Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts

Friday 12th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, as we heard earlier, this past Wednesday was World Suicide Prevention Day. Suicide is always a tragedy, and its effects profoundly felt by whole communities as well as the immediate family. As legislators, I believe we have a responsibility to affirm every life as having inherent and equal value, regardless of age, health, disability or circumstances. I believe we need to seek to prevent suicide, not facilitate it.

We have a national strategy for reducing the number of lives lost to suicide but sadly, the suicide rate in this country is the highest it has been in over two decades. It is almost unfathomable, therefore, that in the very week we should be shining a light on suicide prevention, we are considering amending the Suicide Act 1961—in Clause 32—to make it legal for the state to give drugs to people to hasten the end of their own lives.

Proponents of the Bill have tried to argue that legalising “assisted dying” will somehow reduce the number of unassisted suicides, but there is robust evidence to suggest that it has the opposite effect. Backers of assisted suicide in the Australian state of Victoria claimed it would prevent 50 suicides of terminally ill people each year. They won the argument. But, since the law was changed, unassisted suicide among over 65s—the largest demographic of terminally ill people—has increased by more than 50%.

You can see why. If the state tells the sick and elderly that suicide is a valid way out, some of those who do not qualify under the terms of the legislation will still feel that they should take that same way out, because it has been normalised. Our commitment to suicide prevention as a society depends on a consistent message that every life has meaning and value and is deserving of protection. Suicide cannot be both something we try hard to prevent and something we assist in some cases. That is nonsensical. For the state to tell certain suicidal people, “You’re right. Your life isn’t worth living”, is an appalling message. It is the ultimate in hopelessness and the very opposite of compassion.

According to the Royal College of Psychiatrists, suicidal ideation in terminal illness typically resolves once a

“person’s physical pain or associated fear of it is alleviated”.

But the Bill ignores our duty of care to these people. It sanctions death by poisoning for those who, with the right palliative care and support, would otherwise often choose to live.

The Bill will put vulnerable people under even greater pressure to end their lives for fear of being a physical, emotional or financial burden on others. We see this in Canada, where the medical assistance in dying law has become, in the words of an ME sufferer called Madeline, a “brutal practicality” for people seeking to escape poverty and social isolation. One 37 year-old homeless man applied for medically assisted death because, in his words, he felt “useless” and thought he was “hurting society”. Another woman, in her 50s, asked to die because she could not get adequate housing. Who wants to live in a society like that? This utilitarian way of thinking becomes normalised once assisted suicide is legalised. Polling shows that over one quarter of Canadians now think that it should be acceptable for people to seek state-assisted death as a solution to poverty and homelessness.

The current law exists to protect those who might otherwise feel pressured into ending their lives, and that is why we must keep it. We should be seeking to strengthen people in hope, respect their agency and give them the care and support they need—not affirming them in their hopelessness and giving them drugs to kill themselves. We need to ask: is this Bill really the best we can do for society’s most vulnerable? The Bill cannot be improved; it must therefore fail.