I give a hollow laugh when friends hear about my tracking the twists and turns of the assisted dying debate and they say, “But I thought they voted for that ages ago.” It is a reminder that most people neither follow debates in detail nor understand how much time it takes to make a law. The bill will be back in the House of Commons on Friday 13th June and then again on the following Friday 20th. Before we get to the next big day I wanted to be clearer in my mind about several things, not least the oft-repeated charge that the bill hasn’t been given enough time for proper scrutiny.
This time last week my head was still spinning as I tried to understand what on earth had happened in the report stage of Kim Leadbeater’s bill. Why were there only two votes when there were so many amendments? Why was the debate cut short and what happens next? I know many MPs were equally bewildered. So it was some solace to talk to Dr Ruth Fox of the Hansard Society and find there were moments when she couldn’t quite work out what was happening either. If the expert’s expert on parliamentary procedure was blindsided, even for a few minutes, what hope for the rest of us? But she also described the claims that the bill was getting less scrutiny than government legislation as “rubbish”. Instead, she suggested the whole experience should lead to a rethink about the way we make laws in this country.
So, I asked, did that mean it should change the way we do major social legislation?
She replied: “I hope it changes the way we do legislation, full stop.
“Many of the frustrations we’ve seen here apply to government bills too. We need a better process not just for complex conscience issues, but for all sorts of policy—security, immigration, finance, criminal justice, planning.
“What this process has done is shine a light on the inadequacies of the legislative process more broadly. Everyone talks about Royal Commissions, but I can’t think of anything worse. If you want to kill an issue, send it to a Royal Commission—full of technocrats, and you’ll get a beautifully designed, perfectly formed technocratic solution. But the real problem is political.”
Fox argued that tricky areas of legislation need more initial agreement on the range of possibilities. This bill shouldn’t have been started, she believes, without more groundwork to build some sense of consensus.
“What would have helped,” she said, “is a process that presents MPs with a choice—not just ‘Do you like A, yes or no?’ but ‘Which of these competing models do you prefer?’ Something like a parliamentary commission of inquiry—to do that synthesis, to lay out the real policy options, and then put those options to MPs through a series of indicative votes. Force a choice.
“Once you’ve got a sense of where consensus lies, you can then think about how to operationalise it—and that could be handed to the government and civil service, with a commitment to bring a bill forward on that basis. Still with a free vote.
“I think that would have been a better way to do it.”
There are some suggestions that Keir Starmer is getting cold feet about the political dangers of this bill, even to the extent of being “busy” on the day of the big vote, and that some in Downing Street might be happy if it didn’t pass. It’s speculation and not something I’ve heard directly. But it is thought that he didn’t understand the implications of his promise to Esther Rantzen and what he was asking Leadbeater to do.
“I don’t think the prime minister really appreciated the technicalities and complexities of the private member’s bill procedure, and how different it is from how government bills are handled,” Fox told me. “Because these are not programmed. That creates its own challenges. And expecting new MPs to navigate this—when for many of them it’s the first bill they’ve really engaged with—not just the legal text but also the procedure, is just a huge challenge.”
Fox believes that if the bill gets through, while it may be legally workable, because it is a private member’s bill it may not be the assisted dying legislation most MPs might have actually chosen.
“MPs vote on whether to accept [Leadbeater’s] model. They don’t get the chance to put forward an alternative model. You can tweak the details, adjust safeguards, but the big, principled debate about what form assisted dying should take—six months? 12 months? Unbearable suffering? Terminal illness only?—that’s not really on offer in the legislative text.”
This is a really important point. Even the bill’s title restricts valid changes, for instance to suggest assisted dying should be available to people who are in terrible pain but don’t have a terminal illness.
So now a big question. When people criticise the process and compare it to a government bill—saying it wasn’t given the same amount of time or scrutiny—is that true?
“No, I think that’s rubbish,” Fox said. She noted that the bill’s report stage took about five hours last week—double the time given to the border security bill the week before.
