Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

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.