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

And we're recording just hours after the latest section of debate on the bill. The first day of its report stage consideration has ended, with some people who support the bill saying that they're now over the hump. The most difficult section of debate has now been dealt with, even if a few of the votes haven't yet happened.

Ruth Fox: Yes, Mark, [00:01:00] it was, well, it was a techier than, certainly the second reading, and some of what we saw in public bill committee. It was quite a difficult debate at times and a sense that a few people were quite close to losing their temper and some others quite emotional.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, indeed it was, a different tone of debate.

They said after the second reading debate, this is parliament at its best, which is the MP's sort of backslapping self congratulation of it. We've all been polite to one another today. This was not so polite. There was definitely more kind of subliminal suggestion of bad faith from the other side. Coming from both sides of the debate. And a certain amount of nastiness and just a tinge of procedural gameplay as well. You know, divisions were forced and then went on longer than usual and

Ruth Fox: A bit of foot dragging in the division lobbies.

Mark D'Arcy: Foot dragging in the division lobbies. The kind of old school time wasting tactics that I used to spend many a long Private Members Bill Friday watching in my Today In Parliament days, and here we are again with the same old games being played.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, and I think the Sergeant at Arms was sent out into the [00:02:00] division lobby, I think a couple of times to find out what was going on.

Mark D'Arcy: It wasn't allowed to drag on too long.

Mr. Speaker Hoyle was pretty diligent in making sure that after 15 minutes had elapsed, you know, he'd make sure that they weren't gonna let it drag on.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, yeah.

Mark D'Arcy: So he didn't indulge the game playing.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. No, it was a very different tone of the debate, I have to say. I don't think Esther Rantzen has helped.

Really. If you're not aware, Esther Rantzen, for our international listeners, she's a very famous television presenter for my childhood and teenage years. She's quite elderly now, but she has terminal lung cancer. I think she's the person who approached Keir Starmer before the general election about introducing an assisted dying bill and got a commitment from him that he put the issue to Parliament, and this is what has generated this process.

And she wrote to all MPs this week and basically said that the opponents of the bill were all MPs who had basically got disguised religious affiliations.

Mark D'Arcy: I think the word [00:03:00] she used was undeclared.

Ruth Fox: Undeclared, that was it, religious affiliations.

Mark D'Arcy: I mean, MPs are required to declare quite a number of things.

Their shareholdings, their expenses, their finances, all sorts of things. Yeah, I don't think at the moment there's a requirement for them to declare their religious convictions. They may

Ruth Fox: No, no. I think the Test Act went out some years ago.

Mark D'Arcy: That, for the international listeners, was having to prove that you were a proper Church of England Protestant in the 17th, 18th century.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, so Catholics didn't pass the test. So she said that all these MPs had undeclared religious affiliations, and, she didn't like the fact that they would get to impose their faith, their principles on her. Quite a lot of MPs were not happy with that, and that came out in the debate.

Mark D'Arcy: And some cynics might say, the whole point of being an MP is to impose your principles on others, but leave that to one side for the time being.

It was, as you say, distinctly tetchy, and I think one of the facets of its tetchyness was that the chair, that's Mr. Speaker and his deputies, imposed increasingly tight time [00:04:00] limits on MPs as the debate unfolded, and that's not something that normally happens. No. In private members' bill debates, one of the points about the rules for considering private members' bills is that they are supposed to allow a small but determined minority to block legislation.

So it is just not idly waved through on a warm summer's Friday afternoon, and it's either properly considered, and everybody's happy and it can go through without objection or alternatively, that the supporters of a piece of legislation have to muster enough troops to push it through against objection.

Ruth Fox: Well, Mark, shall we review where we've ended up at the end of this first day on report stage, and we're joined again by our procedural guru, Mr. Paul Evans, former Senior Clark in the House of Commons. Welcome back Paul. Hoping you can explain some of what happened with this selection and grouping of amendments and then the votes at the end of close of play today.

Mark D'Arcy: So what's your assessment of the state of play?

Paul Evans: Well, I think the state of play is that substantial progress has been [00:05:00] made by the supporters and promoters of the bill, and they can feel quite pleased with what they've achieved. What happened at about two o'clock was the lead amendment, was a new clause from the promoter of the bill, Kim Leadbeater, and that was closured. That group, which it led, was Closured.

Mark D'Arcy: That is that they moved to force the vote on it, at that point.

Paul Evans: They moved to force the vote on it, which they won reasonably handsomely by about 50 votes. That was the first time we had a bit of dawdling in the division lobbies, which the Speaker cracked down on very promptly.

