Controversial legislation to permit assisted dying in England and Wales is set to fail because of a lack of parliamentary time, Sky News can reveal.
The Labour chief whip in the Lords, Roy Kennedy, said this week that the government would not give the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill more time before the May deadline, when all legislation must have passed or automatically falls.
The team behind the bill also confirmed they now expected the legislation in its current form to fail.
There are six remaining sitting days left before May, when the King’s Speech happens, and the government is not repeating what it did in December by giving more time.
Advocates for the bill did not blame the government, which it said had been helpful to date, and instead aimed their fire on a minority of peers who have been asking thousands of questions about the details of the bill.
Broadcaster and campaigner Esther Rantzen told Sky News: “This is absolute blatant sabotage. This is a handful of peers putting down 1,200 amendments not to scrutinise the bill, which is their job, but to block it.
“A few peers for their own reasons have decided that they’re going to stop this going through parliament, and the only way to stop them would be to invoke the Parliament Act, which has happened before, or get rid of the House of Lords – they’re clearly not fit for purpose.”
She said she was still hopeful the change would come, as there is a rising cry for reform all around the world. She paid tribute to Sir Keir Starmer, who favours a change in the law, and said he had done everything he promised her before the election.
Many members of the public and even MPs were unaware that the bill was likely to fail. Earlier this week, the Welsh Parliament approved a “legislative consent order”, endorsing in theory the legislation that it expected to come out of Parliament.
The debate will now focus on what happens after May, with proponents of a change in the law saying the public polling and the repeated backing of MPs means that this legislation should be given a second chance.
However, the government is likely to continue keeping the issue at arms length, since there is no single cabinet position on the issue and members of the cabinet like Wes Streeting and Shabana Mahmood are implacably hostile to the change. This makes a change in the law much more tricky.
Some MPs who backed the bill in its Commons stages have told Sky News the process was so torturous that they would not want a repeat of it. Supporters have suggested that you would not have to go through the entire process – avoiding committee stage if the same bill was resurrected – and the Commons stages could in theory be done in one day, and the Parliament Act then deployed to override the objections in the Lords.
However, the more turbulent political context for the government, the bandwidth that even this would occupy in government, and the fact the reforms would not be complete before a general election, mean that this would be a significantly bigger challenge second time around.
