• Hansard Society (17 June 2026), Must MPs choose between improving the assisted dying bill and using the Parliament Act?

• Hansard Society (7 May 2026), The assisted dying bill: How could the Parliament Act be used?

• Hansard Society (20 November 2025), The assisted dying bill: Is the number of Lords amendments a parliamentary record?

• Hansard Society (29 August 2025), Delegated powers in the assisted dying bill: Issues for the attention of the House of Lords

• Statute Law Society lecture by Dr Ruth Fox (18 June 2026), Westminster’s legislative sausage factory: why modern law-making is failing Britain

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 coming up this week:

Ruth Fox: MPs reject the assisted dying bill by just 16 votes. What happened and what’s next?

Mark D’Arcy: We talk to assisted dying supporter Andrew Lewin MP, who spoke and voted in today’s debate.

Ruth Fox: And Reform UK say MPs are lazy, so should they be made to work harder? And if so, what might that look like?

Mark D’Arcy: But first, Ruth, the big subject of the day, the second coming of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill turned out [00:01:00] not to last very long at all.

Whip: The eyes to the right, 270. The noes to the left, 286.

Mark D’Arcy: The bill was defeated in its Commons second reading. So that is that. It won’t be coming back again in this Parliament. In all probability, I suppose the supporters of the bill are still licking their wounds and wondering what to do next, but it looks very unlikely that the private member’s bill route will be tried again in this parliament, even though it’s probably the most favourable House of Commons you’re likely to see in the coming years for a bill of this nature.

Ruth Fox: Yes, well, they’re going to have to reflect, aren’t they, about what went wrong for them, what issues ultimately meant that a declining number of MPs could support the bill since the second reading back in 2024. They lost by 16 today, they won by just 55 in the second reading back in 2024. That declined to 23 in the third reading debate, if you remember Mark, [00:02:00] before it went off to the Lords. So support has been ebbing away step by step, and obviously it came up against a huge hurdle of opposition in the House of Lords. And they’ll have to reflect on why, what went wrong and what are the kinds of issues that have they stumbled over, and what are the prospects for it coming back as a private member’s bill. I suspect not in the next session, they need to take some time to think and reflect over what happened, where they think they went wrong, why they lost support, lost ground each step, and what are the prospects, if any, for turning it around in this parliament if they wanted to bring another private members bill back later in the parliament. But clearly until they’ve worked out the answers to those questions, it’s going to be very difficult.

Mark D’Arcy: Well, there are plenty of interesting nuggets to extract from the number crunching of the votes and the analysis of who voted for what in that big division there, and we’ll come to that a bit later in the pod. But first of all, we thought it was a good idea to speak to someone who’d actually been in the Chamber of the Commons. And so we were delighted to be joined a little earlier [00:03:00] today by the Labour MP for Welwyn Hatfield, Andrew Lewin, who spoke in the debate today and was very much in support of the bill. Andrew, first of all, what was the atmosphere like in that chamber? There were people remarking on social media that it was notably more touchy than previous debates. Was that your take?

Andrew Lewin: Well, good afternoon. Thank you for having me on a really significant day. I’m not sure I would agree with that characterisation. Obviously this is a deeply personal and important subject to lots of colleagues in Parliament and of course in the country. There were moments in the Chamber, but I, wouldn’t say that it was particularly different to the two other set piece debates we’ve had before at second and third reading. I did say in my speech, and I think it’s important to emphasise this point, yes, I was a big advocate of this bill, but it’s so important that we remain collegiate, and incredible admiration, for example, for Ashley Dalton, who takes a very different view to me on this issue, but that was one of the bravest speeches of the day. So I think overall it was a credit to Parliament in terms of [00:04:00] the tone of the debate this afternoon, even though it obviously hasn’t gone the way I’d hoped.

Mark D’Arcy: Did you get a feeling that the debate actually swung people’s opinion or did your colleagues, your parliamentary colleagues, come into the Chamber pretty much with their minds made up?

Andrew Lewin: Really important question. I’ve just been looking back at the numbers that voted in favour of second reading in November 2024, when this was first put to us. And looks like my side, those in support of the bill, were down by about 50. So there has been a change. The question is, is it turnout? Is it the fact that we are busy parliamentarians, people had made other commitments, simply couldn’t be here, weren’t able to make a priority? Or have more people switched sides? I think both camps will be looking at that in days to come. It’s a bit early for me to speculate. Janet Daby, a Labour colleague, did stand up and make a speech where she set out that she changed her position. So I suspect there were one or two, but it looks to me, in the first of a few minutes and moments after the debate, that this was more a question that the No side were [00:05:00] better able to get their supporters here today to vote in the numbers that they wanted.

Mark D’Arcy: There were some shatteringly powerful speeches there. You mentioned Ashley Dalton, who was speaking about her own personal experience at having stage four cancer. There was Claire Hazelgrove who was speaking about the death of her mother. The minister, Alison McGovern, slightly choked in the winding-up speeches when she mentioned that her mother had died recently as well. So there was quite a lot of emotion flying around and quite a lot of really painful personal experience being processed in the chamber.

Andrew Lewin: Absolutely. And a huge admiration for everyone who made a personal speech and were reflecting on their own experiences today. Claire Hazelgrove, you mentioned my colleague for Filton and Bradley Stoke, to have the bravery to talk about the passing of her own mother in the relatively, it happened relatively recently, was just extraordinary. So my heart goes out to her, and everyone who found this especially difficult today, it weighs on us all as parliamentarians, and that was [00:06:00] clear throughout the debate and in the scenes afterwards. And I’ll be honest with you, I’m really happy to come and have a conversation with you. I’m still processing the result a little bit myself.

Mark D’Arcy: Was there a great deal of constituency lobbying? Did you have people crowding into your surgeries, firing letters at you, emailing you constantly about this?

