This is Prospect’s rolling coverage of the assisted dying debate. This page will be updated with the latest from our correspondent, Mark Mardell. Read the rest of our coverage here
30th May
At the end of last week, I realised I had grown over familiar with and probably too dismissive of the arguments against assisted dying. Quite fortuitously, I had arranged interviews with two people who have huge doubts about the bill. The second is Professor Katherine Sleeman, who is the Laing Galazka chair in palliative care at King’s College London and honorary consultant in palliative medicine at King’s College hospital.
She recently argued the bill “has presented a warped view of death and dying. Listening to the second reading debate, you would be forgiven for thinking that most deaths involve great suffering. This is not the case.” So I began by asking her what her core position was.
Katherine Sleeman: I don't have an in-principle objection to assisted dying. Probably the most straightforward way of explaining that is: I would have it myself. I don’t think it is wrong in principle to do this act.
But my experience as a clinician—an NHS doctor for 25 years, a palliative care consultant for 10, working in a very busy hospital in a part of London that is socioeconomically deprived and ethnically diverse—tells me there are people at risk of being harmed by this legislation.
So while I don’t have an in-principle objection to assisted dying itself—to people ingesting lethal substances with the aim of killing themselves—what I do object to is a lack of... not awareness exactly, but honesty. We need to be very upfront as a society that this will come with risks.
And at its most grave, what those risks mean is that some people will end up having an assisted death who didn’t really want it. There will be a risk of wrongful deaths. Whichever safeguards we have, they can’t be 100 per cent safe.
Mark Mardell: No safeguards ever are.
KS: Exactly. So let’s be upfront about that: it won’t be 100 per cent safe. People will slip through the net. What that means, just to be very clear, is that people will have wrongful deaths.
Now, it may be that as a society we say, “Well, actually, we think the benefits of this legislation are so great for so many people that we’re willing to accept that some people will slip through the net.” Perhaps we look at numbers and say, “If it were a one in 100 ratio, we would be happy with that.” But that societal conversation has not happened.
And the people pushing this bill through parliament are indicating that we’ve got a perfect set of safeguards and that it will be 100 per cent safe. That’s just not honest, in my view. So if we want to make this momentous change for society—and it is momentous—fine, let’s do it. But let’s do it properly and have a proper societal conversation about what it really means.
There will be wrongful deaths. And almost certainly, it will be people at the margins of society who will suffer. It won’t be—in general—people who are educated, who’ve had control throughout their lives, and want to have control in their deaths. People who are able to stand up and express their wishes without any external influence.
It will be the people I see in clinical practice who are already subject to external influence in almost everything they do.
MM: Yes, that worries me too. Although I’m in favour of the bill, it does worry me that disabled groups are so strongly, or so apparently strongly, against it. But also what worries me is listening to some MPs… they don’t seem to… well, they obviously do realise… but we’re talking about people with six months to live, aren’t we?
KS: I find that argument very difficult—“we’re talking about people with six months to live”—as though it doesn’t matter if they slip through the net.
MM: Well, not that, but—
KS: But that is what you’ve just said.
MM: Yes, but they’ve got six months to live, so they’re not going to have a happy life at the end of it—
KS: I find that extraordinary. You’re basically saying someone who happens to be in their last six months of life, their life is worth less than someone in their last nine months or 12 months. That is an extraordinary thing to say.
MM: I think it’s an extraordinary thing to say that people need to be protected from themselves. The way some MPs talk—as though people are naughty children trying to sneak into something.
KS: What do you mean?
MM: Well, the suggestion that people might starve themselves, stop insulin, just to qualify.
KS: That will happen, right?
MM: Possibly. What bothers me is preventing people from doing what they want to do. That argument isn’t very compelling to me.
KS: No, I don’t find that compelling either. It’s not the strongest reason not to do this.
The societal conversation I would like us to have—if we were truly serious about this massive change—is: how many wrongful deaths are we willing to accept? What margin of error is reasonable?
And if someone on the pro side stood up and said, “We think we’d be happy with this margin,” then at least that’s the start of an honest conversation.
