On Friday 11 September, the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, better known as the Assisted Dying Bill, failed to pass the House of Commons by 16 votes (286 to 270). This is despite a bill with exactly the same text passing by 23 votes (314 to 291) in June last year. So why did this happen?
Last year, the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill passed the House of Commons following a free vote. This is a vote whereby party leaders do not enforce the whip and allow their MPs to vote according to their own conscience. The bill then went on to the House of Lords, where dissent was significant. Members of the House of Lords ended up placing over 1,200 amendments on the bill, and it ran out of time for passage before the end of the session. Some critics said that the Lords had deliberately wrecked the bill by putting forward so many amendments. Others argued that this was simply the consequence of such an important and morally challenging bill.
When Parliament returned in September, it was announced that the bill itself would be coming back. A Labour MP, Lauren Edwards, introduced precisely the same bill. The decision to introduce precisely the same bill was very deliberate. If the House of Commons passes the same bill for two sessions in a row, it can use the provisions of the Parliament Act 1949 to leapfrog the House of Lords. Doing so for this bill would have been controversial, but using the same bill kept that option open.
However, introducing the same bill also had a downside. It meant that all the scrutiny placed on the bill in the previous session was never built into improving it before it was reintroduced. Despite being the same bill that the same Parliament had voted for less than fifteen months earlier, it was rejected in the House of Commons. Some MPs did change their view and voted against the bill having backed it before. On the Labour benches, 190 MPs voted in favour this time, down 44 from 2025, while only 153 voted against, up just 6. But the biggest change wasn’t MPs switching from yes to no, it was previous supporters, including the Prime Minister himself, choosing to abstain rather than vote at all, which accounts for most of the roughly 50-vote drop in overall turnout between the two votes. Now that the bill has failed in the House of Commons, it seems unlikely that the issue will simply be set aside for the rest of this Parliament.