Today, a bill to legalise assisted dying / assisted suicide comes before the House of Commons for its second reading.
Background
In October 2024, Kim Leadbeater MP introduced a private members bill to legalise assisted dying. A private members bill is one launched by a backbench MP rather than by the government. A certain number of these are randomly selected for debate each year. This passed its Second Reading in the House of Commons in November 2024.
I ran a teaching evening at church to allow us to explore these issues in some detail. The (extended) video version of that teaching is available. Things have moved on: The parliamentary process is in a different place, and some of the statistics from around the world need updating (nothing has changed for the better). But this teaching session remains a great help to think through a Christian view on assisted dying.
To become law, a bill has to go through multiple stages in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords. A bill has to complete this within a single session of parliament (which normally lasts a year, but the previous one was 22 months). The bill ran out of time. It passed all its stages in the House of Commons, but never finished its passage through Committee Stage in the Lords. Because of this, Kim Leadbeater’s bill never passed into law.
The current session of Parliament began on 13th May 2026, and Lauren Edwards MP won the ballot to propose a private members bill. She used this to propose a bill identical to the (amended) one from the previous session. The Second Reading in the Commons is on Friday. After that, it proceeds to Committee Stage, and then a Third Reading, after which it is the turn of the House of Lords.
Don’t Blame the Lords
The line being taken by most of the media is that the House of Lords was to blame for derailing the previous bill. The BBC headline I used as an image for this post has this deck: “The proposal was backed by a majority of MPs earlier this year but did not become law after its progress was stalled by peers.”
The article includes this sentence: “Backers of the bill accused some peers of using delaying tactics to block the proposal, while critics argued it was not fit for purpose due to a lack of safeguards.”
The Guardian’s lead article on this subject this morning ends with this: “[Lauren] Edwards said the measure was only having to be tabled and debated again “because a small number of peers chose to prevent any votes taking place on the bill earlier this year and so blocked its passage. That was undemocratic and brought one of the most significant national conversations we have had as legislators to an abrupt halt.”
You get the idea. But the House of Lords was not to blame.
The real reason Leadbeater's bill failed was because MPs overreached themselves. They took an already controversial and problematic piece of legislation, and amended it to make it worse. They removed key safeguards (like the need for a judge to be involved in deciding if someone’s request to die fell within the law), missed the opportunity to introduce simple safeguards (such as clarifying that eating disorders alone do not count as an incurable illness), and made many other poor changes. The House of Lords is tasked with scrutinising what MPs propose. They correctly identified many things that needed another look. Had MPs not made the proposals worse, the bill may well have passed the Lords in time.
The hubris continues to grow as the bill sponsors put pressure on MPs not to amend the bill in any way today, but to send it to the House of Lords unamended. This would enable them to use the Parliament Act to force the bill through. This says that, if an identical bill is passed twice in the Commons, in two separate sessions of Parliament, then the bill can become law without the approval of the Lords.
Effectively: “To misquote Hey Jude, we took a bad bill, and made it worse. We made changes that removed key safeguards in the original legislation. As a result we ended up with a bill that the Royal College of General Practitioners, the Royal College of Physicians, the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the Royal College of Nursing, the Royal College of Pathologists, the Association for Palliative Medicine, and the Royal Pharmaceutical Society have all said that they cannot support in its current form. The House of Lords did their job, identified these problems, and set to debate them and to work out what changes to propose. That took too long, and we’re impatient, so this time we plan to take away their constitutional right to scrutinise our proposals. If they’re going to try to improve our bill, we are determined not to let them do that.”
Quite apart from whether you support assisted dying or not, this is a disaster. We have two houses of parliament for a reason. The Parliament Act has only been used seven times since 1911, most recently in 2004. The intention of the Parliament Act was to make sure governments can pass legislation that they included in their election manifesto, preventing a deadlock that would stop them from governing. Invoking the Parliament Act for a moral issue about which the nation and MPs are divided would short-circuit vital scrutiny. Given the large number of genuine problems with the bill as it stands, MPs would be very unwise to force it through and reject the need to persuade the House of Lords.
The Leadbeater bill passed the House of Commons by 314 to 291 votes. If 12 MPs had voted differently it would have failed. We do not want a world where something like this, without a clear majority, can completely bypass the proper scrutiny to force it through. That is not democracy, and it’s a very dangerous habit for the House of Commons to develop.
No, Lauren Edwards MP. The House of Lords in 2025 were not being undemocratic. They were doing their democratic duty. Remember, we don't have full democracy in this country; if you wanted that you’d call a referendum. We have a particular form of parliamentary democracy with a constitutional monarchy. Democracy does not mean throwing off all checks and balances. Democracy is about recognising that people can make bad choices, so you distribute those decisions rather than letting a small number push everybody else around. If MPs use the Parliament Act to force this through, pressuring MPs not to make even minor improvements as a result, you are the one being undemocratic.
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