Progression of Bills through Parliament

I beg to move, That this House has considered e-petition 752673 relating to the timely progress of bills through Parliament. It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Sir Edward, and to open this important debate as a member of the Petitions Committee. I want to start by being clear about what this petition, and therefore this debate, is about. Although the petition was prompted by the parliamentary consideration of assisted dying, it is not about assisted dying; it is about British parliamentary democracy and how—or, indeed, whether—it can work. The petition poses what I would suggest is an existential question for us here: does our constitutional settlement allow changes that have been backed by the public and their representatives to pass into law? I desperately want the answer to that question to be yes. That is not because I want a specific piece of legislation to be passed; it is because if, as a country, we cannot resolve different views through Parliament—developing legislative proposals and scrutinising them, but ultimately reaching a decision on them—we are in a very troubling place.

My hon. Friend has made an excellent start to his speech. Does he agree that if the other place has the ability to block private Members’ Bills, that totally undermines the concept of such Bills going forward?

I agree that private Members’ Bills provide an important avenue for democratically elected Members of the Commons to seek important legislative change. For decades, they have been a long-established precedent in how this country introduces social change—whether that is the decriminalisation of homosexuality and abortion, or the abolition of the death penalty. Fundamentally, I do not believe that the unelected Lords should be able to block such key social change, but I will come on to some of the issues that my hon. Friend raised.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

I will introduce the petitioners first, because they ultimately prompted the debate; I will then be happy to take further interventions. The petition was initially proposed by Nathaniel Dye, a man who felt the urgency for change and looked at his Parliament to deliver it. Nat was a music teacher, and after being diagnosed with stage 4 bowel cancer in his mid-30s, he campaigned for cancer awareness and support, being recognised with an MBE for his incredible efforts. Nathaniel knew he was going to die, and he believed that Parliament should engage seriously with the issues that affected him and many others with terminal illness. He campaigned strongly in favour of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which was introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Spen Valley (Kim Leadbeater) in the last Session. As a member of that Bill Committee, I had the privilege of meeting Nat on a number of occasions. He was a remarkable man. In his final months, Nat became frustrated—angry, it is fair to say—at how the Lords were dealing with their consideration of the Bill. True to form, he decided to do something about it, starting the petition that we are here to debate today. Nat died in January this year. I pay tribute to him and his family, who have continued to support his efforts following his death. I am grateful to Rebecca Scott, his sister, for meeting me as part of the engagement process for this debate. After Nathaniel’s death, his friend Sophie Blake became the petition’s sponsor, and it is a pleasure to see her in the Gallery today, as it was to speak with her in preparation for this debate, alongside a campaigner from Dignity in Dying. Sophie has incurable stage 4 secondary breast cancer, first diagnosed in 2020. She is allergic to opioids, which form an important part of the palliative care pain relief toolkit, and unfortunately her family have experienced what she describes as “bad cancer deaths”. She does not want her daughter, Maya—also in the Public Gallery—to run the risk of being left with those memories. She wants the option of an assisted death if she feels that that is required. The key demand of Nathaniel, Sophie and the 114,000 petitioners is that Bills supported by MPs and the public must be able to complete all stages of the parliamentary process and to become law; and that the unelected House of Lords should be able to scrutinise, yes, but not block legislation backed by the elected Commons. Sophie and Nathaniel were both determined that the voices of terminally ill people should be at the centre of parliamentary consideration of the Bill. They closely monitored its various stages. They were in the Public Gallery of the House of Commons on Second Reading and of Committee Room 11 for some of the 100 hours of Bill Committee proceedings, where we made more than 100 amendments, including 30 proposed by MPs who had opposed the Bill on Second Reading.

In 2009 and 2010, I used to be the Whip in charge of Friday sittings, but even now I would struggle to explain just how things work with some of the Back-Bench Bills, given some of the shenanigans that go on. Does my hon. Friend agree that it destroys our constituents’ faith in parliamentary democracy when they feel that we are all playing games—filibustering and resorting to tactics to talk a Bill out, rather than debating things on their merits and moving to a vote to determine the will of the House?

