Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord Farmer Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 12th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I want to stand back from this Bill and call out the dangers of the wider cultural drift towards hyper-individualism it epitomises. Freedom to end life on our terms—making death accessible as a personal convenience—desacralizes and cheapens death, life and humanity itself.

Professor Louis Appleby, advisory group chair of our national suicide prevention strategy, warns that our socially remarkable consensus that it is right to try to prevent all suicides will be radically altered. He also said the phrase “assisted suicide” should not be considered offensive.

At the time of Second Reading in the Commons, two of my friends who were suffering terminal conditions—one has since died—both followed the debate and news coverage and told me that the subject’s very airing made them feel that they were a burden to their loved ones.

Assisted dying is the latest blatant promotion of personal autonomy over any obligations we owe to each other as members of a shared society, and over reverence for life itself. It flouts the important “do no harm” principle underlying classical liberalism. As well as immediate harms to the disabled, those who fear becoming a burden and those vulnerable to coercion, there are long-term harms to the Bill typical of what pollster James Kanagasooriam calls “shrouded attributes” of policies: costs and liabilities, hidden at point of sale to the public, which inflict a later tail of pain.

First, there is the inevitable extension to other groups beyond those catered for in the Bill. International examples abound of legal creep, whereby mental illness, non-terminal conditions and ever-younger sufferers become eligible. Secondly, Canada has shown how palliative care withers, yet two-thirds of the public agree that Labour should prioritise sorting out palliative, social and end-of-life care before even thinking about assisted dying; less than a fifth disagree. Two-thirds of assisted dying supporters agree that our threadbare, charitably sustained hospice movement needs strengthening first, otherwise there is no genuine choice, as we have heard already in this debate.

Hospice movement founder Dame Cicely Saunders’ philosophy of palliative care was:

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


Helping patients live until they die is what very many doctors want to keep offering, or to offer more reliably. Fear of missing out drives calls for assisted dying: supporters are significantly more likely than opponents to believe they will be unable to fund their own end-of-life care, and that the Government will not pay for it.

Thirdly, the cheapening of life and disregard for relationships flow from outlawing physical and mental suffering, despite these being part of our universal human condition. Although those should of course be alleviated whenever possible, actively taking the escape route of death is intensely painful for many years for close family members and friends when they have had no say in the matter. When personal autonomy trumps everything, we end up, dare I say it, deifying selfishness.

A former Chief Rabbi, the late Lord Sacks—we have heard his name already today—wrote this in his last book, Morality:

“Western society has all too often been insensitive to the dimension of time. Thinking through the long-term, unintended consequences of policy changes is imperative. Beware short-term fixes to individuals’ pain which will inflict life-long pain on those near to them—and sow seeds of destruction into our society”.

Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Committee stage
Friday 21st November 2025 Lords Chamber

What I am proposing—I hope that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, when he winds up, will be able to respond positively to these suggestions—is that we introduce a proactive, evidence-based method for detecting potential coercion before any irreversible action is taken. Involving formally the voluntary assisted dying commissioner and the panel in reviewing these financial safeguards ensures the oversight and accountability which are missing from the Bill.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I rise in support of Amendment 118 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, and I am introducing Amendments 118A and 118B which follow it. I also support Amendments 45, 46, 47, 49 and 58.

This is an atheist Bill that assumes there is nothing after death, which is not a neutral but an ideological position. To those without an active belief that there is something after death, I would say, “How can you be so sure?” What makes the point that it is an atheist Bill? It is that it desacralizes death and by so doing it opens the door to very many evils including coercion and pressure, the subject of this group. The Bill is coercive: it gives oxygen to dark thoughts which can loom especially large when our best days seem to lie behind us, and when we are no longer contributing to family and society in the way we once did. Culturally and societally, it encourages and influences them as much as any person referred to in Amendments 45 and 46. Two of my friends with terminal conditions both followed earlier stages of this Bill in the other place and told me the subject’s very airing made them feel that they were a burden. The message that legislation and policy should amplify is, “You will not walk the valley of the shadow of death on your own”. We should encourage people to make and keep those relationships that will carry them through life and through that dark valley.

Others might also have dug out the words of the Times columnist Matthew Parris, quoted in a debate on assisted suicide in the other place in April 2024. He said that although

“‘Your time is up’ will never be an order”

to the elderly, disabled, severely ill and the others to whom assisted suicide will, inevitably, be extended eventually, it

“may one day be the kind of unspoken hint that everybody understands. And that’s a good thing”.

As the right honourable Stephen Timms said in that debate:

“I cannot see that that would be a good thing. It seems to me that legalising assisted dying would impose a terrible dilemma on frail people, elderly people and others when they are at the most vulnerable point in their lives, especially on conscientious frail people who do not want to die but do not want to be a burden. I do not think that there is any way to avoid imposing that dilemma”.—[Official Report, Commons, 29/4/24; col. 18WH.]


