Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Imran Hussain Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 11th September 2026 Commons Chamber

[Lauren Edwards]

I will make some progress. As acknowledged by organisations that provide that care, though, their services cannot address pain and suffering in all circumstances. During the passage of the Bill in the last parliamentary Session, we heard examples of the limits of palliative care from Members with medical expertise themselves.

[Imran Hussain (Bradford East) (Lab)]

Will my hon. Friend give way on that point?

[Lauren Edwards]

No, I will make some progress. We heard difficult stories about patients with bile duct cancer facing the prospect of faecal vomiting as their illness progressed. We listened as Members recounted memories of watching patients bleed to death while conscious, cancer having eaten away at their carotid artery. We felt their frustration when the maximum dose of sedatives could not alleviate the choking and suffocation of someone with peritoneal cancer. Those people deserved choice and a dignified end, too.

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[Lauren Edwards]

I would point out that there is a range of views among those in the palliative care community. It is specifically for that reason that the Bill allows them not to be involved in the process if they do not wish to be.

[Imran Hussain]

Will my hon. Friend be generous enough to give way on that point?

[Lauren Edwards]

No, I am sorry.

I end with the words of Elise Burns, who, like me, called Kent home, and who sadly died in July with secondary cancer of the lungs, liver and bones. She said she would love peers

“to look me in the eye and tell me why me and my friends, and anyone with terminal illness, don’t deserve to die with dignity and to have the choice to die…without pain.”

We owe it to terminally ill people like Elise, who are relying on us and who were so filled with hope when we voted in favour last time. Quite rightly, they cannot understand how, having secured the support of the people they elected to represent them, the issue that is so important to them has been frustrated by a small group of people with no democratic mandate.

The important conversation that we have been having on assisted dying, as legislators and as a society, has been interrupted. To leave it so would have a profoundly negative impact on people’s trust in our political system. If we fail to support the Bill’s Second Reading, are we not saying that it is fine for a minority of unelected peers to defy the will of the House of Commons? Are we really prepared to cede that point and accept the consequences not only for this vital legislation but for future legislation too?

I ask hon. Members to join me in sending a clear message that the will of this Chamber should be respected, on behalf of all the people that we represent, and to support this Bill on Second Reading.

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[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

The hon. Member for Filton and Bradley Stoke (Claire Hazelgrove) has spoken most movingly, and we know that many of us are very conflicted on this issue. We have to respect each other and show compassion—we know what this debate is all about. No one side has a monopoly on compassion.

I will say in a moment why I believe in being assisted to die in a dignified way, but will the House forgive me if I start with an essential legal point? We know that what this is all about is ensuring that the Bill we are debating today leaves the House unamended so that the Parliament Act can be imposed. The Isle of Man had an assisted dying Bill, which, like this Bill, left a lot to delegated powers. The Ministry of Justice concluded that this meant that that Bill was not compatible with the European convention on human rights. When the result of the private Member’s Bill ballot was published, three former Attorneys General of both parties—Baroness Scotland, Dominic Grieve and Baroness Prentis—wrote to the promoter to urge her not to present the same Bill, as it would run into the same legal and constitutional difficulties. It is unfortunate that that offer has not been taken up, and we have to ask why.

Let me give my own personal views as briefly as possible. I will surprise the House by saying that I am in favour of assisted dying. I am in favour of the idea that when I, or when any of us, approach our last moments, we go into a hospice and are assisted to die. That is what doctors and nurses do all the time. I have been very impressed by what our Prime Minister has said on this issue—he has not been mentioned yet. It is about ensuring that everybody receives excellent palliative care, as we see in our hospices like St Barnabas hospice in Lincoln. So we are agreed on that.

[Imran Hussain]

Will the right hon. Member give way?

[Sir Edward Leigh]

If the hon. Member will forgive me, I have been told to be brief.

