On 12 September 2025, Bishop Helen-Ann spoke during the Second Reading of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill. Read the full speech (below) or watch (above).
My Lords, this is not the first country in which I have lived and worked during such a debate as we are having today. I was a bishop in New Zealand ahead of their referendum on a similar Bill five years ago. I witnessed the arguments, heard the reassurances, and have since followed its implementation – including the pressures on healthcare professionals and unforeseen consequences from a lack of clarity around process.
Only recently, New Zealand published its five-year review of the Act, highlighting significant practical challenges, concluding that the Review Committee is ineffective as an oversight body, and recommending reforms. Five years on from passing a Bill much like the one before us, it would be irresponsible not to take its findings seriously.
Most strikingly, the report highlights confused principles for the service and even recommends that the New Zealand government estabish specific principles to underpin the Act. This is no small matter – to be five years into providing the service without clarity of the principles on which it was built. For legislation where the consequences of poor drafting are so high, it is alarming that such principles were not defined from the outset.
And yet, almost a year into the passage of this Private Member’s Bill, we are still discussing core concepts without sufficient detail on how a state-sponsored suicide service would be implemented. That should trouble us all. My Lords, in that regard I will support the amendment put forward by Baroness Berger to enable at least more scrutiny by professional bodies.
Whilst such uncertainty remains about how the Bill would operate alongside our most important end of life care institutions, we should not legislate at this speed or in this way. Our first responsibility must be to ensure palliative, and end-of-life care is accessible and effective for all. Last week, I visited a hospice in Newcastle. I saw and heard at first hand how an affirmation of life and dignity matters for all of us. Proponents of this Bill say it is about choice yet I cannot see how this is true when the Bill is both unsafe and unworkable in its current form.
Within the Judaeo-Christian tradition the idea of being human begins with God, as my noble friend the Rt Revd Prelate the Bishop of Southwark has asserted, the sense of transcendence which informs personhood. Our obsession with selfhood and individual choice belies our dignity and respect for others. In being human, we begin not so much with selfhood but with the idea of the other and of who we are in the realisation of community and society. My Lords, surely the moral imperative is to help people live. I recall the words of my bishop growing up in the northeast, David Jenkins, words now written on his tomb: ‘God is as he is in Jesus, so there is hope.’ It is this that deepens and enriches my vision of life and faith, a vision of hope in humanity, shared with those of other faiths and none and which are inextricably bound together. I cannot support this Bill and urge other noble Lords to resist it too.