Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 19th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I am aware that many noble Lords will, knowing that my life has been spent as a Methodist minister in pastoral work, have reached an assumption that they know what I am going to say. It is not necessarily the case. I have tried, knowing that that awareness would exist, to give my best attention to the material that has flooded our way over the last month, of which I have tried to make sense in as rational a way as I possibly can.

If I have a qualification for speaking in a debate of this kind, it is simply my experience of the phenomena we have been describing: beginning when symptoms present themselves, people moving through to diagnosis and then to treatment, and then seeing the last days and the end of a particular person’s life, dealing with all the emotions released after the death among the nearest and dearest of the person who has died. Being with people directly affected by the phenomena that we are talking about is a long curve.

Families are not necessarily good places. Within families, there are those with views that put pressure on people for money, and others who take a much more humane view of things. Sometimes, there is blame after the death—the view that things could have been done better and that this and that should not have been done. Choice is not an individual making a decision, forensically separate from all the circumstances and contexts within which that happens; rather, they are surrounded by complexity and predisposed attitudes. Therefore, I wish that we could look again at what we think we mean when we say “choice”. The choice for the person who needs or wants to die is not, for the most part, a choice exercised in isolation from other factors.

I am delighted that the noble Baroness, Lady Berger, and my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer have come to an agreement about a Select Committee to look further at the sorts of issues and phenomena that we are describing, concerned with and taxed with in a debate of this kind. Her letter, along with her associates, was the lodestone for my making sense of all the material I was wrestling with. I am glad that we received a subsequent letter to suggest there may be a proper place where we can look into the proper worries that have been expressed here in this Chamber. I wonder whether 7 November is too near the starting point, but we can look at that in due course.

All I know is that a person who is dying may want to or may not want to and may be led to want to or averted from wanting to. There are near and dear people who turn out to be quite problematical in the total pastoral situation. This is not an easy matter.

At the end of the day, I will vote, I suppose, with all of us now that this situation is emerging, for the amendment. I cannot dismiss from my head what a senior doctor said: “This will change the practice and culture of medicine in ways that no amendment of this Bill can prevent”.

Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Committee stage
Friday 21st November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hollins (CB)]

My Lords, we are going to address palliative care in detail in a later group. We are going to make a distinction between palliative care of a general kind and specialist palliative care, and we are going to think about specialist palliative care at its best. Again, we hear day in, day out about how hospices are closing or having to make staff redundant— I think there is a hospice in Hertfordshire that is just starting its redundancy programme this week because it does not have the money to provide for people’s needs—yet we are relying on our hospices to provide that care, which is not sufficiently available.

When I asked my husband’s GP who was going to co-ordinate his care, because there were several different teams involved, said, “Oh, the hospice nurse will do that”. I thought: the hospice nurse or the community nurse who does not have access to all his notes and records? I was surprised that hospice nurses would take precedence over the GP and the district nurses. They did and they were brilliant but, golly, were they short-staffed.

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, this has been an extraordinary and wide-ranging debate. I will limit myself, in a very short speech, to Amendment 3, which would take out the indefinite article and replace it with “an independent”. We have heard two poles of the considerations that are facing us. One is the need for autonomy for the person concerned—the person whose life is in danger and whose future we are considering—to make a choice with dignity and independence. Then there are the wide-ranging ways in which we have discussed coercion and pressure, which suggest that autonomy is not an easy thing to concentrate on. If there is this range of possible ways of expressing coercion, applying pressure or whatever it is, autonomy must be considered quite a difficult thing to achieve. I honestly believe that.

As I said at Second Reading, since the Enlighten-ment we have concentrated so heavily on the individual, but we need to rescue from that discussion of the individual the fact that we are individuals in community. From my experience as a Methodist minister—we are surrounded by people with all kinds of disciplines and experience—all I can say is that being with people, those who are clustered around the person who is to die, continuously from the time the news of an impending death is broken until the funeral, and indeed beyond the funeral, has made me aware of all kinds of pressures, subtle and otherwise.

I was taken by the list of possible pressures given by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, and the indirect or unthought-of ones: the groan, the body language and so on. What is more, the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, asked whether witnesses were brought who were themselves facing an imminent death. I have sat with people facing an imminent death again and again, and I have heard them spell out both their hopes and their fears about their legacy, about someone who is whispering in their ear and about how it will play out among their children, who have quite different views between them. It is all indirect; it is real and contextual. Autonomy is a difficult thing to conceive of, and all these other indirect things need to be thought of very carefully indeed.

How many times have I counselled families for whom there was a rogue element who has fled the family home—for doing something or other years ago that was considered to be very nasty—on whether they should be brought into the picture about this imminent death, or invited to the funeral or beyond the funeral? They say, “Did we do the right thing?”, “How can we live with our conscience?” or “You shouldn’t have pushed me to say what I said”—all those things are said all the time.

Finally—I promised a short speech—just 16 years ago, I was diagnosed with a serious bowel cancer. After having very low blood levels and a total lack of energy, I was immediately rushed into hospital for a serious piece of surgery. It was a large tumour, and I had to face all kinds of things myself. As it happens, the letter that spelled out the seriousness and urgency of the case arrived when my wife, bless her, was with her mother, who was dying up in the Midlands, so I received it on my own. I cannot tell noble Lords what range of things my mind ranged over as I coped with that news: “How shall I tell?”, “Who will want to know?”, “Can I keep it secret?”, “What will the options be for me if I have this serious surgery?”, “Will I have to wear a colostomy bag?”, “Will I have to have invasive and extensive chemotherapy?”, and so on. It was surgery in the end and, mercifully, when we had the tests done and I went back later, they traced not an element of cancer in the rest of my body—and here I am to bore your Lordships with a five-minute speech all these years later. This is simply to say that the indirect subtlety—the stuff beyond the stuff you can be categorical about or put on a statutory basis—is what really comes into play when you are talking about the end of a life.

John Donne, long before the Enlightenment, reminded us that no man is an island—

“send not to know

For whom the bell tolls,

It tolls for thee”.

We are all caught up in this together. Somebody in the Times picked up a remark I had made casually to describe me. It was that I am now a semicolon on his way to his full stop.