MM: Give me an example.
KC: So, coercion. We know coercion isn’t always external. In clinical practice, people often say: “I don’t want to go to a care home, but it’ll be easier for my daughter, so I think I will.” That doesn’t usually worry us—because going to a care home is reversible.
But assisted dying is not. Imagine that same patient says: “I don’t want an assisted death, but it’ll be easier for my daughter, so I think I will.” That’s troubling. That’s not why society is changing the law.
MM: But it’s difficult to legislate for what people think about themselves.
KS: Absolutely. And we can’t always identify coercive control. The courts can’t. And coercive control often worsens at the end of life. We know dying people can be told, “You’re not dying fast enough.”
MM: Supporters of the bill would say that’s happening now. This bill would put safeguards in place.
KS: I hear that all the time. And I think it’s a nonsense argument.
This bill won’t stop people being coerced into going to Dignitas. It simply provides an alternative route. If coercion is picked up, and the doctor blocks it under this bill, the coercer can still take them to Dignitas. So it doesn’t make things safer.
MM: But there are no safeguards now.
KS: But this bill doesn’t fix that. It just opens another path for coercion.
MM: So how can we ever make it safe, unless we have a perfect society?
KS: Exactly. I’m not against this in principle—I would have it myself. But I am against legislating based on half-truths, hyperbole and spin.
We need to go back to the public and say: we know we can’t make this watertight. Are you still in favour under these conditions?
In fact, we did a poll last year. About 63 per cent said they supported assisted dying. But when we asked: “What if someone is pressured into it?”—around 50 per cent changed their mind. “What if someone chose it because they couldn’t get the care they needed?”—close to 50 per cent switched [to ‘against’].
So public support is fragile. It depends on watertight safeguards. And I don’t think the people pushing this bill are willing to seriously consider how safe those safeguards are.
MM: So how would you answer your own question? Is there a tolerable number of wrongful deaths?
KS: That’s a question for society, not me. But it’s a question we’ve not yet asked.
MM: Do you think that’s a failure of government?
KS: I’m not a legislative expert, but I’ve watched more Parliament TV than ever before. I’ve been shocked by what I’ve seen—the oral evidence sessions, who was invited and who wasn’t, the deliberations.
Let me give an example: Rachael Maskell put forward an amendment that said everyone requesting an assisted death should have a palliative care assessment. Just an assessment. As a palliative care doctor and academic, I know that good palliative care can reduce the wish to die.
People who say they want to die often later say they want to live. If we skip that assessment, people may die who otherwise wouldn’t. That’s a wrongful death. And yet, the amendment was rejected.
MM: If the bill does go through, what will it mean for palliative care and the NHS?
KS: It’s a massive question. Many in palliative care don’t agree with assisted dying. I’ve spoken to lots of professionals who say: “If this comes in, I’m leaving the NHS.”
One hospice consultant told me every single consultant there would resign if their hospice offered assisted dying.
So we may face workforce issues. And the rejected amendment about allowing hospices and care homes to opt out—very concerning.
Patients already mistrust us. They think palliative care means killing them. We’ve polled this: one in 20 people think palliative care means giving you drugs to end your life. Among minoritised ethnic groups, it’s one in five. That’s my clinical practice. I see it every day.
Introducing assisted dying into an already fragile system will erode trust. Some groups may withdraw further from healthcare, fearing we’re there to kill them.
This law won’t just affect people who want assisted dying. It’ll affect everyone approaching the end of life. The ordinary people who never wanted this—they’re the ones who may suffer most.
MM: What will you do if it goes ahead? Campaign against it? Work with it?
KS: I haven’t decided. I might even become involved in the assisted dying process. It worries me if the only practitioners are those who are strongly pro.
You need people like me—open-minded, not opposed in principle, but who want to ensure gold-standard palliative care alongside it.
Hospice UK estimates that every year over 100,000 people die needing palliative care and not receiving it. That’s close to 300 people a day dying with unnecessary pain, breathlessness, distress.
If we legalise assisted dying without improving palliative care, people will opt for it simply because they can’t get the care they need. And that is not choice.