I agree entirely. I absolutely respect the fact that others, including opponents of the Bill, reach different judgments on this difficult issue. Ultimately, as I said, in our parliamentary democracy that is for Parliament to resolve, on the balance of judgment of its constituent-elected MPs. That is explainable to our constituents. If something that constituents wish for is decided on by Parliament, that can be explained; what struggles to be explained is when tactics and filibustering are used to not reach a decision at all. I will come on to talk a little about that. At this stage, it is important to say that I spoke to groups opposed to assisted dying as part of my preparation for the debate—again, not to discuss the substance of assisted dying itself, but, as part of balance, to get their view about the process. It is fair to say that their position includes the assertion that the Lords were justified in not reaching a decision on the Bill because Commons consideration in Committee was flawed. I personally disagree; having sat in Committee for more than 100 hours—way in excess of nearly any other Bill—I might be expected to say that. Those exact same arguments, however, were available to Members before Third Reading.

As my hon. Friend knows, we both sat long and hard on that Bill Committee. But if we sent the Bill to the other place in good shape, why did the sponsor there table 77 amendments to it? Is my hon. Friend able to outline why that happened?

I am not here to speak for the sponsor of anything; I am here to speak for parliamentary democracy. Fundamentally, on Third Reading, MPs clearly backed the Bill. That was the final chance for MPs to have their say. In all those debates, my hon. Friend made his points well and ably, as I made mine, in Committee and beyond. I entirely respect his perspective, but I am bringing us back to the issue of parliamentary democracy. It is entirely appropriate, and no one is disputing—the petitioners are not disputing—that the Lords should scrutinise and indeed amend legislation passed to them from the Commons; what the petitioners find outrageous, frankly, is the failure to consider it. I will come on to that.

That is the key. Both the sponsor of the Bill in the House of Lords and others tabled amendments that might well, had they returned to the House of Commons, have had the opportunity to improve the Bill. Would the hon. Gentleman agree that the denial of that opportunity to improve the Bill is an absolute travesty?

Yes, I agree. I will come on to talk about future consideration of the legislation. The arguments against the process—that the consideration was somehow flawed—were widely debated before Third Reading, and the Commons reached a conclusion on that. All MPs had to make a judgment, independent of the Whips, on whether they wanted to pass the legislation. Sophie and Nathaniel were in the Commons Gallery on the day of Third Reading. They, like people across the country, thought a clear decision had been made: that assisted dying reform would become law, with significant safeguards, subject to some further iteration in the Lords, if required, including an extended implementation period of up to five years to allow any other considerations to be worked through. It was the approach of the House of Lords, specifically a small number of peers, that outraged Nathaniel, Sophie and the other petitioners.

It may only have been a small number of peers who tabled amendments, but many others wished to put their names to them. Does the hon. Gentleman not recognise the will of the House of Lords? I think 170 peers had real concerns about the legislation. The role of the House of Lords is to ensure that those concerns are looked at, and it is fully entitled to do so. On this occasion, it was not able to improve the legislation in the timescale provided. Does the hon. Gentleman not accept that?

It is always a pleasure to receive an intervention from the hon. Gentleman; he is much more experienced in this place than I am. However, over 16 days of debate in the House of Lords, the will of the Lords was not tested once. There were no Divisions. If the will of the peers was so overwhelmingly against the Bill, the Lords could have divided on Second Reading if the House had wished; it chose not to. The opponents of the Bill in the Lords went out of their way, it is suggested, to avoid Divisions. Some amendments may have passed, but a great number of others would probably have been defeated. With more than 1,200 amendments tabled, and 1% of peers tabling 60% of them, that small number of peers took up more than a third of the total speaking time.

I will just finish this point. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Daniel Francis) mentioned, Lord Falconer—the Bill’s sponsor in the Lords—made clear that he would sit down and discuss amendments with peers: indeed, he accepted and supported amendments that responded to genuine concerns with the Bill. But there was no opportunity for the Lords to reach a conclusion on amendments, because of the tactics involved. Mark D’Arcy, a BBC parliamentary correspondent for more than two decades, characterised the Lords’ treatment as this: “This is a filibuster. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and tastes good in orange sauce, it’s a duck. If they’re going this slowly over this piece of legislation, I’m afraid it’s a filibuster. There is no other way to describe what’s going on here. It may be in order. It may be within the rules of the House, but what’s happening here is that a relatively small number of peers are putting down lots and lots of amendments and debating them very, very slowly.”