Andrew Lewin: Absolutely, from both sides as you would anticipate. And of course, those in-person conversations. And throughout, it is true of all colleagues, we’ve been as respectful as we can possibly be to the other side of the argument, knowing that there are people with deeply different views on this. What I would say about my speech today, and I really stand by this, is that I made a point, an intentional focus on the actions of the House of Lords, because the reason this was back with us today was because a very small number of peers essentially acted as a filibuster on Kim Leadbeater’s original bill. It had passed the Commons twice, and we were only back having this conversation today because of those laws. And I [00:07:00] do think there needs to be some reflection of all of us in Parliament about the influence they seem to have had on the process because we are now walking down a very different path. And it was only possible because of their actions in stopping the bill in the last session of Parliament.

Ruth Fox: You said you’re walking down a very different path because the bill that you wanted is not now going to get to the statute book. It’s certainly not to be implemented in this parliament, but these issues don’t go away. And as you say, at a constituency level and national level, we’ve seen what a passionate debate it has been and how strongly people feel about it on both sides. But it’s only 16 votes. It’s a very narrow loss and campaigners on the supporters side will take some heart from that, I guess. And thinking about what next, has there been any discussions in the run up to today’s vote about what might happen, in terms of do you try and persuade the Government to create some kind of inquiry or commission of some [00:08:00] kind to look at this and try and take a bit of the heat out of it and look at the kinds of issues that have emerged in both the Commons and the Lords that have been of concern?

Andrew Lewin: Of course. Look, you’re right to say I was a hardened supporter and I don’t want people who have been on my side of the debate to lose hope. But my initial view, and bear in mind we are just minutes from hearing the outcome, is, Ruth, as you said, that the chances of this passing in this parliament now are extremely small. And I think it’s beholden on people on my side of the argument to take some time to reflect about how we best make the case in the future. I’m certainly somebody who would want to bring this issue forward again, but we’ve got to do it in the right time and we are all going to need some space to think about the best options. That the Prime Minister himself was clear that he was neutral and he had a view, a different one to mine, but a very important view as the Prime Minister that focusing on palliative care and social care first would enable us to perhaps come to a different judgement on [00:09:00] assisted dying. And I think what he says in the future on that will matter. But for right now, I also want to just put on record to you my thanks to Kim Leadbeater and Lauren Edwards for the work they’ve done, Charlie Falconer in the Lords in driving this forward in the last couple of years. They’ve worked exceptionally hard and they will all be, perhaps see some of them shortly, but really disappointed, this afternoon.

Mark D’Arcy: Of course you mentioned we had a change of Prime Minister and a change of Government halfway through this process. In the first incarnation of the bill, it was quite clear that Keir Starmer was in favour and a number of his senior ministers were in favour, and there was a bit of discreet support coming along procedurally for Kim Leadbeater’s bill that wasn’t going to be quite the same this time round. Were a lot of your Labour colleagues influenced by the fact that the Prime Minister didn’t seem to explicitly favour the bill in the way that Keir Starmer probably did?

Andrew Lewin: It’s really hard for me to talk on behalf of other colleagues and I shouldn’t, I don’t think that was a major factor, if I’m honest. Every Member of Parliament had [00:10:00] to really weigh their own conscience on this issue, as we were speaking about a moment ago. It will be illustrative to see as we run through the numbers and who voted differently or who wasn’t there this time, how many people actively switch sides, versus perhaps just not as motivated to be here this time around. But I wouldn’t want to draw a conclusion that there was a big shift because of a new Prime Minister. I don’t think that was the case.

Mark D’Arcy: This is a difficult moment for people who’ve put their heart and soul into this campaign for quite a long time. Now, what’s the mood amongst those supporters of the assisted dying bill? Is it, as you were saying earlier, that’s it for this parliament? Is it one more heave? Is it we’ll go away and think of something different to do and we haven’t quite worked out what yet?

Andrew Lewin: It is really hard for me to characterise that just minutes after the vote. And I wanted to come and talk to you and share the perspective of an MP who was speaking today and in the Commons with your listeners. I’m sure there will be different views amongst my colleagues about how we move this forward. [00:11:00] But as well as thanking the parliamentarians, I also want to thank the Dignity in Dying campaign, the other charities and third sector organisations that have been advocates for this for a very long time. And I’m absolutely in no doubt that they will not give up hope, and they will be looking as to what comes next. But I think we need to do that in a considered way. And my immediate view, having just left the Chamber, is that the chances of getting the bill through via a private member’s route in this parliament now look really small.

Mark D’Arcy: And what were your emotions when that result was read out? How did you feel?

Andrew Lewin: I was saddened. No question about that. I’ve long been a supporter. We knew that it was going to be exceptionally close. It’s also actually a slightly different experience for a Labour MP: I was only elected in 2024 being very fortunate, on a party political basis, that I’ve part of a Government with a healthy majority, so the outcomes of votes in Parliament have rarely been in doubt, but they certainly were today. And it will come as a surprise. It came as a surprise to us. But that is [00:12:00] democracy in action.

Mark D’Arcy: Andrew Lewin, thanks very much indeed for joining Ruth and me on the pod today. Let’s take a break and we’ll get to the number crunching in a moment.

Ruth Fox: We’re back, and Mark, we said we’d get into the number crunching first before we reflect on the broader questions and lessons that arise out of today’s debate. So, I’m once again delighted to be joined by my partner in crime here at the Hansard Society, researcher Matthew England, who’s been number crunching and working his way through all the procedural intricacies of this private member’s bill since it started back in 2024. He has written so many briefings on this issue and blogs and so on. So, Matthew, what’s your headline takeaway from the numbers?

Matthew England: As you said earlier, the majority has declined for this bill at every stage that it’s been presented to the House of Commons. So it started off at 55 at second reading, 23 at third reading, and has gone down to 16 against it this time around. I think the question a lot of people will be asking is to what extent the defeat [00:13:00] is due to MPs switching from yes to no, so straight switches from one side to the other, and from what I can tell, only five MPs switched from voting Yes at third reading in June last year to voting No at second reading today. So the question then is why did the majority for the bill decline so much and become 16 votes against it? The answer I think is that there were 43 MPs who voted Yes last year and didn’t vote at all this time around. And there were some MPs who also voted No last time around and didn’t vote this time around, but the number was much smaller.

Mark D’Arcy: So it’s all down to turnout.

Matthew England: Yes, it does seem to be that way in both votes. In 2025 and 2024, 605 MPs voted, this time around 556. So 50 fewer MPs participating in the vote. And the vast majority of those were people who had originally voted Yes.