29th May
I wrote earlier in the week that I was growing increasingly annoyed by the arguments of many opponents of the bill, and so was getting hot under the collar and rather dismissive of their case. I decided to engage more directly with people on the other side of the debate, so I arranged an interview with Rachael Maskell.
Maskell has long been an opponent of assisted dying, and told me at the time that she was disappointed that she apparently wasn’t considered by Kim Leadbeater to be on the bill committee. She is a strong supporter of the group Care Not Killing and was the prime mover behind the palliative care commission.
The MP for York Central is a committed Christian, but argues the strength of feeling on the issue come from her experience in clinical practice and her long career in the NHS. She worked as a care worker and physiotherapist in the National Health Service for 20 years in Norwich and the London Borough of Barnet, and worked as a senior physiotherapist in ITU and acute medicine and as the Head of Health at Unite.
I first asked her why she opposed this bill, rather than assisted dying more generally.
Rachael Maskell: I think, from my perspective, if we are making very significant clinical decisions, we’ve got to listen to those clinical leads, and I don’t think that’s happening now.
And when you heard the President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the Royal College of Physicians—I mean, they say this bill is unsafe. Parliament must really hear those voices, because ultimately, as was said in committee, we could end up having a very significant inquiry into people dying unnecessarily because they didn’t have the right interventions at the right point.
Complex decisions need to be made as part of multidisciplinary teams—that needs to come to the front of the bill. And the bill doesn’t provide for that. So you’re not only not safeguarding the patient, you’re also not providing a proper integrated plan for that patient, which we’ve deemed normal in healthcare.
The deficits in the bill now are really starting to show. And there, of course, we didn’t even get to hear some of the amendments. We only voted on one amendment and an amendment to the amendment. And that was from the mover of the bill, who put down a whole volume of amendments at the very last minute before the report stage. So the whole thing is a complete mess.
I think Kim Leadbeater would be wise to withdraw her bill at this point, to save herself from the embarrassment about the way this very undignified procedure is going forward, and to make sure we have proper consideration before this matter is brought back.
Mark Mardell: Just for now I wanted to pick up on the procedural mess rather than the policy points, which are obviously more important really—but the procedural mess, whose fault is that? It’s the government’s fault, isn’t it?
RM: Oh no, it’s parliamentary procedure ultimately. It’s not designed for this type of private member’s bill. Normally it’s a few clauses, trying to tweak something—not a major policy decision. And the only time it can be compared is when David Steel brought forward the Abortion Act, but then he had two years of proper consultation and deliberation before he did that.
We’ve had the bill for 17 days. I mean, it’s just not been done in the correct way—which is Kim’s responsibility. I’ve never seen her engage on this issue prior to having the bill.
But parliamentary procedure hasn’t worked in committee, and it certainly isn’t working now at report. They often say report stage is where you can really see how poor the process is, and I think that’s certainly what we’ve witnessed.
We’ve got another similar day on 13th June and then expected third reading on possibly 20th June, although it’s not quite clear at this point where we get to.
MM: You’d obviously like to see the bill gone and finished. But would you support the idea of bringing it back in a more coherent way?
RM: I personally believe, from the work that I’ve done as part of a palliative care commission which I established, that the alternatives are very clear to see. What I want people to do is really engage with what palliative care is, not what they think it is—which is what our research shows.
People have this ideal of what palliative care is, but they need to understand what it can actually do for individuals. And I think if people went down that path—and we are recommending significant changes to the whole delivery of palliative care, and have spoken with the minister over that as well—it will actually demonstrate that good care is available in the health service.
I think a lot of what people have experienced over the last few years is incredibly poor care, and that’s certainly what’s been articulated in the debate. People shouldn’t be experiencing the stories of pain which we’ve heard—because there are other interventions, other than opioids, which can address pain, and often those provisions are just not there for people to access. So we really do need to up our game considerably.
What the research actually shows is that palliative care in our country has declined over the last decade, rather than improved. That means people are getting a worse experience today than they were previously. So it really is important that we improve both the access to and the availability of specialist interventions.
