Hansard Society

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

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

• 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

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[00:00:00] Intro: You are listening to Parliament Matters, a Hansard Society production, supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Learn more at hansardsociety.org.uk.

[00:00:16] Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, Parliament itself. I'm Ruth Fox.

[00:00:23] Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark D'Arcy. And welcome to the fourth of our special dedicated mini pods, tracing events on the consideration in the Commons of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, the bill that will enable assisted dying.

[00:00:37] The Public Bill Committee, looking at the detail of the bill, is now in session, working through amendments, and we're going to be talking to Sarah Olney, a Lib Dem MP who's been particularly active this week putting down amendments. We've asked her what her amendments were, how they fared, and and also asked her to comment on the wider conduct of the Public Bill Committee, how things are going, how long it's going to take.

[00:01:04] Well, we're delighted to be joined by Sarah Olney, who's been one of the active members of the Public Bill Committee. And Sarah, first of all, my impression is that things are curdled a bit on the Public Bill Committee, that what may have started out as an attempt to get the mechanism right is turning into something a bit more entrenched and adversarial than perhaps people had expected.

[00:01:26] Sarah Olney MP: Hello, Mark. Yeah, well, I think that's right, actually, and it certainly has taken me a little bit by surprise. I mean, I guess my expectation was it's an issue that cuts across party lines, so while there might have been a little bit of lining up on either side of the argument, at the end of the day, it's different people from different parties. So that our party loyalty is always very strong in Parliament and certainly within the Liberal Democrats, there's a range of views. But for me personally, my colleagues on the bill committee, both of who voted yes at Second Reading, whereas I voted no. We are still very much colleagues and it's not an adversarial atmosphere between us. And I guess I kind of expected that with the other parties as well, but it has been much more adversarial than I was expecting and people very much lining up on, on either side of the argument. And I think just the voting pattern, we've not had many votes so far because we haven't made much progress, but even the votes that we have had, you can see it's a fairly fixed voting position so far. I think that might change. I think there will be other issues that come up later in the bill committee where some people will potentially switch, but currently it does seem to be quite entrenched, but also, I don't know, it is a bit more aggressive than I was expecting.