Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Baroness Watkins of Tavistock Excerpts

Friday 14th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Gove (Con)]

My Lords, I support the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, in raising this question. Whether or not the suggestion from the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, is the right way of addressing this issue is genuinely a moot point. But she is absolutely right to raise the whole question of the fitness for purpose of the Bill, given the nature of our devolution settlement.

I speak with a modicum of experience. For just over four years, I was the Conservative Government’s Minister for Intergovernmental Relations, responsible for seeking to make the devolution settlement work at a time when we obviously had a party of one colour in government in Westminster and parties of very different complexions in Belfast, Cardiff and Edinburgh. Prior to that, as Secretary of State for Justice, Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, I had to navigate the thickets of our devolution settlement.

It requires care to make it work. In order to do so, we have to take account of conventions, of legislative competences, of precedents and, as my noble friend Lord Harper pointed out, of the interwoven nature of the lives of communities that live on our borders. It is absolutely right that we should do so, both as a revising Chamber and as a revising Chamber considering legislation of such moment.

As everyone has pointed out during the passage of the Bill, strong feelings are engaged on every side. If we are thinking about fundamentally changing the responsibility of the state and our NHS when it comes to the balance between alleviating pain, prolonging life and, in certain circumstances, ending life, then we must proceed with care.

It was the explicit wish of many in the House of Commons, including in Committee, that the Bill takes seriously the operation of the legislation—so it is not finicky, an abdication of responsibility or something to be criticised when raising these specific and precise questions. It is our role.

Of course, many of us recognise, whatever our feelings on the Bill, that the House of Commons clearly gave its express wish that those who are living with a condition that means that their life will soon end in any circumstances should be able to choose the timing and manner of their death. I respect that clearly expressed wish. Some of us may take a different view about that imperative sent to us from the House of Commons as a matter of first principle, but all of us have a responsibility to look at how the legislation operates, because we are not in the business of simply recognising and respecting a sentiment, no matter how sincere; we are in the business of introducing legislation that must work and be made to work. Therefore, it is our responsibility in the days ahead to look in detail.

That is why I make no apology for specifically referring to the operation of the Sewel convention. Introduced by Lord Sewel of Gilcomstoun, a fellow Aberdonian and a former Labour Minister, it is a convention that broadly governs how we and the Government should legislate with respect to devolved matters. The Sewel convention makes clear that the Government should not normally legislate in areas that are strictly devolved without the full consent of the devolved legislative chambers—the Senedd Cymru, the Holyrood Scottish Parliament or the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Because it is a convention, of course it is the right of Westminster—Westminster is ultimately sovereign—to legislate without that consent. But the broad convention, on which the success of our devolution sentiment rests, is that that should be exercised only sparingly. This point was made very well and repeatedly by the promoter of the Bill in this House himself, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer. On a variety of occasions in the past, when the Government of which I was part sought to legislate in a way that may have caused disquiet or opposition in devolved legislatures, he has pointed out the importance of the Sewel convention, and he is not alone in doing so.

The former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, in a report commissioned by the current Prime Minister in the other place on the operation of the Sewel convention, recommended that the Sewel convention be made justiciable and that it should be the case that it should move from a constitutional convention to be a legislative part of our constitution. The Government have not yet taken that step, but it is the stated intention and policy of the Government to ensure that, if one did choose to legislate without the consent of a devolved legislature, that would be capable of challenge in the courts, which it is not yet.

In stressing the importance of making sure that we proceed with care, I am doing no more than expressing not just my experience of how important it is to respect the devolved sentiment but my acknowledgement of the direction of travel that the Government had set out with their belief in making the devolved settlement work better.

The point has been made that our devolved settlement with regard to Wales is complex, and indeed it is, as a number of noble Lords have pointed out. Crime and justice are not devolved, but health is. But again, even in the area of crime and justice, there is no settled will.

I participated in the convention looking at the future of the constitution with regard to Welsh devolution, led by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Williams of Oystermouth—Rowan Williams. In it, he made the case—I believe it is a case that exercises the sympathy of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd—

[Baroness Watkins of Tavistock (CB)]

My understanding is that the Senedd is undertaking its usual processes around legislative consent, with reports from the health committee and the justice committee to be published soon. A date for agreeing legislative consent has not been set, but it is likely to be either shortly before or immediately after Christmas. It normally would take place before Report, so that amendments can be drafted in line with the feelings of the Senedd at the time. I wonder whether we need to look forward rather than historically.

[Lord Gove (Con)]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness for making that point, because it takes me to two of the points that I was about to make about the two committees in the Senedd that have looked at this: the Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee and the Health and Social Care Committee. Both have explicitly raised concerns about this legislation.

The point that I was making about criminal justice is that, if there is a broad view among what one might call progressive parties in Wales—and certainly those parties that are likely to form a majority after the next Senedd election—it is that crime and justice should be devolved. That is not the case at the moment. It should not govern how we legislate in this House. But if we have to have regard to sentiment and to making the devolution settlement work, as I believe we should, we should be aware that legislating without the consent of the Senedd in areas such as crime and justice is certainly putting an additional strain on the devolution settlement. Let me put it no more highly than that.