Britain’s bitter assisted dying debate is about to come roaring back to life

LONDON — Kim Leadbeater has a foot-high sheaf of paper marked “PMB” on her Westminster office desk.

The Labour MP’s private member’s bill to legalize assisted dying in England and Wales, which has consumed her and many others’ working lives for 18 months, will collapse next Friday. It remains trapped in a deadlock in the House of Lords, with hundreds of proposed amendments unresolved on an issue that has unleashed intense feelings on all sides. 

But her opponents will be allowed little relief. 

Leadbeater met civil servants in the last week to discuss her plan to resurrect the bill — which she plans to put in motion within weeks of a new parliamentary session starting on May 13.

Her ally Charlie Falconer, the bill’s sponsor in the Lords and an old ally of Tony Blair, claims up to 150 backbench MPs are willing to put Leadbeater’s law in their own name if they are given the chance. After that, they plan to use a rare procedure to pass the bill without the Lords’ approval if it gets stuck again.

“We go again,” said Leadbeater in an interview with POLITICO, pumping her fist into the air. She added: “The bill will definitely come back, there’s no two ways about it. This is not an issue that’s going away.”

The gambit will pile new fuel on the bitterest legislative row Britain has seen since Brexit. 

Lawmakers on each side openly accuse some on the other of bad faith. Leadbeater and Falconer say their bill is about giving people choice over their deaths, was backed by MPs, and accuse a small number of peers of “filibustering” and presenting religious or moral opposition to assisted dying as mere fine-tuning. Opponents accuse them of disregarding legitimate concerns and railroading through a flawed law that will leave vulnerable people at risk of ending their lives without proper safeguards.

The revived fight will be a new headache for Prime Minister Keir Starmer — who has personally backed legalizing assisted dying for years, but refused to offer the bill any kind of formal government backing. Allies are weary at the idea of a divisive debate hoovering up more time and headlines when Starmer is consumed by war, political drama and the effort of trying to turn around Labour’s poll ratings.

But some on both sides of the debate believe that government involvement would be the only way to resolve the question for good.

‘50-50’ chance of success

Leadbeater and Falconer’s plan centers on the Parliament Acts, a pair of laws from 1911 and 1949 that, in narrow circumstances, allow a bill to be passed despite being deadlocked or defeated in the House of Lords. They have only been used seven times in history — the last was to outlaw foxhunting 22 years ago — and never for a private member’s bill.

This scheme requires MPs to pass Leadbeater’s bill in almost the exact form as when MPs last voted on it in June 2025 — with any original Commons amendments, but without any that have since been proposed in the Lords.

Kim Leadbeater joins supporters of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life Bill), during a demonstration at Parliament Square in London on March 20. | Aaron Chown/PA Images via Getty Images

The bill would then go to the House of Lords, where it could be amended — but only if peers didn’t become deadlocked again. If they did, the bill would pass without their input.

The gambit has a “50-50” chance of success, estimated Ruth Fox, director of the Hansard Society, a charity and nonpartisan authority on parliament. “It is feasible but it will be challenging to line up the timings and the procedural mechanisms,” she said.

The audacious plan essentially has to clear three hurdles to work.

Step 1 is to “win” the private member’s bill ballot, a strangely English affair where white-gloved officials pull numbered balls out of a glass bowl. MPs matched to those balls put forward a bill on a topic they choose, with a slim hope it might one day become law. The highest five or six MPs in the ballot could have a chance of success. 

Leadbeater plans to re-enter the ballot herself and bring her bill again if she wins, she told POLITICO. If she loses, she and her staff, led by the veteran former Labour communications director Lance Price, will offer to advise an MP who puts the bill in their own name. 

Exactly how many pro-bill MPs are willing to do this is unclear. In a separate interview Falconer said “it might be as many as 150,” but this number is based on MPs who have privately asked Starmer to give the bill more time. Whether all of them would be willing to make themselves the public face of the bill is a very different question.

Either way, Leadbeater has won private guarantees from some MPs. “I haven’t gone around and spoken to every individual, but I would say there’s a significant number,” she said. 

Step 2 is to push the bill through its committee stage in the Commons without any new amendments. Last time this stage took four months as MPs and experts raised concerns about the bill. How it would work this time is highly uncertain.

One backer, Simon Opher, suggested to Sky News that the entire public bill committee could be made up of supporters to reduce the risk of amendments. This would be an “abuse,” said Nikki Da Costa, the Conservative former legislative affairs director for 10 Downing Street who opposes the bill, as such committees are meant to reflect the breadth of MPs’ views.

The bill’s backers believe there is a precedent for having no Commons committee stage at all, given the bill already went through this committee stage last year. However, this precedent is for a government-run bill, the one that banned hunting in 2004.

Step 3 is to pass the bill unamended on the floor of the Commons, where it was approved by 23 votes last time, and hand it to the Lords. 

To fail at this point, at least 12 previously “pro” MPs would need to turn against the bill. Leadbeater pointed out that some MPs who opposed the bill last summer are now “appalled” at the deadlock, suggesting they might now add to the ranks in its favor, while opponents argue that some MPs who backed the bill on the basis that it would get further scrutiny now have cold feet. 

