Lewis Atkinson

I thank my hon. Friend and regional colleague for her intervention. The Parliament Act was explicitly designed to include provision for private Members’ Bills and it has been used on issues of conscience before. I also question the idea of contention. There is no doubt that assisted dying is a really serious matter, but the view of the British public on it is remarkably stable, which makes the resolution through parliamentary means absolutely clear. As part of my preparation for this debate, I spoke to Sophie Stowers from the polling and insight company More in Common, whose work on this topic, I stress, has been independent and not funded by campaigns on any side. She told me that polling on the introduction of assisted dying has been remarkably consistent from the time of the Bill’s introduction to now, with support levels among the British public of 60%, compared with opposition in the teens. That finding is consistent with work carried out by others, including the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, which ran a citizen’s jury on this topic, exposing all the participants to lengthy discussions on arguments for and against a change in this place. When I speak to constituents, they still think assisted dying is coming into force because people do not understand—perhaps they cannot understand—how in 2026, elected representatives of their country can vote for something and yet it can still be blocked by a small number of Lords who have no accountability to the public. In its insight work, More in Common reports that people do not understand why the Bill fell, they are puzzled about the suggestion that it ran out of time, and they do not believe that it should be the end of the process. In its polling in January, when it was becoming clear that there was a risk of the Bill running out of time in the Lords, more than four in five citizens said that the assisted dying bill should be introduced again in the Session of Parliament that we are now in.