Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord Tyrie Excerpts

Friday 14th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Empey (UUP)]

My Lords, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, said that some people were suffering from insomnia. I think this House is suffering from collective amnesia. All of a sudden there is a great hurrah about the Sewel convention and respecting devolution. I gently remind this House that it had no hesitation whatever in legislating over the heads of the Northern Ireland Assembly against the expressed wishes of that Assembly on abortion, for instance, and on other matters. So, if we have suddenly decided that we are going to respect these settlements, it is a Damascene conversion, and I hope that it is perfectly obvious that there are huge holes in where this legislation is taking us, as has just been ably pointed out by the noble Lord, Lord Gove. Like him, I leave it open as to whether this is the right amendment, but I just gently remind everybody that we in this House are not scoring very high on consistency.

[Lord Tyrie (Non-Afl)]

I will be brief—everybody will be delighted to hear that. I should say that I am a supporter of the intentions of the Bill, and I agree with what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, said, particularly when he suggested that the Government will need to be involved in sorting out some of these problems.

What concerns me is that we are now going to try to improve a Bill, which is demonstrably flawed, with 900 amendments—many of which seem to make sense to me—on the Floor of the House between now and Christmas. Surely the Government should now be listening, and grasping that they need to take the Bill in themselves. They need to consult nationally and widely, to try to find as much consensus as possible, and then in a considered way they need to come back to the House. To attempt to deal with these 900 amendments in this way will end up with the Bill being talked out, with us being in a place we do not want to be—at least those of us who want to see progress on the Bill—and we will end up in a worse place than we would have been had the Government done the sensible thing at the beginning and taken the Bill in, as they did with Private Members’ Bills such as the Suicide Act.

[Baroness Stuart of Edgbaston (CB)]

My Lords, I shall be even more brief than the noble Lord, Lord Tyrie, but I put on record that I am quite in favour of Damascene conversions on this occasion. This last hour and a half have shown us that this is irrespective of the aims of the Bill. The way the Bill is written has so many flaws that I do not think that, however long we debate it, this House will be able to get it to a stage where it is legislatively fit to be passed, and that is our role: we should not vote for anything that cannot legislatively be properly implemented.

Covid-19: Social Care Services

Lord Tyrie Excerpts

Thursday 23rd April 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tyrie (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I agree with a great deal of what has been said. Some extremely powerful points have been made. I will confine myself to just one further point about making sure that we maximise the effectiveness of public expenditure in this environment.

The underlying objective of policy must be to minimise the loss of life from the epidemic. The challenge is to find ways to use all the resources available for that job. Some core facts help us think about that. We know that 80% of deaths are likely to be among the over-70s and that most of the remainder will be among those with underlying health conditions. It must follow from that that a very robust lockdown, with whatever financial support is necessary—substantially more than currently —to the elderly and other vulnerable groups, is needed. That funding will need to be maintained indefinitely, unless a vaccine or treatment is found or it turns out that, as now seems less likely, general immunity can develop in the population at any pace. That is the backdrop to this debate. A very high proportion of the most vulnerable people are in care homes, so they need particularly rigorous protection with a much more intensive infection control regime than is currently in place, and the public expenditure simply has to be found to pay for it.

Of course, the merits of any increase in spending among the elderly or the vulnerable will have to be set against the cost of the currently indefinite lockdown, but some basic numbers help to flag up how clear it is that the money should be spent. The overall cost to the Exchequer of coronavirus is forecast to be £218 billion, or 11% of GDP. Total local authority spending on adult social care last year was £21 billion, or 1% of GDP. I think that your Lordships can draw conclusions from those figures. Spending on infection control in care homes is affordable when seen against the backdrop of those numbers, and it would pay off in spades. Of course, analysis of that type can and should form part of an overall assessment of the health effects of the lockdown, both on morbidity and particularly on mortality. I argued for such an assessment and for greater concentration of support on care homes a month ago in the Chamber, on the last day before the Recess. In my view, it is now absolutely essential. Of course what I am describing is very difficult work, but it seems scarcely less difficult and uncertain than the work already being undertaken on the epidemiology and more widely.

I urge the Government not only to undertake that full healthcare analysis—of which care of the elderly will be a crucial part, including the funding of care homes—but to publish it. I very much hope that the Minister will tell us that it is already under way.