She also noted comparisons to the Hunting Act. “The hunting bill was put through twice, because of the Parliament Act. But even if you total both bills, the hours in the Commons were 109. The assisted dying bill, at the minute, is on 97 hours—and it hasn’t finished report stage or had third reading yet.”
“There was a criticism that the bill was pushed through quickly, or that it was published only shortly before second reading,” she added. “That’s also not accurate. It was presented earlier than many government bills are presented to the House of Commons before second reading—and it’s a much shorter bill.”
I mentioned that it seems to me that Leadbeater has done a really extraordinary job despite being hamstrung.
Fox agreed. “She’s done several important things. One: she got public evidence for a private member’s bill—that’s never been done before. It wasn’t done on the [1967] Abortion Act… In those days, there was no TV coverage of parliament, no internet, no social media. The behaviour of MPs during the passage of the abortion bill—the way it was handled—was, frankly, disgraceful.”
Fox believes Leadbeater made a tactical error at the committee stage, by seeming to take control of the witness list and how time was divided up—unlike the procedure for a government bill, where time and witnesses are usually divided equally between government and opposition. “She would have been better off doing that, because she wouldn’t have opened herself up to the criticism that she’d weighted the committee in her favour.” (It’s worth noting, however, that in this case the “opposition” isn’t a united group—so dividing the time and witnesses between them would have been another challenge.)
Perhaps it was the lack of direction from the whips that made the session on Friday 16th May so hard to follow. Some at Westminster feel the speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, doesn’t do a great job of explaining the “where’s and what fors” of the debate. For a detailed overview I recommend Fox’s piece for the Hansard Society. But here is her answer to the specific question: what happened at the end of the debate?
“They were approaching the deadline of 2.30pm—the moment of interruption. The problem is, if any business is taken after that 2.30 point, it can only proceed if there are no objections.
“There was the faintest of ‘no’s heard in the chamber—it sounded like one female voice. I don't know who it was. The speaker initially didn’t hear it, but the clerks did and said to him, ‘Oh, there’s been an objection.’ So, as a consequence, they couldn’t proceed to a vote on that question of whether a new clause 10 should be added to the bill. Business was wrapped up.”
This will mean that on the second day of the report stage, MPs will need to first vote on clause 10—which chiefly ensures no one is obliged to help with assisted dying—and then possibly also vote on two more clauses before they begin debating.
This underscores how complex it all gets. So I asked, what do you say to people who say it’s such a mess it’s going to collapse?
“Well… I don’t think it will be a mess in the sense that the government won’t allow it to be. The lawyers will intervene if nobody else does. The government would not accept a bill that was legally unworkable. It will be technically workable, if it gets Royal Assent.
“That’s different from saying it’s a good policy. You might think the provisions or safeguards aren’t strong enough. But based on committee and report stage, there’s not much evidence of opponents having the numbers.
“What I took from report stage—and why a lot of MPs were getting overwrought—wasn’t just that they were finding it technically difficult, or struggling with speech limits, but that once those votes started going through the numbers held up pretty well for Leadbeater’s side. There wasn’t much slippage.”
Fox believes the bill will get through the Commons, even if more voters switch. “It will be interesting to see what people make of the process once it goes to the House of Lords.
“If the Lords pay as much attention to this bill as the Commons has—and I think they will — we’ll see a different kind of scrutiny. It’s less partisan. Whipping is lighter. They spend more time, and they have genuine expertise across a wide range of areas.
“They will engage carefully with the legal text—they’ll get into the detail, especially around delegated powers. This bill is almost a framework bill: it gives huge powers to ministers and officials, like the Chief Medical Officer, to determine how things are implemented later. It’s hard to predict how delivery will work.
“The Lords will get into that. There’s a delegated powers committee and a constitution committee. Both will report on the bill.
“You’ll probably see some amendments that were rejected in the Commons being picked up again in the Lords. And that might be where the final version of the bill—the one that does or doesn’t get Royal Assent—really takes shape.”
This is rare praise for the Lords way of business. But we’ve got a long way to go before we get to that stage.
