MPs are set to vote today on a fresh attempt to legalise assisted dying in England and Wales, in a debate that could send the proposal back to the House of Lords for further scrutiny.
The bill, championed by Labour MP Lauren Edwards, would give terminally ill adults with less than six months to live the right to seek help ending their own life, provided they meet a set of safeguards, including sign-off from two doctors and an expert panel.
Edwards has framed the vote as a chance to finish work left unresolved when a similar bill, brought forward last year by Labour’s Kim Leadbeater, passed the Commons but became bogged down in the Lords after peers put forward well over a thousand amendments. She has urged colleagues to let the upper chamber “finish what they started,” arguing that further delay comes at a real cost to dying patients.
Broadcaster Dame Esther Rantzen, one of the best-known faces of the campaign for assisted dying, has also weighed in. The 86-year-old, who is living with terminal cancer, said she had become too unwell to travel to a Swiss clinic as she had once planned, and described her situation as unbearable.
Not everyone in Westminster is convinced. Labour MP Ashley Dalton, who opposed the previous version of the bill, says her concerns remain unaddressed and that the protections on offer are still not strong enough to shield vulnerable people from pressure or coercion.
Faith leaders have also spoken out against the plans. The Catholic Church’s Archbishop Richard Moth has dismissed the bill as flawed and wrong in principle, while the Archbishop of Canterbury has warned in print that passing it would send a troubling signal about which lives society regards as worth living. Royal Colleges representing psychiatrists and physicians have likewise flagged reservations about the safeguards written into the legislation.
Hospice and palliative care charities, including Marie Curie, Hospice UK and St Christopher’s, say they are not taking sides on the principle of assisted dying itself, but have repeatedly stressed that end-of-life care across the country remains patchy and underfunded. Hospice UK’s chief executive, Tony Porter, told the BBC that genuine choice at the end of life depends first on access to decent palliative care, something he says too many patients are still denied.
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has confirmed she will again vote against the bill, arguing that the scrutiny process, including the Lords’ extensive amendments, should not be treated as mere obstruction. When she opposed the legislation last year, Badenoch set out her reasoning in some detail, saying she does not oppose the underlying principle of assisted dying and rejects the purely religious case against it, but that she cannot back this particular bill because of doubts about the state’s capacity to manage such a sensitive process safely. Drawing on her time as a minister overseeing safeguarding failures elsewhere in the health system, she said the same institutional shortcomings would likely resurface in the judicial and medical machinery responsible for assisted dying, and concluded that without stronger protections and more time for debate, the country was not ready to proceed. She was joined in opposition last year by then-Health Secretary Wes Streeting and Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, while former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was among the Conservatives who backed the bill, underlining the extent to which the issue has cut across, rather than along, party lines.
That split is echoed more broadly across the Tory benches and beyond. Research into last year’s votes found that non-religious Conservative MPs were markedly less inclined to support assisted dying than non-religious MPs as a whole, suggesting factors beyond faith are shaping Conservative opposition to the bill. Fresh polling by Whitestone Insight for the think tank The Other Half has also found that seven in ten Britons believe Parliament should sort out palliative, social and end-of-life care before legalising assisted dying, a view that aligns closely with the argument long made by Badenoch and other Conservative critics. The same poll found that seventy-eight per cent of respondents think MPs who supported the bill previously should judge the new version on the evidence now available rather than feel bound by their earlier vote.
Edwards has deliberately kept the new bill identical to the version MPs approved last June, a move with constitutional significance: under the Parliament Acts, an identical bill passed by the Commons in two consecutive sessions cannot be blocked outright by the Lords a second time, though peers would retain the ability to propose amendments. Some MPs are uneasy about this strategy. Labour backbenchers Gareth Snell and Dame Meg Hillier, on opposite sides of the underlying argument, have jointly written to colleagues warning that the tactic leaves them facing what amounts to a take-it-or-leave-it choice.
The vote itself is expected to be tight, with both camps braced for a close result that may hinge on turnout on what would ordinarily be a constituency day for many MPs. A defeat would kill the bill outright, though campaigners have signalled they would try again as soon as possible.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham is not expected to cast a vote, saying the matter is properly one for Parliament rather than government to resolve, and that his administration will remain officially neutral. He has previously indicated a personal view that funding for end-of-life care ought to be strengthened before assisted dying is legalised.
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