Lord Falconer of Thoroton (Lab)

My Lords, today is our final day scheduled for the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill. I am despondent that this Bill, so important to so many, has failed not on its merits but as a result of procedural wrangling. There is no prospect that the Bill can get through this House today or before Prorogation ahead of the King’s Speech on 13 May. Consequently, we cannot complete the Committee stage, let alone have a Report stage, when we could have tested the House’s views on the amendments proposed and then had a Third Reading debate. If the elected Chamber decides to return this Bill to us in the next Session, as I very much hope it will, there will be ample time for us to pick up where we left off and complete the proper task assigned to us as a revising Chamber. We are not a democratically elected House, but we are rightly held to account for what we do here, or, in this case, what we have not done. Members of the public, who support assisted dying by a very large margin, will be asking themselves why Parliament has failed to enact a measure that they believed would and should become law after Members of Parliament voted in favour of it in the other place. That is why I believe it is not only right but imperative that we take some time today to consider why we find ourselves in this position. I remain as committed to this Bill as I have been throughout the whole process, and so, I believe, do a majority in this House. We know that a majority of the Commons do, as do a majority of the public, as demonstrated in survey after survey by reputable polling organisations over a long period of time. The assisted dying Bill commands strong views. In those circumstances, it is for us in your Lordships’ House to debate with civility and patience. We need to set an example, in the way we conduct this debate, to everybody else engaged in the debate. I have kept that important point in my mind at all times in the course of this debate. The public have had an eye on our proceedings on this matter in a way that they rarely do. Our constitutional role is to revise and propose amendments, not to block. I know, because many noble Lords have said so, that it is not just supporters of this Bill who believe that we have let ourselves and Parliament down. Much more importantly, we have let down those terminally ill people, and those who love them, who were depending on us at least to reach conclusions on the Bill. Although this House has debated assisted dying on several occasions over the past two decades, for the first time we have had before us a Bill sent from the other place following unprecedented scrutiny and with clear majorities there at both Second and Third Reading. The suggestion that Members of Parliament did not deeply interrogate this Bill in the other place and that the issues it raised were not properly dealt with is profoundly mistaken. The Bill passed its Third Reading in the Commons in June after more than 100 hours of debate, including 29 sittings in Bill Committee, two full days of debate on Report on the Floor of the House, and a full day’s debate at both Second Reading and Third Reading, with no whipping and no guillotines. That is almost double the time given to scrutiny in the other place of, for example, the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill that we have been debating. Altogether, the Bill Committee in the other place considered and debated over 600 amendments, accepting around a quarter of them. Over 100 amendments were made in the sponsor’s name and more than 30 amendments were tabled by MPs and passed by MPs who had voted against the Bill.