Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Debate between Baroness Grey-Thompson and Lord Falconer of Thoroton

Committee stage
Friday 21st November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton (Lab)]

I completely appreciate what the noble Baroness is saying. She is, in effect, repeating what she said with such force and articulateness before. My answer to that is that there will be some professional people, and Clause 5 recognises this, who think the person is saying, “I just can’t bear this, I want this to end”. Would it be inappropriate in those circumstances for a professional person, in the context of all the other options, to raise it? In my view, it would not be, and in my view, it would be completely wrong to say that if you did raise it in those circumstances, that person, the patient, would be barred from ever having an assisted death.

On Amendment 58, the lead amender—not every other amender—said that coercion or pressure should include

“intentional or indirect structural disadvantage including poverty or lack of care”.

We are all agreed that coercion and pressure on an individual by another individual is not to be allowed. Where the reason that you want an assisted death is because in your mind you are influenced by your circumstances—for example, because you are poor—should you be barred from having an assisted death because of your poverty? In my view, you should not be. What the two doctors on the panel have to be satisfied about is that it is your own decision.

[Baroness Grey-Thompson (CB)]

This partly follows on from the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Fox. The noble and learned Lord mentioned in his previous answer to one of my amendments that the doctors would be able to investigate. I think many of us still do not understand how that investigation would take place. In terms of understanding the standard of proof, Minister Sarah Sackman in another place said it would be on a civil standard. So, in terms of balance of probability, is the noble and learned Lord saying that the doctor has to be only 51% certain that there is no coercion for the panel to carry on and for an assisted death to be granted?

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton (Lab)]

They have to be satisfied that the person is not being coerced. That means that they have to do the appropriate inquiries. If, for example, as the noble Lord was saying, they do not understand the community, then they cannot be satisfied. If, for example, they do not know enough about it, they cannot be satisfied. Every case will depend upon its individual circumstances. They will have to do what is required in relation to it.

Amendment 118, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, proposes that if you have a close relative who has been convicted of fraud or you are living with somebody who has been convicted of fraud, there has to be an independent financial assessment. That means that if your child, grown up by this time, has committed a fraud, there has to be an independent financial assessment of your circumstances before you can have an assisted death. I am strongly against the idea that if a relative of yours committed such an offence, that would mean there would have to be a yet further layer that you have to go through. There are still all those protections.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton (Lab)]

On my noble friend’s first question, I have not dismissed all the amendments; I have accepted that we should look at some of them, and very many of the ones I am not accepting are because they are already covered in the Bill. I am rejecting some of them on the basis that I do not think they are practical. When my noble friend talked about the donor, I think he was talking about, for example, somebody who may benefit from the will of the patient. Indeed, that was a point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Farmer. Very often, the person who most supports you in relation to this is the person you love most and who is going to benefit under your will. So, very frequently the person who has taken a loved one to Switzerland is the person who is then going to inherit under their will. That does not make them bad, and I would most certainly not exclude people who benefit from the will of the person who dies because they have helped them in this respect. It seems to me to not properly recognise the importance of human relations in relation to this.

I have dealt with the point of the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, about the will. His second point was that, if you had a friend who was convicted of a criminal offence involving financial fraud of some sort, you should not be able to have an assisted death unless there is an investigation of your financial position. Well, if I reject the point from my noble friend Lord Hunt in relation to a close relative or the person you speak with, then I think, for the reasons I have given, it also does not apply in relation to a friend.

In Amendment 181, the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, proposes that the doctor must ask why and seek specific confirmation that a decision is not coerced. There is no specific requirement for that in the Bill: it is for the two doctors to determine what they think the right course is. If they felt that they could not reach a decision without asking why, or without asking, “Are you being coerced?”, they would have to ask that. But there is no prohibition. It is, as the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, said, a decision for the two doctors and the panel to decide, in each case, what is the best way to reach a conclusion as to whether this person is being coerced. That is the question that all these things are addressing.

[Baroness Grey-Thompson (CB)]

So, the two doctors could ask an entirely different set of questions to each person who is requesting to end their life?

