Assisted Dying Bill for Terminally Ill Adults Advances in House of Lords
The terminally ill adults (end of life) bill, which seeks to legalize assisted dying for terminally ill adults with less than six months to live in England and Wales, has successfully passed through the House of Commons and is currently under scrutiny in the House of Lords.
The bill is at the committee stage in the Lords, where amendments are debated group by group. This process is slower than in the Commons due to the limited number of sitting days and the obligation for peers to debate each amendment set without a selection system like that of the Commons speaker. As a result, progress can be prolonged.
Peers have tabled more than 1,100 amendments from both supporters and opponents of the bill. Some are regarded as attempts to waste time, such as proposals involving mandatory pregnancy tests for patients.
One of the main risks now is not an outright defeat of the bill but rather significant delays. There is no fixed timetable for the committee stage in the Lords, prolonging the legislative process.
Constitutional questions have arisen during the debates: the Salisbury convention, which discourages the Lords from blocking government bills with broad support, does not apply to private member’s bills like this one. While many discuss whether the Lords should block a widely supported bill, there is no binding requirement for them to pass it.
To speed the scrutiny, the government chief whip in the Lords, Roy Kennedy, has arranged additional sitting days. Despite this, a vote on the third reading of the bill in the Lords remains unlikely in the near future.
If the bill’s progress is delayed excessively, supporters might invoke the Parliament Act as a last resort to carry the bill into the next session. This is considered a nuclear option for a private member’s bill and would require either government adoption or reintroduction by another member of parliament.
