Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord Goodman of Wycombe Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 12th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Goodman of Wycombe (Con)]

My Lords, others have referred to report of the Delegated Powers Committee on the Bill. I am a member of that committee, but I should emphasise that I, of course, speak today for myself personally, and not for the committee collectively. Indeed, I have no idea whether most members of the committee share my view that assisted dying is deeply problematic in principle.

But, as has been made clear, we unanimously concluded that the Bill is flawed in practice. By my count, our report made 13 main recommendations, covering vital matters such as the investigation of deaths, approved substances, the prohibition of advertising and, perhaps, above all, voluntary assisted services—in other words, the relationship between what the Bill proposes and how the NHS will dispose if the Bill comes into effect.

I quote from the report:

“There are several themes running through many of the issues we draw to the House’s attention … some delegated powers have very limited provision on the face of the Bill and leave so much to delegated legislation that there is insufficient detail or principle evident for proper Parliamentary scrutiny of the underlying policy; … in some cases, particularly where a substantial regulatory regime may be needed, this tendency results in skeleton legislation; … there are several clauses where delegated powers can be used to do anything that an Act of Parliament can do. This is a highly inappropriate formulation that gives sweeping, unspecified and unjustified powers to the Government while removing Parliament’s scrutiny role for provision that should be in primary legislation, and replacing it with the considerably more limited role of scrutinising delegated legislation”.


Noble Lords will have perceived that the main question the committee was tasked with answering was not “What does the Bill seek to do?” but “How does it seek to do it?”. I suggest that this is the key question, not just for the committee but for the whole House, which, for better or worse, tends to scrutinise legislation more exactingly than is sometimes the case in the other place. If the answer to the question “how?” is “inadequately”, a further question arises, namely, “How could the Bill be made adequate?”. Indeed, can it be made adequate at all?

I intend, as many other noble Lords intend, to table amendments in Committee and on Report, some of which will seek to effect the recommendations of our report. However, I cannot see how the Bill can be made adequate, no matter to what degree it is amended, for as Jill Rutter and Hannah White of the Institute for Government have noted, this Private Member’s Bill carries matters more weighty, profound and complex than it can properly bear, whatever the degree of government involvement and support. They write that

“a key problem with using this route to legislate is the lack of pre-legislative stages … Legislation on an issue like assisted dying would have benefited enormously from a more thorough preparation phase …a well-led review, involving many of the people on both sides of the argument, and with a mandate to engage the public, could have addressed the whole range of issues that MPs are now trying to navigate”.

I should add that this view was backed up by the Constitution Committee, which has echoed many of the criticisms of the committee that I have the privilege of sitting on.

I end with perhaps the most crucial criticism of the Bill in the committee’s report: it surely cannot be right that a matter so vital as the relationship between assisted dying services and the NHS is left to Ministers to propose by regulation. I ask noble Lords to consider whether a Bill that contains such a proposal can possibly be fit for purpose.

Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord Goodman of Wycombe Excerpts

Committee stage
Friday 14th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sentamu (CB)]

My Lords, I want us to return to the amendment and my contribution will be very brief.

The wonderful joy of the English language is that it is always evolving to meet circumstances that were never perceived before. That is why it will continue to be the language of the world. The word “capacity” is no longer just a psychiatric term to assess people’s mental ability; it now applies to whether a council has the capacity to do one thing or another. The word now is no longer a very narrow word. I am quite surprised when I hear people say that the word has been used for a very long time in the medical circle. But the word “capacity” is not in the rules of the Persians and Medes that can never be changed—words grow.

When we are dealing with a new situation of assisted dying, we need to look at whether the word “capacity” is adequate to deal with the new circumstances we are discussing in our Parliament. Is it adequate for a person who is facing the question of death and saying “I want to end my life now”? What does the word “capacity” mean to them?

The word “ability” would probably come much nearer to the understanding of an ordinary person wanting to make a decision about ending their life medically. Let us not treat the word “capacity” as such a holy word which cannot be changed. Let us not be lazy but work hard and consult a lot of other people in the field who know the most adequate word to describe this. I thank the mover of the amendment. Perhaps it could be put into a melting pot with some other words and out will pop a word that makes sense, and the whole House can rally around it.

[Lord Goodman of Wycombe (Con)]

My Lords, in debating ability and capacity, I will speak briefly as a member not only of the Delegated Powers Committee that considered the Bill but of the Select Committee that also did so. Noble Lords have heard differing views from members of the Select Committee about the various goings on that took place there, but I am sure we can all agree that we heard some very fine evidence.

