Crime and Policing Bill

Lord McColl of Dulwich Excerpts

2nd reading
Thursday 16th October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord McColl of Dulwich (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome the inclusion of the cuckooing offence in this Bill. Unfortunately, across the country as a whole, vulnerable people are being exploited, threatened and manipulated in their own homes by criminals who take control of their property for their own purposes. Communities are also suffering terribly from this anti-social behaviour as a consequence. We call it cuckooing, which sounds a bit odd, but it is because of the similarity to the behaviour of the cuckoo bird, which imposes itself into another bird’s nest, expelling the rightful offspring and manipulating the adult birds into caring for it. It was 2021 when I first proposed the criminalisation of cuckooing. This was prompted by expert research by Justice and Care and the Centre for Social Justice. I was concerned that the existing laws were inadequate to address the exploitative nature of this predatory behaviour.

I congratulate the Minister and his colleagues on bringing forward this offence. I also thank him for his response to my correspondence regarding the victims who are too afraid to verbalise their lack of consent and young people who may be compelled to engage in cuckooing by others who are exploiting them. I hope these issues will be addressed on the record during later stages of the Bill. The cuckooing offence treats this activity with the seriousness it deserves and will give the police the tools they need. I look forward to seeing it brought into force.

Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord McColl of Dulwich Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 12th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord McColl of Dulwich (Con)]

My Lords, I have attended and spoken at most of the debates on euthanasia over the last 35 years, and one feature that has always struck me is that they have been full of anecdotes. Perhaps we ought to consider that the Greek word “anecdote” means “unpublished”, which is arguably what most anecdotes should remain.

I will avoid anecdotes and stick to my practice over the last 50 years, looking after people who are dying. Perhaps I can best illustrate that by referring to a lady aged 28 who came in with an inoperable cancer of her throat. She was in pain and in great respiratory distress, and I said to her to that I could relieve all her symptoms with an intravenous injection of an analgesic. I said to her, “Would you like me to do that?”. She said yes. I put a needle into her vein and started to titrate her, as it were, with a very powerful drug, and I was amazed at how much I had to inject. Eventually, all her symptoms went. She died three weeks later, having had three weeks symptom-free.

Cicely Saunders, with whom I was a contemporary at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital, was the founder of the hospice movement. She devised this technique of keeping the level of analgesia in the blood at a constant level. She found that it was best to prevent pain rather than wait until it had come. That worked, and the patient was much more wide awake and could enjoy what life remained with this technique.

One of the worrying features of this whole subject is that many of those who are keen on euthanasia have taken it into their heads to rubbish the hospice movement and spread rumours that it does not know how to relieve pain. This is a lie. I have worked in hospices for all these years, and that is not the case. They say, “Oh, well, we weren’t allowed to give more analgesia because of the law”. There is no law that prevents that. You can give as much as is needed. That is what Cicely Saunders promoted and did so very well.

We hear a lot about freedom, that people must have freedom. A man came into a hospice, and he had multiple myeloma, so it was infecting his bone marrow and releasing large quantities of calcium. Too much calcium in the blood means the heart stops beating. He said, “No no, I want euthanasia”. They said, “Look, you are having a drug that keeps your calcium down to stop you dying. If you want to die, all you have to do is stop taking the drug”. He never stopped taking the drug until the day he died—so much for freedom.