The House | The painful death inflicted on the assisted dying bill shows the House of Lords is not fit for purpose

Pro-assisted dying campaigners outside the Houses of Parliament, September 2025 (PA Images / Alamy Live News)

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Views are often shaped by personal experience, such as the death of a loved one, or by religious belief. It was the former which led me to confess in the Lords Chamber that, if the proposals in the assisted dying bill amounted to the ‘loaded gun’ with which it was equated by Baroness Finlay of Llandaff, I would have been prepared to fire it at my mother, so great was her agony as she begged for help in the final hours of her protracted death.

I was a strong supporter of the bill but my speech was followed by one from Baroness Grey-Thompson, who opined that “the bill that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, is proposing is simply not fit for purpose”.

This could have been one of several recent Fridays in Westminster – but it was actually July 2014, and that bill was stymied by the general election the following year. Since then, many other countries have embraced the concept of assisted dying, yet the UK is about to flunk another attempt to change the law on this subject. This time, with some of the same peers participating and deploying the same arguments, the ultimate victim could be the House of Lords itself.

Respect for politics and politicians, already meagre, has been further eroded by the continuing fallout from the Epstein saga. An Upper Chamber stuffed with people born into a tiny sub-stratum of society, chosen by the Church of England or anointed by the leaders of political parties, was never easy to justify in a modern democracy. Finally ditching the hereditary element might once have been enough to temporarily appease those demanding change but the controversy over its handling of the assisted dying bill has put the institution in real jeopardy.

Since 2014, public opinion has moved steadily in favour of offering dying people a chance to end their lives in the way they choose. The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill improves on previous efforts in this area and has been passed by the elected House of Commons. The role of the Lords, as its members keep saying, is to scrutinise and improve legislation, employing the extensive and hugely varied expertise its members can bring to bear. But it stretches the bounds of credibility to argue that this is all that has happened when a short bill has been subject to 1,253 amendments. 

The protracted and repetitive speeches these have produced, rendering it impossible for the bill to come close to meeting a workable timetable, have raised doubts as to whether self-regulation is any longer workable. If it looks like a filibuster, sounds like a filibuster and has the same effect as an intentional filibuster, then people will conclude that it is just that. And a House that cannot prevent such behaviour killing a bill that has the support of the elected members and the public is simply not fit for purpose. Rather than be an effective scrutineer, the Lords has allowed the personal prejudices of a few to thwart the wishes of the many.

The bill is not perfect: such legislation could never cater for all eventualities, and some opponents have proved hugely imaginative in positing extraordinary situations with which any new ‘assisted dying regime’ might have to contend. Others have sought to impose such conditions and demands that it would be impossible for any really sick person to comply, let alone the terminally ill. Cries for yet more ‘safeguards’ ignore that, currently, there are no real protections to stop grasping relations from encouraging a trip to Dignitas or suggesting that the patient should forgo further life-preserving treatment. 

Meanwhile, people who are close to death and desperate to have some control over the manner and the timing of their exit continue to be deprived of even that option.

Baroness Wheatcroft is a crossbench peer