Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Debate between Baroness Butler-Sloss and Lord Pannick

Committee stage
Friday 21st November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, I do not like this Bill, but I am here, like many other Members of this House, to agree on amendments that will make this a better Bill, and I hope it will be effective.

When my father died, the family nanny, who had also been his housekeeper, needed somewhere to live, and my brothers and I paid for her to live in a very nice care home, where she was entirely happy, until I went to see her. On each occasion, she said to me, “I shouldn’t be alive. I ought to die. It is not right that you and your brothers are having to pay for me”. I have this direct knowledge. She was perfectly happy when I was not there and, of course, we continued to look after her until she died.

But the Bill, once it is passed, is absolutely certain to be enlarged in all sorts of ways, as happened with other Bills in other countries once they became law. There are various reasons why it would be a good thing to enlarge it. For example, it seems to me bitterly unfair that those with locked-in syndromes such as motor neurone disease would be extremely unlikely to benefit from the Bill in the last six months, because many—those I have known—have been unable to do anything themselves in the last six months. The word “encouragement” is absolutely crucial. It does not have to be coercion. It does not have to be abuse. It could be nice people listening to a loved one and realising that they are saying, “I ought to die”, and consequently saying, “Yes, why not?” That would be extremely unjust.

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

My Lords, there is a profound irony in this group of amendments, because the Bill introduces far greater protection for vulnerable patients than exists under current law. Terminally ill people are currently vulnerable to all sorts of pressures from family members and others who may have their own agendas in seeking to persuade the patient not to continue with their treatment, to die or just to give up on life. The Bill introduces in statutory form a whole range of new statutory protections that simply do not exist in the standard cases of vulnerable people being encouraged not to continue with their treatment.

We see that in Clause 1(2), which summarises what the Act provides in some detail. Steps are to be taken, and they are taken under the Bill, to establish that the person concerned

“has a clear, settled and informed wish to end their own life, and … has made the decision that they wish to end their own life voluntarily and has not been coerced or pressured by any other person into making it”.

Those seem to me to be very strong and very appropriate protections. The idea that we should proscribe encouragement will inevitably lead to the family members and friends of the person concerned, the person in the terminally ill condition, being worried that, if they discuss this difficult, important subject with their loved one or friend, they will be vulnerable to all sorts of sanctions under the law. That, I would have thought, is the last thing that we want. The application of these principles—and they are the right principles in Clauses 1 and 2—will inevitably depend on the facts and the circumstances of the individual case, so I, for my part, do not see the need for any of these amendments.

Football Governance Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Butler-Sloss and Lord Pannick

Committee stage
Wednesday 18th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

I do not want to deal with human rights. I have come here to deal with modern slavery. I disagree with the noble Lord. The problem is that Section 56 is voluntary and not mandatory. Consequently, companies are not obliged to follow what happens. In a 2019 review led by Lord Field of Birkenhead, of which I was a part, we picked up the fact that it was not mandatory. Consequently, if the regulator does not have to think about modern slavery, he would not have to look to see whether or not an individual taking over a club is making his money in a wholly inappropriate and extremely wicked way. Because it is not mandatory, it is important that someone else looks at it. If it were mandatory, I would entirely agree with the noble Lord.

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

Is it the case that the reason it is not mandatory is that Parliament did not think it should be? Therefore, the question is: why should it be imposed in this context and not generally?

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

Section 56 says that it is utterly wrong to have companies that make money by exploiting people down the chain—consequently, it is wrong. But, for reasons I do not know but can guess, the last Government, who put in place this very good bit of legislation, presumably did not want to offend businesses. I understand that there are problems in making it mandatory but, if somebody is making money that they are going to put into a football club by exploiting other people down the chain, that is something we should not want our clubs to be involved in.