The past 18 months have been “very intense” for Kim Leadbeater. Resting on the table between us in the Labour MP’s Westminster office is her bill – officially, the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, but more commonly referred to as the assisted dying bill. Printed on green paper, heavily annotated in biro – circles, arrows, with plenty of underlining and comments in the margin – this legislation would have brought about the most significant social change to the UK in decades. Adults considered to have six months or less to live would be granted access to life-ending medication, subject to approval by two doctors and an expert panel.
Leadbeater entered politics after the murder of her sister Jo Cox in 2016 – the first assassination of a sitting MP for more than a quarter of a century. She felt compelled to “make a difference”. Coming top of the private members’ ballot in September 2024 was an opportunity for her to do just that. She saw the existing rules on assisted dying – whereby anyone helping a patient end their life could be prosecuted – as a “failing status quo”. She strongly believes people should be helped to avoid traumatic deaths and that they have a right to bodily autonomy. “I thought there was a moral obligation to try to do something about it,” she tells me.
Leadbeater’s bill failed on 24 April. Despite being approved by the House of Commons last summer, it timed out before being put to a vote in the Lords, after more than 75 hours of debate. “Myself and lots of others are very angry,” says Leadbeater. But, she adds, “this issue is not going away”.
Less than a year ago, campaigners were optimistic. The majority of the public supported changing the law and legislation had passed initial parliamentary hurdles in both Westminster and Scotland. Since then, however, assisted dying has become one of the most toxic and politically divisive issues in the UK. Depending on who you ask, the fall of Leadbeater’s bill is either a betrayal of democracy or the consequence of poorly drafted legislation. But is there more to its failure? Is Britain unable to pass legislation on complex moral issues? Or does the battle over assisted dying suggest there are deeper divisions among us – divisions that go to the very heart of how we view society and our role as individuals within it?
Failed attempts to legalise assisted dying have been a feature of UK politics for decades. Leadbeater’s bill, introduced in the Commons in October 2024, seemed destined for a different outcome. It passed its second reading, 330 votes to 275, a month later, with politicians and the media commentariat quick to brand the debate “parliament at its best”. MPs spoke and listened respectfully, reflecting the magnitude of what they were being asked to decide.
The first draft had been drawn up – pro bono – by the former government lawyer Elizabeth Gardiner. After it passed its second reading, officials from the Ministry of Justice and the Department of Health and Social Care stepped in to help. Leadbeater spent months with civil servants and government lawyers. That’s not standard but in this case, Leadbeater explains, the bill was both complex and had clear implications for both criminal justice and the NHS. The government had a responsibility to ensure that if a law was going to pass – even one about which it had a neutral stance – that it was workable. The decision to provide this extensive support, Leadbeater’s team says, came directly from No 10.
In Leadbeater’s view, the process was smooth until the bill reached the House of Lords. “The vast majority of people,” she says, conducted “a really respectful, really civilised, really professional debate”. She tried hard to work “collegiately and collaboratively with anybody” who wanted to engage on the bill. “Really good changes” were made to the legislation in the Commons, such as mandatory training for doctors to identify coercion. It reached the Lords in what Leadbeater calls a “really strong state”. Arguably the most significant change during its progression through the lower house was the removal of oversight from a High Court judge; it was placed instead with a panel consisting of a social worker, a psychiatrist and a lawyer.
Others do not share Leadbeater’s positive assessment. Disagreement surfaced almost immediately after the bill’s second reading. A committee of 23 MPs was established to scrutinise the bill, but opponents argued its ideological make-up – 14 in favour, nine against – didn’t fairly represent the split in the Commons. Clashes followed over who the committee would hear evidence from (a decision to exclude the Royal College of Psychiatrists was reversed after criticism on social media).
