Britain’s Assisted Dying bill: in terminal decline?
Sounding the alarm – A group of more than 50 Labour MPs have, over the weekend, written to the Leader of the UK’s House of Commons, asking her to intervene and postpone the third and final vote scheduled for Friday 20 June on Kim Leadbeater’s Private Members ‘Assisted Dying’ bill.
If this bill, formally known as the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, becomes statute, then it would legalise medical complicity in people’s death.
Campaigners have highlighted the moral, ethical and medical arguments for opposing the bill and here we have a legal challenge. One aspect to this is that a Private Members Bill (PMB) procedure is not inappropriate for an issue that will deliver ‘fundamental changes’ to healthcare in England. Another is that procedures for Private Members’ Bills have been breached. Given the importance of Parliamentary procedure, these two allegations should VOID the bill ab initio. So, even were the vote to go in its favour this Friday 20 June, these breaches would make it a lame duck.
The Labour MPs have referred to two breaches, namely inappropriate use of a PMB and also breaches of procedure in the handling of a PMB. With the legality of the whole bill at stake, we must ask whether the fifty MPs correct.
Breach of parliamentary procedures The fifty MPs have claimed that just fourteen per cent of MPs have had the chance to speak in Parliament on the Bill, with many movers of amendments not having been able to speak to the changes they have laid. In addition, they state that MPs have had the opportunity to vote on just 12 of 133 amendments tabled at Report Stage, and should the final vote take place on 20 June, would be arriving at Westminster without sight of the final version of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill.
As it happens, the Labour MPs are not alone in raising issues of breach of procedure. For, documents coming from the ‘men and women of Great Britain’ have been served on all MPs in Parliament, highlighting not only breaches of procedure but also the serious consequences of voting for a Bill with the foreknowledge of these breaches. What is the basis for these allegations, and how extensive are they?
Basis for allegations of breaches The Hansard Society document on PMB procedures specifies that ‘There is no end date for a PMB’, adding also that there should be no ‘time limits on speeches’ and that the time required for committee consideration of the PMB must be dependent on ‘the nature of the bill and the level of interest in it’. Given the high level of interest in the Bill (an interest that is inevitable given the impact of the bill on the life and death of men and women in Britain), and the fact that time limits have been placed not only on speeches and on the amount of time available to consider the bill in Parliament, but also on the time available to the Parliamentary committee for its proceedings, these procedures have been indubitably breached. Here are just a sample of the breaches of PMB procedures, with others raised by the fifty Labour MPs:
- The 38 page bill was published just 18 days before its first debate
- Only 67 days were allowed for drafting the legislation, a duration which the Hansard Society deemed to be ‘undeniably short’ and with ‘the timescale limiting the depth of policy design’ (Fox and England, 2025). The result (ibid) is a bill that leaves significant operational detail to ministers by conferring 34 powers to make delegated or secondary legislation. As Fox and England state, ‘this raises important questions about democratic oversight’. In fact, no pleading of a short timescale can justify the tight timescale, given the lack of any prescribed end date for a PMB procedure
- Between 28-30 January 2025, the Parliamentary Committee heard from 50 experts, a vast number to be listened to by committee members in the short time span of three days allowed (Baker and McKee, 2025), one that cannot be justified given the lack of any prescribed end date for a PMB procedure
- By 5 June 2025 the bill had received just under 98 hours of Parliamentary scrutiny. Limiting total debate time and the time allowed to individual MPs is a serious breach of PMB procedure which specifies that ‘there should be no ‘time limits on speeches’.
- Shabana Mahmood, Justice Secretary, stated that there was ‘curtailed’ debate in the House of Commons (Heffer, 2025)
- Naz Shah, an opponent of the bill in the committee, was forced to leave the committee early after an all-day/ evening debate when her hearing aid battery was no longer functioning given the length of the session into the late evening
Note that the Institute of Government’s justification for the rushed timetable, namely that the rushed committee proceedings were driven by the need to ‘take advantage of the first Friday available for a PMB to receive its report stage’ (Baker and McKee, 2025), is not only a presumption, rather than fact, but also breaches the open-ended timetable of a PMB. .
Inappropriate use of a PMB
What of the Labour MPs’ allegation of an inappropriate use of a PMB? This seems wholly justified given a number of points:
- Unlike a government bill, a PMB includes no provision for the taking of external evidence from experts or members of the public at committee stage, In the event, 50 witnesses were heard but numerous bodies were not allowed to act as witnesses including the UK Deaf and Disabled Coalition, the British Geriatrics Society, Hourglass – the UK’s only charity supporting older abuse victims – and Standing Together Against Domestic Abuse, which works to combat abuse and coercion (Eastham, 2025)
- The committee logged 98 hours in total, three times the combined time spent on all 49 PMBs that became law in the previous Parliament. This shows how different in nature are all other PMBs, used for far less significant issues
- The witness list for the committee stage leaned in favour of the bill whereas, for a government bill, the witness list would have been more evenly divided
- The patronage exercised by the bill’s supporter, Kim Leadbeater, led to supporters of the bill being modestly over-represented compared to the second reading result, ensuring that proponents always outnumbered opponents in votes
- Earlier PMBs concerned with matters of conscience (specifically the Abortion bill and the Capital Punishment bill) were significantly shorter than The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, with the Abortion bill containing only 7 sections as compared with the Assisted Suicide’s 64 clauses and two schedules
- The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill amends several statutes as well as the principles of the NHS, not the usual hallmarks of a PMB
- Shabana Mahmood, Justice Secretary, referred to the ‘inadequacies’ of using a PMB to bring forward The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill laws
Breach of Parliamentary process: two commentators stated that ‘the argument that this should have been a government bill remains compelling’ and the facts quoted above bear this out.
Conclusion? Are the fifty Labour MPs correct to be calling out the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill as breaching procedures for a PMB as well as using a vehicle for the bill, a PMB, that is wholly inappropriate? The points raised by previous commentators support their view that the bill is fatally flawed and it would appear that, were a vote to be held on Friday 20 June, the bill would be VOID ab initio. So, given that all MPs have been served details of these breaches, a key question concerns whether they might be guilty of malfeasance of public office were they to vote in favour of it.
Watch out for parliamentary fireworks in the run-up to 20 June.
About the author: Professor Gloria Moss PhD is the author of over 80 peer review journal articles and eight books. She can be contacted via Truth University, the Home of Critical Thinking, at: www.truthuniversity.co.uk
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