Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord Murray of Blidworth Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 12th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

My Lords, irrespective of the underlying moral and policy question, as many noble Lords have already identified, the Bill in its present form is seriously procedurally flawed. I am against it.

I am most concerned about the impact those flaws will have on vulnerable people. Given the time available, two points occur to me which demonstrate this problem. First, at no point in the mechanism under the Bill does anyone expressly ask the applicant the reason why they wish to die. Such a question would not be an intrusion on private autonomy; to the contrary: it would be a reasonable and compassionate inquiry. In its own way, it would be a significant guard to protect the most vulnerable.

Secondly, more technically, there are very significant failings in the panel stage of the process, as described in the Bill and embodied in Clause 17. In its current form, the panel stage of the process, as the noble Lord, Lord Grabiner, identified, is lawyer window dressing—I agree. Unlike him, though, I suggest that this stage could and should be used to reinforce the process and to protect the most vulnerable against abuse.

Clause 17 provides that the panel’s function in an application for a certificate of eligibility for assisted suicide is simply to determine whether the nine tick boxes set out in Clause 17(2) are met. To do so, the panel, who are described in Schedule 2 as comprising a lawyer, a psychiatrist and a social worker, must hear from the co-ordinating doctor, the applicant, and they may hear from anyone else. Subsection (7) then requires that the panel must grant a certificate if they have satisfied that the nine boxes in subsection (2) are met.

This is a quasi-tribunal process in which the tribunal is bereft of any appropriate powers. Frankly, even a parking adjudicator has more evidential power than these panels. In the past few months, this Government have given more enforceable rights to employees and tenants, to mention two Bills that have recently passed through your Lordships’ House—the Employment Rights Bill and the Renters’ Reform Bill—than to those who seek assistance to die under this Bill. How is that so? Because those other pieces of legislation—employment legislation and landlord and tenant legislation—go before a court or tribunal with evidential powers to look into the matter before them.

The panel in this Bill is toothless. It has no power to require evidence to protect vulnerable people, no power to summon witnesses or experts, no power to order the disclosure of documents and no powers of compulsion at all. Indeed, the panel would have no power even to see an applicant’s will or to summon witnesses to explain the relationships in the application before them. There is no logical reason why those applying for assistance to die should have their request for a certificate of eligibility scrutinised by a body with fewer powers to compel evidence and make decisions than a person would have had if they had brought an employment claim, a landlord and tenant claim or a road traffic matter. At the very least, this Bill should explicitly provide that part of the statutory role of the panel should be to investigate motivation and possible coercion. The panel should have the powers of any other tribunal in performing that task.

Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord Murray of Blidworth Excerpts

Committee stage
Friday 27th February 2026 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Murray of Blidworth]

142: Clause 4, page 2, line 39, at end insert—
“(f) providing guidance regarding the practice and procedure of Assisted Dying Review Panels (see Schedule 2).”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment and two others in the name of Lord Murray of Blidworth addresses an issue raised by Select Committee witnesses namely that the Commissioner is not under an obligation to give guidance to the panel on procedure, which could mean it is entirely at each panel’s discretion how they work. These amendments make the provision of guidance mandatory, following consultation.

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

My Lords, it is a long time since I last spoke on this Bill, at about 3.20 pm on Friday 12 September, the first day of Second Reading. In that speech I outlined my concerns about the panels proposed in Clause 17. It gives me great pleasure to introduce the group of amendments to those panels. I will come to my amendments in a moment.

The concerns in my Second Reading speech, which were reflected by a number of others, were also seen in the evidence provided to the Bill Committees in the other place and here. Of course, the addition of the panels happened organically during the passage of the Bill through the Commons and, as a result, there have been adverse comments, particularly, as we will see, by legal stakeholders concerned about how the proposed system works and about the lack of detail on the panels in the Bill.

It is perhaps of note that the Justice Minister, Sarah Sackman, when asked by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Scotland, about the lack of policy definition regarding the process and the fitness of those adjudicating, said that

“the commissioner, in establishing the office of the commissioner, will be responsible for producing the procedural rules governing the panel’s activity and, potentially, guidance that will govern how they go about their work”.

She then said that the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Scotland,

“is absolutely right that what it does then is give the commissioner the powers to go away and develop the governing practices of the panel”.

The Minister suggested that that was not unusual in the establishment of bodies of similar nature, but many do not share the somewhat laissez-faire approach that she adopted there.

The Law Society raised specific concerns about how the panels would operate. Kirsty Stuart noted in her evidence:

“What is unclear at the moment is where the panels will be held and how people would know about them”,


and whether they would be public or private. In the Law Society’s written evidence, it was said that Parliament should

“clarify how Assisted Dying Review Panels would deal with and decide cases”,

and that the Bill

“leaves substantial details about how the scheme would operate to be dealt with in secondary legislation and guidance”.