MM: And few people would disagree that palliative care needs to be improved, like so many aspects of the NHS. But isn’t it cruel to deny people the chance of assisted dying just because palliative care is being used as a sort of stick to beat the government with?
RM: What would be cruel is if people died unnecessarily. And I think Dr Lade Smith said it very clearly—that after a terminal diagnosis, people often experience a depressive disorder, which is treatable. And then, once it’s treated, they no longer have a desire to die. That would be cruel. And yet the bill could facilitate that.
So I think what we’ve got to ensure is that people aren’t coerced, people have proper capacity assessments—this isn’t within the concept of the bill we’re talking about. And we need a better understanding around prognostication, which only has a 46 per cent accuracy rate [for terminally ill cancer patients]. So the bill is not safe in itself. And therefore that’s what’s cruel—if somebody dies where they could have been treated.
MM: I mean, what struck me listening to a lot of people on your side is that they were trying to put so many conditions around the bill that were just intended to stop people taking advantage of it if it ever became law. I mean, it just seems to me that sometimes people are losing sight of the fact you’re talking about terminally ill people—not somebody getting some wonderful advantage out of life, sneaking in the back door pretending that they’re dying. It seems absurd to think someone would starve themselves to death so that they could get assisted dying. They can jump in front of a train, frankly, if they want to kill themselves.
RM: Well, I mean, when they’re talking about terminal malnutrition, which is what we are hearing from eating disorder patients, then clearly proper intervention should be made—and that shouldn’t be occurring. It does relate back to poor care.
But what I would say is that we know across the board that people may live longer than set out in the bill. For instance, we know Esther Rantzen said she didn’t think she’d see Christmas two Christmases ago—she’s seen last Christmas as well. That prognostication point has been made very thoroughly.
Actually, palliative care is about helping people to live, not helping people to die. We’ve got to understand that people can have enrichment at the end of life, and that’s really important. It’s important for families, too. And we know from the evidence taken from other countries that the impact on trauma and grief as a result of assisted death can be very significant for those people left behind. We’ve got to look at that issue in more detail as well.
I think often there is an idealised concept of assisted dying. But I’ve been researching around the application of different preparations of drugs. What you find is that individuals can develop pulmonary oedema, which can be incredibly distressing—but they won’t be able to communicate that. So that peaceable death may not be realised. And that’s certainly what the evidence is pointing to.
I do believe, as a clinician, that everything you do in healthcare has to be evidence-based. And I do believe if we’re legislating on a matter of healthcare, that too needs to be evidence-based. Therefore, I won’t draw back from the rigour in which I’ve practised in the NHS for over 20 years.
MM: I mean, the evidence is mixed, of course, I know, but I have spoken to palliative care doctors who say some people do reach a condition where the drugs just won’t treat the pain.
RM: Well, if it’s not drugs, you can have neuromodulation, you can have positive therapy, you can have cordectomy and nerve block. I mean, there are other options out there. But the tragedy is that often these interventions are not offered to patients—not even considered, apart from by those absolute specialists who can make that provision. It will take a neurosurgeon or anaesthetist to be able to apply them.
So there are options available—they just aren’t commonly used.
MM: And why is that?
RM: Well, I think we can see across the whole health service, it’s poorly commissioned. You’ve got different parts of the service commissioned in different ways. Other parts of the service aren’t properly commissioned at all. In fact, they’re run by charities and from fundraising. I mean, it is a dog’s breakfast out there.
That’s why we’ve got to ensure that there is proper coordinated commissioning, which just hasn’t happened across the service. And that’s why we see such a postcode lottery, which is just not right.
MM: Another thing that surprised me—and I’m sure you won’t share my view on this—but what did you make of the fuss about Esther Rantzen’s letter?
RM: Well, I found [the letter] really distasteful. And I think what was most surprising is that Esther’s address on it was from Dignity in Dying. So, you know, it’s just like—it kind of blew her cover in that sense.
But I personally think that everybody comes to a debate with a worldview, based on their experience. It may be their faith, it may be their background, it may be all sorts of things. So to say that people have got to declare—one of the things my colleagues have been saying is that they now feel less secure about having a faith and being able to debate in that context.