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton (Lab)]

It will depend on the circumstances. If, for example, the doctor had a very severe doubt about whether somebody was being coerced, I would expect them to ask very many questions about their domestic circumstances. Suppose, however, it was somebody who was clearly not, on the face of it, at the slightest risk of coercion—a person of 60 in the full flush of his or her pomp, as it were—and who had said, right from the outset, “I can’t bear the thought of this illness”, and the idea that this person has been coerced is not really plausible, then I would expect the doctor to be asking different questions from the sorts of questions that they would be asking if the circumstances of somebody’s home life were completely different. It would obviously depend on what you knew as the doctor, or had found out as the panel, about the circumstances of the individual.

Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Grey-Thompson and Lord Falconer of Thoroton

Friday 7th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton]

My Lords, perhaps I might I try to short-circuit this. I am broadly in favour of having something in the Bill that says, “You should not be making suggestions”. My anxiety is that I do not want to end up in a situation where there is a fine debate in court as to who first suggested it. It may be that somebody would say, “Can anything be done? Can this be brought to an end?”, and the doctors would say, “There are these options”. Would that be in breach? I do not know and I need to think carefully about the drafting in relation to this to avoid that sort of fine, purposeless discussion in court.

[Baroness Grey-Thompson]

My Lords, a doctor very explicitly suggesting to somebody that they end their life is one thing. But for me a much greater concern, which has been debated quite a lot already, is about the gentle suggestion that people should consider ending their lives—the arm around the shoulder. I am sitting in your Lordships’ Chamber only because many hundreds of thousands of pounds of NHS money have been spent on putting me back together. I have had some amazing doctors with a dreadful bedside manner, and I have had some doctors with a great bedside manner who have performed procedures that I did not ask for. It was recently reported that a young man, Mik Scarlet, turned down a certain procedure several times. When he was on the operating table, the surgeon completely ignored his wishes and carried out the procedure anyway, and it had to be reversed. He is in a better position now than he was previously. It is a very long and complicated story, which is detailed on the Huffington Post.

For me, this is about the constant drip-drip of “You’re not worth it”. I am a very resilient person. If I got upset every time somebody said to me, “I wouldn’t want to be like you”, I would be depressed. Somebody said to me recently, “Well, I wouldn’t want to be incontinent. That’s my worst thing in life”. I am technically incontinent. If it was not for self-catheterisation, I would probably be dead, because I would have pressure sores; I would not exist. I was having a debate in Central Lobby with somebody who strongly supported my view on where we should go with the Bill. He looked at me and sort of waved at the wheelchair and said, “Well, you must have considered killing yourself hundreds of times”. No, I have not, actually, and I think that it was a bit of a surprise to him. It is that sort of tone, where “You’re brave. You’re marvellous”. People do not realise that they are being demeaning. I think that they genuinely think that they are being empathetic, sympathetic and kind, but, actually, you are constantly being knocked down and told that you have no value and no worth. That is what is of much greater concern to me.

The noble Lord, Lord McColl, mentioned Oregon. In 1994, the Oregon medical assistance programme cut funding to 167 out of 700 health services. Four years later, assisted suicide started being referred to as a “treatment”. On the back of that, funding was cut to 150 services for disabled people. They started limiting funded doses of powerful pain medication and put barriers in the way of funding for antidepressants. Thank goodness we do not have an insurance system like the one they have in the United States. I would be dead because my parents could not afford to keep me alive. For me, the big issue is not the doctor saying that your life is not worth living; it is the arm around the shoulder. It is that constantly being told, “You’d be better off dead”. That is what disabled people face every single day. Disability hate crime figures are the worst they have ever been in 10 years of reporting. It is constant. There is not a group of disabled people and a group of terminally ill people; there is a huge crossover.

I am sure that many people have noticed that my noble friend Lady Campbell of Surbiton is not here today. She has a chest infection. She is watching at home on her ventilator. We all know what a chest infection does for her prognosis. It immediately switches her from being okay to fitting in with the category of having less than six months to live. That is not a situation that I am very comfortable with.