The hon. Gentleman is making an excellent speech. He will be aware of early-day motion 2709, which I tabled in January. It is about the role of the House of Lords in scrutinising legislation, and the importance of ensuring that they are there purely to scrutinise and provide sober second thought on legislation. It had strong cross-party support. On 12 February, the Leader of the House responded to a question to say that if there were delays, “I will find time to see how we can progress it. This is a timely warning to their lordships”. —[Official Report, 12 February 2026; Vol. 780, c. 957.] This was a fundamental attempt—a successful attempt—to block the Bill; it was nothing other than that.

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. I agree with him—as does Rod Liddle, a journalist who did not support changing the law and was an opponent of the Bill. He said: “The truth, I am ashamed to say, is that in the case of the assisted dying Bill, my side won by cheating…What was not right was for opponents of the Bill, no matter how strongly they felt, to use machinery rather than honest debate to get the Bill booted out.”

My hon. Friend the Member for Spen Valley (Kim Leadbeater), who introduced the assisted dying Bill as a private Member’s Bill, cannot be with us today. Does my hon. Friend agree that the filibustering in the Lords and the inability of the Lords to deal with the assisted dying Bill within reasonable time fetters us as Back Benchers, and has a chilling effect on introducing a range of issues of conscience as private Members’ Bills?

My hon. Friend is right, as is my hon. Friend the Member for Spen Valley (Kim Leadbeater). I have heard it said that it was inappropriate for this issue to be brought as a private Member’s Bill, but equally we know that it would have been inappropriate for it to be included in any party’s manifesto. I see opponents of the Bill, as well as proponents of it, nodding in assent. Clearly, both public opinion and parliamentarians’ opinions on this issue are not split across party lines. The Prime Minister was clear in advance of the general election that he favoured a free vote to decide this issue—not on what the outcome of the issue should be—and that a private Member’s Bill was an entirely appropriate mechanism to achieve that. I hear some opponents saying, on the one hand, that a private Member’s Bill was never appropriate to do this but, on the other hand, that it would not have been appropriate to include this issue in a manifesto. Therefore, one is left to conclude that those opponents think there is no viable vehicle for social change in this country.

The challenge was that this Bill was launched very fast in the House of Commons, without pre-legislative scrutiny, whereas other private Members’ Bills have often been knocked around for a long while and discussed in detail, so that their flaws were recognised, adjusted and amended at different times. This Bill came very fast and there was a lot that was missing that had never been debated in the Commons, because of the way that the system works—not just for private Members’ Bills but generally. We need to legislate better in this country—I think we would all agree with that—and the Lords were doing their job.

I thank my right hon. Friend for her intervention, and I respect her significant experience and expertise in this place. Again, though, I gently say that that very argument was well rehearsed; in fact, I think she made it on Third Reading. And the judgment collectively of MPs was that it did not carry.

I did not speak on Third Reading.

Apologies—my right hon. Friend may not have spoken, but many other Members certainly made that argument, and it was a key argument for voting against the Bill on Third Reading. We either believe in parliamentary democracy and in the primacy of the House of Commons where each of us independently reaches our judgment—I accept that it is a judgment; I am not an absolutist on this issue—or we do not. We cannot believe in parliamentary democracy when it suits us and not believe in it when it does not suit us. Nevertheless, I agree with my right hon. Friend on the need to legislate better and I believe that the Hansard Society has put forward some recommendations about how the approach to private Members’ Bills in general could be improved. I absolutely agree that some improvements could be made.

I will finish my point. Fundamentally, the question is whether we can achieve social change in this country through parliamentary means, or not. I will just go back to how Sophie, the key petitioner, felt. She summed it up in the following way: “I’m living with incurable cancer and I know how precious time becomes when you’re facing the end of life. Watching Parliament waste that time because of the actions of a tiny number of unelected politicians is heartbreaking”. It is not that the House of Lords was improving the Bill. It may have been in some cases, but the fact that the House of Lords, in 16 days, did not divide once and decide on one amendment—

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

I have already given way to the hon. Member.

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. Does he agree that wherever people stand on assisted dying, the country is reasonably entitled to expect that after 16 days—more than 75 hours—of debate, the House of Lords should have come to a decision on one of the most profound issues that has been debated in this parliamentary Session?

I do.

Lewis—time.

