The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill: The…

In this article, Alex Goodman KC examines the constitutional tensions in the passage through Parliament of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, a controversial private members’ bill, introduced in October 2024, proposing to legalise assisted dying in prescribed circumstances.

Lord Falconer says the House of Commons may have to force through the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill using the Parliament Act 1911. Counter-intuitively, this proposal is an affirmation of British democracy.

The House of Commons voted to pass the Bill at second reading in November 2024 by 330 votes to 275 and again at third reading in June 2025 by 314 votes to 291. The Commons engaged in over 100 hours of debate, including 39 sittings of the Bill Committee. Since then, the Bill has been held up in the House of Lords with almost half of a record 1,227 amendments proposed by just six peers.

Section 2 of the Parliament Act 1911 allows the Commons to break this impasse and to drive through a Bill that has been rejected by the Lords. The procedure has been used on seven occasions, the last time being the ban on fox hunting in the Hunting Act 2004[1]. Most bills are public bills passed into law through the Houses of Parliament at the behest of the Executive and, if need be, by the government whip. The democratic principle behind the Parliament Act 1911 is to tilt the balance of power in favour of the House of Commons. In practice, and less comfortably, it is usually governments through their control of the Commons that reap this reward.

However, in the rare case of this Bill, deploying section 2 of the Parliament Act 1911 would not involve the government asserting its whip hand, but rather the House of Commons asserting its primacy as the elected Chamber. The votes on the Bill were free votes according to the conscience of each elected member of the House of Commons. It was an inspiring moment in British democracy to see so many MPs freely wrestling with their conscience and engaging with their constituents on how to vote on this Bill. The electorate will judge each member. The vote in favour of this private member’s bill enjoys a stronger imprint of democratic legitimacy than any public Bill pushed through by the government through party loyalty, threats, and inducements. The actions of the unelected Lords are becoming a challenge to the authority of the elected Members.

The Lords’ conduct in obstructing the passage of this Bill brings into focus the constitutional legitimacy of the part-appointed, part-hereditary House. The UK is the only democracy where the large majority of its legislators are unelected. With 800 peers, it is the largest second Chamber of any democracy. America has 100 elected Senators; there are 245 members of India’s upper house (233 elected). It was the very question of the legitimacy of the House of Lords which led to the Parliament Act 1911, as that Act says in its introduction:

“whereas it is intended to substitute for the House of Lords as it at present exists a Second Chamber constituted on a popular instead of hereditary basis, but such substitution cannot be immediately brought into operation”

At that time, all members of the House of Lords (apart from a small number of judicial and spiritual peers) were hereditary. The only means for pushing through a Bill to which the Lords objected was the creation of new peers. The threat of such a measure was sometimes sufficient, as for example in relation to the Great Reform Act 1832 and indeed in the passing of the 1911 Act itself. The 1911 Act introduced a procedure which allowed, as a last resort, the Commons to assert the primacy of the elected Chamber. The procedure was shortened to one year and two sessions by the Parliament Act 1949. The Parliament Act 1911 expresses not just a process for the Executive to assert its will, but rather a constitutional principle that Parliament is sovereign, and that in the final balance, the will of the House of Commons must prevail over the unelected Chamber, subject only to Royal Assent.

Parliament’s intention to substitute the House of Lords for an elected Chamber remains on the face of the Parliament Act 1911. Yet the powers in that Act which allow the Commons the final say have operated to stall the fulfilment of that intention for over a hundred years. Perhaps the actions of a few peers in obstructing the passage of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, may yet be seen as the beginning of the end of this constitutional anomaly.

This blog was written by Alex Goodman KC.

Alex Goodman KC is a barrister practising in constitutional and administrative law and joint head of public law at Landmark Chambers. He has advised on the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill including by appearing in committee in the House of Commons.

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[1] The Government of Ireland Act 1914, the Welsh Church Act 1914, the Parliament Act 1949, the War Crimes Act 1991, the European Parliamentary Elections Act 1999, the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 2000 and the Hunting Act 2004.