Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord Cashman Excerpts

Friday 24th April 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cashman (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I thank the Chief Whip for the opportunity to speak. I will speak briefly. I spoke at Second Reading and in Committee. I did not mention then, but I will mention now, that 12 years ago I watched my husband of 31 years die a slow and agonising death. When death came, it made absolute sense to him and gave him peace. To me, death makes no sense, but when I face it, I want to have the death of my choosing, as indeed my friend Elise Burns does, who is facing stage 4 cancer and is in your Lordships’ House this afternoon.

I also remember my dear friend June Brown, who implored me to get her to a country where she could die with dignity and have the death that she wanted. I deeply regret that we have not passed this necessary and important Bill. We have not fulfilled the humane wishes of those who seek the right to choose how they die. But I honestly believe that we have fulfilled the wishes of those who believe that this House should be radically and drastically reformed.

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest, as past chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which ended on 1 December last year. I say that because it is pertinent to the remarks I will make. I gave evidence to the Select Committee in the other place as long ago as 2024. While the Equality and Human Rights Commission took a neutral position on the principle of assisted dying, it found several flaws with this particular Bill.

After we started proceedings on the Bill on 22 January this year, I, with the support of 60 or so other Peers, wrote to the noble Baroness, Lady Merron, asking for a revised equality impact assessment, because the original one was by then so out of date and so much new information had come to light during our deliberations. The Bill itself had changed so enormously from when it was first tabled, so we thought it was important to get more up-to-date assessments of what the Government thought the impact of the Bill would be.

The noble Baroness, Lady Merron, very generously wrote back to me very quickly on 29 January. She recognised that these were important considerations but declined a revised impact assessment. However, she promised that, once the Bill became an Act, the Government would review all the impacts of the Bill. In other words, we were being asked to legislate blind—to move amendments without knowledge of what the impacts might be. That is an essential requirement of an Act of Parliament or primary legislation. We were asked to legislate blind. While I understood the Government’s position and their neutrality, that has been the effect of where we have been. It may be one of the reasons we have had so many amendments that some noble Lords find time-wasting.

I want to turn to one important thing in my final observation. I will not speak for long, but I want to impress upon the House the responsibility that we have when the state is asked to sanction—indeed, assist in—the taking of life rather than saving it. This is particularly so when so many other jurisdictions appear today to have stretched the ethics of where that balance should lie. That may not have been where they started out, but that is where they find themselves decades later. I believe that it is right that we in the UK, with our particular constitutional arrangements, take care and apply the due diligence that careful scrutiny seeks.

If we have people who find that the level of their suffering is so intolerable, I completely accept that perhaps we should think of a way of death for those people. I say that only to re-emphasise what the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, said what seems an aeon ago but was only a few hours earlier: autonomy without protection is not freedom; it is a risk. I will go further: it is a risk that we as legislators should not in good conscience allow to pass to be exploited by the unscrupulous. I believe we have discharged our duties, but that is not to say that this should be the final word on this most difficult and contested ethical issue. I hope that the proposers will take note of the good faith that we have all employed and try better next time, as I believe they may well be entitled to.