Professor Charles Foster also criticised the lack of statutory requirements for the panel’s procedure. He noted:

“There is no requirement for the panel to ask anybody, including the applicant, anything at all, or to test the evidence in any way. Cases can be dealt with in private. There is no obligation to publish the reasons”.


Professor Ruck Keene—I declare an interest that he and I are in chambers together—noted that the panel’s design suffered from being developed “on the fly” and that it was “neither fish nor fowl” regarding its powers. He noted that the policy had not been formed and said that the panel had

“too few powers to deal with more difficult cases”.

With my amendments I hope to address some of the problems that have been highlighted. My Amendment 925A concerns the power to appoint the members of the panel. At the moment, the position is that the panel members would be self-selecting. By setting various criteria for the appointment of panel members, this amendment would reduce that risk. It says:

“A person may only be appointed to the list following … an independent appointments process involving tests, interviews and role-play … professional vetting”—


that is perhaps topical—

“and … in the case of a legal member, a recommendation from the Judicial Appointments Commission”.

My next set of amendments deal with the question of panel procedure. Amendment 142 would require that the commissioner, when providing guidance to the panels, has an obligation to produce that guidance. In the way the Bill is structured at the moment, there is no requirement to provide guidance; this measure would introduce that requirement. Amendment 937 would make that mandatory. Amendment 938 would require that the guidance must be produced following consultation with various relevant bodies: the Tribunal Procedure Committee; experts in domestic abuse, old-age psychiatry and neurodivergence; and disability groups. Amendment 463 is intended to address how the procedure is to work.

Finally, my Amendment 464 deals with powers of evidence gathering. As I noted at Second Reading, at the moment the panel has fewer coercive powers than a parking adjudicator. This body is going to be determining matters of life and death, and ultimately it needs to know whether there is coercion and whether the wishes of all involved have been taken into account. Amendment 464 is drafted in such a way that the panel shall have the powers and privileges of the High Court. I appreciate that it is far from perfect. It is a probing amendment so that I can hear what proposals the noble and learned Lord may have to improve the powers of the panel and to rectify the obvious deficits that exist in the current system proposed in the Bill. I beg to move.

Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord Murray of Blidworth Excerpts

Committee stage
Friday 13th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

My Lords, I thank everyone who has spoken on this adjourned group. I propose to adopt the enviable style of my noble friend Lord Effingham and not refer to everybody’s speeches. I would, however, pick up just one point from our discussion on 27 February, which was in the speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, when she criticised my comment in opening the group that this was not a life and death decision that the panel was making. I answer that by simply pointing to the contents of Clause 17(2), which sets out the checklist on which the panel must be satisfied. The most pertinent of those are:

“that the person is terminally ill … that the person has a clear, settled and informed wish to end their own life”

and

“that the person made the … declaration voluntarily and was not coerced or pressured by any other person into making that declaration”.

In my submission, it is plainly a decision—a question—of life and death that the panel is making.

I propose to respond to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, and the Minister thematically, adopting their own approach. There are three key themes in my amendments. They are the appointment process, whether there should be guidance to the panels and what powers the panels should have. I am very glad that the noble and learned Lord agreed with me that there needed to be an appointment process, but I am afraid I do not share his laissez-faire approach that it can all be left to the person of the assisted dying commissioner.

It seems to me appropriate for such a significant post to be considered by a formal body. I do not accept the account given by the Government that it is all a bit too administratively difficult for the JAC to consider this. The JAC is a body set up under the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 and it is governed by a statutory instrument of 2013. Those are all capable of amendment and, with resourcing, it is entirely capable of managing the task that I envisage in my amendments.

I turn to the question of guidance. There is no provision that there must be guidance to the panels. It seems to me that unless you have guidance, there is a real risk that panels will be of differing quality and adopt different local practices. This could cause terrible errors, with very significant and ultimately irreversible consequences. There must be guidance, and there must be guidance made by the commissioner to the panels, and it must be informed by consultation with relevant bodies. That is what my amendments achieve. I am afraid I do not share what we might call the “good chap” theory of assisted death that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, appears to suggest by having an option to create guidance to the panels.

Finally, as to powers, criticism was made of me by the Minister and the noble and learned Lord that I had asked too much in my amendment, by asking for the powers of the High Court to be imposed upon the panels. As I made clear in my speech, and as indeed is clear in the Member’s explanatory statement, if noble Lords look at the Marshalled List, this was always a probing amendment. The Minister said that I had not specified which powers. Well, if she had looked at the Member’s explanatory statement, she would have seen them. They are targeted at the powers to require evidence because, as I said at Second Reading, at the moment these panels have fewer powers than the parking adjudicator of Greater London. In a matter where they are looking at whether somebody is being coerced into volunteering to die, the panel cannot even ask to see their will. These powers are an essential addition to the Bill if it is to proceed and with that, I beg to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 142 withdrawn.