So I think it was really distasteful, and in fact discriminatory. And we’ve had this constantly from other people like Charlie Falconer raising this issue. And quite frankly, people come to their conclusions with faith or no faith.
I’m Christian, but I look at this whole debate through the perspective and the training I’ve had as a clinician—to use my brain to interpret what’s happening. And I’ve been looking at it very much from my clinical perspective.
MM: I haven’t seen the letter, because it’s not in the public domain. But I’ve seen the main quote, and it seems to me that she’s not saying you can’t have a faith, or shouldn’t be driven by your faith. She’s saying that if your views are hidden and moreover if you wouldn’t change your mind… I mean, could you see yourself changing your mind?
RM: Well, I can’t change my mind, because the evidence isn’t changing. That’s what I’m drawing on. I’m using my analytical brain, and I’m using it on this important matter.
What she did not acknowledge is that everybody comes to a debate with a perspective. And the saddest thing I’ve found throughout this whole debate is that many people are depending on stories, on experience, on general feeling about how they’re voting—rather than engaging with the evidence.
If all my colleagues engaged with the evidence, I think we might see a different outcome to this bill. So that’s what I want people to do—to go on facts, not on where they think things are.
MM: But isn’t much of parliament like that?
RM: Sure, but we shouldn’t be legislating in that way on healthcare.
MM: Isn’t there a difference between someone who raises objections—and believes them, of course—but who fundamentally could never change their mind? I mean, take something smaller than the evidence base—say, the objection to a doctor raising it first, as I think you do. So if they’re making a big point about that, putting an amendment down—shouldn’t they be able to say: even if you change this, I wouldn’t support this bill?
RM: I think what we’re seeing throughout the bill is how flawed it is. There are so many elements which are unsafe, as demonstrated by different professional bodies highlighting the risks within the legislation. So, of course I’m going to say this, but it’s completely unsafe and should not pass through parliament.
And if parliament does its job properly, then we wouldn’t be legislating on things which will put people at risk. Whether it’s this issue or, currently, the wider debate around removing the Personal Independence Payment—knowing that’s going to put people at risk—I stand firm on the evidence that we should not be legislating where it puts lives at risk unnecessarily.
That’s the principle I apply in healthcare, and the principle I apply in politics: our duty is to safeguard the public. And the bill fails to do that. So of course, I won’t support the bill.
MM: What about people who do have a fundamental Christian or other religious opposition? Should they say that?
RM: To be honest, people can say that or not. That’s up to them to disclose. I think one person during the debate did state their religious affiliation. But I mean, in other debates, do people talk about how they came to the view that somebody should live or die? I personally think many things formulate one’s view, and to pick out a protected characteristic as a mechanism—I just think it’s prejudicial.
MM: I was just trying to think of an example of something I fundamentally believe. I was thinking—say, slavery—I believe it’s absolutely wrong. If I were to make an argument in parliament in the 19th century, saying it was damaging the cotton trade, or people would work harder if they weren’t slaves, that would be a bit dishonest if I was just against the principle, wouldn’t it?
RM: Well, but there’s a reason why you think slavery is wrong. In the same way, there’s a reason why I think assisted dying is wrong—that it puts people at risk. That is the perspective I’m coming from, and because of the evidence pointing towards that—whether people have a psychiatric disorder, whether they’re coerced, whether it’s intrinsic coercion—then that’s the framing by which I’ve determined this is an unsafe process.
I’ve been very honest about that. I’ve set out the stall as to how I’ve come to my determination of this piece of legislation.
MM: What do you think will happen to the bill?
RM: I don’t know, to be honest. The bill’s still got a way to run. It’s not even touched the House of Lords yet. We’re not even complete at the report stage. So I’ll continue to be focused—as I’m sure colleagues will—as we move into the next stage on 13th June.
MM: Do you think you’ve got enough votes to defeat it at third reading?
