Member

We have debated all these issues and very many others. We have had time to debate at appropriate length all the issues that needed to be debated. Yet at the end of this Session, having completed only seven out of 59 clauses after 13 days of Committee, we have reached no conclusion on any part of the Bill or on the question of whether we should we return the Bill to the Commons. The only Committee debates of equivalent length in the last 20 years in your Lordships’ House have been for massively larger Bills. The 176 pages of the Welfare Reform Bill took 17 sittings. The Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill was 392 pages and required 15 sessions. The Crime and Policing Bill is 429 pages and has needed 15 sittings. For a Bill of this size— 51 pages—following such intense scrutiny in the Commons and drawing upon the vast experience of other jurisdictions around the world that have introduced assisted dying, we have made lamentably slow progress in our considerations. We could unquestionably have got through all the stages of our consideration of this Bill if we had conducted ourselves as we normally do.