Opponents of the Assisted Dying Bill at a demonstration in Parliament Square in June 2025. | Vuk Valcic/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

But no one who spoke to POLITICO was sure if the number of supporters will go up or down. With war in the Middle East and a cost of living surge, many MPs have turned their minds away from the topic entirely since last considering it in June 2025. “I don’t think people have thought about it for months,” said one pro-bill MP, granted anonymity to speak frankly.

Meg Hillier, a veteran Labour MP who opposes the bill, argued MPs are “weary” at the prospect of another round. “Everyone is very worried about what’s going on in the world … so why would we have a national conversation about this again and prolong it even further?” 

“I don’t think it’s fair to characterize it as a distraction,” said Leadbeater. “It’s extremely popular with the public. Literally every day, people will stop me and share their stories with me and say, ‘Thank you for doing this bill.’”

‘They’ve done themselves a disservice’

If the bill ticks all the boxes above, then its backers will win no matter what happens in the Lords. Days or hours before the end of the parliamentary year, if the bill were still deadlocked, Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle would “certify” that it could bypass peers and go to King Charles III for approval. Assisted dying would become legal in England and Wales.

Leadbeater and her allies argue that the bill already went through its Commons scrutiny last year, so they simply want peers to finish the job.

Leadbeater said she has been left “angry” for families who want reform — and argued it has damaged the Lords’ reputation. “I think House of Lords reform is now on the agenda,” she said. “I think this bill has really brought that to the forefront of some people’s minds.” 

Leadbeater added: “I think it would be a huge shame if we didn’t reach a point of resolution on this issue. And I don’t mean that for me, I mean that for the public. I don’t think they would look fondly on parliament for not reaching a decision … The public don’t have a huge amount of respect for the House of Lords, this unelected chamber of people that they don’t quite know how they ended up in there. So I think they’ve done themselves a disservice.”

Falconer is tooling up for a fight too. In the Commons stages of a fresh bill, he said, “you’d just have to say no to everything. You couldn’t amend the bill, because the moment you amended the bill the Parliament Acts wouldn’t apply, and then the fear would be that the Lords would do their evil work again and block it.”

This brinkmanship will worsen an already fractious debate. 

Da Costa called the plan “extraordinary.” She said: “Last time round, MPs voted to allow the Lords to do their work. This is a very different vote. There will be no ‘off switch’ once it goes to the Lords. MPs will be asked if they’re happy with the bill — with all its deficiencies and all the evidence that has been heard — to become law.”

Opponents of the bill argue that the debates in the Lords have exposed holes in the law that the Commons scrutiny did not. One, Labour peer Luciana Berger, pointed out that the bill has sweeping powers and 59 clauses — far longer than any known private members’ bill, including those that allowed abortion and outlawed capital punishment.

Supporters of assisted dying react outside Parliament on June 20, 2025 as MPs in the House of Commons voted in favour of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill. | Wiktor Szymanowicz/Future Publishing via Getty Images

“This process has shown that we can’t get a bill that is safe,” said Berger. “What are [proponents] saying about the medical colleges in this country — the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the Royal College of Physicians, the Royal College of Medical Examiners, the Royal College of GPs, who all as organizations say they are publicly neutral on the principle of assisted dying, but on this piece of legislation, have very substantive and significant concerns about this bill?” Falconer argued that these concerns had been dealt with during debates in the Lords.

Da Costa added: “Supporters promised to do the work in the Lords last time, they didn’t. Instead, Lord Falconer was looking at Parliament Acts before second reading — requesting government advice. They’ve wanted to do this from the start. It’s smoke and mirrors. They’ve always known that the Lords would never have enough time.” (Falconer described this claim as “completely false” and “rubbish,” saying he only considered the Parliament Acts once the bill was almost certainly doomed, and that while he had accepted some changes to the bill, he hadn’t made promises to change it at the outset.)

Leadbeater insisted she is “extremely open to the idea of making changes … but often people can’t tell you what they want those changes to be.” But Berger countered that “ninety-nine percent of the time, Charlie [Falconer] has rejected every single amendment.”

A prime example of this dispute is an amendment by the former Paralympian Tanni Grey-Thompson, which would require people seeking an assisted death to have a pregnancy test. “This includes 72-year-old men,” said Falconer. “It’s absolutely ridiculous. These are such obvious filibustering techniques.” Berger acknowledged it could have been drafted better, but argued the amendment showed there had been scant consideration of what to do if pregnant women wanted to end their lives. “It’s a really good case in point about how this whole process has been completely inadequate,” she said.

Hillier argued that any “abuse” of the process, as she described it, would set a “dangerous precedent” for a theoretical future government run by the right-wing populists Reform UK.

“You play games with parliamentary procedure with real caution,” she said. “It opens the door for any future government to try and push something through the private members’ bill process without the scrutiny that you would get in the normal way.”

Even some of Leadbeater’s supporters have questioned privately if the plan will work. 