Ruth Fox: And quite a few of those were ministers.

Matthew England: Yes, and very big names. [00:14:00] It’s worth noting that probably the three most powerful people in the country didn’t participate in the vote. Louise Haigh, John Healey, and of course the Prime Minister, Andy Burnham. And the first two of those had voted Yes at third reading last year and were now non-voters. Now, I don’t know why they didn’t vote. Perhaps they had ministerial commitments or something of the sort, but there were a number of other junior ministers and backbenchers among that group. It’s worth noting as well that Labour MPs formed, again, the vast majority of those who voted Yes last time around but didn’t vote this time around: 36 of the 43 were Labour MPs. One question is of course whether the intervention from the Prime Minister a few weeks ago suggesting that this should all wait until palliative care is sorted out, had an influence on some Labour Members of Parliament who decided they didn’t want to turn up.

Mark D’Arcy: And is there any party lines lesson here? I get the impression that Conservative MPs were a lot more likely to be against this proposal, for example, and Labour MPs were a lot more likely to be for, though that leaves plenty of room for substantial numbers taking the opposite line in each of those parties.

Matthew England: [00:15:00] No, the divisions of each side on party lines has remained more or less the same throughout the process. The majority of Labour MPs supported the bill at each stage and the majority of Conservative MPs opposed the bill at each stage. And the number of those MPs voting at each stage hasn’t really changed too much. 20 MPs from the Conservative Party voted in favour of the bill the last time it was before the Commons in 2025, and 17 of those voted for the bill again this time around. And that’s a decline of three, which proportionately speaking is about the same as the number of Labour MPs who declined.

Mark D’Arcy: But before we go any further with all this, I really do think we need to retrace the story so far. So let’s wind back to the previous parliamentary session, and Kim Leadbeater comes top of the private member’s bill ballot, the ballot that gives MPs the right to debating time for the bill of their choice as a private member’s bill in the House of Commons. And she comes up with the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which is drafted very rapidly [00:16:00] by Dame Elizabeth Gardiner, a very eminent parliamentary draftsman. It’s put before the House of Commons. It goes through a very elaborate period of scrutiny, and then is passed again by MPs with a slightly reduced majority at third reading and goes off to the House of Lords.

Ruth Fox: Yes. And then in the House of Lords, they don’t normally vote at second reading. So for a Government bill, for example, Mark, they just wave it through, as it were. It’s a formality. So they debate it, but there’s no formal division. And that’s what happened. A bit of toing and froing at the end of the second reading debate, but that’s what happened. They passed it on the nod, as it were, and it went into Committee. And unlike in the Commons where there was a small group of members in a public bill committee looking at the bill, in the Lords, it’s Committee of the Whole House, so all peers in the Chamber can participate and can debate and can table amendments and so on.

Mark D’Arcy: There was actually a little evidence-gathering committee that heard views and then published those views, but didn’t really itself analyse those views. So there was a little [00:17:00] sidebar there.

Ruth Fox: Yes. And basically the most significant number of amendments for decades, I think since the Companies Act, wasn’t it, Matthew, were tabled for the bill by peers and the sheer volume, in the end it was over a thousand amendments, the sheer volume meant that once those were grouped into the relevant clauses and schedules and so on, they’ve sat regularly, numerous sittings on a Friday, Stakhanovite working.

Mark D’Arcy: Friday after Friday, week after week. On and on, it went with no end in sight. Basically moved it to snail’s pace throughout.

Ruth Fox: Yes. And of course, this is where then the allegation came, the claim that peers were filibustering the bill. Now I kept saying on the media, one person’s extensive scrutiny is another person’s filibuster. You are convinced it was a filibuster.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes. I’m happy to call it a filibuster. Yes. Use the f word.

Ruth Fox: A filibuster, traditionally, listeners, you probably think about it as an MP or a peer who gets up, and stands [00:18:00] up and speaks at length, drones on and on and on. We did not see that, there was not an individual peer that was speaking at length day in, day out. But what we did see was essentially a flooding of the order paper with amendments, and then on each of the groups, they were taking quite a while, slower debate, and they just did not get through them. They did not make that much headway. And there were very few, well, no formal divisions on any of the groups of amendments.

Matthew England: Yes. Not just they didn’t get through them, they didn’t even get through half of the bill at Committee stage. They took 11 months just to do that. And that’s the length of a standard parliamentary session. You remember the last session was an extended session, so the Lords had even more time than usual to get through it and didn’t even get through half the bill.

Ruth Fox: Yes.

Mark D’Arcy: Now, while I’ve called this as a filibuster, and I’m quite smug about the fact that I was occasionally quoted in various parliamentary debates doing so, the one thing I’d say is I am a bit wary of abolishing that. I’m not [00:19:00] keen on the idea that you close off every possible avenue of parliamentary opposition to something you deeply disapprove of. I can imagine measures that, were I a peer, I would move heaven and earth to stop, come hell or high water, stretching Standing Orders possibly beyond their breaking point to do so if I felt it necessary. And I think that’s the position that people like Mark Harper, the former Commons Chief Whip who’s now in the House of Lords, was taking, that they were doing their utmost to stop this bill.

Ruth Fox: A matter of principle.

Mark D’Arcy: And they succeeded. And I’m not sure that I would be prepared to block off that avenue of opposition, because one day there might be a government I really didn’t like, that I would want to do that too on one of their measures.

Matthew England: On the other hand, you could probably find a dozen peers who are opposed to most private members’ bills. And there’s a question of whether the fact that this has ultimately succeeded sends a message to members of the House of Lords that this is something that ultimately is a valid method of defeating Commons legislation. And whether [00:20:00] therefore that then sends a further message to the Commons that pursuing more independent and more controversial private members’ bills isn’t a reliable route to pursue. And that may encourage them to take up more handout bills perhaps.

