Assisted Suicide Bill – it’s not over yet. Not by a long chalk.

COMMENT

Some people think the recent vote to progress Kim Leadbeater’s assisted suicide Bill means it is now law. But MPs are not the only ones with a vote. No bill can become law unless it is also approved by the House of Lords.

House of Lords

The Lords has a vital constitutional role in scrutinising and amending legislation. On occasion, it blocks laws from reaching the statute book altogether. If its job, as some Leadbeater supporters imply, was simply to wave through legislation approved by the Commons, what would be the point in having a House of Lords at all?

“It is in the Lords where the real detail of legislative proposals is considered and properly scrutinised”

It plugs the gaping holes left by the concertinaed and constrained scrutiny that takes place in the Commons. The Lord Speaker of the House of Lords, Lord McFall, puts it emphatically: “It is in the Lords where the real detail of legislative proposals is considered and properly scrutinised”.

He explained: “…the House adds significant value to parliamentary scrutiny and revision, and is distinct from and complementary to the House of Commons… the membership of the House of Lords is replete with experience and expertise”.

Indeed, this is so widely recognised that some MPs appear to have voted to progress Leadbeater’s Bill precisely so that it would get the kind of scrutiny in the Lords that it failed to get in the Commons.

Rushed

PoliticsHome reported: “A furious Labour Peer… had spoken to MPs who were unhappy with the detail in the bill, but were intending to vote it through on principle and leave it up to the Lords to carry out the thorough scrutiny later on. They described this approach as ‘extraordinary’, arguing it shouldn’t be left to peers to improve such a consequential piece of legislation. One Labour MP who opposes the bill claimed they had also spoken to colleagues who would be voting for it, despite describing it themselves as a ‘mess of a bill’.”

In the Commons, because of Government constraints on time, many MPs were unable to speak, and scores of crucially important amendments were never even discussed, let alone voted on, leading many to complain about the Bill being “rushed”.

frustrating exercise in futility by those we elect to make our laws

After June’s Third Reading vote, Rosie Duffield MP posted on X that she had stayed up most of the night writing her speech against the Bill, and waited in the Chamber for hours for a chance to speak, only to be overlooked because the debate ran out of time.

At the previous stage of the Bill, some MPs did not even get to speak to their own tabled amendments. This frustrating exercise in futility by those we elect to make our laws underscores the value of the Lords, a self-regulating House where any Peer can speak for as long as they need to, without needing permission from the Speaker. If lots of Peers speak, say because of a particularly controversial aspect of a Bill, that means the debate takes more time and the Government has to schedule more days for the debate to continue.

The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, for example, was originally timetabled for six days of Committee debate. But the Bill contains much that is controversial, so this was quickly extended to eight days. Because there were so many amendments and speeches, at the end of those eight days Peers were only around half way through the Bill. Four more days for debate have since been scheduled.

This, surely, is what all of us as democrats want: for our legislators to have the time to consider a Bill and discuss it properly, rather than being silenced, or limited to token two-minute speeches, like some kind of sixth form debating society. This allows for meaningful changes to be made, and for bad laws to be avoided.

‘Run out of time’

As Lord McFall points out, the Government makes just as much use of the Lords’ ability to amend legislation as anyone. In the 2019-21 session of Parliament the Lords made over a thousand amendments to Government bills, at the Government’s request. McFall explains: “This is the high value of the civil discourse that we conduct in the Lords. The way we conduct our business improves the law of the land, serving the interests of the public.

“Ask most MPs and they’ll agree that they don’t have enough time to properly scrutinise legislation, line-by-line, as we do in the Lords. Capacity for this detailed work in the Commons is limited, and MPs are rightly busy responding to local issues and the needs of their constituents, while also operating within a 24/7 cycle of news and social media. In doing this scrutiny work, we draw upon the expertise of lawyers, judges, scientists, doctors, artists, diplomats, former cabinet members and many other professions represented amongst our membership.”

