Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)

It is Committee; the noble Baroness can come in later. As I say, the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, will be able to speak to Amendment 459 afterwards. One consideration has to be that the person has informed their children of their decision for an assisted death. I cannot be the only person who knows people for whom there is completely no relationship between parent and child. The child could be aged 60 and have been living abroad for years. They might not know their parent is ill and may not have been in touch with them for 40 years. But somehow we are going to have to try to track down children. Also, the ill person may not want their child to know that they are ill. We are all old enough now; we have had lots of friends go through this. I had a friend who did not want his daughter to know he was terminally ill because she was facing her own health issues at that time. But this would somehow lay down that despite the desire of a father, in that case, nevertheless that child has to be found and told that their parent not only wants an assisted death but that their parent is dying and wants an assisted death. I really wonder about this denial of agency. If that person does not want to tell their child, according to Amendment 459, they have to make “adequate arrangements for another person to inform the children”— who might live abroad, or whatever— “of the assisted death and provide bereavement support”. I just wonder what world we are living in where, when someone is reaching the end of their life, some agency of the state demands that they tell them whether they have any children, whether they know that those children are still alive and where they are, and has to tell that child that their parent is ill and that—in a way, a smaller matter—they want to bring forward that death a little bit so that it is not too bad at the end. Some of these ideas seem to me to exclude from our consideration the patient concerned. They seem to put everyone else in a position of taking decisions. The noble Baroness, Lady Cass, spoke earlier about the amendment that wants more and more specialist advisers brought in. Can we just sometimes revert to remembering that we are talking about seriously, terminally ill people who surely have some agency over their life? If they are refused this, they can still commit suicide but they will probably do it, as a friend’s father did, by going into the garage, blocking the bottom of the door so that no air can get through, turning the engine on and killing themselves that way. I wonder sometimes whether we are remembering that people are facing a terrible end and we just ought to have a little respect for them.