Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Lord Davies of Gower Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 22nd October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Davidson of Lundin Links on her excellent maiden speech today and say how very good it is to see her here in your Lordships’ House.

Like many others in your Lordships’ House, I have received a hefty mailbag of correspondence. In addition, I have received a large number of emails. I have read them all and have been deeply moved by some of the extremely sad and heartfelt issues that have been brought to my notice. It is difficult to condense matters into three minutes, given the many aspects, but in opposing this Bill, I thought that I might evidence some of the correspondence, as opposed to just opinionating. Yes, I confess that my Christian beliefs play a big part in this, but, as I said, I have been very moved by the letters both for and against, and I will quote from two of them that significantly assisted me in forming an opposing view.

The first is very moving and might well be known to some of your Lordships as it has been the subject of a television documentary. It is a letter from a doctor who has already been quoted by other noble Lords in today’s debate. He is a consultant in anaesthesia and intensive care medicine and writes that

“half my professional time is spent alleviating pain and suffering, and the other half caring for pretty critically ill patients in ICU, a significant proportion of whom go on to die. I have cared for thousands of patients in my career so far. Only once do I recall thinking, ‘I would like the option of intentionally ending life to end my patient’s suffering’. He was a young father, suffering with intractable pain from a haematological condition. I turned out to be wrong. He went on to make a significant recovery from his critical illness and returned home to be with his family.”

The doctor says that his critical care team cared for another patient who had suffered a devastating stroke:

“In our view, he was clearly dying, so we switched the focus of care to comfort and discharged him to the general ward for ongoing palliation. Two weeks later, he walked back into our ICU to thank us for our care on his way back home to continue his recovery. Doctors are poor at predicting when people will die.


I embarked on a vocation in medicine with the aim to cure sometimes, to relieve often and to comfort always. Killing patients is antithetical to the medical enterprise and allowing it would irrevocably harm the doctor-patient relationship.”


The situation described in the second letter was, as I said, part of a BBC documentary. It concerns Ian and Sue Farquhar, whose brother Peter Farquhar met a young man called Ben Field—noble Lords may recall this story.

“Field was a student of Peter’s as well as a church warden—an outwardly respectable young man. Then he set about gaslighting and slowly poisoning Peter into a belief that he was dying from an unexplainable disease. Then, in 2015, he died. He did so having left his detached house in Buckingham and a substantial sum of money to Ben Field. Over the course of a meticulous police investigation, we learned that our brother Peter had never been sick at all.”


I fear for the elderly and infirm, in the form of abuse and coercive control behind closed doors, and the pressure that carers are placed under in hard-pressed families. The noble Lord, Lord Carlile, rightly spoke of the immense pressure that this Bill would place on family court judges. I will add to that. I fear that a Bill such as this would create nothing less than an onerous and difficult challenge for the police, who may be called on to investigate a variety of issues which may have led to a doubtful or suspicious termination of life. This is an extremely dangerous path to go down and I firmly oppose the Bill.