King’s Speech

Baroness Cash Excerpts

Monday 18th May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Cash (Con)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Reid of Cardowan, for outlining, much earlier today, the challenges that this country has been facing over a period of 20 years in the rapid rates of immigration. I am also grateful—as noble Lords will be, because I will not repeat the speech—to my noble friend Lord Murray, who outlined the number of failed applicants who arrive on boats and are not removed from this country: 41,000 people crossed the channel illegally in those boats last year alone. The deeper problem we have is not stopping the boats, which has clearly failed, but managing the system that processes the applications once they arrive. In practice, the reality, as my noble friend pointed out, is that, really, anyone who arrives on a boat ends up staying, and that is a massive incentive to keep coming.

We know that the cost of this is huge—£4 billion last year on asylum hotels housing those illegal arrivals in the country—and the pressure on the neighbourhoods, the people who have to live near all that, is enormous. It has become unfashionable and the subject of hostility, as we are experiencing on our justice committee at the moment—a matter of irreconcilable difference, some might say—to express any concerns about this whatsoever, yet the public have voted again and again to ask the democratically elected Governments to address it.

It appears that this Government are hopefully going to learn something from the failures of the previous Government, and I welcome the proposals of the current Home Secretary—the best one we have had since the noble Lord, Lord Reid of Cardowan, of course—and hope very much that they will have the support of her Back-Benchers in the House of Commons and the Labour Benches in this House. They will certainly have mine, because we are already facing really weak productivity growth, mounting public debt and rising pressure on public services.

British people are some of the most welcoming and tolerant in the world. I walked this weekend from the National Gallery to see an exhibition and through Chinatown on the way home, and we went to eat Indian food afterwards. This is the most fabulously tolerant and diverse country, but we cannot sustain the pressure on our resources and the pressure that ordinary people are feeling in their neighbourhoods. We have to listen to people who have told us what they want to happen. We have seen it with the Brexit vote, the vote in 2019 and, again, in 2024, when Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, promised to smash the gangs— I am not saying that in any way to score political points; it is incredibly difficult to stop those boats. But these proposals by the current Home Secretary are reasonable and overdue, and they should be supported. I very much hope that they will be.

Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Baroness Cash Excerpts

Committee stage
Friday 9th January 2026 Lords Chamber

Amendment 182 and Amendments 261 to 264 in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, and my noble friends Lady Ritchie and Lord Hunt would require someone seeking an assisted death to have their palliative and end-of-life care needs assessed and care provided by an appropriate health or social care professional if the person requests it. These amendments would also place a duty on the Secretary of State and Welsh Ministers to make regulations about the provision of palliative and end-of-life care. There would need to be justification for the different levels of palliative care being offered, on the one hand, to terminally ill patients seeking an assisted death and, on the other, those in comparable situations where patients are not seeking an assisted death. The Government have some concerns, as I said earlier, about creating unequal access to palliative care, with the potential effect of prioritising resource for those who wish to pursue an assisted death rather than for those with the greatest clinical need.

[Baroness Cash (Con)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Levitt (Lab)]

I am not going to take any interventions, I am sorry. I am simply giving the Government’s view. We are very short of time. I apologise to the noble Baroness.

[Baroness Levitt (Lab)]

I am not taking any interventions.

These amendments create a further risk of incentivising the use of palliative care when it is not in line with the wishes of the individual. If a patient has relevant and available palliative care options, as with all treatment options, it remains their decision whether to pursue them.

Lastly, I turn to Amendment 832 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins. The Government have workability concerns in relation to the amendment, which states that no person may access an assisted death unless a consultant from palliative medicine has

“confirmed in writing that all appropriate specialist palliative and end-of-life care options … have been discussed and, so far as reasonably practicable, tried or considered”.

This appears contrary to usual clinical practice, whereby the involvement of specialist services depends upon an assessment of need and on the wishes and preferences of the patient. As Amendment 832 excludes people from eligibility unless they have tried or considered particular options for care, this could give rise to legal challenge on the basis that it is not justified under Article 2 or 8 or may amount to unjustified discrimination under Article 14.

[Baroness Cash (Con)]

My Lords—