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Lord Falconer of Thoroton (Lab)

Speaking in the House of Lords on 9 January 2026

Debate

Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Contribution

May just continue? I will come back to the noble Baroness in a moment. This is very important—it is the critical bit of the whole thing. There was a lot of evidence given to the Commons Committee in which this very issue was discussed. Sarah Cox, an expert, gave evidence. She said: “The other thing that concerns me is that we are putting all these assessments on the shoulders of two doctors individually, followed up by a High Court judge. In any other clinical practice, when we are making very serious decisions, we know that shared decisions are much better quality, much more robust and much safer. In clinical practice, we make all these decisions in multi-professional teams. I would never make these decisions independently of my team, because the perspective they bring can help me to understand things that I am not seeing”.”.—[Official Report, Commons, Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill Committee, 28/1/25; col. 74.] Judges are marvellous, but a number of pairs of eyes in relation to this is better. A huge number of questions were asked as to why the sponsor in the Commons and I—

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