Mark D’Arcy: I take that point up to a point, there aren’t going to be many private members’ bills as big as this, is my first answer to that. Most private members’ bills are actually quite humdrum by comparison to assisted dying as a subject. And there is a way that the Commons can ultimately override the House of Lords. And we’ll come on to the intricacies of the Parliament Act, no doubt, in a minute. But it’s not an absolutely insuperable barrier. But I do think that closing off avenues of opposition, that legislation springs into being once the Commons has expressed a view, is a bad idea. I think occasionally you need more than a handbrake. Occasionally you need to be able to do some kind of emergency stop. And that was essentially what they were doing. Although it is a very slow emergency stop in this particular instance.

Ruth Fox: But just before, Mark, [00:21:00] we spring forward from the last bill into this session and this new bill, it’s worth just noting that despite all this time that was spent in the House of Lords scrutinising it, we still don’t know what the opinion of peers was on the principle of assisted dying. There has been no vote: no second reading vote, and it didn’t get to third reading, and the bill’s not going back now in this session. So we still don’t know. And it could well be that there was actually a majority there for it.

Matthew England: We also don’t know the Lords’ opinion on any of the safeguards or any other changes that the Lords would have supported, because there were no divisions on amendments, particularly because the House never reached Report stage.

Ruth Fox: And going to that point about filibustering, Mark, traditionally it’s seen as long speeches, but it’s been put to me by clerks that the other route of filibustering it is to prevent the House getting to a vote.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes.

Ruth Fox: That clearly is what has happened in that sense.

Mark D’Arcy: It was a much more subtle exercise than the kind of thing you see occasionally in the US Senate where [00:22:00] someone sits there reading out recipes of muffins or something.

Ruth Fox: This is the House of Lords!

Mark D’Arcy: Yes. This is a much more subtle…

Ruth Fox: Upmarket filibustering.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes. Definitely “upmarket filibuster” is probably the best description I’ve yet heard of what went on there. But anyway, as the saga unfolds, we get to the second incarnation of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill. Lauren Edwards, another Labour MP, comes reasonably close to the top of the private member’s bill ballot, and she decides to pick up this bill and have another go at passing it in more or less the same form. And this is where we engage the intricacies of the Parliament Act, because for the Parliament Act to work, that is for it to be used to force a piece of legislation through in the teeth of the House of Lords refusing to pass a bill, it has to be exactly the same bill in the second incarnation as it was in the first incarnation. There are a few things that can be changed, like sort of trigger dates for things if the bill’s a year late, you can change the dates a bit, things like that. But broadly speaking, it has to be exactly the same bill. So she picks this bill up and proposes to take it through. And she [00:23:00] argues that one of the reasons for doing that is because the House of Lord has essentially been impertinent in stopping the previous bill, the Kim Leadbeater incarnation of the bill. So that argument is attempted as well, that one reason to pass this bill is because the House of Lords shouldn’t have stopped it.

Ruth Fox: “People versus peers” was a thread in the recent weeks. Yes, definitely. And I think that’s one of the arguments that was live among supporters of the bill. There’s a little bit of evidence that possibly a few opponents of the bill last time were very uncomfortable, particularly those who were opposed to an unelected house, very uncomfortable with the idea that the Lords will be able to block this. But clearly not in sufficient numbers to get the bill through.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes. And you also have the weird kind of democratic paradox here that in order to force the bill through, MPs couldn’t change it in any way, even though many of them probably thought it needed to be changed, which all became rather difficult when you’re trying to argue for this course of action in the House of Commons. [00:24:00] So proposers of the bill were asked, you are saying, we’ve got to pass this bill as is, but then the Lords can change it if they want to.

Ruth Fox: Yes. And that, as you say, it’s a sort of paradox, isn’t it? We can’t amend the bill, but the unelected House can. Of course, whatever changes the unelected house wanted to make would have had to have been approved or not by the House of Commons. So they would have come back. But the House of Commons wouldn’t have been proactively amending it themselves. But of course there was this opportunity for suggested amendments, a sort of shadow scheme of legislative change or proposals that would be tacked on to the back of the bill and sent as like an appendix.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes. MPs would’ve been asked to vote on a list of acceptable changes that could then be made in the House of Lords, which is a slightly weird way of going about it, but which in the end didn’t happen because the bill didn’t get passed. We don’t know whether they would have been able to get the parliamentary time to even try this exercise. It would’ve required the Government’s acquiescence for that. But we are now in the realm of hypotheticals because the bill wasn’t passed.

Matthew England: It’s a great regret to me actually [00:25:00] that it didn’t get tested, because it’s why I always get upset when some procedural unknown doesn’t get answered.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes. Pulling my parliamentary anorak closely about me, I would love to have seen this be tried purely as an exercise in a sort of applied parliamentary procedure, because it’s never been done on this scale. I think you have to go back quite some years to find any example of this being tried, but not in the way that this would’ve required where, 60, 70 plus amendments would have to have been suggested.

Ruth Fox: Well that’s also one of the interesting questions here, isn’t it? And Lord Falconer had – what was it he said? – 77 amendments down in the previous session for Kim Leadbeater’s bill.

Mark D’Arcy: This is when he was in charge of the House of Lords stage at the bill.

Ruth Fox: Yes. And, we just don’t know how many of those were regarded as absolutely essential, or nice to haves but not essential, or things that could be discarded. And the question that we’ve posed a number of times throughout this process is how many of those are essential, and is a route through to dealing with them, therefore, [00:26:00] for the House of Commons to have had this suggested amendment stage and sent those proposals off to the Lords. We will never know.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes. We’ll never know unless someone tries this again next year, I suppose. But that seems quite unlikely. You heard it from Andrew Lewin earlier on. But I do wonder what the mood now of the pro assisted dying camp is as they survey this result. They’ve lost their chance for the moment. And this is a parliament that’s probably about as favourable as you’re ever going to get to assisted dying, on paper at least. And it can’t be persuaded to give this a second reading a second time. So, we shall see. I’ve got here a statement that Lauren Edwards put out after the vote. I think I might just run through some of the headlines here:

“This is a hugely disappointing result – not for me, but for the many thousands of terminally ill people and their loved ones who were given hope when the Commons voted for this bill last year. It is all the more heartbreaking for them because support for choice at the end of life is still as strong in Parliament as it was before.”

Well, not quite, because it didn’t [00:27:00] get through.

Ruth Fox: No, that’s a bit odd.

