Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Debate between Baroness Grey-Thompson and Baroness Royall of Blaisdon

Committee stage
Friday 6th February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Royall of Blaisdon (Lab)]

My Lords, many points have been made around the Chamber about disability. The most recent large survey, carried out by Opinium in February 2024 of nearly 11,000 respondents in the UK, showed that 75% of the general population were supportive of the Bill and 14% opposed it. Of those who had a disability, 78% were supportive and 14% were opposed. It is very important to put those figures on the record.

[Baroness Grey-Thompson (CB)]

My Lords, Amendments 88 and 89 are in my name. I tabled them based on my experience in my former career as an athlete, where I knew a significant number of men and women who had varying degrees of eating disorder. I probably had disorderly eating behaviour rather than a diagnosed eating disorder. I very carefully managed and adjusted my eating to try to achieve my goals.

As an athlete, you have a number of measurements. You have your skinfolds measured several times a year; the amount of fat you have in your body is measured. Keeping your funding going is dependent on having low results, as well as on your performance measures. I competed in a sport where power to weight was really important. My race weight, as an adult female, was 45 kilograms—about the same weight as an 11 year-old girl. I had to keep to that weight because I had a very expensive chair built around it.

In the process of training, I vomited regularly. I cannot remember a dentist who has not asked me, very directly and with no particular care around me, “Are you bulimic?”, because my teeth show signs of bulimia. If I was, I do not think that would have been the way to address it. I have had a very close friend who became very ill with anorexia. You are in this impossible situation of trying to help, support and guide them through. It is a terrible thing for people to go through.

That is why I find it slightly extraordinary that we are still having to deal with these questions today in the Chamber, because the danger of this Bill to people with eating disorders was first raised on 30 October 2024. Eighteen experts, including leaders of the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ eating disorders faculty, signed a letter to the BMJ saying that the Bill

“fails the public safety test”.

Since then, the issue has been pointed out in oral evidence to the Public Bill Committee by Chelsea Roff, it was discussed in Committee in the other place, the Bill has been amended with support from the Commons sponsor on Report and the issue was raised by a coalition of eating disorder charities in two open letters and by the Complex Life and Death Decisions group at King’s College London. However, I think it still has not been resolved—as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, presumably agrees, because he has tabled an amendment in this group to fix the issues.

Last week, we discussed in-person assessments and several noble Lords noted that the honourable Member for Spen Valley, Ms Leadbeater, had identified Zoom consultations as a potential problem and said she was considering an amendment, but the issue had never been resolved. Something analogous has happened with eating disorders. Everyone knows that there is a problem, but nobody has found a way of fixing it. This is significant, first, because it shows why this whole process is taking longer than it might have needed to, and, secondly, because it is unclear how the sponsor wants us to interpret Amendment 87.