You want me to make progress, Sir Edward, so I will. The question then turns to what happens now. What does this mean for assisted dying, yes, but also for the British constitutional settlement? As part of my preparation for this debate, I spoke to Tom Brake, CEO of Unlock Democracy, which campaigns for constitutional reform, including of the House of Lords, to address the democratic deficit. He believes that the case for Lords reform has been significantly strengthened by the behaviour of peers in this episode. In contrast, the Hansard Society’s director, Dr Ruth Fox, to whom I also spoke in preparation for today, reminded me that the Lords is a self-regulating Chamber. It is not subject to the timetable or expectations of the Commons or anyone else and, she believes, nor should it be. But she is also clear that in the current circumstance the British constitutional settlement provides a clear and appropriate response that the Commons could use to assert its primacy—the Parliament Act 1911. That Act was explicitly designed to be applicable to private Members’ Bills. Indeed, when the Parliament Bill was debated back in the 1910s, an amendment to confine it to Government Bills was defeated. The Parliament Act has been used before on issues of conscience—for example, equalisation of the homosexual age of consent in 2000 or the Hunting Bill in 2004, when the Lords refused to accept the decision of the Commons. The petitioners believe that it is now necessary to use the Parliament Act for assisted dying legislation also. They point out that if the legislation is reintroduced and passed by the Commons a second time, the Lords will again have a chance to do its job properly—to consider the types of amendments that a number of hon. Members have suggested that they believe the Lords want to see. The Lords may pass amendments for Commons consideration, but under the Parliament Act it would be unable to block progress entirely. I believe that the Parliament Act gives us a way to answer the question whether parliamentary democracy is still fit to tackle the key issues of our time. I am grateful that my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House is here and I look forward to his assessment of the situation in response to this debate. I hope that he will specifically touch on the Government’s assessment of whether the Parliament Act would be applicable should the Bill be reintroduced and, crucially, whether the Government would make appropriate time available for necessary procedures to take place to allow its use.

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way while making such an important speech on such an important, but also contentious, subject. We know that the Parliament Act has only ever been used seven times and never for a private Member’s Bill, and in recent weeks leading figures have opposed use of the Parliament Act in this way. Does my hon. Friend think that something so contentious that is a private Member’s Bill should override the present constitution?

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.

Lewis, you have to finish now.

In my constituency, I am getting a substantial amount of mail in my inbox from people who are glad that the Bill has been turned away. What they really wanted to see was investment in hospices, and there has been remarkably little to move that forward. I suspect if this Government made a major investment in hospices and the Bill came back in a few years’ time, it would make a big difference.

I note that the Scottish Parliament democratically came to a judgment on the devolved issue of hospice funding that the hon. Gentleman mentioned. The arguments he made were aired extensively before Third Reading and the Commons made its judgment clear. I will turn to my conclusions, as I know a lot of Members wish to speak. The public expects Parliament to work. More widely than on assisted dying, we can all sense a general public mood of impatience that change cannot be delivered in this country. Many on the Government Benches felt some of that impatience when it took 18 months from our election to pass the Employment Rights Act 2025, partly due to the ponderously slow process of the Lords. We rightly asserted the primacy of the Commons at that stage. Parliamentary democracy is not a pick-and-mix affair.

Will the hon. Member give way?

No, I am going to finish now. More in Common reports a shift from frustration to anger among the general public—not on this issue specifically but because it is too difficult to get things done in this country. There is a sense that our institutions are broken and that action is blocked at every turn. That cannot be healthy for anyone, least of all for people who are dying and have a limited number of days left. For people like Nathaniel and Sophie, parliamentary delay and inaction are not abstract concepts. Delay takes time that they do not have and it prolongs a status quo that MPs clearly voted to change. I would not serve here if I did not believe in British parliamentary democracy. The petitioners believe that we must act to demonstrate that parliamentary democracy remains fit to deal with the issues of the day, including life or death. I pay tribute to them. This issue is not going away, and I look forward to this debate.

Order. A large number of colleagues wish to take part. I want this to be an orderly debate, in which everybody has their say, so I shall institute an immediate six-minute limit on speeches. If everybody sticks to that, everybody should get in. Just in case colleagues are tempted to give way to others and therefore prolong their speech, I should say that nobody will be given extra time if they give way to another colleague. That is to ensure that everybody gets in. In terms of parliamentary courtesy, this is a debate; it is not an opportunity to come in, make a short intervention and then leave. Therefore, if you make an intervention, you are expected to stay for some significant time and to return for the winding-up speeches. I hope that is agreeable to colleagues.