The Labour MP and committee member Naz Shah told the New Statesman in March 2025 that the amended bill was “weaker” than the original and still contained “too many loopholes”. Another Labour MP, Jess Asato, goes further: “It was an absolutely dreadful process,” she says. “Incredibly few amendments were accepted in the committee stage.” Most of those agreed were tabled by Leadbeater, including the replacing of oversight from a High Court judge to the expert panel. Asato says further amendments tabled after the committee process – to be considered by all MPs – “weren’t even debated, let alone voted on”. There wasn’t enough time to scrutinise the bill properly or allow all those who wanted to speak in the debate the opportunity to do so, she adds, in large part because it was a private members’ bill rather than government legislation. Some began to wonder whether parliament wasn’t at its best, but its worst.
The bill passed its third reading, and its journey through the Commons, in June 2025 with a reduced majority – by 314 votes to 291. Appearing on Channel 4 News immediately after the vote, the disability rights campaigner and cross-bench peer Jane Campbell told disabled people not to be afraid. “We [in the House of Lords] will do our very best to make it the safest law that we can make it,” she said.
Supporters of Leadbeater’s bill insist it failed for one reason: a handful of peers blocked it. “They are ideologically opposed to the principle,” says Sarah Wootton, CEO of the campaigning group Dignity in Dying. Under current criminal law, she and Leadbeater claim, there is no systemic exploration of whether a terminally ill person who takes their own life has been coerced to do so. “I don’t see how you can argue that having greater scrutiny, transparency and regulation around what’s going on at the moment doesn’t protect people more than the status quo,” Wootton says.
The bill’s co-sponsor and Labour peer Charlie Falconer accused his colleagues of filibustering. The former chair of Labour’s National Executive Committee Dianne Hayter, also a peer, tells me she agrees: “They’ve stopped it by shenanigans.” The bill was flooded with “silly amendments”, she says, which contradicts the Lords’ normal conduct. This is an accusation even those who voted against the bill in the Commons have agreed with: the Lib Dem leader, Ed Davey, said he was “disturbed about the filibustering” and how “undemocratic” it looked.
Yet blaming a handful of peers for the bill’s demise ignores the concerns that were raised by others before debate even began. Two Lords committees – albeit one that included two of the peers accused of filibustering – worried about the bill’s lack of pre-legislative scrutiny and the absence of detail about how assisted dying would work in practice, including which drugs would be used in an assisted death.
While remaining neutral on the principle, none of the medical royal colleges supported the bill. Nor did any major disability charity or organisation. The human rights group Liberty, which backs a change in assisted dying laws, also refused to support Leadbeater’s bill. While it had been “drafted with the best intentions”, the organisation had “serious concerns over how it places disabled people, people of colour and other marginalised communities at risk”.
The bill is “badly written”, according to the cross-bench peer and Paralympian Tanni Grey-Thompson. “It’s lovely to try to pretend this legislation is in isolation of everything else in society, but it’s not,” she says. Many disabled people were worried the bill didn’t contain adequate safeguards. For example, a range of conditions, including cystic fibrosis, “would very easily fit into a terminal diagnosis”, she has told a Lords committee. A “halcyon view” of doctors and medical treatment had been presented, she argues. But disabled people “live in a very different world”, one characterised by daily discrimination. She believes doctors should not be able to raise the issue of assisted dying without being asked by the patient first.
While more than 60 peers tabled amendments, Grey-Thompson is one of seven singled out for criticism by colleagues, campaigners and the press. Between them those seven proposed nearly 700 changes to the bill out of a total of more than 1,220 – thought to be the highest number of amendments ever tabled in the House of Lords for a single bill. It is easy to see why many think they were intent on blocking assisted dying. “That doesn’t look like people are trying to strengthen the bill,” Leadbeater tells me. “It looks like people are trying to stop it from proceeding.”
Some amendments (not proposed by Grey-Thompson), Leadbeater has pointed out, seemed “cruel”. One required that anyone who had travelled outside the UK in the year before seeking an assisted death would be ineligible. Another called for all parts of the process, including the death itself, to be recorded on film. It is difficult to understand how these really would have improved the bill.
