice to die under conditions such as those is a fragile thing. It can be heavily influenced by illness, fear or, indeed, loneliness. No set of procedural safeguards could fully take account of that complexity, particularly without the input of a GP who properly knows the patient.

Surely the true mark of a compassionate society is not whether we give people a way out of life but whether we support them to live with dignity even when life becomes difficult. We need to ensure that sufficient funding is ring-fenced for high-quality palliative care with far greater access for all who need it, rather than legislating for death to become a treatment option.

Tobacco and Vapes Bill

Baroness Bray of Coln Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 23rd April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bray of Coln (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Earl, Lord Russell. I was a smoker for about 50 years or so and gave up seven years ago. If I am honest, it was not that hard. I do not find it possible to support the Bill as it stands. I am one of the Conservative libertarians that my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham referred to earlier today.

As we know, the Bill is designed to achieve a long-term aim of ending smoking, with the introduction of a growing, year-by-year ban on our centuries-old freedom to buy tobacco products. Through those centuries, we have learnt about the health hazards attached to smoking, but we have also been learning how to handle them with rules of containment and treatments, based on growing scientific knowledge, but not before now with a total ban.

Let me be clear: I recognise that smoking can lead to serious, sometimes life-threatening, health conditions, and I support limits on where smoking can take place. A ban on smoking in indoor public places makes sense—and indeed, outside schools—but certainly not outside pubs and their gardens. Smokers should always be mindful of people around them when they light up, but there is space for considerate smokers, and that is surely a reasonable balance.

Smoking can be a very expensive burden on the NHS, but so can other choices we make. What about sports with high injury rates, such as boxing, football or ice hockey? What about the growing obesity problem? Should there be more control over what people can eat? And, of course, alcohol causes huge additional pressure on the NHS, serious health problems as well as damage and injuries from drunken behaviour—but I do not hear a call for a ban for grabbing a pint or two, and nor do I want to.

Meanwhile, smoker numbers in the UK have fallen significantly over the years. Back in the 1960s, some 51% of the population smoked, which was down to around 11% by 2023. The figures go up and down, but the overall direction is clear. This fall is due to successful health campaigns and a growing interest in healthy living, not a total ban.

As we have discussed, we face an extraordinary proposal in this Bill: anyone born in 2009 onwards will not be allowed to buy cigarettes at any age, while those born even a day before them can. Surely that is simple generational discrimination, which will continue until the last person born before 2009 has passed on? In 2027, two adults of a similar age will have different rights, based entirely on their birth date—this is arbitrary lawmaking and very divisive.

Further regulation of vapes is also planned, despite them being considered less harmful than smoking cigarettes, because young teenagers are attracted to them. Disposable vapes are to be banned—I agree that they pile up as horrible litter. The advertising designed to promote vapes, because they appeal to a young audience, is also to be banned. Many of the popular vape flavours are to be banned. It is right to try to protect young people from getting hooked on vaping, but this will also affect many adults who are finding that various vape flavours they like are helping them give up cigarettes. There needs to be a balanced approach to this. It is already illegal to sell cigarettes and vapes to under-18s.

The Bill proposes new demands on retailers, including requiring much clearer evidence of purchasers’ birth date details. This needs careful thought. Some retailers may decide to close due to the increasing demands, including the introduction and management of new age-verification systems, more training for staff and compliance with regulations. Some reports suggest that many closures are possible. As we have been hearing, if those local shops—which have always been one of the main sources for buying tobacco products in local communities—start to close, the black market is always there to fill the gap. That way, there is very little control over who buys and what they buy. It is a very dangerous presence where it sets up.

As I said, the Bill proposes that everyone born in 2009 onwards will be banned from buying all tobacco products, but it seems that there is no ban on possession or consumption, so presumably that means that at 18 they will be allowed to smoke, just not to buy the products. Although it will be illegal for those who can still buy tobacco to buy for someone who cannot, how on earth will that actually be policed? Will sharing a cigarette also be illegal, and how will that get policed? New Zealand has now dropped its plans for a similar ban. So should we—and we should allow the number of smokers to continue to dwindle, as it is, as smoking becomes increasingly uncool.