The Assisted Dying Bill fails: the role of the House of Lords
By Sasha Macmillen
The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill has failed to become law, having run out of time in this parliamentary session. This follows months of what has been described as ‘filibustering’ by the House of Lords, whereby select peers have been accused of deliberately seeking to block the bill’s passage via the submission of hundreds of amendments. Instead of fulfilling the unelected chamber’s role of revising and improving legislation, peers’ tactics have been criticised as “trying to prevent the government functioning”, according to Labour MP Paul Foster, who had voted against the bill when it passed its third reading in the House of Commons last June. Whilst many of the bill’s opponents have celebrated its failure, its supporters have decried the manner in which it was blocked, and it appears likely that the bill will be reintroduced in the next parliamentary session.
First introduced as a private members’ bill by Kim Leadbeater in October 2024, the bill passed its second reading in November of that year by 330 votes to 275, following an impassioned yet respectful debate which many had viewed as the ‘Commons at its best’. By November 2025, it had reached the Committee stage in the Lords, at which point a group of seven peers set about introducing more than 800 amendments, more than half of the 1,280 total. The peers in question have denied the accusation of filibustering, instead criticising the bill as poorly drafted and full of loopholes that necessitated amendments. Had the bill been successful, it would have required a mentally competent adult assessed to have fewer than six months to live to request approval from two independent doctors and an overseeing panel, in order to be assisted to end their life. Nevertheless, many disability and religious campaigners were highly critical of the bill’s design, despite its relatively narrow scope in comparison with similar bills passed in other European countries.
”As this exceptional case has shown, peers retain the ability to ‘talk a bill to death’’
The Lords has long been recognised as the revising chamber, in which peers with expertise in specific fields have the opportunity to add value to a bill through amendments. Its powers of delay were significantly reduced by the Parliament Acts 1911 and 1949, so that the Commons is supreme and episodes such as the current one are increasingly rare. However, as this exceptional case has shown, peers retain the ability to ‘talk a bill to death’. Some of the amendments proposed were criticised as overbearing or cruel, such as a requirement that patients must not have travelled out of the country in the previous year and another that mandated assisted deaths be video recorded.
The tactics employed in blocking the bill have led to calls for greater Lords reform, with the newly registered All-Party Parliamentary Group on House of Lords Reform drawing cross-party support. Despite there existing a broad consensus that the Lords must be reformed, how to do so remains unclear, and a deeply entrenched conservatism within British institutions means that any proposals are likely to meet fierce opposition. Supporters of the Lords are keen to defend its status as a ‘scrutinising’ chamber yet calls for change only grow when it impedes the will of the democratically elected Commons. In this case, a 2024 Opinium poll found 75 per cent of the country to be in favour of assisted dying, with a majority in every constituency. The comparative closeness of the vote in the Commons already suggests a level of disconnect between constituents and their representatives, whilst the bill’s blockage in the Lords is more outwardly anti-democratic.
Even if as is likely, the bill is reintroduced in the next parliamentary session and eventually passed (the Parliament Act prohibits the Lords from blocking the same bill twice), its disrupted passage through parliament will have no doubt convinced many MPs that the time for Lords reform is now. Whether or not the government chooses to allocate chamber time to constitutional reform matters such as the Lords remains to be seen during a period of domestic and international instability, yet the tide of public opinion is inevitable, and sooner or later it is likely that the Lords will undergo major reform.
Image credit: ‘Official portrait of Kim Leadbeater‘ by House of Commons / Roger Harris via Wikimedia Commons licensed under Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0)