Parliament’s summer holiday runs from the end of July to the beginning of September, when the current session of Parliament will resume. The Leadbeater Bill is scheduled to have its Second Reading on 12 September. (Confusingly, ‘Second Reading’ is the name of the first debate, where the general principles of a Bill – but not amendments – are discussed.)

After that the Lords will scrutinise the Bill line by line, clause by clause, amendment by amendment, at Committee Stage which takes place in the Lords chamber, where any Peer can participate. Compare this to the Commons where Committee Stage was delegated to a group of just 23 MPs, handpicked by Kim Leadbeater.

Nikki da Costa, former No.10 Director of Legislative Affairs, says the Lords ought to schedule 20 days of Committee so that all the amendments overlooked in the Commons can be debated. Bear in mind, because it is a Private Member’s Bill, it would usually only be debated on sitting Fridays and the Lords typically only sits for one or two Fridays per month. 20 days could take ten months of sitting Fridays. Even if the current Parliamentary session is extended to May, as some speculate, the Bill would run out of time and fall.

After Committee comes Report Stage, where Peers go through the Bill again to consider and vote on more amendments to remove or add bits to the Bill.

Third Reading is similar to Second Reading in that it widens out to consider the Bill as a whole. This is where the Lords must vote on whether to block the bill or send it back to the Commons.

Block the Bill

The very fact that the Lords has a Third Reading Stage is a reminder that it has the power to stop any Bill. Lord Falconer, who has taken over running the Bill from Kim Leadbeater, suggests it is somehow improper for Peers to vote down a bill that MPs have supported. This is simply not true. And as one seasoned adviser to the Bishops in the Lords has pointed out, on “26 October 2015 Lord Falconer also joined 307 Peers in successfully voting to delay the Government’s changes to tax credits, despite the Commons having voted to approve them by a majority of 22 the week before”.

If Peers vote to block the Bill, that is game over for this session of Parliament

Incidentally, Leadbeater’s Bill was approved by a Commons majority of just 23.

As Cambridge Professor of Public Law Mark Elliott has observed, “Any argument that it would be undemocratic or otherwise constitutionally suspect for the Lords to do anything other than rubber-stamping the Bill would be wide of the mark.”

If Peers vote to block the Bill, that is game over for this session of Parliament. Since it is a Private Member’s Bill, there is no guarantee it will come back in the next session, and talk of the Government using the nuclear weapon of the Parliament Acts to force the Bill onto the statute book in a year’s time without the consent of the Lords seems unlikely.

If Peers send it back to the Commons but with amendments, MPs must vote on whether to accept those amendments or insist on their own version of the Bill. This begins a process known as ‘ping pong’. (Yes, that is the official name.) This is a battle of wills between the two chambers.
So anything could happen.

And here is what we know: The more people understand the detail of Leadbeater’s Bill, the less likely they are to support it. It is presumably for this reason that, as one commentator has observed: “Leadbeater’s allies are once again trying to short-circuit what safeguards Parliament has left by demanding the Lords subject the Leadbeater Bill to less scrutiny than they would ordinary legislation, despite the fact it has already received less scrutiny in the Commons.”

Rewriting the legal and moral foundations of the NHS to turn it into a state-funded suicide service

But, he goes on: “…peers could cause an enormous headache for the Government if they simply do their job properly. Unlike the Commons, … the Lords still does proper line-by-line consideration of legislation and takes much longer to do it, affording its members more time to speak and often sitting long into the night”.

The idea that Parliament is going to pass a half-baked Bill that exposes our most vulnerable people to coercion under a law that says “your life is no longer worth living” is too awful to contemplate. Rewriting the legal and moral foundations of the NHS to turn it into a state-funded suicide service, and doing so via a Private Member’s Bill moved by an MP with no experience as a minister and little experience as a Parliamentarian, beggars belief.

The House of Lords might just expose all of this. Let us pray that it does.