Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord Kakkar Excerpts

Friday 12th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kakkar (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, for having introduced this Bill in your Lordships’ House, and I thank many noble Lords for their thoughtful and deeply insightful contributions to this debate, which have helped inform, in effect, the crux of the matter; that is, that this is a very complex and serious issue that will ultimately change the relationship between the citizen and the state, and indeed between patients and their doctors. However, it has also highlighted the important principle that, as a matter of course, we offer our fellow citizens rights as long as those rights do not result in harm to other citizens. Therefore, it is appropriate that, at this moment in time, we consider the question of whether citizens should be given the right, when terminally ill, to consider when and how their lives are ended. In doing so, however, we need to be deeply sensitive to the many residual anxieties that still exist and the many issues that have been raised that attend this Bill in its current form.

The principal consideration here is whether in introducing a right for the individual, the Bill inadvertently creates the opportunity for harm to other individuals, and whether sufficient steps have been taken to protect against those potential harms. There are a series of other issues as well. There is precedent, though, that when Bills of this nature have arrived in your Lordships’ House—the nature being Bills that have a profound societal impact—the Government of the day have made additional time available. Two examples are the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965 and the Abortion Act 1967. So, at the very least, it is essential for His Majesty’s Government to ensure that time is made available for appropriate scrutiny.

That appropriate scrutiny must consider a series of issues, many of which have been raised in this debate already. One that has been raised with me by many colleagues in active practice is that they are, in principle, strongly in favour of the provisions of the Bill, but in practice, they are very concerned about how it might be applied in the NHS, in particular about how it might end up being used in a substantially protocolised fashion, where the thoughtful and insightful application of its provisions to the individual is lost in the way that so much care is now organised in the NHS. This is something that we will need to explore.

The other point that has been exceedingly well made is on the implications and the message sent by passing a Bill that makes provision for the state to pay for an assisted dying service in its entirety, while not fully funding the provision of palliative care. What are the implications, and what message does that send? What might be the inadvertent consequences of pursuing that approach? This is another matter that will need to be considered very carefully in Committee.

If this Bill is to pass, it must do so enjoying the maximum amount of confidence possible, having provided the appropriate safeguards; to pass it in any other way will regrettably result in serious adverse consequences.