I am in favour of our being assisted to die as painlessly as possible, and every palliative care nurse and doctor I have ever talked to has made it clear that in the overwhelming majority of cases, that is possible. Of course, we can be anaesthetised, as we all are when we have operations. I hear the argument, but I believe that we need to improve palliative care.

What worries me about the Bill—this is my point—is that I do not believe that it will be just an assisted dying Bill; I think that in time, it will become an assisted suicide Bill. I have mentioned the ECHR. What is the logic of the Bill? We all know it is terrible if you have a terminal cancer prognosis, but what if you are clinically depressed? What if you are quadriplegic? What if you are sentenced to a lifetime of being unable to move your arms or legs? What if you know, as a member of our family in Canada does, that you will get more and more dementia, so you take the assisted dying route? The truth is that we cannot differentiate between these conditions that make life unbearable for many people. I make this prediction: if this Bill goes through—if the Parliament Act ensures that it does—I believe that in 10 years’ time we will be in similar situation to Canada, and very large numbers of people will be choosing assisted dying.

We hear a lot that this country is broken, and that the elite is ruining the country. I think that is rubbish. This country is not broken. The reason we are under pressure is that there are too many of us—too many old people; too many people with multiple health conditions. There is tremendous pressure on the NHS; we know that. We heard a lot from my right hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Dame Karen Bradley) about coercion. We have also heard that coercion is not necessarily external; it can be internal. I believe that if we move to a society in which assisted suicide is the norm, vast numbers of people will take it up. Is that really the sort of society that we want?

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[Ashley Dalton (West Lancashire) (Lab)]

The last time this House considered this Bill on Second Reading, I was keeping a secret. While hon. and right hon. Members were debating the issue, I was grappling with my own terminal diagnosis. I was told that I have stage 4 incurable metastatic breast cancer. I was overwhelmed with grief, fear and anxiety; I was scared of what was to come, and fearful of how it would impact my family and my loved ones. I was scared that I was going to get really poorly and thinking, “How will I cope? How will my family cope? How will I be cared for? How will I afford it? How badly will it hurt? How long will it last?”

When you hear those words, depression, anxiety, grief, fear, shame and guilt come in bounds. Suicide risk is highest immediately after diagnosis, and it usually falls quickly, within three to six months. I would be lying if I said that when thinking about all that was to come, I did not consider that it might be fairer and easier on everyone if I just got the dying over with as soon as possible. Having treatable depression, however, will not exclude anyone from an assisted death under this Bill, and depression is common among people with terminal illness, but it is often treatable. Clinicians are trained to prevent suicide in people suffering from depression, but where would the line be drawn? This Bill makes no provision to support this difficult transition, or to create safeguards around it.

A person can also be suicidal and have unmet mental health needs prior to developing a terminal illness, and then ask the state to kill them without any assessment of their psychological health, just an assessment of their mental capacity—because mental capacity and mental health are not the same thing. The Royal College of Psychiatrists recommends a holistic, multidisciplinary assessment of every applicant. The three-person panel at the end of the assessment process provided for by this Bill is not what most NHS clinicians recognise as a multidisciplinary team; it certainly does not allow for meaningful multidisciplinary decision making. The assessment needs to happen at the beginning of the process, not the end, and each team member should be independently assessing the patient in person. That is not what is included in this Bill.

I do not know how long I will live. I will be on treatment for life, however long or short that may be. At the moment, I live between scans, in nine to 12-week blocks of time. The last scan might have shown that the disease is stable, but the next scan might show that it is growing again. If the disease is stable, the drug is working and we can carry on. Eventually, the drug will stop working, the cancer will grow, and we will have to try another drug and see if that works. At some point, we will either run out of drugs to try, or I will be too poorly to tolerate them—then I die. It could be months. It could be years. No one really knows. Prognosis is notoriously difficult to predict. Palliative care professionals and oncologists tell me that while they can more or less give me an indication of when I will die when I am a few days or weeks off, anything beyond that is the flip of a coin. The six-month prognosis in this Bill is something no one can ever be really sure of. What the palliative care professionals have told me is that palliative care can help me when I die.