Mark D’Arcy: “The objections raised today were not about the principle of assisted dying but about parliamentary process. The public, who strongly support a change in the law, will not understand why that couldn’t happen because a minority in the House of Lords used procedural devices to block it and MPs baulked at insisting that they do their job.”

Again, I think that’s a touch tendentious.

Ruth Fox: Yes. it’s the democratic right of the, the House of Commons to decide whether it wants to override the House of Lords. And they democratically chose that they didn’t.

Matthew England: Yes. the initial part of that about the public not understanding why this has happened has a tinge of truth to it. I think I’ve encountered a few people who aren’t involved in politics or Parliament who, when I’ve talked about assisted dying with them, assumed it had already happened because they’d seen the images of the House of Commons voting for it last year and assumed that was the end of it.

Mark D’Arcy: Well, I suppose that’s the mysteries of the parliamentary process and those initiates in SW1 possibly don’t share their knowledge very [00:28:00] effectively with people outside. to continue what she’s saying.

Ruth Fox: Hang on a minute.

Matthew England: We try.

Ruth Fox: We try.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes. Well, absolutely. But it is such, such a tough…

Ruth Fox: They need to listen to this podcast.

Mark D’Arcy: Well, turn on, tune in, drop out, listeners. Then she goes on:

“Assisted dying will come in this country as it’s already doing across the world, but not soon enough. Parliament has dropped the ball today. It will be picked up again, as it must be because the law as it stands is simply too cruel and too unjust to be allowed to stand.”

Now that raises the question of what happens next for them. Is there another avenue for this to be pursued? Are they going to have another go in next year’s private member’s bill ballot? Suppose a really enthusiastic sympathiser with the cause of assisted dying decides to bring in a different bill next year.

Matthew England: It reminds me of reading about the abortion bill in the 1960s, which was a private member’s bill and passed after a significant amount of filibustering and talking out and unusual procedural motions. And the reason it passed was because the [00:29:00] Government provided time and procedural support. But the reason Harold Wilson was willing to provide time and procedural support was that he was worried that this was an issue that was just going to keep coming up, again and again.

Mark D’Arcy: And I do wonder whether this is the case. For example, I think it was Sidney Silverman, the 1950s and 1960s Labour MP who worked very hard to get the abolition of the death penalty, tried annually. He was repeatedly bringing in private member’s bill after private member’s bill on the same cause again and again to try and hammer home the death penalty ought to be abolished. There were several attempts to get rid of the ban on homosexual acts between consenting adults in private, that eventually succeeded. There were several attempts to legalise abortion. So there are a whole load of people constantly trying to do these things. And as you say, eventually maybe governments decided it was just too divisive to keep having the same old debate again. And Harold Wilson’s government moved to allow a lot of these things to happen.

Ruth Fox: Yes. And I think if any [00:30:00] MPs are contemplating the idea that if I come high in the ballot next session I might pick it up and try and take it through, I think they’ve got to reflect long and hard on, well, why has it failed this time? After all this time, all this effort, all this coverage, propitious political circumstances for much of the period, you had a Prime Minister in office who was apparently supportive of this when he’d been Director of Public Prosecutions. He felt that the change in the law was required. Interesting to note Lauren Edwards, she answered my question from when Keir Starmer resigned: If I were her, I’d have been pretty outraged that he hadn’t held on to vote. And she made clear in some media statements today that she was not amused. So quite right. But, propitious political circumstances and yes, they’ve run into problems in the House of Lords. I think, when we go to the start of this podcast series, when we first started looking at the bill, we highlighted the way in which the House of Lords works, the number of peers who’ve got interest in this [00:31:00] question. Dealt with this kind of legislation. Before that there was always the prospects of a flooding of the order paper with amendments, that this was where the difficulties might lie. And I think it’s quite ironic, isn’t it, that actually the House of Lords is the House accused of playing procedural games with this bill, when usually on private members’ bills it’s the House of Commons. So it’s the other way round. But you know, they’ve got to reflect on all of this in the round and think, where did we go wrong? How do we fix it for next time?

Mark D’Arcy: I don’t think they can bring back the same bill again. I think they’ve got to look at the amendments, the debates in the House of Lords, in the House of Commons before that, and decide whether they can answer some of the points and criticisms that were made. So they need to come up with a very different bill. The lesson of the Kim Leadbeater bill, and the reason for some of its flaws, was you can’t do that in a couple of weeks between winning the private member’s bill ballot and submitting your bill. If they’re going to try and submit a bill next time round, the assisted dying lobby [00:32:00] basically has to look now at what went wrong and come up with a new draft bill to answer it and do a lot of work there, and then hope there’s someone brave enough to pick it up, come the next private member’s bill ballot in the next session.

Matthew England: I mean, the alternatives that have been suggested throughout this debate, other than just changing the content of the bill to introduce new safeguards, have been about the vehicle by which assisted dying is introduced. And the two main ones I’ve heard are that it should have been done as a Government bill, or that it should have been preceded by some kind of Royal Commission to look into assisted dying. And on the issue of a Government bill, whether it should have been done as a Government bill asking the wrong question, because the Government was flatly unwilling to do so. And the question then is, what should proponents have done given that the Government was unwilling and the options were do nothing or introduce it as a private member’s bill?

Mark D’Arcy: But the other mechanism you could talk about is something like a Royal Commission. And you can imagine that maybe a different kind of chess move for the assisted dying lobby now would be to go to the Backbench Business Committee and get them to agree [00:33:00] to have a debate on a motion, say, calling for the Government to set up a Royal Commission on assisted dying, whose remit would include drawing up legislation.

Ruth Fox: I think one of the things also that flows from this discussion and debate and the problems that have emerged, is that the pro supporters of the bill had a real difficulty because none of the professional bodies in the health sector and none of the major disability charities were in favour of it. And I think that’s also something they’re going to have to confront in terms of the court of public opinion and in Parliament, and particularly in the Lords. How do you get over that hurdle?

Mark D’Arcy: Yes. There’s a huge problem there for the assisted dying lobby that they really do need to have a proposition that’s a bit more solid than the one they put forward, that defuses some of these objections.