Many thanks, Sir Edward, for your firm chairing today, which I now look forward to. I sincerely thank the petitioners, and particularly Sophie Blake for all the work she does and for a very well put petition. I also thank Nathaniel Dye, and I had the genuine honour of meeting him and seeing his work before his death. I want to add a cross-party voice to the debate. The Greens were not whipped on the issue of assisted dying—we do not whip our Members in any debates—but all four Green MPs voted for this issue of conscience. However, that is not what we are here to debate today; we are here to talk about the process. I was so impressed with it and with the seriousness with which my colleagues and colleagues across the House took this issue. We made our decisions after so much debate and engagement with the Bill text and the amendments, and debates in our offices and with our staff. In our constituencies, we all spoke with constituents from a wide range of different groups. I spoke with young people, disabled people, faith groups, several terminally ill people and people caring for those who were terminally ill. This was serious work. I was a very new MP when the Bill went through its Second Reading, and I found it so inspiring. It is a sad topic, but I found the debate extraordinary. After all the debate in the House of Commons, which was unwhipped—by any party—and conducted with such seriousness on an issue of conscience, all that work led to a majority for the Bill. We all know what happened next: a refusal by the House of Lords to come to any kind of decision, and the effective blocking of any further consideration of this issue, into which we had all put so much work.

I thank my constituency neighbour for giving way. Many of my constituents have been deeply upset by the way a small number of peers blocked the passage of the assisted dying Bill, despite the broad support from the public and from a majority of MPs every time it was voted on. Does she agree that debate on the Bill, about which there are strongly held, principled views on both sides, is very welcome, but that intentionally filibustering to prevent its passage is unworthy of this Parliament?

I quite agree. It was courageous of the House to take on this issue, consider it and then vote. We put our names to positions that we came to with some courage, I think, because we all knew there were people who felt very strongly the opposite way, whichever way we voted. On the principle—on this and any other issue where a similar process takes place and the House of Commons has the courage to come to a decision—I agree that it is not for the House of Lords to stop that using these kinds of methods. I agree with the petition writers, who want the Government “to ensure that when bills are supported by MPs & the public, they have the time to complete all their stages in Parliament.” That is 114,000-plus signatories, alongside the 69% of people polled this year who believe that the debate on assisted dying should have continued until Parliament reached a conclusion. I look forward to hearing from the Leader of the House about what can be done so that we can make the important private Members’ Bill process viable again in the future and restore the public’s faith in the health of democracy—I will not beat around the bush—and in the ability of this Parliament to make decisions on issues of such importance to so many of our constituents.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Edward. I want to speak about the process of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which was prevented from completing its parliamentary journey by a small number of unelected peers who showed through their actions that they had no respect for the constitutional settlement of this country, no respect for the House of Commons, no respect for their own role as scrutineers and no respect for the British public.

May I intervene, please?

I am sorry; I will not give way, as I want to finish this speech. The House of Lords at its best provides detailed scrutiny of legislation, proposing amendments to make it more workable and addressing criticisms of it. But this was not the House of Lords at its best; this was the House of Lords that I remember from my early adulthood: the Lords who kept blocking the equalisation of the age of consent for gay men and who delayed the repeal of section 28. What august company for these modern-day peers to be in! In each of those cases, the primacy of the Commons was asserted, and I really hope that once again the primacy of the Commons and the will of the British people prevail. Opponents of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill will say that the actions of those few peers were the Lords providing the scrutiny that the Commons did not. I say: what utter nonsense. We have already heard that over 1,200 amendments were proposed, including a pregnancy test for all applicants, regardless of their sex or fertility status. Is that scrutiny, or is it filibustering? I think we know the answer. In the Commons, the Bill had more scrutiny in terms of debate on the Floor and hours in Committee than any Government Bill of recent times. I remember those debates in the Commons; for the most part, they were nuanced, thoughtful and well intentioned. I remind Members that the issue of assisted dying has been debated for over 100 years in this country. I have also sat on multiple Bill Committees, including some of the longer and more contentious ones in this Parliament, and they did not last as long or see as many amendments debated as the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill did in the Commons. If a process that went above and beyond the process for any Government Bill is not sufficient to pass a law, what is? The debate in this place and the subsequent amendments to the Bill addressed matters of substance that were raised because of often understandable concerns. They were supported by many of us who support the right of someone to choose the timing and manner of their own death in principle, but who would not support a Bill that exposed people to the risk of not making that choice freely or that did not have strong guardrails. My conclusion, and the conclusion of the Commons debate, was that this was about how a Bill would operate in practice. What we saw in the Lords was not that. The majority of Lords were first prevented from voting on any aspect of the Bill whatever, and the clogging of the debate with unserious amendments prevented a proper debate on matters of substance. Where does that leave us? It leaves us in a dangerous status quo where terminally ill adults, with the means to do so, go abroad to die, often too early. It leaves us with a legal situation where the manner of someone’s death and the intention of the people who were with them are determined after someone is dead and cannot make their views known. It leaves hundreds of terminally ill adults taking their lives every year, often in very upsetting circumstances. Most people will die a perfectly ordinary death, managed well by palliative care, but palliative care cannot help everyone, no matter how good it is. Anyone who says otherwise is unfortunately not telling the truth. That has been demonstrated, unfortunately, by too many difficult deaths and by the pain of too many families who are left behind. The debate today is about something even bigger than those tragedies; it is about the constitutional settlement of the United Kingdom. It is about the reasons why we have decided that those with no democratic mandate should not be able to block the will of the elected Chamber. It is about trust in Parliament—trust that we will act with dignity and respect for the proper way of doing things, and know our constitutional places and the limits placed on our power, which are there for a very good reason. It is about the ability of the Lords to behave in a way that allows us to have flexibility in our constitutional settlement, to move with the times and not to be bound by a single, rigid written document. I see great value in having flexibility in our constitutional mechanisms. However, that relies on individuals and groups of individuals operating with honour—something that, unfortunately, this episode did not demonstrate. I worry that if that is repeated, we risk having to move to a more rigid system to enable the primacy of the Commons. The British people expect high standards of scrutiny from parliamentarians, in both this place and the other place. In the case of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, the House of Commons did its job very well. In the other place, the Lords were prevented from doing their job properly by the actions of a minority. Not only for the memory of Nat—our friend and fellow campaigner—but for every person in this country, that cannot be allowed to stand.

