Bills to legalise Assisted Dying have now been defeated in Scotland and in England & Wales. Campaigners are promising that their fights will continue.
For the London Parliament, their future path is clear. They are going to try again in the 2026/27 Parliamentary session. By law, the House of Lords cannot block the same Bill twice. Therefore campaigners are seeking to re-present the recently-failed Bill in exactly the same form as it passed through the House of Commons in November 2025. If the replacement Bill should once again pass (without amendment) through the Commons, then the House of Lords will have no option but to pass it straight through without further change.
That seems amazingly possible but its chances of success are not so impressive as they may sound. First it will be necessary for a supportive MP to come near the top in the ballot for new Private Members’ Bills Then, MPs must resist the temptation to pass amendments to it. Finally, the House of Lords must prove incapable to coming up with any other new weaselly tricks of their own. And, of course, this will all have to be achieved in an atmosphere of some weariness with the whole issue and with a Labour Whips’ office very keen to get on with other pieces of legislation.
For readers of this website, however, any further failure may not be particularly important. The failed Bill’s insistence on a 6-month terminal diagnosis, the procedural bureaucracy and the exclusion of patients with Parkinson’s or dementia meant it was only ever going to be of limited relevance. Certainly, none of the Swiss VAD providers was forecasting any reduction in their patients from the UK.
There may well be a revitalisation of interest in much smaller Bills to de-criminalise relatives who accompany patients to Switzerland or to bring about a reform of the iniquitous “forfeiture rule” under English law. We shall have to wait and see.