Ruth Fox: Whatever your views on assisted dying as a policy matter, in terms of the actual legislative text, [00:34:00] looking at it as the Hansard Society from a procedural perspective, there were problems with it because there were problems with the delegated powers. My favourite subject as, Mark, these are the kinds of things that Matthew and I look at throughout our research month in month out. And we did a number of briefings looking at the delegated powers. There were a lot of powers in this bill that were going to hand decisions to ministers about how to implement this process once Royal Assent was granted, and how ministers were going to use those powers, what they were going to do, how the whole system was going to be set up was at times very unclear. Now you can say, if you’re an assisted dying supporter, well that’s for ministers to sort out and would be done through the NHS and that can be sorted out in the four year implementation period. That’s what governments do all the time with their legislation. That doesn’t make it right. And equally, if it’s a private member’s bill, you couldn’t get the answers from Government, from ministers, if they weren’t going to put more detail in the face of the bill. You couldn’t sometimes get answers in the scrutiny sessions. And that was, I think, one of the big [00:35:00] problems in the Lords. The House of Lords peers asked detailed questions about things like constitutional matters, about the implications for devolution, relations with Wales, and so on. A lot of important questions, and just couldn’t get answers to them.

Matthew England: In a sense, it was quite refreshing that the delegated powers in the bill formed such a major part of the discussion in both Houses. It would be nice, I think, if the House of Lords and House of Commons were more stubborn about delegated powers for other bills as well. The question is not so much were ministers vague about delegated powers for this bill, I think very clearly they were, and there were a lot of vague delegated powers in the bill, but did the House of Lords’ behaviour with respect to this bill, was it the same as it would have done if it were a different topic? I don’t think that’s reflected in how they behave in other bills.

Mark D’Arcy: I suppose my final thought on this is, that this is not an issue that’s going to go away. There were some incredibly emotional, very highly charged speeches [00:36:00] made in the debate today. There are very very strong feelings on both sides of the argument. And I don’t get the impression that the assisted dying lobby is going to go away. It may bide its time, it may look at different routes for getting to where it wants to go. But as Lauren Edwards was saying in that statement, this is an issue that she feels is not going to go away. So it may well be that both the assisted dying lobby will regroup and come back with something else, and that its opponents must be prepared for another go round on this issue because neither of them are prepared to drop their viewpoints.

Ruth Fox: No, and as you say, the private member’s bill ballot offers a route in the future for an MP to take it up. But what interests me is will there be a backlash in the House of Lords because we don’t know what the result would have been if there had been a vote. But there were an awful lot of peers who did support the assisted dying bill, that wasn’t reflected in the debates and the committee stage and second reading, because it wasn’t in the interest of supporters of the bill to speak because that consumed time. So a lot [00:37:00] of them just kept quiet. But they were no less passionate. And I do wonder if there might be a little bit of a backlash in the House of Lords among members who are unhappy with how some of their colleagues have handled this and whether or not there’ll possibly be a decision to look at some of their procedures. And there are possible implications to have a look at the way private members’ bills operate in general because lots of people did say, yes, this should have been a Government bill, but the reality is politically it was never going to be because getting a manifesto commitment for something like this, which cuts through party lines would be incredibly difficult. So if you don’t do it through a private member’s bill route, how do you do it?

Mark D’Arcy: Yes, and I do suspect actually the Government Whips will be quite glad about this result because it does remove a source of division in their own ranks. Yes, I’m sure that’s true of the other parties as well. There’s a particular issue for the Government, I think.

Ruth Fox: Yes. Well Mark, we’ll have to see what the fallout is going to be over the coming days. So it will perhaps be something for us to pick up next week, where [00:38:00] we’re going to have a special episode next week.

Mark D’Arcy: We are going to be live at Queen Mary University of London, talking to students and professors in a kind of question time session.

Ruth Fox: As part of their student week, their induction to life at university. So I don’t know about you, I’m a bit trepidatious about what might come up. I’m terrified, but you never know. We might know a little bit more about the fallout from the assisted dying bill so we can talk with the students about that then.

Mark D’Arcy: But let’s take a break now, and when we come back, we’re going to be talking about Reform UK’s plans for its first a hundred days in government, emergency legislation, MPs sitting seven days a week, and lots, lots more.

Ruth Fox: And thanks Matthew for joining us and listeners, we’ll be back in a minute.

Matthew England: Thanks.

Mark D’Arcy: We are back. And Ruth, the Reform Party conference has given us a bit of a glimpse of how a Nigel Farage-led majority government would attempt to do business. They’re talking about 100 days of action, ramming through lots of legislation, all sorts of interesting things. And before we get onto the details of that, I’ve really got to [00:39:00] say John F Kennedy has a lot to answer for here. The number of governments that over the years have set out, have 100 days to show that they’re in charge, and ran through lots of often quite ill considered legislation and do things quickly just to show that they’re essentially alive, is becoming a bit annoying now. And I do think that people need to calm down about the first 100 days of government.

Ruth Fox: Well, do you remember, Mark, I think on the pod we previously discussed at the 100-day mark of the Keir Starmer government, that Angela Rayner was bringing in the Employment Relations Bill to hit that mark that they’d promised in the manifesto. And I think it’s fair to say the bill was a bit undercooked at that point. So not ideal. You don’t need to rush quite so much. But according to Nigel Farage, they’re going to have this declaration of a national emergency, I think around the small boats crisis. I think he imagines pulling on levers of power for emergency powers to direct the Government. Of course, as we know, my favourite subject, Mark, regulations, statutory instruments, he doesn’t need emergency powers. There’s a huge swathe of powers on the [00:40:00] statute book that he’d be able to use, and of course the major powers like the Civil Contingencies Act, that would cause him more problems than it’s probably worth, and I think the lawyers would be crawling all over it. But yes, he’s got this idea of pushing through lots of legislation in that first 100 days. He talked about, and Lee Anderson, the Reform Chief Whip was also talking about this, having the MPs sit seven days a week for that 100 days and beyond to crash through all their legislation. I think that might be of a challenge in terms of the staff, not least, but also lots of presumably very inexperienced Reform MPs crashing around the Westminster estate

Mark D’Arcy: And being pretty tired by the end of the process, you’d think. Let’s be fair about this. First of all, if an incoming government thinks there’s a national emergency and wants to do something about it, I think basically the parliamentary staff are just going to have to suck it up. If that’s what’s required. And the MPs just have to suck it up. And I think you might find that quite a few of them were running out of steam after wall-to-wall legislating every day of the week for several weeks. But [00:41:00] leave that aside. If an incoming government thinks there’s an emergency, they’ve got a right to act as if there is one.

