SCRUTINY within the House of Lords “should never be conflated with obstruction”, the Bishop of Newcastle, Dr Helen-Ann Hartley, wrote last week, in a joint letter with six other members of the Select Committee that heard evidence on the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill.
The committee heard “vital and infrequently highly critical evidence” from several experts, including psychiatrists, coroners, and social staff, the peers wrote, in an open letter published on 11 December.
The letter says that nearly all of the experts “indicated that the Bill, because it stands, shouldn’t be fit for purpose”; further scrutiny was needed.
The Bill is being scrutinised by “committee of the entire House”, and greater than 1000 amendments are into consideration. Four days of debate have been held up to now, and an extra ten are planned for the primary 4 months of 2026.
“Our entire purpose at this stage is to pay attention to the concerns of experts and professionals, and to propose amendments which aim to interrogate the detail and display where improvement is required,” the letter says.
Last Friday, the Bishop of Gloucester, the Rt Revd Rachel Treweek, who’s the lead bishop for prisons, spoke in support of an amendment to forestall prisoners’ being eligible for an assisted death.
She said that the “prison population is in worse health than the final population”, and that age-related illnesses began at an earlier age.
Palliative and end-of-life care was inconsistent, she said, although, under the law, prisoners were entitled to equal access. Incidents of self-harm were high.
Given the problem of prison overcrowding, “the will to remove people from the system is high,” she said. “I fear how the Bill could play out among the many prison population.”
In a debate the previous Friday, discussion focused on an amendment to boost the minimum age for an assisted death from 18 to 25. Under the terms of the laws, the person will need to have a terminal illness and be expected to live for lower than six months.
The Bishop of Leicester, the Rt Revd Martyn Snow, said that, while the peers were discussing a problem that related to 18- to 25-year-olds, there was not one in that age group within the chamber. “The voices of youngsters and young persons are, it seems to me, vital in such a debate,” he said.
The President of the Catholic Union of Great Britain, Baroness Hollins, who’s Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry of Learning Disability at City St George’s, University of London, argued that the minimum age ought to be raised as an “enhanced safeguard”. She cited research suggesting that “maturity could also be delayed by antagonistic childhood experiences.”
“It is, due to this fact, reasonable to assume that some young adults with serious illness may carry such developmental vulnerability into their decision-making around the tip of life,” she said.
Last week’s letter referred to “troubling” reports that the Labour Party, while in opposition, had supported changing the law via a Private Member’s Bill. A policy document leaked to The Guardian suggested that laws might be “influenced heavily through the method if we’re lending government support”.
Legalisation of assisted dying was not included within the Labour manifesto before the 2024 General Election, but Sir Keir Starmer did, in December 2023, say that there have been “grounds for changing the law”.
“Traditionally this has all the time been handled through a Private Member’s Bill and a free vote, and that seems appropriate to me,” he said.
A spokesperson for the one in all the sponsors of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, Kim Leadbeater MP, said that the Government had “remained scrupulously neutral” throughout the method, and that policy decisions on the Bill had been made by the Bill’s sponsors: her and Lord Falconer.