So the closure we had to vote on, we then had, I mean, this gets a bit procedurally complicated. The new clause was read a second time without a division, in order to allow an amendment that had been selected for separate division to the new clause to be moved once it had been read the second time.

Ruth Fox: Stick with us listeners.

Paul Evans: That amendment was then moved formally and it was defeated by about the same number by which the closure had been won.[00:06:00]

And so we then moved on to putting the new clause being added to the bill.

Mark D'Arcy: There was a shout of object from behind the chair.

Paul Evans: There was a shout of object from behind the chair. There was a very little voice that said no. What I think the objection was and possibly why someone had shouted no was to stop further proceedings continuing after that point. Because in theory, anything that was unopposed could have been dealt with after that point. So, for example, more new clauses by Kim Leadbeater could have been put and agreed if nobody had objected, but someone did object to further proceedings. And we will proceed to the new clause being added to the bill on Friday the 13th.

Mark D'Arcy: So friday the 13th, the very ominous date of course, Friday the 13th of June is when this report stage debate resumes, and now it will start with a couple of leftover votes from today's debate. So the MPs will have been debating now, and it'll be several weeks before they actually get to vote on what they've been [00:07:00] debating.

Paul Evans: Indeed. And you talked about the amount of, time and the grouping. We did talk a couple of weeks ago about how many groups there would be. There's often only one nowadays. This time the Speaker decided on two. One feels that that was probably with a view to there being two days of debate. The trouble with these big groups and both the groups, and I might come back to the what I think might be slightly flawed tactics by the opponents of the bill, but anyway, the trouble with these big groups is they cover a very wide range of topics.

So it's quite hard to get a focus on particular issues. I wasn't able to watch the debate, but you reported to me some members a bit frustrated, they didn't get to speak to their amendments and so forth. The Speaker then will now have a problem when we resume the report stage on Friday the 13th. He will call any in the name of Kim Leadbeater for decision.

They could be agreed without division, because many of them are making concessions I think, to people who've opposed some [00:08:00] aspects of the bill. And then among those that are not Kim Leadbeater's, he has to make a choice about which ones might be called separate division. And that's going to be a very tricky choice.

And frankly, I couldn't even begin to predict what criteria he will.

Mark D'Arcy: Why is it a tricky choice?

Paul Evans: Well, because there are so many to choose from, and they're quite different. They cover quite a range of subjects. So how do you decide which of those subjects is worthy of a separate division and which not.

Now, the selection, in a sense, has been very generous. I think listed on the amendment paper, there were only perhaps three or four amendments in total that weren't selected. That's fine. That's in line with current practice to be quite generous in selection. But there are some amendments in this first group, which seemed to me to teeter on the brink of selectability, if you like.

It's always a judgment call, but for example, Ben Spencer MP has been pushing for widening [00:09:00] eligibility, and for sort of broadening the scope of the bill, you could argue that the report stage is perhaps not the point at which you're supposed to be rewriting the premise of the bill. In a sense, the premise of the bill was decided at second reading.

So it's not to say his amendment's out of order or unreasonable, but they are pushing right at the limits of things and you and the Speaker might think, well, look, the House needs to focus its attention, the whole point of selection is to focus the House's attention, members' attention, on some key issues, which they're going to decide, and it's only worth focusing really on key issues.

Where the decision is in question, if you like, where it's a real point of principle or a significant issue. So as I say, I have no idea how many the Speaker is going to select for separate division come Friday the 13th. He might go for a fairly, you know, rough and ready selection to say he's only going to let two things, which he really feels worth spending [00:10:00] time voting on, rather than talking about. Talking about them is the important thing. Voting on them is a bit of a waste of time unless you think they're going to be agreed amendments.

Mark D'Arcy: But, looking at this from, if you like, a tactical point of view, have the supporters of the bill got as it were over the hump.

These were the difficult amendments, these were the most emotive questions. Things like whether or not people should, and institutions should, be able to opt out of taking part in assisted dying. And having got through those,

Paul Evans: My sense is that they have got over the most difficult. I'm afraid I haven't given the bill the attention that many others have in the detail of these amendments.

Because there are an awful lot of them. But my sense is the second group are somewhat less controversial than this first group. Now the point we go back to about the closure, which was successfully claimed and won, is that it's ended debate on that first group.

There can be votes, there can be decisions. But there's no more debate on that first group, so that's a key point. Past all [00:11:00] those tricky questions.