RM: I’m not involved in that aspect of the campaign, tracking the numbers. I’ve been very much focused on the policy and evidence space behind the different clauses of the bill. So that’s what I’m focusing on now.
27th May
I give a hollow laugh when friends hear about my tracking the twists and turns of the assisted dying debate and they say, “But I thought they voted for that ages ago.” It is a reminder that most people neither follow debates in detail nor understand how much time it takes to make a law. The bill will be back in the House of Commons on Friday 13th June and then again on the following Friday 20th. Before we get to the next big day I wanted to be clearer in my mind about several things, not least the oft-repeated charge that the bill hasn’t been given enough time for proper scrutiny.
This time last week my head was still spinning as I tried to understand what on earth had happened in the report stage of Kim Leadbeater’s bill. Why were there only two votes when there were so many amendments? Why was the debate cut short and what happens next? I know many MPs were equally bewildered. So it was some solace to talk to Dr Ruth Fox of the Hansard Society and find there were moments when she couldn’t quite work out what was happening either. If the expert’s expert on parliamentary procedure was blindsided, even for a few minutes, what hope for the rest of us? But she also described the claims that the bill was getting less scrutiny than government legislation as “rubbish”. Instead, she suggested the whole experience should lead to a rethink about the way we make laws in this country.
So, I asked, did that mean it should change the way we do major social legislation?
She replied: “I hope it changes the way we do legislation, full stop.
“Many of the frustrations we’ve seen here apply to government bills too. We need a better process not just for complex conscience issues, but for all sorts of policy—security, immigration, finance, criminal justice, planning.
“What this process has done is shine a light on the inadequacies of the legislative process more broadly. Everyone talks about Royal Commissions, but I can’t think of anything worse. If you want to kill an issue, send it to a Royal Commission—full of technocrats, and you’ll get a beautifully designed, perfectly formed technocratic solution. But the real problem is political.”
Fox argued that tricky areas of legislation need more initial agreement on the range of possibilities. This bill shouldn’t have been started, she believes, without more groundwork to build some sense of consensus.
“What would have helped,” she said, “is a process that presents MPs with a choice—not just ‘Do you like A, yes or no?’ but ‘Which of these competing models do you prefer?’ Something like a parliamentary commission of inquiry—to do that synthesis, to lay out the real policy options, and then put those options to MPs through a series of indicative votes. Force a choice.
“Once you’ve got a sense of where consensus lies, you can then think about how to operationalise it—and that could be handed to the government and civil service, with a commitment to bring a bill forward on that basis. Still with a free vote.
“I think that would have been a better way to do it.”
There are some suggestions that Keir Starmer is getting cold feet about the political dangers of this bill, even to the extent of being “busy” on the day of the big vote, and that some in Downing Street might be happy if it didn’t pass. It’s speculation and not something I’ve heard directly. But it is thought that he didn’t understand the implications of his promise to Esther Rantzen and what he was asking Leadbeater to do.
“I don’t think the prime minister really appreciated the technicalities and complexities of the private member’s bill procedure, and how different it is from how government bills are handled,” Fox told me. “Because these are not programmed. That creates its own challenges. And expecting new MPs to navigate this—when for many of them it’s the first bill they’ve really engaged with—not just the legal text but also the procedure, is just a huge challenge.”
Fox believes that if the bill gets through, while it may be legally workable, because it is a private member’s bill it may not be the assisted dying legislation most MPs might have actually chosen.
“MPs vote on whether to accept [Leadbeater’s] model. They don’t get the chance to put forward an alternative model. You can tweak the details, adjust safeguards, but the big, principled debate about what form assisted dying should take—six months? 12 months? Unbearable suffering? Terminal illness only?—that’s not really on offer in the legislative text.”
This is a really important point. Even the bill’s title restricts valid changes, for instance to suggest assisted dying should be available to people who are in terrible pain but don’t have a terminal illness.
So now a big question. When people criticise the process and compare it to a government bill—saying it wasn’t given the same amount of time or scrutiny—is that true?
“No, I think that’s rubbish,” Fox said. She noted that the bill’s report stage took about five hours last week—double the time given to the border security bill the week before.
