Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Biggar Excerpts

3rd reading
Wednesday 25th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)]

Before anyone else comes in, I will just say that we should be addressing only the narrow issue of the impact assessment and nothing else.

[Lord Biggar (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak for no more than 90 seconds in support of the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan.

When we in this House voted through Clause 246 last week, we had failed to consider an important logical effect. In voting to decriminalise abortion by the mother up to the eve of birth, we decriminalised the deliberate killing of a mature, foetal human being. Between the human foetus on the eve of birth and the human infant 24 hours later, there is no significant moral difference. In passing Clause 246, we chose to breathe down the neck of legitimising early infanticide.

The fact that the clause leaves in place a general prohibition of abortion after 24 weeks makes no difference. In declaring that the killing is no crime, we declare that it does not matter. The killing does not matter only because what is being killed does not matter. What applies to the mature foetus applies equally to the early infant.

Our failure to assess that significant implication is highly regrettable, and that is why I support the amendment.

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

My Lords, I have great respect for the views of the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan. We understand where she is coming from. But, as the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, said, this has been democratically passed by both Houses. The very graphic descriptions of the physical aspects of abortion are intended to put us off, but those aspects apply to any abortion. Any abortion at any stage could go wrong and result in something very upsetting.

There is an assumption on the part of those who oppose this new law that desperate women will be reading the law in all its detail before they resort to what they do. I suggest that a woman in the very late stage of pregnancy, who has probably been abandoned by the man responsible for it and who has no support, is unlikely to take down the statute book and study what the consequences are. All this new clause does is remove the criminal element. It does not make anything better or worse. It just stops desperate, unsupported women going to prison.

Finally, as I always say in debates about abortion, it is all very well expressing great sympathy, but who is there when the poor woman on her own has to go home with a baby whom she cannot support? She is abandoned and unable to look after it. None of us here is going to volunteer to help her. We have to have compassion for a woman who is in that desperate a state.

Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord Biggar Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 12th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Biggar (Con)]

My Lords, we face a tragic dilemma. On the one hand, advocates for the disabled and several royal colleges voice persistent concerns about the risks of abuse that the Bill’s legalisation of assisted suicide would create. On the other hand, as we have heard, are dreadful cases of individuals suffering grievously, where those who help them find relief through suicide must endure police investigation.

This intolerable situation, we are told, would be solved by the Bill before us—except it would not. By limiting assisted suicide to the terminally ill, the Bill excludes those who are not dying but are still suffering grievously. Anyone supporting the Bill who intends that terminal illness should remain a prerequisite of eligibility, accepts that some people, tragically, have to suffer, and others have to endure police investigation, because the social dangers of wider access are just too great.

But if the Bill, despite its tragic imperfection and risks, is supposed to be tolerable, how come the legal status quo, with the same tragic imperfection and fewer risks, is not? If we were serious about reducing the quantity of human suffering, we would not focus on assisted suicide at all, reckoned to be chosen annually by up to 7,500 people after a decade. Instead, we would focus on ensuring the universal provision of adequate palliative care, which, as we have been told several times today, more than 100,000 fellow citizens every year need but do not get. We have known that for decades and done nothing about it.

Indeed, if we were to pass the present Bill before ensuring that, we would create an unjust inequality of autonomies. Some—typically privileged like us—would have a choice between decent palliative care and assisted suicide. But others—poorer and less white—would have to choose between grievous suffering and killing themselves. That is why two-thirds of the more than 5,000 people polled by Focaldata last November wanted end-of-life care sorted out first before any thought is given to assisted suicide.

It is also why the 2012 report of the Demos commission on assisted suicide, chaired by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, himself, stipulated as an “essential” condition of legalisation the universal provision of the

“best end of life care available”.

I refer noble Lords to pages 24 and 299.

Compassion is a virtue, but it needs to look in more than one direction and distribute itself equitably. Compassion that takes impatient and imprudent risks with the lives of the vulnerable is no virtue at all. To pass this Bill in the current state of palliative care provision would be, I think, unjust and imprudent, and I cannot support it.