Health: End of Life

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Thursday 12th December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, it is a particular pleasure for me both to thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Sheffield for his thoughtful and poignant maiden speech, and to welcome him to your Lordships’ House. I see that, like Moses, he chose to read from a tablet.

I am married to an Anglican whose father and grandfather were, for more than 60 and 50 years, Anglican priests, and there are eight ordained Anglican clergy crossing the generations on my wife’s side of the family. As an outsider, I have seen something of the extraordinary selflessness that characterises the men and women from whom the right reverend Prelate has been drawn.

Steven Croft is a Yorkshireman who, after graduating from the University of Oxford, studied for the priesthood and obtained his doctorate at Durham. After serving in parishes and as a diocesan adviser in Wakefield, he returned to Durham with his family as warden of the university’s Cranmer Hall, St John’s College. This required him to lead the training of men and women for Church of England ministry. He thrived in his new responsibilities, wrote widely about his experiences as a parish priest and began to express increasing concern about the urgent need for the church to engage with a society that has been drifting spiritually but where the Christian faith is needed like never before.

Shortly after Rowan Williams—now the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Williams of Oystermouth—was appointed as the Archbishop of Canterbury, the right reverend Prelate became Archbishops’ Missioner and Fresh Expressions Team Leader. For four years he oversaw the emergence of Fresh Expressions, an initiative of the most reverend Primates the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, in conjunction with the Methodist Church. Fresh Expressions encourages and resources new ways for the church to engage with the world. The movement has resulted in thousands of new congregations being formed alongside more traditional churches. The right reverend Prelate is known as a very shrewd and strategic thinker. The energy and determination that he has brought to his work thus far will prepare him perfectly for his duties in your Lordships’ House. Sheffield is lucky to have him. I have no doubt that, as the years pass, we will hear many more thoughtful and challenging contributions to our proceedings, and I know that I speak for all sides of your Lordships’ House when I thank him again for making such an excellent start with his maiden speech.

It was an illustrious English woman, a devout Anglican, Dame Cicely Saunders, whom I was fortunate to meet, who was the founder of the modern hospice movement in England. Dame Cicely trained as a nurse, a medical social worker and finally as a physician. Involved from 1948 onwards with the care of patients with terminal illness, she founded St Christopher’s Hospice in 1967 as the first hospice linking expert pain and symptom control, compassionate care, teaching and clinical research. St Christopher’s has been a pioneer in the field of palliative medicine, which is now established world wide. Like the late Lady Ryder of Warsaw, Sue Ryder, whose charity the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, referred to earlier, Dame Cicely was resolutely opposed to assisted suicide and euthanasia. She once said:

“You matter because you are you, and you matter to the end of your life. We will do all we can not only to help you die peacefully, but also to live until you die”.

In declaring a non-pecuniary interest as a patron of two hospices, I stand with the hospice movement, the disability rights groups and the British Medical Association in believing that we should never confuse the importance of providing end-of-life care with the legalisation of euthanasia. Were the law to change, we would see the emasculation of the hospice movement but we would also see a fundamental change in the relationship between doctors and their patients, especially the vulnerable.

Nor does experience overseas, which has been referred to, encourage me to change my mind. We are told that in the US state of Oregon, one of the handful of places where these practices have been legalised, everything is fine and the law is working well. That is a highly questionable assertion. There is no audit system in place for Oregon’s law. It is totally dependent on the honest reporting of doctors. What we do know, from the annual statistical reports, is that the number of legal assisted deaths is rising year on year. In 2012, the number was nearly five times that in 1998, and the latest figure is the equivalent of between 1,100 and 1,200 such suicides per annum in England and Wales. It is claimed that the rising trend has levelled off. It has not. The official data show that the death rate from assisted suicide has increased by over 20% in the past five years.

There is another reason for being cautious about Oregon. The latest report states that nearly half of those in Oregon who asked for lethal drugs with which to end their lives listed as a reason that they feared being or becoming a burden on their families. In today’s society, where we are living longer and where younger generations are often burdened with debt and other responsibilities, such fears are all too natural, and I fear that they will become even more so. For those reasons, I hope that we will resist the temptation to legalise something which on two occasions your Lordships have voted against.