Ruth Fox: But you’re going to have a real problem with scrutiny though. Let’s be clear, because if you’re ramming through legislation very, very quickly, first of all, what state is it in? Because as we know, bills take time to draft by the official government draftsmen, the Office of Parliamentary Counsel. So are they going to have the drafting done before they arrive? Some governments have tried that when they were in opposition, to varying degrees of quality. I’ve long thought that it just ought to be automatic that at a certain point, parties that are conceivably likely to form the next government or be part of the next government should have access to civil service resources to help them with this process.

Mark D’Arcy: And you should be automatic. It shouldn’t be a decision that the Prime Minister has graciously decided to allow the opposition party at a very late date to have access to a few civil servants. It should be that any party that looks as if it’s going to be a government, or at least have a role in government, should at some point in the run-up to a general election [00:42:00] have access to the civil service machine to refine its programme and draft some of its legislation possibly, so that an incoming Secretary of State can slap down some draft bills on the table in front of their civil servants and say, “This is what I want to do, feed that into the machine and see where we are, because we want to get this through Parliament in the next few weeks.”

Ruth Fox: So there’s that, there’s a sort of quality and preparation question. There’s the scrutiny question about how much of it is it going to get scrutinised if so many of your MPs are new. As we know, it takes them a while to find their feet. And if you are ramming through lot of legislation, we know that that’s not going to get the kind of attention it needs. And also it’s going to create a pipeline problem. Because you can run through this legislation through the Commons, because if the Government’s got a majority, then it can set the agenda and it can drive that.

Mark D’Arcy: And it can guillotine everything very sharply and drive its legislation through. Sure.

Ruth Fox: Yes. And it can put through bills through in a day if it wants, if it’s got the majority, it can do that. It can’t do that in the House of Lords. [00:43:00] And this, I think is the challenge for Reforms, for how they think about what they would do in the Upper House, because they haven’t got any peers at the moment, I don’t think.

Mark D’Arcy: Well, I think there’s Lord Offord, isn’t there? Matthew Offord, but he’s sitting in the Scottish Parliament, I don’t know if he’s really engaged in the House of Lords any more.

Ruth Fox: No. So in terms of recent appointments, there have not been any Reform appointments.

Mark D’Arcy: Which I think frankly is unfair to Reform. Given that recent governments have been prepared to appoint Green peers on the basis of the Greens having a bit of a showing, Reform ought to have got at least a handful of peers by now, and they haven’t.

Ruth Fox: Yes. There’s then the challenge, well, either work with the existing parties dominated by Labour and Conservatives and the Lib Dems and the Crossbenchers. And if Reform’s got a majority, they make the political and moral point that, we are the democratically elected government and you will pass our legislation in a reasonable amount of time. But if those peers did not play ball, then Reform is in the business of having to appoint enormous number of new peers. So where are they coming from?

Mark D’Arcy: Well, there’s a pretty large [00:44:00] number of GB News presenters out there. And if you’re following the Donald Trump playbook, half his administration is including the Secretary for War, Pete Hegseth was a Fox News presenter before he became the Secretary of War. So they can appoint half the staff list of GB News straight into the House of Lords. And that might be quite a good way to get in there. Maybe I should apply for a job there. You never know.

Ruth Fox: Out of retirement to the fire. So are they appointing lots of new peers going to dominate the House of Lords that way? Certainly Nigel Farage indicated in his conference speech that that would be the way of things.

Mark D’Arcy: And he was talking also about having a referendum on the composition of the House of Lords, I think it was. To sweep away opposition if the House of Lords wouldn’t play ball with them.

Ruth Fox: Yes. It’s interesting. And the other thing that came out of it, and I do object to this, standing up for MPs on this: Lee Anderson had an article, I think it was in The House magazine, about their plans and how they would operate in government. And he basically [00:45:00] implied, well, more than implied, he said that MPs are lazy and that’s why the House needed to sit for longer, it needed to focus more on legislation. He wanted to get rid of a lot of the backbench business and the petitions and the adjournment debates and so on, which he thought was unnecessary and a distraction from the core business of running the country and the legislation to run the country.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes, you’ve got to be a little bit careful about some of this. I think he wasn’t particularly keen on adjournment debates and Westminster Hall debates and things like that. But those take place outside the main time allocated for legislation anyway, adjournment debates, half an hour at the end of the day when whatever legislation is on the agenda for that day has been dealt with one way or another. So it doesn’t really get in the way of the legislative programme. The bits that do get in the way, if you wanted to find more time for legislation, I think you would have to have a look at reducing or completely removing the allocation of time for the Backbench Business Committee, the Petitions Committee, maybe having fewer in inverted commas, “general debates”, which seem to crop up more and more in the Commons agenda at the [00:46:00] moment, and just get on with ramming that legislation, whatever it was, through. But if the complaint is that MPs are lazy, I think it is completely the wrong word. You may accuse MPs of a lot of things, but most MPs these days are pretty hardworking bods. . Because they have to be, because it’s a matter of survival because there really aren’t that many seats that are so safe that you can represent them from a distance, hardly do anything in your constituency, and still survive with a comfortable majority. Those days are gone for most MPs. It’s simply not true and it hasn’t been true for quite a while.

Ruth Fox: Going back to the types of business, I agree to some extent, I think the e-petitions debates tend to be in Westminster Hall. So they don’t tend to intrude so much on the legislative programme. What we are seeing, as you say, lots more of these sort of general debates, but we’re also seeing an awful lot of urgent questions and ministerial statements. I have questioned on a number of occasions, is that question really urgent? Yes, it’s topical, but not necessarily urgent.

Mark D’Arcy: Is this question really urgent? There ought to be a poster, a sort of “Britain needs you” [00:47:00] figure pointing urgently and accusingly.

