Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Baroness Royall of Blaisdon Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 19th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Royall of Blaisdon (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the Bill. I'm grateful to Kim Leadbeater for her work, and to advocates such as my courageous friend Esther Rantzen. I am also grateful to my noble friend Lady Berger for showing us a way forward, in terms of a committee, and for setting out a clear timetable.

While I warmly welcome the compassionate and moderate tone of last week’s debate, from which we learned a lot, like my noble friend Lady Thornton, I was dismayed at the conflation made by some of suicide and assisted dying. This is not just about careless language; it is actively damaging to people who are already suffering. Let us be clear: people who choose assisted dying are not suicidal. They are dying and they want to regain some choice, control and dignity where it has otherwise been stripped away. We should hear the views of terminally ill people, some of whom had a letter published in the Independent this week:

“We are not suicidal – we want to live, and to make the most of the time we have left with the people we love. But we are dying and we have no choice or ability to change that … We are not seeking to make a choice between living and dying but between two kinds of death … To equate choice and control over the timing and manner of inevitable and imminent death with suicide is deeply insensitive to those of us facing this position”.


Australia’s leading suicide prevention organisations have warned that confusing these terms can delay access to suicide prevention services for people in distress, and complicate or delay care for people with terminal illness who are seeking an additional choice at the end of life. When in 2021 I asked the Government to provide data on the number of people who take their own life every year, I did so because this debate needs to be guided by evidence and the lived experience of dying people and their families. The best available evidence estimates that around 300 terminally ill people end their own life at home every year in England. These deaths are recorded as suicides, but it is clear from talking to and listening to bereaved family members that these are not people who wish to end their own life but people who are taking drastic and often violent steps to control an inevitable and imminent death.

There is absolutely no evidence that assisted dying undermines or runs counter to effective suicide prevention strategies, nor is there evidence to suggest that legalised assisted dying leads to a shift in attitudes towards suicide. Figures from Victoria in Australia show a slight decrease in suicide rates since it introduced assisted dying.

In 2021, at Second Reading of the Assisted Dying Bill of the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, I said:

“The current blanket ban on assisted dying does not eradicate demand for choice at the end of life; it simply forces people to take matters into their own hands in loneliness and in fear”.—[Official Report, 22/10/21; col. 495.]


Those words remain true today. We continue to hear of dying people taking their own life and we continue to hear about the devastating impact this has on their families. It is time to change the law.

I am a humanist. I respect those who believe in the sanctity of life and I subscribe to many of their values, but this Bill will not compel anyone to act against their conscience. It provides agency and choice for people who are near death, with the ability to decide how they spend their final days—whether they have faith or no faith. I am confident that the scrutiny of the Bill will be as robust in your Lordships’ House as it was in the Commons. We will do our work with compassion and diligence, improving the Bill, including by making anorexia outwith the Bill. But we must always be mindful of our duty to respect the primacy of the Commons.