Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord Barber of Ainsdale Excerpts

Friday 24th April 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

I recognise that there is that power, but it is very rarely used. That is the point I have been making all the time. Juries will not convict.

This has happened before in our history. There was a time when the law decided that youngsters as young as 10 or 12 could be hanged for stealing a pocket handkerchief. That fell away because juries would not convict. Similarly, I do not believe that the present law on suicide can in fact operate effectively, and therefore it should be changed.

[Lord Barber of Ainsdale (Lab)]

My Lords, I have spoken only once previously in the many long hours of debate on the Bill. That was at Second Reading, when I told the story of Daniel, the much-loved son of my noble friend Lord Monks, who, in the absence of any form of assisted dying in this country and faced with intolerable suffering, starved himself to death in 2024.

Like many others around our country, I had strong hopes that the Bill would have given, for the first time, people very close to the end of their lives some choice on how to leave this world. While remaining silent in the Chamber, it quickly became very clear to me that an additional voice was certainly not needed. I have been distressed and disturbed by what I have witnessed here.

As I was coming into this place a little over a year ago now, I was given to understand that we had two central responsibilities. Our job was not to seek to displace or overturn the elected House, but to act as a scrutinising and revising Chamber. So, how well have we carried out those responsibilities? As my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer reminded us, this is a Bill of 59 clauses. In Committee, after 120 hours of debate we have managed to scrutinise only seven of those clauses. The rest of the Bill, 52 clauses, has received no scrutiny whatsoever. As to our responsibility to propose revisions for the elected House to consider, there have been a handful of entirely non-contentious matters to which revisions have been made in Committee. Of course, substantive revisions would fall to be considered and voted on Report, and we have never come even close to reaching that point. In sum, we have abjectly failed in our responsibilities as a scrutinising and revising Chamber.

It became apparent very early on in Committee that the rate of progress was utterly glacial. My noble and learned friend proposed a Motion to the House, seeking additional time if necessary, and committing the House to completing consideration of the Bill in good order to return it to the Commons. Nobody voted against it, but nobody changed the form or the length of their contributions to these debates, even by a tiny amount, to make its objective achievable. All efforts by my noble and learned friend, as he reminded us, to establish more streamlined processes, came to naught.

There has been a catch-all justification that we have heard again today, offered by some of the Bill’s opponents, that it has always been a bad Bill in need of fundamental root-and-branch reworking from top to bottom as a result of insufficient earlier work and insufficiently detailed scrutiny. I reject that view, and I regard it as deeply disrespectful and an insulting slur on the sponsors of the Bill and all those highly expert advisers who have supported the sponsors at every stage of the Bill’s preparation. It rather ignores the very detailed consideration the Bill received in the elected Chamber, in many cases, with honourable Members—

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords—

[Lord Barber of Ainsdale (Lab)]

With great respect, I would like to conclude my remarks.

There were many cases of honourable Members weighing their positions after close consultation with deeply interested constituents. Noble Lords may disagree with the Bill and oppose its objectives, but please do not claim that there is some grave technical deficiency in it to justify that position.

I have used, throughout these remarks, the word “we” in describing the House’s handling of the Bill, but this is not about the House as a whole, because what has become abundantly clear to me—and I suspect to many people in the wider community—is how a relatively small number of people in this place have been able to use its procedures, not to scrutinise or revise a Bill supported by the elected House, but simply to seek to block it. In my younger days, I attended a number of lively demonstrations, led by the chant, “kill the Bill”. The message and intent of some colleagues may have been less brutally expressed in this House, but the objective has been clear.

Many noble Lords have had grave reservations on particular points in the Bill but have seen it as their duty to seek what they consider would be improvements. They too have been thwarted by the actions of those determined to block its passage. Indeed, the whole House has been denied any meaningful opportunity to express its view on the Bill as a whole and what it was seeking to achieve. This may now prompt a wider debate about the role of this House, the privileges it confers on noble Lords, and whether its procedures are justifiable when they can be used so blatantly to overturn the expressed will of the elected Chamber.

I recognise that many noble Lords have genuine, deeply felt objections to the Bill, perhaps as a result of their faith or just a strong personal conviction that this Bill can never build in enough safeguards to satisfy their conscience. I recognise and respect that, but is it right, on that basis, to use the privileged position that this House gives to each of us to impose that personal view on the membership of the House as a whole? I think not.

That is a matter of interest to those of us concerned with constitutional issues in our democracy and institutions. I would not run a local trade union branch meeting with a difficult decision to make in this self-regulated way that so many Lords take great pride in. As we lay this Bill to rest and pronounce the last rites over it, at least for now, I think first of all of those ordinary, decent people, perhaps with deeply loved ones in circumstances such as those that faced Daniel, yearning to see this change enacted. They will be bewildered and outraged to understand how it has foundered in this place. On this matter, the House has not served our nation well.

[Baroness Hollins (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble and learned Lord for an opportunity to reflect on this debate. Nearly 250 Members have spoken in the debate, not the minority that have been spoken about. I remind the House that I am a past president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and a fellow of three other royal colleges.

When my husband was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, he read that motor neurone disease was the most feared illness. He took a different view. He joked that he was just fading away. He had good care. I wish everybody did. He died naturally and peacefully at home with a smile on his face. Fear is infectious. Please let us not feed on fear.

The Bill’s aim was to provide patients with a choice at the end of their lives. For that to be meaningful, it needs to be a real choice. I have introduced amendments to try to address the other side of choice: the lack of palliative care and the gaps in services that underlie so many of the distressing stories that we have heard; the lack of clarity about the actual means by which someone would be assisted to end their own life; and the risk of implicit institutional coercion, when new processes and procedures change the culture in the NHS.