Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 19th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I am aware that many noble Lords will, knowing that my life has been spent as a Methodist minister in pastoral work, have reached an assumption that they know what I am going to say. It is not necessarily the case. I have tried, knowing that that awareness would exist, to give my best attention to the material that has flooded our way over the last month, of which I have tried to make sense in as rational a way as I possibly can.

If I have a qualification for speaking in a debate of this kind, it is simply my experience of the phenomena we have been describing: beginning when symptoms present themselves, people moving through to diagnosis and then to treatment, and then seeing the last days and the end of a particular person’s life, dealing with all the emotions released after the death among the nearest and dearest of the person who has died. Being with people directly affected by the phenomena that we are talking about is a long curve.

Families are not necessarily good places. Within families, there are those with views that put pressure on people for money, and others who take a much more humane view of things. Sometimes, there is blame after the death—the view that things could have been done better and that this and that should not have been done. Choice is not an individual making a decision, forensically separate from all the circumstances and contexts within which that happens; rather, they are surrounded by complexity and predisposed attitudes. Therefore, I wish that we could look again at what we think we mean when we say “choice”. The choice for the person who needs or wants to die is not, for the most part, a choice exercised in isolation from other factors.

I am delighted that the noble Baroness, Lady Berger, and my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer have come to an agreement about a Select Committee to look further at the sorts of issues and phenomena that we are describing, concerned with and taxed with in a debate of this kind. Her letter, along with her associates, was the lodestone for my making sense of all the material I was wrestling with. I am glad that we received a subsequent letter to suggest there may be a proper place where we can look into the proper worries that have been expressed here in this Chamber. I wonder whether 7 November is too near the starting point, but we can look at that in due course.

All I know is that a person who is dying may want to or may not want to and may be led to want to or averted from wanting to. There are near and dear people who turn out to be quite problematical in the total pastoral situation. This is not an easy matter.

At the end of the day, I will vote, I suppose, with all of us now that this situation is emerging, for the amendment. I cannot dismiss from my head what a senior doctor said: “This will change the practice and culture of medicine in ways that no amendment of this Bill can prevent”.

Tobacco and Vapes Bill

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 23rd April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I speak with great pleasure after my compatriots and certainly rejoice in the fact that we can add some Celtic flavouring—not vaped at all—on St George’s Day.

I had naively thought, since the legislation, as the noble Lord said, came originally from the other side when in government, that this would be a nice, easy debate with everybody agreeing, and that my noble friend the Minister, who has already laboured under the Mental Health Bill and put it to bed just earlier this afternoon, would have a clear run for the next one. But the battle lines have been drawn—and I have to say that I am very pleased about that. We have highlighted the negatives, the things to be feared, and the things we think have been exaggerated in the discourse thus far, which need to be heard as part of the debate if we are to have a good Bill.

I am very sympathetic to the view expressed by one noble Lord that bringing legislation relating to vapes to the same level that is already in existence for tobacco would seem like a legitimate, logical and realisable aim. I fear the enactment and enforcement of any of the claims in the Bill, but that will come in Committee and beyond. This is just to say that this is clearly going to be a Bill where certain points are fought hard for.

I have been amazed at the number of families that have been brought to our attention in this debate that gave noble Lords sitting on these Benches smoke-filled beginnings to their lives. I feel under an obligation to add yet another one right now: we lived in just one room, and it was filled with smoke. The facts are very simple. I have been meditating on this question for just about all my life, to be quite honest. First, there was the fact that my mother, who had an industrial injury plus lung cancer, died at the age of 62. My dear brother, his lungs riddled with cancer and a heavy smoker, died 25 years ago at the age of 57.

I am married to a woman whose entire life has been dedicated to radiotherapy in an oncology department, where she has treated people with lung cancer. Of all the things she might have thought would have impacted on our children without having to say so, the fact that she was trying day by day, through her skills and as part of a team, to alleviate the suffering of such people might have made its own point. The noble Earl, Lord Leicester, who is not now in his place, has three children who all smoked for a while. He was glad that they no longer do. All mine smoked. I just could never understand it: I am married to this woman and I have these children. The boys gave it up but our daughter moved from smoking to vaping. Her daughter also vapes. I cannot understand the dynamics and the nuances. All that leads me to think that passing a law would do nothing to affect any of the circumstances that I have lived through. Prohibition does not work; people will find other ways of achieving their pleasures, whether we like it or not.

So I am left with mixed feelings. Here I stand proudly on these Benches—indeed, I have nothing but affection for the Minister—but I am going to be an awkward so-and-so in the course of these debates. It is complicated. We need a good Bill, and we must unpack the mystery—at least, it is a mystery to me—as to why these forces, such as the subtle, nuanced peer pressure, the commercial advantage and all the rest of it, give us the outcomes that they have, which we then have to live with. It is not a simple matter.

Hospices: Funding

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, there has truly been a depositum of wisdom in this short debate, illustrating an area of concern that we all share in and indicating a degree of urgency by which we should all be impressed. I offer the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, my true thanks for his opening remarks and daring to set up this debate in a philosophical way; he has given us a framework within which we can test our ideas out.

My noble friend Lady Pitkeathley reminded us of the practical applications of good hospice care and the plight of hospices at this present moment. In a sense, I have less to contribute to a debate such as this than the experts who have already spoken, except that I do come across hospices. My noble friend and I have, I think, visited the same people—Members of this House—in hospices.

I am shocked to see from the briefings that we are in this situation of financial difficulty in an area of life where the good being done is so obvious that it is hard to understand why people do not back it. In the charitable sector, endless efforts go on in little shops, on the streets and so on, but what about the one-third and two-thirds?

Similarly, the supreme irony of the fact that we are soon to debate assisted dying—I make no comments about that debate now; there will be time for that—is that it is being put forward as wanting to offer options to people at the end of their lives. Hospice care is an option at the end of people’s lives. It is tried and tested, with proven in-person experience from the offering of one testimony after another. Is it not ironic that we cannot see the two together? We must stiffen our resolve, influence all we can and stand up for investing in hospices as a responsible way of dealing with people at the end of their lives. We must then let the other debate happen, with that already a commitment on our part.