Access to Palliative Care Bill [HL]

Lord Quirk Excerpts

Friday 23rd October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Quirk (CB)]

My Lords, of course I, too, must begin by joining those who have thanked my noble friend Lady Finlay for presenting Parliament with this authoritative and timely Bill. There can be no one in this House, no one in this country, so well qualified in the whole area of palliative care, and we can be sure that every single detail in Clauses 2 and 3 of the Bill, for example, addresses issues that have been expertly identified by my noble friend in her personal experience as a clinician.

About 500 years ago, Francis Bacon memorably noted:

“Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark”.

He was using “men” in the gender-inclusive sense, of course. But I wonder why pharmacological progress in pain management, especially in the last half-century, does not seem to have mitigated or reduced this primeval fear of death. Perhaps it is because so little is known or understood of the comfort and relief that can be afforded by the current standard of palliative care when it operates at its best. Why else is there this trickle of desperate folk to seek terminal help in Zurich? Why else does a steady majority in this country, identified by opinion polls, favour the assisted suicide advanced by the noble Lord, Lord Joffe, and, in recent months, persuasively, by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton.

The sad fact is that those with a good knowledge of current standards in palliative care know also how “patchily”, as my noble friend said, a high standard of such care is available in this country. We should, of course, be proud of our enviable record in this field—proud to be voted this very year, 2015, as the best in the world, just as we were in 2010. We should be proud of such selfless trailblazers as Sue Ryder and Cicely Saunders. Indeed, one of my own proudest moments as vice-chancellor of the University of London came when both these ladies accepted honorary degrees.

We can be proud, too, of our great charities, as the noble Lord, Lord Howard, noted. When in the late 1960s Dame Cicely approached Sir Isaac Wolfson, he and his trustees were enthused and began at once to join in the funding of this new wave of hospices. His son and successor as chairman, Leonard, later Lord Wolfson, was equally enthusiastic, as were a succession of trustees, such as the noble Lords, Lord Turnberg and Lord McColl of Dulwich, right down to the present, to the tune of many millions of pounds. The Wolfson Foundation has supported no fewer than 130 hospices across the UK, all reducing the fear Bacon spoke of, as, whether children or adults, we make our way into the dark.

Proud as we can be of this litany of praise and success, we have a very long way to go, and the rest of the world has relatively further still. Even in such a relatively well-provided area as London, the variation in provision from borough to borough is alarming. Such variation is gravely amplified when we look at the UK as a whole. In some quite extensive areas, patients seek in vain palliative care of the kind they need. This Bill specifies succinctly and authoritatively what needs to be done as a matter of urgency, and it surely deserves our wholehearted support.