Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Baroness Stuart of Edgbaston Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 12th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stuart of Edgbaston (CB)]

My Lords, we have had several references in the debate so far to a settled public view: that the public are in favour of this legislation. I briefly revert to my previous existence as a Member of Parliament, when I took part in the 2015 Private Member’s legislation on assisted dying. My constituency was Birmingham Edgbaston, which had some interesting aspects, such as Harborne having the highest concentration of doctors per square mile anywhere in the country. Across the road from the constituency was the Birmingham Oratory, which had very strong Catholic views.

As the debate was coming up, I thought I would do something very unusual for an elected politician, because if you are elected, your voters want only to hear your certainties; they never want you to go out and say, “I really don’t know what I think about this. Could you help me?”. I organised three public meetings: one was organised by the Birmingham Medical Institute and was attended largely by members of the medical profession, another was organised by St John’s Harborne church and brought in all the faith groups, and the third was a public meeting open to all my constituents or anybody nearby who wanted to come.

The format for all three meetings was the same. I had a lawyer there who would explain what the Bill was about, and I said, “I’m going to make up my own mind, by the way; you’re not going to mandate me on how I’m going to vote, but I really want to test my views and hear what you have to say”. The outcome was very surprising. The one group which was almost unified in its view was the doctors, in that the legislation was about what should happen if you needed medical assistance, and they said, “We don’t think we should go there.” Here, again, we have this argument between choices and palliative care. The group which was most divided—with apologies to faith leaders—was the churches. They were arguing from one end of the argument to the other. The most thoughtful debates were among the public, who, in essence, were making the cases for and against, and, at the end of the meeting, when I asked, “Broadly speaking, what should I do?”, one of them got up and said, “You’ve got a really tough job on your hands, love. Just try and do your best.”

I am explaining this because I think we should be very careful. If you have a survey which asks, “Do you want to reduce pain?”, of course you say yes, but as many speakers here have said, it is about palliative care, where the money goes and the consequences of that. I do not think we have really considered that.

The other thing which I want specifically to address is personal autonomy. To make choices for the few and assume that that will not have implications for society as a whole is deeply misguided. The essence of society is that it is a collective of individuals. We can permit it when we stop criminalising suicide, but to suddenly make it an option, is, I think, problematic.

I want to finish with something which the noble Baroness, Lady Debbonaire, started to address and to quote Bronowski, who in one of the episodes towards the end of “The Ascent of Man” said:

“Science is a very human form of knowledge … Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal”.


In the end, he quoted words by Oliver Cromwell:

“‘I beseech you in the bowels of Christ: Think it possible you may be mistaken’”.


As the noble Baroness, Lady Debbonaire, reminded us, this is one of those occasions when, if we are mistaken, we cannot reverse it.

Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Baroness Stuart of Edgbaston Excerpts

Committee stage
Friday 14th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[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.

[Lord Mackinlay of Richborough (Con)]

My Lords, I am in favour of the amendments from my noble friend Lady Coffey. This has been a fascinating debate about the issues that we have with the devolution settlements across our United Kingdom. It is not only about the issues across the English-Welsh border, which have been so ably demonstrated and described by my noble friend Lord Harper, who has experience in this matter from the other place, but we have other strange dynamics going on in this country on the English border over into Scotland, where things are very different. There are other differences between England and Northern Ireland. We are not proposing to usurp the settlement with Scotland or to usurp the settlement with Northern Ireland.

I am quite interested to hear, at the appropriate time, whether the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, will declare whether he is no longer quite so keen on the old devolution settlements that I can but assume he was part of during the Government that he served in, in that it is not quite as convenient now in this Bill to do the things required by those devolution settlements.

I was interested to hear the comments from the noble Lord, Lord Weir, because the Northern Ireland arrangement has a further dynamic, between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, where there is, again, a swapping over and a commonality of health provision, and it is quite commonplace that people come and go.

The matter of abortion was also raised. That has had a different dynamic across our United Kingdom over many years. My voting record in the House of Commons will show that I took no part in the rather heated debate on abortion that happened some years ago. I abstained because I appreciated that the devolution settlement was a matter for the Northern Ireland Assembly to come to its own conclusions on.

We have to ask ourselves what this Bill is. Is it a criminal justice Bill? We have 42 Henry VIII powers, exercisable by Ministers, so the Bill before us is not actually the Bill that will affect people’s lives; that will be written later because this Bill has so many of those Henry VIII powers in it. Many of those powers, as I described at Second Reading, should not really be there. We should not be having Henry VIII powers to create criminal matters under statutory instruments and delegated legislation; that is just not the way we do things.

So is this a criminal justice Bill? I do not think it is, because it has now morphed very much into a health Bill. It seeks to amend the NHS Act. I think it is the intent of many of the Bill’s supporters that it is the NHS that does these things: advise, provide the medical staff and do the deed. I do not know which chemical might be used. It may be barbiturates in England; it might be heaven knows what in Scotland. These are serious matters.

Is this a medical Bill? I believe that it is. Because it has morphed increasingly into a medical Bill, whether or not we agree with the devolution settlements, we have to respect them. As my noble friend Lord Harper highlighted very clearly, this is the danger of a Private Member’s Bill that is so interwoven with and entrenched in the complications of a devolution settlement. Whether you are for or against this Bill, or whatever, these are complex matters. These are matters of a different potential life or death, depending on which border you are close to in this United Kingdom. This is a matter of health in Wales.

Looking back to Covid, I know that it is a period we all rather like to forget, unpleasant as it was. At that time, I and my noble friend Lord Harper—I am sorry to keep mentioning him—were somewhat active in the space. Do noble Lords remember? These were matters of life and death; I mean, Covid was deemed to be. I was not quite so keen on the measures and voted against them all, but they were deemed to be measures of life and death; that is why they were so draconian.

I remember very clearly that I came up with what I called the Wilkinson conundrum. It is not a good conundrum now, because Wilkinson has subsequently gone into liquidation, but I made the point that because Wilkinson sold everything—fresh fruit and vegetables, tins of beans, and pots and pans—it was allowed to open. The lunacy was that the independent trader next door who sold only pots and pans was not allowed to open. We did that for whatever reason—it was deemed to be a matter of life and death—but Wales did something entirely different. In Wales, Wilkinson had to hide the pots and pans; one could buy beans and everything else, but a cover had to be put over the pots and pans. In matters of life and death, we allowed Wales to have its way.

This is most seriously a matter of life and death. We have a devolution settlement, and it has to be respected.