In the campaign around this Bill, though, it seems to me that it is being implied that a person with a terminal illness will have a dreadful, painful death unless they have access to assisted dying. That is simply not true; palliative care in the UK is excellent. Far too many people do not have access to the palliative care they need, but the idea that it is not possible to alleviate pain and discomfort is false. People have been terrorised—I have been terrorised—with tales of people vomiting up their own faeces, as though this is commonplace during death. It is vanishingly rare. Bowel obstructions are more common, but they are treatable. I know—I have had one. It is nothing short of irresponsible to scaremonger people like me into believing our deaths will be horrific when all the evidence suggests that, with access to good palliative care, deaths are, on the whole, gentle.

The answer is not to terrify people and their families. It is to sort out palliative care and social care first, because none of this takes place in a vacuum. Until we can say that everyone who needs it has access to high-quality palliative care, we are offering nobody a choice. A terrible death or an assisted death is not a choice; it is a threat.

While I speak today from the position of someone with a terminal illness, I am acutely aware that this is not about me. This debate is also not about an abstract concept or a position of principle. The question that will be put at the end of this debate will not be, “That this House has considered the question of assisted dying.” It will not even be, “That this House agrees with the principle of assisted dying.” The question will be, “That the Bill be now read a Second time”—this Bill, not the Bill it might have been, not the Bill that Members might have hoped it would be, and not the Bill it could be. This Bill is the only thing before us today. Incidentally, there is absolutely nothing before us about the House of Lords. That is not the question we are being asked.

Whatever hon. or right hon. Members think about the principle of assisted dying, surely our first and foremost responsibility is to write law that is safe and workable. Not one of the professional bodies that would be tasked with delivering the Bill is willing to attest that it is, as it stands, safe or workable. The Royal College of Psychiatrists, the Association for Palliative Medicine and the Royal College of Physicians all say that the Bill is seriously inadequate. They are not opposed to assisted dying in principle, but they cannot support this Bill.

Instead of bringing a Bill identical to the last, so that the Parliament Acts can be used and the Bill can be forced unamended on to the statute book, why did the proposers not spend the summer working with the royal medical colleges, the professional bodies and organisations to build a Bill that they could support? If they had done that, it would have been difficult for anyone opposed to the principle to argue against the Bill. But they did not do that.

This is not about sides. This House is not a debating society; it is about making the law. While we may be campaigners out there, in here we are all legislators. It is our responsibility not to pick a side and dig in, but to work together to build the best laws that we can, and that is never truer than with a private Member’s Bill on a matter of conscience.

[Imran Hussain]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Ashley Dalton]

No, I will not. This Bill does not protect the most vulnerable. It does not mitigate against the poor, the old, people with disabilities, or black and minority ethnic people being disproportionately affected. It does not protect people who are mentally ill. It does not recognise that not everyone has the same level of agency, control or influence over their decision making. The clinicians we would ask to deliver this Bill are saying that it is not even workable—that there is every expectation that it would not even work for the terminally ill people who want an assisted death either.

And there would be no stopping it. Auto-commencement means that if the Bill is passed by the Commons and pushed through via the Parliament Acts, it has to happen on the stroke of four years after being passed. Even if the Government or the NHS are not ready, even if there is no funding, even if palliative care is still broken, and even if it is known to be dangerous, flawed or unworkable, then it is still happening, ready or not.

This is not a last-chance saloon. This debate has been going on for years. It is not a once-in-a-generation opportunity; it could come back again in the next Parliament. My days may be numbered, but that does not mean that I want this Chamber to rush through bad law, just so I might have a chance to see it or use it. This matter is of huge importance. If hon. and right hon. Members have any doubt that the exact Bill before us today is not the best it could be—if it is anything less than excellent, well thought-out and robustly drafted legislation that protects the vulnerable and recognises the expertise of our world-class clinicians—and that it is not the Bill that I and other terminally ill people deserve, then I urge them to vote no or to abstain.