One question is what would happen to the dozens of amendments proposed by Falconer himself in the Lords, which would not be included in the version sent through the Commons.

Fox said there could be a “suggested amendment stage” in which the Commons could propose amendments to the Lords, but added it would be unusual for this to accept a large number of Falconer’s own amendments. Falconer insisted the numbers would not be disproportionate.

All this would leave opponents in the Lords with a painful choice, said Fox: “The real danger for the opponents of the bill is that they stick it out, and what makes it to the statute book is an act [of parliament] which has got some real flaws.” She added: “Do they recognize that it’s going to make it regardless, and therefore, it would be better if they could get some ameliorative amendments into it?”

In theory, opponents could use a nuclear option.

Parliamentary officials believe it would be possible for an anti-bill MP who won the ballot to claim the draft law for themselves — but then refuse to give it a day for debate, because they would control the timetable. “That way madness lies,” said one official.

Kim Leadbeater (centre) being welcomed to the House of Commons by Starmer and his then deputy Angela Rayner in July 2021. She said she had met him on the bill in the past few months and he had been clear he still supported the principle. | Stefan Rousseau/PA Images via Getty Images

One MP campaigning against the bill predicted this would never happen: “It would be bad faith, it would enrage the supporters, we would lose the moral high ground and it would be a fight to the death in which this would probably end up being law in three years.” 

‘This could have been Keir’s legacy’

The bill’s backers have another option, but it depends on Keir Starmer pulling himself into the debate — something the prime minister is unwilling to do.

The key question for supporters is whether No. 10 would give the bill “government time” — allowing it to be debated on days other than Fridays with stricter time limits. 

Leadbeater last met Starmer personally about the subject of assisted dying “a couple of months ago,” she revealed to POLITICO. During the meeting, in his office in parliament, was he clear that he still backs the principle? “Yeah, 100 percent,” Leadbeater replied. 

She added: “Is it fair to say there’s a lot of other things going on in the world? Of course there are. But that doesn’t mean you stop caring about a particular issue.” (Her aides and No. 10 declined to discuss the private meeting further.) 

Leadbeater has also met Alan Campbell, the leader of the Commons who controls the timetable, in recent months, said one person with knowledge of the meeting. They suggested she asked if there was anything the government could do to unblock the bill. 

Falconer said: “Nobody has said to me in No. 10, they will give it time — but nobody has said no.” But a government official said: “They definitely have had conversations, but they haven’t gone anywhere. The government position is still the same.”

A second government official said giving government time would require Starmer to give up other parts of his agenda — when it already doesn’t have enough room for all the bills his ministers want. 

Then there is the element of this grim topic occupying the news agenda at a time when ministers, lagging in the polls, want to give the country hope. A third government official said: “Everytime it rears its ugly head, it does shit on the government’s grid.”

Leadbeater said the government’s stance of neutrality was the “right thing to do,” and would not be drawn on whether Starmer should come out more forcefully for the bill while still giving MPs a free vote — as former Tory PM David Cameron did over gay marriage in 2012.

But Lib Dem MP Vikki Slade, who supports the bill, said: “This could have been Keir’s legacy and I think he’s missed a trick.”

Even some opponents of the bill view the prime minister’s neutral stance as untenable. Berger said: “How can the government not take a view about how assisted dying might be introduced and the impacts it would have on our NHS? Obviously, it does have a view, but it’s not prepared to express a view. That’s just not sustainable.”

‘Hell needs to rain down on them’

One Labour MP who backs the bill said: “It makes a mockery of that place [the Lords] and hell needs to rain down on them.”

Berger argued: “If they want to blame us, if it makes them feel better, then by all means. But they are not being honest about the root of the challenge that we have all suffered from” — the parliamentary process itself. “We haven’t had some form of commission or proper pre-legislative scrutiny,” she said. “We’re trying to essentially fit a square peg into a round hole.”

There is no denying that this process has led to the sort of genuine raw anger that is seldom seen in the British parliament.

“I’m the devil to a large number of people in the Lords,” said Falconer. “People who you would normally have a nice conversation with do genuinely believe I’m the prince of darkness and are absolutely impossible to deal with at any sort of level.”

The bill has ended up being a topic of discussion on cross-party parliamentary delegations overseas, and it has exercised strong feelings among Starmer’s allies.

Two people close to Attorney General Richard Hermer, a former lawyer colleague of Starmer and his closest friend in Cabinet, said he has privately expressed frustration with the deadlock in the Lords.

It also provokes strong feelings elsewhere in the Cabinet, including among potential leadership candidates (Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting both oppose the bill). One person who spoke to Home Secretary and former Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood, who opposes the bill, during the previous Commons process said she said privately that she would resign rather than have to work on putting the bill into practice.

For Leadbeater’s part, she argues that despite all the bad blood, it is time for parliament to make a decision. “We’ve seen the changes happening in many other countries on this particular issue,” she said. 

“I do think it’s a thing like gay marriage, where we will look back when the law does change — and it will change — and say, goodness me, why did this take so long to happen?” It could well take a lot longer.