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Lord Moore of Etchingham (Non-Afl)

Speaking in the House of Lords on 23 January 2026

Debate

Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Contribution

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Stevens, who speaks from great experience and professional knowledge, made a very clear case about how the assisted dying navigator is quite outside the normal purposes of the National Health Service. I guess it could be described, in effect, as a form of advocacy. In the ancient world, the dead were carried across the River Styx by Charon. It seems that role would be performed by the navigator, because where is he navigating you to? It is to the River Styx; he is not trying to navigate you to anywhere else. If that is included in the National Health Service, it would create a quite different purpose from the normal purposes, as the noble Lord, Lord Stevens, described. I wonder, therefore, whether we should consider whether this actually amounts to the National Health Service trying to persuade people to accept assisted dying. If it does, and if you think of the vulnerability of the individual cases that so often will occur, could it be argued that it might become an institutionalised form of coercion?

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