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Assisted dying bill: How could the Parliament Act be used? - Parliament Matters podcast, Episode 128

30 Jan 2026
Image © UK Parliament
Image © UK Parliament

As the assisted dying bill grinds through the House of Lords under the weight of more than a thousand amendments, Lord Falconer has signalled that time is running out. With the Bill unlikely to complete its Lords stages this Session, he has openly raised the possibility of using the Parliament Act to override the upper House in the next Session. In this episode we explore what that would mean, how it could work in practice, and the political choices now facing ministers and Parliament.

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The assisted dying bill – properly known as the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill – is facing an extraordinary procedural logjam in the House of Lords. More than 1,170 amendments remain to be debated, organised into 89 groups for debate, yet only 20 of those groups have been reached after seven days in Committee. With just a handful of sitting Fridays left before the end of the Session, Lord Falconer has warned that the Bill is very unlikely to complete its Lords stages in time. In a letter to Peers, he has floated a list of possible compromise amendments but has also, for the first time, strongly indicated that the Parliament Act may need to be invoked to override the opposition of a small group of Peers and secure the Bill’s passage in the next Session.

Although rarely used, and never in relation to a Private Members Bill, the Parliament Act has been deployed before on highly contentious measures, most recently the Hunting Bill in 2004. Using it to force through the assisted dying bill would require intricate choreography in both the Commons and the Lords, as well as major political decisions about whether the government formally takes ownership of the Bill or whether it continues as a Private Member’s Bill. It would also raise difficult questions about how amendments are handled, and how far MPs and ministers are prepared to go to assert the primacy of the elected House in the face of sustained resistance from a small but determined group of Peers.

In this episode, we explore how the Parliament Act works, how it could be used in this case, and the political and constitutional trade-offs involved in relying on it to deliver this legislation.

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Matthew England

Matthew England

Matthew is a Researcher at the Hansard Society whose work focuses on delegated legislation and parliamentary procedure. Matthew has produced several briefings for the Society on the assisted dying bill and the relevant Private Member’s Bill process in the Commons and the Lords, analysing the parliamentary stages that the Bill will need to pass through to become law. Before joining the Hansard Society, Matthew worked in the office of a Member of Parliament, focusing on scrutiny of legislation.

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Transcript

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 series of special podcasts tracking the progress of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, the Bill that will allow assisted dying in England and Wales.

And we're joined for this podcast to trace the latest developments by Matthew England, the Hansard Society's researcher who earlier this week was given this accolade by Robert Peston on ITV. 'Geek of the week'.

So Ruth, let's look at the latest developments.

Lord Falconer has both deployed a carrot and a stick. He's indicated his willingness to accept amendments on certain parts of his Bill, but there's also distinct mutterings about the [00:01:00] possibility of invoking the big stick in the parliamentary process, the Parliament Act, to force through the will of the Commons, even if the unelected House of Lords decides that it doesn't want to pass this Bill.

Ruth Fox: Yes, so Lord Falconer has written to Peers, but he's also launched a bit of a media campaign to basically make the case that we were making a couple of weeks ago, that this Bill, at the pace it's going in Committee in the House of Lords, is not gonna get through the House and it may not even get through Committee Stage by the end of the Session, which is thought to be mid-May or so. Full transcript →

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