But a considerable number of amendments are what’s called “consequential”, meaning a single change might need further alterations to make the entire bill consistent. Take this fictional example: if someone wanted to suggest that either a doctor or nurse could be the person who judges suitability for an assisted death, not just a doctor, that would result in an amendment for every time the bill used the word “doctor”. The cross-bench peer Ilora Finlay, who tabled 191 in all, explained to me that one of her proposed changes resulted in 70 amendments.
Supporters of the bill argue that peers such as Finlay are simply opposed to legalised assisted dying. She is open about this when we speak. Having been a consultant in palliative medicine for four decades, Finlay says she has seen the good that quality end-of-life care can provide if done properly. But she denies blocking it. While she would not vote to legalise assisted dying, she says she knew it could pass and wanted to ensure it was workable within the current health system. “Those who are fervently against the principle – ever, for anybody – were quite cross with me for even trying.”
There are other doctors in the House of Lords not opposed to assisted dying in principle who were resistant to this bill in particular. “You don’t have to know very much about how clinical medicine works to know that the bill is utterly undeliverable in the form it’s in,” says Hilary Cass, the former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. She worried about the six-month prognosis as the main eligibility requirement – doctors are “appallingly bad at predicting”. The absence of a requirement to provide a reason for seeking assisted death (if they’re judged to have six months or less to live), she says, increases the risk of coercion or of people feeling like a burden.
Doctors in the Lords were not united, however. Clare Gerada, the former president of the Royal College of General Practitioners, believes the bill was “very good” and dismisses concerns about its lack of detail. She argues that these should be left for the relevant medical professionals to decide. “I couldn’t believe how bad some of their arguments have been,” she says of those who were seeking to alter the bill. The medics in the Lords who spoke against the bill were “either out of clinical practice, or they have no idea how real-world general practice works”.
From the many conversations I’ve had in recent weeks, I have not doubted the sincerity with which anyone has spoken to me. But the competing sides seem as if they have been looking at entirely different pieces of legislation. Each camp is all too ready to accuse the other of bad faith and false motives.
Meanwhile, Leadbeater has suffered abuse throughout the last 18 months. Grey-Thompson has been branded a “heinous bitch”, and Finlay called “anti-democracy” and “responsible for the downfall” of the House of Lords. “I had quite a few [messages] that said things like, ‘Shame on you – I hope you die in pain,’” Finlay recalls. Some colleagues, with whom she had previously worked well, now treat her “as if I’ve got the smallpox”.
Legalising assisted dying has been attempted before, but the tenor of debate has never been so toxic. What’s changed? “I think society’s quite different,” Grey-Thompson says. “I think it is quite unforgiving.” She also points to social media. Leadbeater says it raises a broader question for politics over how we “manage to disagree well”. Intense lobbying on both sides of the argument may also have contributed. Campaigners – for and against – have been an almost permanent fixture in both Westminster and Holyrood. Both sides have commissioned polling to persuade the public of their view. An opponent of the bill suggests the anger might be a response to how much money has been spent, too. For example, Dignity in Dying spent £2.7m on campaigning in 2024, the year the assisted dying bill was introduced – almost double the previous year.
Separate – and slightly different – assisted dying legislation fell in Scotland in March, when 12 MSPs switched to vote against. Some explained that they believed the bill contained too few safeguards and put too much faith in doctors; that Scottish medical groups pulled their support was also significant. While there was obvious disagreement and disappointment among those who supported the bill, the level of vitriol endured at Westminster does not seem to have been present in Scotland. Yet the vote in Holyrood exposed its own political fault lines.
Some argue that the country’s assisted dying legislation failed because of timing. The final vote occurred just before the parliament rose for the 7 May Scottish elections. While some of those who switched their vote tell me the imminent ballot curtailed proper scrutiny, others are more sceptical. The former SNP MSP Michelle Thomson, who voted for assisted dying, says some members feared supporting the legislation would have negative consequences for their careers. SNP members were mindful of wanting to secure a place in the next Scottish government, she explains, well aware that the party leader, John Swinney, was against the legislation.
