Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 12th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Lab)]

My Lords, I cannot support the Bill, and I am also opposed in principle to assisted dying. Those in favour have spoken today of those who face physical pain at the end of their lives having personal autonomy. That is not a view that I share, but I do believe that more needs to be done to address the state of palliative care in the UK to improve the treatment of those at the end of life.

However, of most concern to me is that the Bill poses an inherent risk to the elderly and disabled. Decisions to end life are complex and not simply procedural. They take place in the context of individual daily lives. The context of many elderly and disabled people today should raise red flags about how we are caring for them and whether they will face abuse and pressure to end their lives. It is a context where 46.6% of those who have died in Oregon have cited being a burden; and where 21.1% of those who died in 2023 in Canada whose death was reasonably foreseeable cited isolation or loneliness as a factor in their decision-making. Age UK reports that 1.4 million older people in the UK are often lonely. According to Hospice UK, 90,000 of our citizens die in poverty every year—that is 247 people daily who have faced the financial impact of a terminal illness.

It is also a context where, as Disability Rights UK has observed, the Government, sadly, do not have a good track record of protecting the vulnerable and disabled—I am talking about all Governments in the past 30 years. The Bill poses a danger to disabled people. The British Geriatrics Society says that many of its members are not confident that effective legal safeguards could be developed to protect older people from unwarranted harms. Perhaps most worryingly, research from The Other Half in June stated that we should prepare for one in seven of those being assisted to die in a single year being a recent victim of elder abuse.

This is all is especially pertinent in a nation that is rapidly ageing. In 2022, 19% of our population was aged over 65, and this is expected to rise by 27% by 2072. With several millions more elderly and sick people to be expected in the coming decades, what will be our message to them? Will it be that they are a burden on our NHS and economy and should therefore consider ending their lives before they get worse? As a House, we have a duty to protect the vulnerable. Should not our response to the elders of our nation be to reverently love and support their need? Should it not be to invest in our care services such that they do not have to suffer alone?

I am not persuaded by the apparent procedural safeguards contained in the Bill. None of them does anything to ameliorate the concerns I have raised for the elderly in particular. I will be supporting the amendments in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Carlile of Berriew, and my noble friend Lady Berger. I believe in letting us fulfil the duty of the State to protect the vulnerable and not encouraging them to die.

Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick Excerpts

Committee stage
Friday 21st November 2025 Lords Chamber

I confess I was slightly aghast by the Committee stage in the other place. MPs had tabled amendments to include much more explicit protections in the Bill as safeguards for individuals who might be vulnerable to coercion in all its forms and to more subtle interventions that could be characterised as encouragement. Amendment after amendment along these lines were rejected. I hope that this Committee will adopt a different approach and tighten up the drafting of the Bill precisely so that autonomy is meaningful and not just a slogan.

[Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the amendments to Clause 1 in this group. I speak in particular to Amendment 48 in my name. This seeks to strengthen the safeguards against someone being coerced into an assisted death by removing the words “by any other person” from Clause 1(2)(b). This would extend the notion of coercion by recognising that coercion or pressure can come from a multitude of places—an institution, a circumstance or another individual. I am sure there is agreement across your Lordships’ Committee that nobody should feel obliged to opt for an assisted death. This amendment aims to strengthen and clarify the eligibility criteria in the Bill in recognition that they are perhaps its most important safeguard.

I have deep concerns, as many of us do, about how we protect vulnerable people from unnecessary, unwanted death. I am especially anxious that we should be aware of the risk of coercion in all its forms, which is an issue that I raised during Second Reading. This includes somebody who feels coerced through a lack of real choice.

The National Audit Office’s recent report into the state of the palliative and end-of-life care sector is stark. As we know, funding is stretched and provision is disparate. As things stand, there is a lack of real choice for many people about the end of life. The knowledge of this could easily be internalised by people, leaving terminally ill patients in certain regions or who are part of particularly vulnerable marginalised populations feeling that they have no choice but assisted dying, whether or not another person is explicitly pushing this.

Therefore, my Amendment 48 seeks to ensure that such cases are not left out of the Bill’s definition of coercion. I ask my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer, in his summing up, to give consideration to this, so that it remains possible to detect and prevent any death that the person has not freely chosen.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, I do not like this Bill, but I am here, like many other Members of this House, to agree on amendments that will make this a better Bill, and I hope it will be effective.

When my father died, the family nanny, who had also been his housekeeper, needed somewhere to live, and my brothers and I paid for her to live in a very nice care home, where she was entirely happy, until I went to see her. On each occasion, she said to me, “I shouldn’t be alive. I ought to die. It is not right that you and your brothers are having to pay for me”. I have this direct knowledge. She was perfectly happy when I was not there and, of course, we continued to look after her until she died.

But the Bill, once it is passed, is absolutely certain to be enlarged in all sorts of ways, as happened with other Bills in other countries once they became law. There are various reasons why it would be a good thing to enlarge it. For example, it seems to me bitterly unfair that those with locked-in syndromes such as motor neurone disease would be extremely unlikely to benefit from the Bill in the last six months, because many—those I have known—have been unable to do anything themselves in the last six months. The word “encouragement” is absolutely crucial. It does not have to be coercion. It does not have to be abuse. It could be nice people listening to a loved one and realising that they are saying, “I ought to die”, and consequently saying, “Yes, why not?” That would be extremely unjust.