All I wish to do in intervening here is to quote what Professor Alex Ruck Keene, whom my noble friend Lady Berridge referred to earlier, said about capacity and the role of psychiatrists, as it is extremely relevant to the debate on this clause. He said:

“The point I am trying to make is that, if you simply say, ‘Apply the MCA. Apply the principle of the presumption of capacity. Support the person to have capacity to decide their own life’, I anticipate, if you asked very many psychiatrists, they would go, ‘How am I supposed to think about that?’ That is for a very specific reason. For psychiatrists, most of the time, their job is to secure life. Their job is suicide prevention”.


He concluded:

“We need to know—and one of my real concerns is—how this Bill sits in the wider landscape of the law. I need to be able to tell, because I am going to be one of the people writing the books here and giving the training. I need to be able to say, with absolute crystal clarity, to a psychiatrist, ‘This is the point where you are not in the suicide prevention zone, and if you do not do all steps necessary to try to secure this person’s life, you could be prosecuted or you could be charged in various different ways or be civilly liable’. I need to be able to say, with crystal clarity, ‘You’re no longer in that zone; you’re now in the zone of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill’”.


I quote the professor simply to draw to the Committee’s attention once again the complexity of the issues before us. Although “ability” may be flawed and legally powerless, as the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, suggested, “capacity” is deeply problematic in the context of the Bill.

[Baroness Grey-Thompson (CB)]

My Lords, there is probably one thing we can all agree on today: everyone’s frustration with the process of evidence giving. I was hugely frustrated when the committee in another place was looking for evidence but deaf and disabled people’s organisations were not able to give evidence, despite making up 25% of the population.

I hope that I speak on behalf of the whole House when I say how sad it is that my noble friend Lady Campbell of Surbiton is not able to be in her place. She has experience in politics and in the House of Lords of extensively debating capacity, on what became the Domestic Abuse Act and in previous debates on assisted dying. I would urge anyone who has time to look at her contributions on capacity.

My noble friend is an individual who, I am afraid to say, in her 66 years, has been deemed terminal more times, probably, than most of us in the Chamber combined. She has had her capacity challenged probably an equal number of times. I remember a few years ago, when I had not long been in your Lordships’ House, when my noble friend was in hospital and several of us had phone calls to say that we needed to get to the hospital right away because they were challenging her capacity. Her husband was told that she was not able to make decisions on her care because she was delusional. Why was she delusional? Because she had told the doctors that she was a Member of the House of Lords. The response was, “She can’t be in the House of Lords—she’s disabled”. I cannot remember whether her husband got away with taking her pass in; there was talk about having to take her seal in to prove that she was in the House of Lords. But this highlights some of the issues with mental capacity assessment.

I have had personal experience of it. When my father was ill and the doctors found out I had lasting power of attorney, I was taken to one side to argue that he should have a different set of treatment. He had the capacity and ability to decide what he wanted. In this case, he had to have his leg amputated, and he was told that, as a wheelchair user, he would have no quality of life—they said that to me. If there was one thing I could do for my father, I could get him a wheelchair.

More recently, I have had an experience with my husband. At the end of 2020, he had a blood clot on the brain stem—he had a stroke, and he was blue-lighted to hospital. It was a dreadful experience. My daughter was in her first year at university and had to be called home. We did not think he was going to make it, and we were not allowed into the hospital. I was frequently told by the medics that he had no capacity to make a decision on his treatment. My husband said, “Look at the notes”; I said, “Look at the notes”. What they were arguing over in terms of his capacity was his ability to walk. Looking at the notes was really important, because his lack of ability to walk was nothing to do with the fact that he had a stroke; it was due to the fact that he had had a spinal cord injury in 1984 when he crashed his pedal bike into the back of a double-decker bus.

I understand what the Chamber is saying. I have personal experience where I think the Mental Capacity Act has been used in the wrong way. We have to find a way of making it work so we are able to take care of capacity. Like others, I am not entirely sure that “ability” is the right word. I understand what I mean by “ability”; I have amendments later on around the ability to understand decisions. I have one on British Sign Language because of the case of a deaf man who was told by a nurse who could only fingerspell that he had HIV when he did not—he thought for two days that he had HIV—and I have another amendment around people with learning disabilities. So maybe “ability” is not the right word.

My noble friend Lord Pannick talks about legal definitions, and I also have a number of very minor amendments which look at a better legal definition of disabled people. Perhaps we can take this away, work on it and do something. As the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Scotland, said, we have to make it work. We have to look at the Mental Capacity Act through the prism of the Bill, not in terms of what it was designed to do.