She also noted comparisons to the Hunting Act. “The hunting bill was put through twice, because of the Parliament Act. But even if you total both bills, the hours in the Commons were 109. The assisted dying bill, at the minute, is on 97 hours—and it hasn’t finished report stage or had third reading yet.”
“There was a criticism that the bill was pushed through quickly, or that it was published only shortly before second reading,” she added. “That’s also not accurate. It was presented earlier than many government bills are presented to the House of Commons before second reading—and it’s a much shorter bill.”
I mentioned that it seems to me that Leadbeater has done a really extraordinary job despite being hamstrung.
Fox agreed. “She’s done several important things. One: she got public evidence for a private member’s bill—that’s never been done before. It wasn’t done on the [1967] Abortion Act… In those days, there was no TV coverage of parliament, no internet, no social media. The behaviour of MPs during the passage of the abortion bill—the way it was handled—was, frankly, disgraceful.”
Fox believes Leadbeater made a tactical error at the committee stage, by seeming to take control of the witness list and how time was divided up—unlike the procedure for a government bill, where time and witnesses are usually divided equally between government and opposition. “She would have been better off doing that, because she wouldn’t have opened herself up to the criticism that she’d weighted the committee in her favour.” (It’s worth noting, however, that in this case the “opposition” isn’t a united group—so dividing the time and witnesses between them would have been another challenge.)
Perhaps it was the lack of direction from the whips that made the session on Friday 16th May so hard to follow. Some at Westminster feel the speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, doesn’t do a great job of explaining the “where’s and what fors” of the debate. For a detailed overview I recommend Fox’s piece for the Hansard Society. But here is her answer to the specific question: what happened at the end of the debate?
“They were approaching the deadline of 2.30pm—the moment of interruption. The problem is, if any business is taken after that 2.30 point, it can only proceed if there are no objections.
“There was the faintest of ‘no’s heard in the chamber—it sounded like one female voice. I don't know who it was. The speaker initially didn’t hear it, but the clerks did and said to him, ‘Oh, there’s been an objection.’ So, as a consequence, they couldn’t proceed to a vote on that question of whether a new clause 10 should be added to the bill. Business was wrapped up.”
This will mean that on the second day of the report stage, MPs will need to first vote on clause 10—which chiefly ensures no one is obliged to help with assisted dying—and then possibly also vote on two more clauses before they begin debating.
This underscores how complex it all gets. So I asked, what do you say to people who say it’s such a mess it’s going to collapse?
“Well… I don’t think it will be a mess in the sense that the government won’t allow it to be. The lawyers will intervene if nobody else does. The government would not accept a bill that was legally unworkable. It will be technically workable, if it gets Royal Assent.
“That’s different from saying it’s a good policy. You might think the provisions or safeguards aren’t strong enough. But based on committee and report stage, there’s not much evidence of opponents having the numbers.
“What I took from report stage—and why a lot of MPs were getting overwrought—wasn’t just that they were finding it technically difficult, or struggling with speech limits, but that once those votes started going through the numbers held up pretty well for Leadbeater’s side. There wasn’t much slippage.”
Fox believes the bill will get through the Commons, even if more voters switch. “It will be interesting to see what people make of the process once it goes to the House of Lords.
“If the Lords pay as much attention to this bill as the Commons has—and I think they will — we’ll see a different kind of scrutiny. It’s less partisan. Whipping is lighter. They spend more time, and they have genuine expertise across a wide range of areas.
“They will engage carefully with the legal text—they’ll get into the detail, especially around delegated powers. This bill is almost a framework bill: it gives huge powers to ministers and officials, like the Chief Medical Officer, to determine how things are implemented later. It’s hard to predict how delivery will work.
“The Lords will get into that. There’s a delegated powers committee and a constitution committee. Both will report on the bill.
“You’ll probably see some amendments that were rejected in the Commons being picked up again in the Lords. And that might be where the final version of the bill—the one that does or doesn’t get Royal Assent—really takes shape.”
This is rare praise for the Lords way of business. But we’ve got a long way to go before we get to that stage.
