Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord Shinkwin Excerpts

Friday 21st November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Lord Shinkwin (Con)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

We have given an enormous amount of time to looking at safeguards. The noble Lord just totally denied that and said that we have to begin all over again. We do not. This debate has regrettably been characterised by too few of the speakers giving any consideration at all to the important, tough safeguards already decided in the House of Commons. I will not go through them now, in the interests of time, because I that know my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer will, when he responds to this debate.

[Lord Shinkwin (Con)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Cass (CB)]

My Lords—

[Captain of the King’s Bodyguard of the Yeomen of the Guard and Deputy Chief Whip (Baroness Wheeler) (Lab)]

My Lords, we will hear from the noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin, and then the noble Baroness, Lady Cass.

[Lord Shinkwin (Con)]

My Lords, an enormous amount of time was given in the other place to blocking safeguards. I support the vital amendments in this group and thank all those who tabled them. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Dodds of Duncairn, who made some incredibly important points about vulnerability. Some of us have been there. This is proper scrutiny; it is the House of Lords at its best. On whichever side of the divide we find ourselves on this Bill, we should all be very proud of that.

As someone who speaks from one patient’s perspective, I would never presume to know exactly how the pain another person experiences might feel to them as an individual. But I think that the sense of incredible loneliness, compounded by a sense of disorientation, are both parts of total pain, as defined by the pioneer of specialist palliative care, whom the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay of Llandaff, mentioned—Dame Cicely Saunders. That makes these amendments dealing with coercion and pressure crucial.

When I have been drowning in a pool of pain, the sides of which, in that moment, seemed so steep and slippery, I would have clutched at almost anything in an attempt to pull myself out. I appreciate how coercion and pressure are so nuanced and subtle and how much each of us in this House, at some point in our lives, may need to be protected from them. My noble friend Lady Coffey is absolutely right, in speaking to her Amendment 47, to mention the Royal College of Psychiatrists and, in her explanatory notes, its reference to the sense of being a burden as an internal coercion. I can testify from personal experience that in some cases the sense of being a burden, or the burden of pain, whether physical and or emotional, can be simply too great to bear on your own. This can be the most powerful and damaging form of coercion and perhaps the one from which we most need protection. We need to recognise that in the Bill.

I note that the Bill does not require any questions to be asked about why a person may wish to die. It is because Rebecca Paul’s Amendment 468 on precisely this issue was rejected in Committee in the other place that Amendment 3, moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay of Llandaff, and Amendment 181, in the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady Grey-Thompson and Lady O’Loan, are so important. As the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, and the other sponsors of Amendment 48 have argued, we cannot divorce this internal coercion from the circumstances in which, for example, a disabled or older person might find themselves. We have to factor those in. It is not just coercion or pressure by any other person that may prove the tipping point.

I hope that your Lordships’ House will give very careful consideration to the amendments on financial pressures, such as Amendment 462, which I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, for tabling so ably. As we know, these pressures are exacerbated when a person is living with a disability.

In closing, I particularly welcome Amendment 846, tabled by my noble friend Lady Berridge, and Amendment 58, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, because the subtlety of pressure, particularly as it relates to disability, can definitely stem from cultural attitudes, whether institutional—for example, in terms of access to appropriate care—or societal. I give one example. I was laughed at in the street outside my home as recently as last weekend because of how I look as a result of my disability. That is not good for morale, to put it mildly.

It could be argued that mockery goes with the territory of being disabled, particularly when the anonymised vitriol on social media encourages teenagers, for example, to view disabled people as fair game. My question in relation to the Bill, and specifically Amendment 58, is, how can being subject to such prejudice not affect a person’s mental well-being or their sense of self-worth? How could such a structural disadvantage, in terms of the cumulative effect of being constantly exposed to such negative and discriminatory attitudes, not affect a person in a vulnerable situation who is considering assisted dying? It is inevitable, but how many non-disabled people factor that in?