Hansard Society

• Assisted dying - The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill: Rolling news

• Delegated powers in the assisted dying bill: Issues for the attention of the House of Lords, August 2025

• The assisted dying bill: A guide to the legislative process in the House of Lords, September 2025

• Assisted dying bill: How does Committee Stage work in the House of Lords? November 2025

House of Lords

• Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee report on the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, September 2025

• Constitution Committee report on the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, September 2025

• Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill Select Committee report and oral and written evidence, November 2025

Please note, this transcript is automatically generated. There may consequently be minor errors and the text is not formatted according to our style guide. If you wish to reference or cite the transcript copy below, please first check against the audio version above. Intro: [00:00:00] You are listening to Parliament Matters, a Hansard Society production supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Learn more at hansardsociety.org.uk/pm.

Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, Parliament itself. I'm Ruth Fox.

Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark D'Arcy. And welcome to the latest in our special series of podcasts, tracing the progress of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, the Bill that would legalise assisted dying in England and Wales.

Ruth Fox: And this week we're in the rather magnificent law offices of Gibson Dunn in Temple in London, overlooking the Thames, and we're joined by Lord Falconer, the former Lord Chancellor, Labour Peer and longtime advocate of assisted dying, but he's the co-sponsor now with Kim Leadbeater, of the assisted dying Bill.

It's arrived in the Lords and he'll be taking it through its next stages. So Mark and I are here with Lord Falconer. Welcome to the podcast.

Lord Falconer of Thoroton: Thank you very [00:01:00] much. I'm very glad to be here and I'm very glad you are here.

Ruth Fox: So, we just want to explore where we are with the Bill and what happens next.

Mark D'Arcy: But my first thought is, this is, I don't know, your third, fourth, fifth attempt to get an assisted dying Bill through the House of Lords. Why is this an issue that matters so much to you? Because there's obviously personal conviction behind this.

Lord Falconer of Thoroton: I have personal conviction behind it from my own experience, but also the more you go into the issue, the more you discover how incredibly unfit for purpose the current law is. So the law at the moment makes it a crime to assist anybody to commit suicide. That means, for example, if you want to accompany somebody you love to Switzerland, where it's lawful, buying the tickets to take them to Switzerland, knowing that their purpose is to take their own life at Dignitas, that's a crime which has a maximum [00:02:00] punishment of 14 years. The Director of Public Prosecutions has indicated over years that he won't prosecute people if they're motivated by compassion, but he's absolutely clear that if, for example, you're a medically qualified person and you helped somebody you love to die, then he would prosecute you because it's only amateur assistance that he's prepared to authorise so you have a completely guarded system, effectively only available to people who've got the energy, the wherewithal, and the money to go abroad. Or as so very often happens, people who are willing to take their own life without any assistance so that they don't involve their relatives.

Stuart Broad, the well-known cricketer's father, Chris Broad, who was himself a famous cricketer and an umpire, his wife was ill, she hoarded pills, she took the [00:03:00] pills and the first that her husband knew it was happening was an email from her saying she'd done it. She was absolutely determined that he should not in any way be implicated. Because the number of people who've spoken to me and said, it's not just that I lost my loved one, but when I came back from Switzerland, I was then investigated by the police. It took months. The police were incredibly sympathetic. But the burden over my head of having a police investigation going on was terrible and the law needs to change.

Mark D'Arcy: And you talked about your personal experience in this. Is this a relative, a close friend?

Lord Falconer of Thoroton: Do you mind if I don't talk about that?

Mark D'Arcy: I understand, it's not always an easy thing to talk about. I'm sure you've encountered so many people during the course of this who've wanted to make the case for assisted dying because of their own circumstances, but you've also encountered, as you become the proponent of this, lots of people who are instinctively and in principle very, very opposed to it. Full transcript →