We have heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, about the data from Oregon, where over half the people who have applied for assisted dying since 2017 did so not because they wanted to die but because they felt that they were a burden. Amendment 47 from the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, would guard against this “internal coercion”, to use the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ phrase. Further, her Amendment 49 includes,

“body corporate, institution or organisation”,

alongside “person”, which would of course catch the Government themselves. Tragically, and I declare my interests as a Hampshire farmer, there are farmers who have committed suicide ahead of the imposition of the family farm tax, choosing to die early so their land is passed on intact. Law and policy starkly influence personal decisions, hence our responsibility as lawmakers to take these unforeseen consequences into account and not brush them aside.

In her Amendment 58, the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, is right to focus on lack of care as a disadvantage that pressurises. If death looks as if it might be painful and protracted then going through it alone, unmissed and uncared for, is too terrible to contemplate, but surely we can do better than help someone act on that dread thought, “No one would miss me; no one cares”.

Amendments 118A and 118B, which are my amendments to Amendment 118 in my name and that of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, would ensure that wills were scrutinised and the backgrounds of friends, as well as family, were not overlooked if sinister motives suggesting financial abuse were not assumed but at least considered. Legislating for motivation is notoriously difficult, because motives are private, subjective, and easy to disguise. Instead, assisted dying legislation must use clear, objective safeguards to remove the possibility of improper motives influencing the process.

As an aside, I am not sure the Bill prevents any doctors involved profiting from early death, but Dr Harold Shipman did of course inveigle himself into the wills of some of his victims, and that would also be a red flag if found in the commissioner’s checks on wills.

Therefore, I ask the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, why the Bill does not do more to exclude anyone with a financial or personal interest, and by extension anyone who might have been under their influence. We cannot draft either for compassion or for malice, but we can protect applicants by making it clear from the outset that if anyone with suspect motives has any involvement, their application will fall.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I, by contrast, speak as an atheist and humanist, mainly to address my Amendment 45, which would add the word “encouraged” after “coerced”. I support the general theme of the other amendments in this group, which largely tackle the need to strengthen safeguards against patients being indirectly influenced into opting for assisted death—often coerced, in all but name. All these loopholes undermine any certainty that the “choice”, in inverted commas, is made autonomously.

My amendment, supported by the noble Lord, Lord Goodman of Wycombe, may appear to be a small change, as it would add just one word. But before anyone concludes that I am tabling trivial amendments to waste time, I note that, when dealing with a fundamental change in the state’s relationship with its citizens and the NHS’s relationship with patients, and life and death decisions, the specificity and appropriateness of the words in the changed law matter.

At present, the Bill requires doctors to ascertain only coercion or pressure. They are the only two words given in Clause 1; there is no duty even to probe or ask broader questions about more subtle, insidious influences that could affect a person’s decisions. I note that the concept of encouragement is not arbitrary; the encouragement of assistance in suicide is illegal under the Suicide Act but would not be in this Bill. Indeed, CPS policy guidance on prosecuting those who have assisted suicide acknowledges “encouraging”—it uses that word—the victim as a factor in favour of prosecution. It is also criminal to encourage a person to commit an offence under the Serious Crime Act. Therefore, the question is less about why I am bothering to table an amendment to add just one word; the question is why the sponsors of the Bill left out that word “encouragement”.

Adding the word “encouragement” would allow a shift in perception about what undue influence could look like. Even though there are real problems in spotting coercion or pressure—we have heard many examples of that—the concepts at least have a hard edge or overt sense, at least in everyday parlance, that you are talking about people doing something that they really did not want to do. You do not say, “I had a really lovely day today; my husband coerced and pressurised me into doing” something. There is a grey area of much more subtle intervention; an individual could motivate, lead on or nudge someone into opting for an assisted death, rather than making that person aware of all the ways that they might live out their limited time as comfortably as possible. This amendment is trying to get at that sort of encouragement.

As I explained at Second Reading, one of my big dreads is that, once assisted dying is normalised as a positive treatment option, that vibe shift will not be confined to medical scenarios. It can and will mean that it is popularised as a go-to option in broader society. Consider this scenario: you have just received the news that you have a terminal diagnosis and have about six months to live. You are frightened, shocked and seeking reassurance. It is a bleak time and you are depressed because you do not want to die.

But then a third party—a family, carer or friend to whom I ascribe no motivation—says, “Have you thought about asking your GP for an assisted death? I’ve been reading about it all over the place and you can do that now. At least that way you’d have dignity in dying. You know how much you hate hospitals and all those doctors fussing about you, and we all know that you are not good with pain. How would the kids cope with running around having to visit you when you’re in and out of hospital? Wouldn’t it be so lovely to choose when you go, then we could all be with you at the end?” All of this is said in soothing, kind tones. Therefore, you think, “Well, I really don’t want to die. My instincts are to

‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light’,


but I don’t want to be a nuisance either, and they know me so well. They know what I’m like and that I won’t cope. They have my best interests at heart, so I suppose so”. It does not sound exploitative or coercive, but it is an iron fist in a velvet glove.

We have some cultural reference points here. In discussions about how the Online Safety Act will tackle suicide sites, there is consensus about the problems of online influencers encouraging vulnerable people into believing that suicide is a positive way out of their suffering. There is widespread revulsion at those cajoling siren voices encouraging death as an attractive option. In that context, none of us concludes that this encouragement is not problematic because it is not explicitly coercive.