Hansard Society

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

• Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill: Concerns about the delegated powers

• The Assisted Dying Bill: A guide to the Private Member's Bill process

• The Assisted Dying Bill: Making sense of the parliamentary process [Video]

Parliament

• Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill: Bill documents (see particularly the Amendments Paper tab)

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[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.

Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, Parliament itself. I'm Ruth Fox. And at this point, if you're a regular listener, you'll know I'm usually joined by my partner in parliamentary podcasting, Mark D'Arcy, but today, Mark's indisposed, so I'm flying solo for the very first time.

I've promised him I'll do my very best not to ruin the pod's reputation. Each week, Mark and I unpack what's been happening in Westminster and explore ideas for making our democracy more effective. But it's been a relatively quiet week in both Houses of Parliament, so with Mark away, I'm focusing on just one key issue : the assisted dying bill.[00:01:00]

The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, to give it its proper title, is about to undergo detailed scrutiny by the Public Bill Committee, a group of 23 MPs tasked with examining the Bill's text and proposing amendments to improve it. Although the committee hasn't been sitting this week, its members have been busy reviewing over 100 submissions from experts and the public, as well as reflecting on insights from last week's oral evidence sessions.

They've been using all this input to draft amendments which will be debated when the committee reconvenes next week. But how exactly does this mysterious amendment process work in a public bill committee? To demystify it, I'm going to be joined by our resident Parliament Matters procedural guru Paul Evans, a former senior clerk in the House of Commons and a long standing member of the Hansard Society.

And then later we'll hear from Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP for Runnymede and Weybridge, who before entering Parliament in 2019 was a [00:02:00] consultant psychiatrist with a PhD in decision making capacity. Under the current draft of the Assisted Dying Bill, he'd actually qualify as a medical expert assessor for any individual seeking an assisted death.

Although he's not one of the 23 MPs on the Public Bill Committee, that doesn't stop him tabling amendments, and so he has 36 of them at the last count. One of his key proposals is to establish a new body, the Assisted Dying Agency, to oversee the process. So I'll be talking to him about why he's championing these amendments, and how he plans to influence the bill's progress, even from outside the committee.

But first, I'm delighted to be joined on the podcast again by our procedural guru, Paul Evans, who's joining us down the line from Wales. Paul, welcome to the podcast again. Thanks for joining me. We wanted to talk to you about the process now for amendments. Now the bill is, uh, is going to be looked at by MPs next week, getting down to that, uh, what they call it, line by line scrutiny.

We'll see. But can we start [00:03:00] by unpacking what the process is? What is a public bill committee? What's its purpose?