Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts

Friday 24th April 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

My Lords, this House has debated assisted dying this century on nine occasions, first in 2003 and then in 2005. There are very few members in the House today who spoke in those debates, with the possible exception of the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay of Llandaff. She was a very devoted opponent of the Bill of those days, just as I was a devoted supporter of it. But all those debates were about Private Members’ Bills that originated in this House. What we have now is a Bill coming from the House of Commons; it is not a government Bill, but it received a great deal of debate, amendment and improvement, and then it was sent to us.

However, we do not exist as a House to frustrate the determined will of the House of Commons. Our task is to examine Bills—which they do not do themselves in a measured way today—to improve them and send them back. This has been frustrated by a relatively small group of people; just seven noble Lords has tabled nearly over 1,000 amendments. That is a tiny minority by any standard. I believe that the prolonged filibuster they embarked upon is a constitutional farrago. It is a denial of democracy and an attempt to give this House the wrecking powers that were taken away in 1912.

I congratulate the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, for the very patient way he dealt with the repetitive speeches that were full of absurd exaggerations and extravagant fantasies. He did not lose his cool, and that is quite remarkable. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, for his effective contributions towards improving the Bill. He came forward with several proposals, but he too is frustrated from implementing them currently as a result of us returning the Bill to the House of Commons in the way we received it.

I support this Bill for two reasons. First, it will reduce the suffering of many elderly people who are experiencing a prolonged death, and nothing was more eloquent than the speech that my noble friend Lord Markham made about that. We are particularly well suited in this House to debate this sort of measure because, on the whole, we are rather older than most MPs and we have experienced the deaths of friends, colleagues and relatives. Just this week, one of my closest friends, who was a Cross-Bench Peer in this House, died. I had tea with him the previous week. Robert Skidelsky was my close friend. We lived close to each other. He was a brilliant economist, but he was also a very good bridge player, and I shall miss him enormously. He is one of the lucky ones, as it were.

As I said, one reason I support the Bill is that it reduces the suffering of people when they slowly begin to lose control of their own bodies. It was very interesting to hear what the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Newcastle said, because in previous debates the main argument was about the sanctity of life. It is only the Bishops who continue to make that argument; no one else will make the argument because what we are concerned with are the safeguards, and this Bill will reduce the suffering of people. As we slowly lose control over our own bodies, people can no longer get up and dress, wash or feed themselves, or prepare their food, or walk or run, or engage in any life whatever; they then lose control of their bowels and bladders, and it is a very unpleasant way to die. If you can get palliative care, you can anaesthetise pain, but you cannot anaesthetise indignity. This Bill allows people to die in a dignified, and sensible, way in their own homes.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Scotland of Asthal (Lab)]

My Lords, I hesitate to interrupt the noble Lord, Lord Baker, but I am sure he would want the House to be aware that the Attorney-General’s guidelines have assisted in enabling prosecutors to make decisions which would obviate the need for prosecution where there is no evidence that the person assisting did it other than for love. The fact that there are so few prosecutions is something we should celebrate as opposed to criticise, because those 10 that go forward are because there is evidence that that which was done was not well done and should be prosecuted.

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

I understand what the noble and learned Baroness is saying, but the police have decided very clearly what their position is. Between 2009 and 2025, 199 cases were referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions by the police for assisted suicide. Of those 199 cases, 131 were not proceeded with by the Director of Public Prosecutions and were withdrawn; the police then withdrew 39 other cases. Therefore, this not a law that is operating today because juries will not convict. I would—

[Baroness Scotland of Asthal (Lab)]

I do not want to interrupt the noble Lord again, but I think it is right for him to know that this matter came before the Attorney-General, myself, to determine how we should address this problem. How could we make it better? How could we differentiate between those who should validly be prosecuted and those who should not? The Director of Public Prosecutions then has a duty to implement the Attorney-General’s guidelines when making a decision as to whether to prosecute or not, and they have duly done so.

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

I recognise that there is that power, but it is very rarely used. That is the point I have been making all the time. Juries will not convict.

This has happened before in our history. There was a time when the law decided that youngsters as young as 10 or 12 could be hanged for stealing a pocket handkerchief. That fell away because juries would not convict. Similarly, I do not believe that the present law on suicide can in fact operate effectively, and therefore it should be changed.

[Lord Barber of Ainsdale (Lab)]

My Lords, I have spoken only once previously in the many long hours of debate on the Bill. That was at Second Reading, when I told the story of Daniel, the much-loved son of my noble friend Lord Monks, who, in the absence of any form of assisted dying in this country and faced with intolerable suffering, starved himself to death in 2024.

Like many others around our country, I had strong hopes that the Bill would have given, for the first time, people very close to the end of their lives some choice on how to leave this world. While remaining silent in the Chamber, it quickly became very clear to me that an additional voice was certainly not needed. I have been distressed and disturbed by what I have witnessed here.

As I was coming into this place a little over a year ago now, I was given to understand that we had two central responsibilities. Our job was not to seek to displace or overturn the elected House, but to act as a scrutinising and revising Chamber. So, how well have we carried out those responsibilities? As my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer reminded us, this is a Bill of 59 clauses. In Committee, after 120 hours of debate we have managed to scrutinise only seven of those clauses. The rest of the Bill, 52 clauses, has received no scrutiny whatsoever. As to our responsibility to propose revisions for the elected House to consider, there have been a handful of entirely non-contentious matters to which revisions have been made in Committee. Of course, substantive revisions would fall to be considered and voted on Report, and we have never come even close to reaching that point. In sum, we have abjectly failed in our responsibilities as a scrutinising and revising Chamber.

It became apparent very early on in Committee that the rate of progress was utterly glacial. My noble and learned friend proposed a Motion to the House, seeking additional time if necessary, and committing the House to completing consideration of the Bill in good order to return it to the Commons. Nobody voted against it, but nobody changed the form or the length of their contributions to these debates, even by a tiny amount, to make its objective achievable. All efforts by my noble and learned friend, as he reminded us, to establish more streamlined processes, came to naught.

There has been a catch-all justification that we have heard again today, offered by some of the Bill’s opponents, that it has always been a bad Bill in need of fundamental root-and-branch reworking from top to bottom as a result of insufficient earlier work and insufficiently detailed scrutiny. I reject that view, and I regard it as deeply disrespectful and an insulting slur on the sponsors of the Bill and all those highly expert advisers who have supported the sponsors at every stage of the Bill’s preparation. It rather ignores the very detailed consideration the Bill received in the elected Chamber, in many cases, with honourable Members—