Ruth Fox: Perhaps might just be helpful for listeners to explain that the groups that we're talking about, I mean in terms of the content of them, the first group, the ones that they've dealt with today, concern things like protections and duties for medical practitioners, hospices, and care homes, the procedures for receiving assistance under the Act and the safeguards, eligibility issues, mental capacity. So go to the heart of some of those really big, contentious debates about how this assisted dying bill will work. And then the group that we haven't got to, that we'll get to on Friday the 13th, the group two is looking at the approved substances and devices that will be used to actually deliver the drug to bring about the assisted death, things like advertising, inquests, death certification, codes of practice, Welsh language. So that's a bit more of a sort of rag bag of some of the operational matters, which are important, but not perhaps as highly contentious as what's been discussed today.

Paul Evans: They're broadly consequential on the assumption being made that [00:12:00] this is going ahead, if you see what I mean. They don't go to the heart of the issue. They are consequences of deciding to introduce assisted dying.

Mark D'Arcy: You do wonder whether the steam will now go out of this a little bit and maybe the opponents will feel that they've essentially lost the main battle, or whether they will decide they're gonna fight every inch of the way on every clause that they possibly have a vote on.

Paul Evans: Indeed. And that's a choice, obviously, for them to make, but it might be worth reminding them when they're thinking about that, there is a third reading. Now, what's been going on behind the scenes, and we've talked a lot about time available. At the moment, it looks like there may be three or four Fridays potentially available for the remainder of report and third reading. That kind of draws a sting. And especially with this closure today on the first group, it means that delaying tactics are probably futile in the end. They're not going to stop the bill simply by delay. What properly is where you vote on the principle for the second time, having [00:13:00] voted on it on second reading, you vote again on third reading, and that is where you either kill the bill dead in one vote or it goes ahead. So although there are many important little details that have been brought up in these report stage amendments, it's not really the point of report stage to kill the bill.

And I slightly take issue with something Mark said earlier about procedure being finely tuned to allow people to frustrate private members' bills. I think that's accidental and it's been much condemned by the Procedure Committee who have themselves recommended that these bills should be timetabled in some way, a certain proportion of private members' bills should be timetabled

Mark D'Arcy: And they've recommended it again and again. It's never happened. Governments like being able to stop private members' bills without having to go to the trouble of having a vote on them.

Paul Evans: Well, I think it's a minority who like being able to stop private members' bills because as I say, if you can muster a majority, you can always kill a bill on third reading.

Mark D'Arcy: But it's much better sometimes to kill them by stealth.

Paul Evans: Well, that [00:14:00] that's a view, but it's not one shared by the Procedure Committee.

And just to go look at this closure today, if this bill had been a government bill and there'd been a knife, as we call it, in a programme motion at two o'clock today.

Ruth Fox: So programme motion is like the timetable.

Paul Evans: Mm, it sets the timetable, it's agreed in advance, well, it's agreed immediately after second reading.

Normally, if their knife had fallen at two o'clock on this group, then not only would the only amendments be taken after that point, because even considered would be government amendments, they would all be taken en bloc. All government amendments. I.e., there'd be one vote on the whole package. You couldn't disaggregate them.

And no amendments are likely to be called separately by other people. I mean, there could be. Programme motions do allow for separate divisions by other people, but they're very much at the discretion of the speaker. And they usually wouldn't be more than one or two, or three at the most, separate divisions.[00:15:00]

So comparatively, people complain about the amount of time and fair enough, it's a big and complicated subject, but compared to what would've happened in a government bill, this has probably been giving people more time overall, although undoubtedly there have been losers in that because some people don't get a chance to speak. But every debate, I'm afraid, is held in the House of Commons, especially on legislation, under programme motions, when they're government bills, means a lot of people don't get a chance to talk about their topics that they might feel passionately about.

Mark D'Arcy: Welcome to Westminster.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Well, I mean, just think about this. Monday, the Border and Immigration Bill got two and a half hours for report stage and third reading because a lot of the time that was scheduled for, it was crowded out by urgent questions and ministerial statements.

You know, that is a contentious bill. There were quite a few amendments to be considered and they got two and a half hours debate for all remaining stages. So by comparison, just one group of amendments today on the assisted dying bill has [00:16:00] had double that.

Mark D'Arcy: And looking ahead now to the lie of the land for the remainder of the consideration of this bill.

The next sitting Friday is Friday the 13th, as we've been saying with our ominous tones, and this will begin with leftover votes from this Friday's proceedings followed by the second group of amendments. If that's really extended, I suppose the fag end of those could run into a third day's debate, which would then be followed by a third reading.