It is a pleasure to serve under the iron grip of your chairmanship, Sir Edward. We are here not to relitigate the substance of the assisted dying Bill, but to consider a profound change to the way we in this place carry out our duties as legislators. The petitioners seek, in short, for a failed Bill to be smashed through, as though it had not been subject to proper procedure, and for us to accept that it fell through procedural malfeasance. It is not so: this Bill failed because a gamble was taken to proceed down the private Member’s Bill route. It is well known that such Bills can run out of road due to time constraints. The emotive nature of the subject of the Bill is obvious, but just as the Commons debate was dominated by deeply moving yet ultimately anecdotal accounts of painful deaths, we cannot decide here on emotion. Bad cases do not make good laws. We must decide on cold, hard facts. It is a fact that this Bill carried a major flaw at its heart, in that it was not part of the Labour manifesto on which this Government were elected. It is also a fact that the Lords’ scrutiny role is designed to prevent the passage of poor legislation. This was flawed legislation, replete with issues unresolved at Committee, and passed to the Lords in a situation that Cabinet Office guidance warned would “likely kill the Bill”. I have seen all too often the result of a paucity of scrutiny when legislation has passed through the Scottish Parliament. Holyrood lacks a revising Chamber entirely, with its Committees expected to do the hard work of line-by-line consideration. This petition is couched in terms of fairness and democracy, but it is neither fair nor democratic to usurp our system for reasons of dogma. No matter the subject of a Bill, if it lacks a manifesto heritage, staggers through Committee amidst a welter of chops and changes, and ultimately fails on contact with the Lords, we have no place attempting to resurrect it because we admire its aims or because it is popular.

It continues to be the case that the royal medical colleges and many of the organisations representing disabled people take issue with the Bill as it stands. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that, while many among the general public would like to see assisted dying, or assisted suicide, introduced in principle, the detail of the legislation matters, and therefore the House of Lords was doing its job in providing that scrutiny?

I completely agree with the hon. Gentleman that this Bill has huge difficulties, and its popularity does not capture those. The Salisbury-Addison convention that the Lords will not seek to prevent the Government from implementing manifesto pledges simply does not apply. In this case, it has not been breached. The Government made repeated declarations that they were neutral on the Bill—that it was a private Member’s Bill—and so the convention does not arise. We cannot let the emotional baggage of the assisted dying Bill override proper parliamentary procedure.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

I will finish. Of course, the legislation approving abortion in this country came through the private Member’s Bill route, but that was backed by the then Labour Government, who appointed a medical advisory committee that also supported its passage. That was a gold standard, against which this Bill is mere base metal. It fell—and fallen it should remain.