LEGISLATION on assisted dying will receive further time for scrutiny within the House of Lords, it was agreed on Thursday.
The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill was already as a result of be debated into the spring, after the addition of ten extra days of debate (News, 27 November 2025).
The details of the further extension are yet to be announced, but were agreed in principle in a debate on Thursday evening.
The proponent of the Bill within the House of Lords, Lord Falconer (Labour), proposed the extension, saying that without overtime, it could be unattainable to “complete the strategy of scrutiny”.
More than one thousand amendments to the Bill have been tabled, and only a fraction have been debated to this point, and there is simply around 50 hours of allocated parliamentary time left.
Members from either side of the controversy had expressed the view that it could be “fallacious, and would significantly damage the repute of this House, if we failed to achieve conclusions on the Bill”, Lord Falconer said.
In the controversy that followed, Lord Shinkwin (Conservative), who opposes the Bill, suggested that the indisputable fact that so many amendments had been proposed might reflect “the standard, or lack thereof, of the Bill that was sent to us”.
He said: “If any Bill is so poorly drafted and so unsafe, surely the query isn’t a lot whether the Bill deserves more time, but whether yet more time could transform it.
“You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”
There was broad agreement across the House that more time was needed to scrutinise the Bill, but nonetheless the controversy lasted almost an hour.
Baroness Butler-Sloss, who chairs the Ecclesiastical Committee, suggested that peers should “speak more briefly” within the debates on assisted dying. “At the top of the day, we have now to get it through,” she said.
The President of the Catholic Union of Great Britain, Baroness Hollins, also supported the proposal for more time, but she said that she didn’t think it could be sufficient. “The kindest thing for the Government to do could be to hunt to determine a royal commission to provide this weighty issue the eye that it deserves. We cannot do it justice through the Private Members’ Bill process,” she said.
The next day, the controversy on the Bill itself continued with discussion of an amendment looking for to require a judge to approve applications for an assisted death.
Also debated was an amendment which might see a panel of palliative-care experts assess applicants, and to supply care “to the extent crucial to enable them to choose whether such care would affect their wish to finish their life”.