Have I got that right?

Paul Evans: You have. A lot will depend, as I say, on how much time is spent voting on the leftover amendments from group one.

Mark D'Arcy: Potentially they could start with sitting in private again.

Paul Evans: Well, I'll come back to that. It's up to the opponents, essentially, how much time they want to spend passing through division lobbies. It's up to them, and the Speaker in their decision how many separate decisions to call? He will call all the Kim Leadbeater proposals for amendments. In theory, they could all be divided on. You could [00:17:00] waste probably a couple of hours or more on divisions on Friday the 13th.

To what purpose? It's for others to judge. Given that the Speaker decided to accept the closure at two o'clock today, I would imagine he would be anticipating accepting the closure around about the same time on Friday 13th, possibly earlier. Or it could be that it trickles over, as you say, onto a third Friday. Whatever happens, if the closure is taken at two o'clock-ish, it's unlikely they'll dispose of all the decisions in group two.

So on the third day, we'll, again, we'll start with leftover decisions from group two and then we'll move on to third reading.

Mark D'Arcy: But the lesson of the votes that we've had so far is that the majority in favour of the bill seems to be pretty much holding up. There was talk that there was a big move against it.

MPs were abandoning the Leadbeater bill. That doesn't seem to have made a great deal of difference to the ultimate result from the votes.

Paul Evans: No, you are right, [00:18:00] as far as I can see.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean, it looks pretty solid. There's a few, I think majority at second reading was what, 55? We've had two divisions today with majorities of 49 and 36, so there's a few losses, but not everybody was necessarily here because of it being a constituency Friday, but there certainly hasn't been the big drift of people away from Kim Leadbeater's position that was being speculated on in the press.

Mark D'Arcy: Have Kim Leadbeater's opponents in this got their tactics right. Do they know how to conduct a guerrilla war in the legislative jungle?

Paul Evans: Well, I think where they may have miscalculated is tabling quite so many amendments in a way, because they have a sense that there are some key issues I think, which they feel weaken the bill or possibly fatally weaken the bill and they could perhaps, if they'd been coordinated and worked together, made these debates more focused on those key issues, by tabling fewer amendments. You don't need a lot of amendments at report stage to make the time [00:19:00] killing process work, if you want to do it that way.

So perhaps fewer and more focused amendments and more focused debates would've helped.

Mark D'Arcy: Helped in the sense of swinging opinion.

Paul Evans: In their efforts to swing opinion, yeah. You know, to get their message heard clearly and loudly. Whether it's one opinion or not, of course, you don't know, but my sense is that there's not a lot of virtue in having a hundred and odd amendments at report stage.

It looks like a bit of overkill, but there may be there's just a lot of people putting in their thing and not much coordination.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean, I think that point is right, Paul. My sense is that there are quite a number of small groups of MPs that are coordinating together and you know, they're sort of signatories on letters to fellow MPs and so on.

But I'm not sure that the opposition, as a block, to the bill is coordinated, and that's possibly part of the difficulties that they face. But obviously part of that is also a resourcing issue. I mean, it came through in the debate a number of times that individual MPs who've got concerns about the bill, feeling that they haven't got their sort of resources to [00:20:00] be able to get the amendments drafted and do the policy work and so on.

And, you know, coordinating a good number of MPs on top of that would be an even bigger challenge.

Paul Evans: Herding cats is always a challenge and it's, um,

Ruth Fox: Glad you said it. I wasn't going to. We've had a couple of questions, Paul, from listeners who were watching the debate live. So could I put these to you both and get your thoughts on it?

So we've had a question from George Picthorne, who's in Parliament. He was asking about what happened right at the beginning of the debate when the Speaker called a vote on making the debate sit in private and the ayes and noes were sounded out, and despite the ayes were clearly more numerous, a vote was called.

And the Speaker then seemed to backtrack and called back the vote. Do we know what happened? I think the Speaker possibly just fluffed his lines and got in a bit of a muddle.

Paul Evans: Just to explain what the whole point of this division was. There is a motion to sit in private. It used to be called that strangers do now withdraw. [00:21:00] I spy strangers. And then the chair had to put strangers in.

Nowadays, the purpose of moving that is very rarely, I did a broadcast on Today in Parliament a few years ago with Mark on this very topic on the anniversary of the first private sitting in 1916. But it's used nowadays as a technique for interrupting debate.

