Assisted Dying Bill fails in Parliament

By 286 votes to 270, MPs voted against allowing the reintroduced Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill to proceed beyond its Second Reading, halting what had appeared to be the most promising attempt in decades to change the law in England and Wales. After the near-identical Bill sponsored by Kim Leadbeater secured Commons support in the previous parliamentary session before running out of time in the House of Lords, supporters had hoped that Lauren Edwards MP's reintroduced Bill would provide a route back to reform. Instead, the Commons has drawn a line under the proposal, at least for the foreseeable future. 

Many opponents of the Bill questioned whether the NHS, social care system, and palliative care services are sufficiently resourced to introduce assisted dying safely, warning that reform should not proceed before wider end-of-life care is improved. Many of the MPs who spoke against the Bill emphasised this point, perhaps taking the lead of Prime Minister Andy Burnham who has recently explained that he takes this view.

Proponents of the Bill, including its sponsor Lauren Edwards MP, expressed frustration that legislation previously endorsed by the Commons failed to reach the statute book because of what supporters described as the use of “procedural devices” in the House of Lords. In response, backers of the reintroduced Bill had explored procedural routes that could ultimately have enabled the elected House to prevail. Yet today's defeat suggests that concerns about parliamentary process alone do not explain the Bill's demise. The narrower support compared with previous Commons votes indicates that at least some MPs became less convinced that the proposed system struck the right balance between autonomy and protection. 

While campaigners (and Lauren Edwards MP herself) have already promised to return to the issue, today's vote demonstrates that assisted dying remains one of the country's most contested questions. For now, public sympathy for those seeking greater choice at the end of life continues to butt up against concerns about safeguarding the vulnerable. The debate is perhaps unlikely to disappear, but reform now appears further away than it has at any point over the past year.