Lord Farmer (Con)

My Lords, in giving support to Amendment 22, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, I will also speak to Amendment 30C in my name and hers. These amendments would prevent serving prisoners—those on a hospital order and remanded— and bail defendants accessing legally assisted suicide. This group is about people in vulnerable categories having access to assisted suicide, but it must be said that anyone with a terminal illness is, by virtue of that, in a vulnerable group. I frequently came across that word in relation to female offenders when I was asked by the previous Government to chair a review on how to strengthen their family and other relationships to prevent reoffending and intergenerational crime. Hence, it seemed very important to define it. From the Latin vulnerabilis, it means wounding or being susceptible to physical harm or damage and emotional injury, especially in being easily hurt and subject to attack. We can argue about relative vulnerability, but my now rather extensive experience of visiting men’s and women’s prisons has brought home to me that many male prisoners and men on remand are also highly vulnerable, for similar reasons to women. Without excusing criminality and overstating causality, I know that a very large proportion have had multiple adverse childhood experiences. Three-quarters of boys in the youth estate grew up with only one parent, typically an overworked mother, and one-quarter of adult prisoners spent time in local authority care. I know that adversity can develop a deep seam of resilience in a young person or adult, but research shows that it is far less likely to happen without healthy supportive relationships. This is the very ingredient lacking in the lives of very many of those sitting in our prisons. A conservative estimate is that around half of prisoners do not receive visits from anybody outside. Few of us can imagine the despair that settles in when people enter prison: the inner turmoil and the sense that their life has been ruined. Those on remand can feel stuck in limbo for months, given the severe backlogs in our criminal courts. Sentenced prisoners at least have some certainty. Detention in prison is the punishment, and the state has a duty of care while people are detained, which is why levels of self-inflicted death are of such concern to the Prison Service. The suicide rate for prisoners on remand is approximately 1.8 deaths per 1,000 prisoners, while the rate for sentenced prisoners is less than half of that—approximately 0.8 deaths per 1,000 prisoners. My review team worked out that the cost of the inquiry that followed each suicide was around £2 million in 2017’s money. In 2024, people on remand accounted for about 34% of all self-inflicted deaths in custody, despite being 20% of the population. Noble Lords might ask: what does that have to do with assisted suicide? The duty of care we owe to remand and sentence prisoners should disallow a death sentence being carried out when they are already far more likely to be in the frame of mind that says that they just want to end it all when a terminal illness is diagnosed. We have an ageing prison population, and one that is full of historical sex offenders. That is the compassionate reason. We should be able to promise them excellent palliative care and not play into an understandably exaggerated desire to end it all quickly on their terms—their last act of control in a life that has spiralled out of control. But there is a more hard-edged reason: compassion to victims. We do not want sentenced prisoners or people remanded in custody while awaiting trial to have access to assisted suicide to avoid justice. Jeffrey Epstein was officially ruled to have died by suicide in his cell while awaiting trial. There is also the famous case of Goering after the Nuremberg trials. Conspiracies abound, but the principle remains that, if terminally ill adults know they can be assisted with their suicide, this implies a possible moral hazard if the cost of committing a crime is dramatically lowered.