And the purpose it is used on Private Members' Bill Fridays, or used to be, was if on a division on the question to sit in private, which you intend to lose, you don't want to do it, but you want a division. And the key thing about this is it's a question the chair cannot refuse to put, and if there are fewer of than 40 voting in the division, and that includes the four tellers and the chair, so if there are a few than 35 numbered in division, the House is declared inquorate and the business under consideration stands over. And you go on to the next item of business. So it was used for a while on Private Members Friday. So you would interrupt a debate on a bill by calling strangers.

The [00:22:00] division would be inquorate and that bill's proceedings would be adjourned because there weren't 40 people in the House.

Mark D'Arcy: So it's a way of knocking bills off the list. This is why people now take to putting that motion before they've started consideration of a bill. So that it can't later be used, because it can only be used once in a day, as I understand it.

Paul Evans: That is right. It's only ever used once in sitting. So people having got wise to this technique quite rapidly, they started putting it right at the beginning of the day before any bill had been entered upon. Once it had been defeated, it couldn't be used again that day. And that was what Kit Malthouse was presumably doing today. He was making sure it couldn't be used during the rest of the proceedings, and that's become a kind of ritual, where the motion is claimed, the Speaker puts it, everybody says no, and that's over and done with.

Ruth Fox: Because you can see quite clearly there's more than 40 people sitting in the chamber.

So you know, it's quorate.

Mark D'Arcy: And with the position of the Speaker there, I think as you say, he maybe looked around and thought, well, hang on a minute. I can tell perfectly well there's not gonna be a majority for that, so we don't [00:23:00] have to go through the rigmarole of a full scale division and waste time on that.

Paul Evans: Or inexperienced members called the wrong way or whatever, you know?

Yeah. And anyway, quite right to take the division out.

Ruth Fox: And we've had another question. Well, it's from anonymous. Ah, so I don't know who he, who he or she, is.

Mark D'Arcy: He or she is a regular questioner.

Ruth Fox: Yes, quite. They say what's the purpose of the Opposition front bench giving us a summing up speech during report stage.

This seemed not to be a personal intervention, but a generalised summing up or critique of small parts of the process. Especially since there was such little time for other contributions, this seems an inappropriate use of time. So worth pointing out, both the Government front bench, Stephen Kinnock, and the Opposition front bench did wrap up speeches at the end, and they were reasonably lengthy compared to what some of the other contributors had had time for. And of course the government is neutral on this and effectively I think the Opposition front bench, I think, is taking a position of neutrality on it as well. So yes, it does sort of bear the question, why were they speaking?

Mark D'Arcy: The government I think had a little [00:24:00] bit more of an excuse in the sense that as the government, its job is to make sure that any legislation that is passed is workable.

So Stephen Kinnock went through some of the clauses saying they like this and they didn't like that on grounds of workability. But all the same, it did seem to take an unconscionable amount of time and the opposition front bench speech seemed to take a great deal of time as well. It may perhaps have seemed longer than it actually was, but it did take quite a while.

Paul Evans: Yes, I think that that's absolutely the explanation. The government has a better excuse. They need to intervene on a private member's bill, really, if only to say, we consider this to be workable legislation, or we consider this won't be workable unless amendments 6, 16 and 24 are made to it, and that's a proper thing for them to intervene on.

The opposition, it's a convention that if a minister gets up, then the opposition has to get up. And if the opposition are determined to exercise that implicit right, then nobody can really stop them.

Ruth Fox: Well, there we are.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, we'll be back next week at our [00:25:00] normal time, so you can look out for us appearing on your podcast feed on Friday next week, and we'll, of course, be reverting to Fridays when this bill starts being debated again on Friday the 13th of June, that ominous date.

Ruth Fox: But before we go, first of all, thank you Paul for joining us yet again. We're gonna need you a few more Fridays yet before your duties are done.

Mark D'Arcy: Save those dates in your diary.

Ruth Fox: And, can I just ask listeners if you'd be a really great help to us on the podcast, if you could complete our listener survey?

Those of you who've listened to recent episodes will know all about this. The link is in the episode show notes in your podcast app. If you could complete that, that would be incredibly helpful, so we can find out some information about what you like about the podcast, what you don't, what you'd prefer us to concentrate on, and also find out some sort of data that will help us in terms of trying to grow the podcast. And to be blunt get some advertisers, more advertising in, to help pay the bills. So it'd be great if you could complete that survey and also give us a review in your podcast app, five [00:26:00] stars

Mark D'Arcy: Always greatly appreciated, but for now, goodbye from me and goodbye from Ruth.

Ruth Fox: See you soon. Bye.

Intro: 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 at Hansard Society.

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