Ruth Fox: The numbers do seem to have gone up and that does intrude then on to legislative business because those bits of business are dealt with before you get to the main legislative agenda.

Mark D’Arcy: But you’d have thought incoming Reform cabinet ministers might want to make quite a lot of statements since they’re going to be announcing quite a lot of changes of policy. So statements to the House and urgent questions generated perhaps by a lack of statements to the House about changes of policy might be quite a big feature of an incoming Reform government.

Ruth Fox: Well this is the balance, isn’t it? On the one hand, particularly if you’re in opposition as they are now, they would want ministerial statements, opportunities to ask urgent questions, bringing the minister to the House to answer for whatever policy problem or challenge that they’re facing. So it’s a real balance, how much do you focus on the urgent, the topical for the day, and how much then does that bite into the amount of time that you’ve got for legislation? And I did, as you know, I did a lecture for the Statute Law Society a few weeks ago, earlier in the summer, we’ll [00:48:00] put a link in the show notes to the video. And as part of that, I looked at the length of the sitting day, which is not necessarily the best indicator, but it is an indicator.

Mark D’Arcy: It is an indicator, certainly.

Ruth Fox: Yes, of how much time is being spent in the Chamber. And in the early session of the Blair Government, so 1997-98, the House sat on average according to sessional returns for 9 hours 15 minutes a day. It’s a pretty good stint. In the last session of the last Parliament, so before the general election, 2023-24, it was sitting on average for 7 hours 13 minutes. So it’s two hours less.

Mark D’Arcy: So in 25 years, a 2-hour decline in the length of time MPs sit, as well as a change in the composition of the business that they deal with. Because as you say, the proliferation of urgent questions and ministerial statements and things like that.

Ruth Fox: Which didn’t exist then. Well, ministerial statements…

Mark D’Arcy: Certainly nowhere near as common. So that’s quite a big thing. And the hit against MPs is not so much that they don’t do work [00:49:00] but that they’re doing the wrong kind of work, I’d suggest. And the suggestion is that MPs are too much focused on the super-councillor constituency side of the job, which is a matter of political and electoral survival for an awful lot of them, be it noted, and less and less on the law-making side of the job. So they’re spending less time asking awkward questions in bill committees and delegated legislation committees, and more time doing adjournment debates on the urgent need for a local bypass or something. So there’s a change in the focus of the way MPs work. Now, you’ve got to be very careful about this, because I don’t want a class of legislators who are so completely detached from their constituents that they don’t know what their constituents’ actual concerns are. But there is a balance to be struck, and maybe it has tilted a little bit too much in the direction of the super-councillors, super-socialworker side of the role, and too little is now done on the actual detailed work of legislating. And to some extent that slack is then taken up by the House of Lords instead.

Ruth Fox: Yes, exactly. Also, when MPs are spending time [00:50:00] on scrutiny of legislation, and particularly obviously my favourite subject, delegated legislation, got to get it in there, it’s often performative. The hours are being put in, thousands and thousands of hours being spent by MPs across a session in delegated legislation committees not really contributing, not really able to achieve very much, because of course the statutory instruments are not amendable and they don’t reject them. And so you’re putting in that time and there’s some scrutiny for some of them, but often it’s just a conversation between the two front bench representatives: the Minister in the Opposition spokesperson.

Mark D’Arcy: I’ve sat in plenty of these committees and watched them underway. And you can see a lot of the backbench MPs beavering through constituency paperwork, while the proceedings are going on around and more or less completely oblivious. And then just sticking up their hands to vote when the whips tell them to, without really taking any account of what substance they’re voting for.

Ruth Fox: Or get to December and they’ll be signing their constituency Christmas cards, piles of correspondence piled up on the desk beside them. So it’s scrutiny that’s not [00:51:00] really directed in the right way and in the right places.

Mark D’Arcy: But just to pick up that point about scrutiny though, if you are ramming legislation through at Warp Factor 9 in the first 100 days of a Reform government, how much scrutiny are you going to invite? That’s not the problem that Lee Anderson’s pointing to, I think.

Ruth Fox: No, exactly. The other thing that you pick up about in some of the critique of MPs is the sense that, and I use this phrase carefully, but the sense that some people think that the MPs are intellectually lazy. So not necessarily physically lazy in terms of turning up and being there at the right hours and so on. But that intellectually, there’s a laziness that’s crept in across the political class.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes. There are fewer and fewer kind of Tam Dalyell figures asking awkward questions, having carefully studied the small print of whatever it is in front of them. And I think that is a problem. That kind of thing is actively discouraged by the party machines. And I think a lot of time is spent winnowing out the askers of awkward questions.

Ruth Fox: Yes. Well we’re seeing that in selection, sort of the processes, aren’t we, as well. Where is the [00:52:00] parliamentary grit in the scrutiny oyster, as it were? Well, we shall see what happens. Reform have obviously had a difficult period, a difficult few weeks and possibly difficult months ahead with the police on their tails. So we’ll see what happens. But if they maintain their position in the polls, despite all these local and national difficulties, they’ll have to face more and more questions about what it is that they will do if they get into government.

Mark D’Arcy: And we’ve just provided them with a helpful hint that they should take a look at the powers that already exist in legislation for them to enact their agenda when they come in rather than worrying about putting through new primary legislation. But that’s for another day. And with that, Ruth, I think we’ve come to the end of this week’s pod.

Ruth Fox: Yes, Mark, I think that’s all we’ve got time for, but listeners, before we go, my customary farewell words to you. If you are enjoying the podcast, please do like and review us on your podcast app, particularly if it’s Apple or Spotify, because it really helps us to grow the audience and for other listeners to find us.

Mark D’Arcy: And as an extra special bonus, we’re offering $5,000 to every subscriber. This will be funded by a [00:53:00] special tariff that we’re imposing on all other podcasts, so you’ll be fine! Joke, by the way. Yes, that was satire, just in case anybody’s wondering.

Ruth Fox: Yes, I’m not sure the Hansard Society can afford that. See you next week.

Mark D’Arcy: Bye-bye.

Outro: Parliament Matters is produced by the Hansard Society and supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. For more information, visit hansardsociety.org.uk/pm, or find us on social media @HansardSociety.