Daniel Johnson is one of three Labour MSPs who switched their vote from “yes” to “no” at the final stage. “I think people make the mistake that the Labour Party is a progressive party, just from the perspective of individualism, and it’s absolutely not,” he says. “We are a party that is communitarian in mindset; the outcomes we look at are social rather than individual.” What would assisted dying look like for the disadvantaged? “Does it make it better or worse – and will it disproportionately impact them?” At Westminster, Jess Asato takes a similar view: “Our duty on the Labour side is always to think about the most vulnerable, the poorest, those who don’t have all of the opportunities that we have.”
Some oppose assisted dying for reasons of faith, but that isn’t the motivation for many. The legislation has exposed divisions between the progressive and social democratic traditions on the left and, more broadly, how we balance individual rights with our responsibilities to others. “We confront a profound fault line between two fundamental considerations: respect for individual choice and autonomy, and recognition of human vulnerability and the state’s duty to protect life,” Thomson argued during the debate in Scotland. It is not that one is right and one is wrong. But they are different ways of viewing the world, and are perhaps impossible to reconcile.
Campaigners such as Jane Campbell saw Leadbeater’s bill as a clash of rights between the individual seeking an assisted death and those vulnerable to coercion and wrongful prognosis. She herself has been declared “end of life” by doctors more than once. “It’s raising the rights of one group against another group, who are more vulnerable, to have a voice,” she tells me. As things stand, Campbell says, the challenges facing disabled people – such as cuts to benefits and care packages or the feeling of being a burden – make true choice impossible. There is no safe way, currently, to introduce assisted dying.
Leadbeater rejects the claim that her bill prioritises the rights of some over others. “Why would the rights of a terminally ill person matter less than the rights of a disabled person?” Leadbeater says she will always fight for the rights of disabled people and that some of the stories she has heard about how they have been treated were “outrageous”. “But that is not what the bill is about.”
One rare – perhaps only – area of agreement is that demand for legalised assisted dying is not going away. Westminster will not have to wait long for the issue to return, Leadbeater says. There are many MPs prepared to take it on, should they be drawn high in the next private members’ ballot when parliament returns in May. There are “ongoing conversations”, Leadbeater suggests, with the government about whether it would make time available for debate if she brought the bill back herself.
The Parliament Acts of 1911 and 1949 allow for legislation that has been blocked by the Lords to become law – effectively, peers can only reject a proposed law twice before it can be passed without the upper house’s consent. To bypass the Lords in this way, a reintroduced assisted dying bill would also have to pass through the Commons unamended. This is rare – and it has never happened before with a private members’ bill.
This route would, in the view of peers like Finlay, be “an abuse of parliament”, ignoring the Lords’ role as the chamber that scrutinises and improves legislation. “It would say, ‘We don’t care about anything that’s wrong with a piece of legislation. We’re just going to hammer it through.’” Others take a different view: “It’s really about whether we’re prepared to stand idly by as the principles of parliamentary democracy are torn down by unelected peers with an agenda,” says Dignity in Dying’s Sarah Wootton.
There is no guarantee the bill would get through the Commons again if MPs know it might not be amended in the Lords. Opponents claim support for assisted dying has fallen, but the polling that claim is based on surveyed fewer than a sixth of MPs. Some in Labour’s ranks may also be reluctant to expend more political capital on what has become an increasingly contentious debate.
There will be grave consequences, whatever is decided. “No vote that we can cast will guarantee that no harm will be done,” Michelle Thomson told her colleagues in May 2025. “A vote against assisted dying will mean that many people will continue to die a slow, lingering death with, as they see it, no quality of life.” And yet: “A vote for assisted dying will mean that some people are likely to die prematurely and, at worst, will feel compelled to make that choice because of external pressure.” It was a rare moment of honesty among the hundreds of hours of debate.
No legislation will ever be perfect. Politicians must ask whether the bill they have before them is good enough; whether it has done enough to minimise harm, while not creating a system so onerous that those seeking an assisted death cannot pursue it. That will require confronting uncomfortable truths. If this can be done, we really will see parliament, and politicians, at their best.
[Further reading: Caution should prevail on the assisted dying bill]
Content from our partners
Related
Join the debate
Subscribe here to comment