What is happening to the assisted dying bill in the House of Lords?
The assisted dying bill could fall even after passing the House of Commons – and perhaps even without a vote on the substance of the bill in the House of Lords.We explain what is happening and what may come next.The terminally ill adults (end of life) bill, which would legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults with less than six months to live in England and Wales, passed in the Commons earlier this year and is now in the House of Lords.Peers are at the committee stage, which is a line-by-line review where amendments they put down are debated and voted on.In the Commons, the speaker selects amendments for debate and vote.
That is not the case in the Lords, where the committee stage requires members to debate each amendment group by group, so it can take a long time over limited sitting days.Peers could simply run out of time before reaching the point of final votes on the bill’s substance.In practice, the biggest risk to any bill in the Lords is simply delaying its passage rather than voting it down – there is no fixed end date for bills at committee stage.For government bills, the government will normally make time, but that is less likely for private members’ bills.To obstruct a bill, peers can make it impossible to finish before the parliamentary session ends.
Peers have submitted an extraordinary number of amendments, more than 1,100.Many of them are on important issues worthy of scrutiny – from eating disorders to prevention of coercion.They come from some of the most passionate opponents of the bill, including the peers Tanni Grey-Thompson, a former Paralympic athlete, and Ilora Finlay, a palliative care expert.But proponents of the bill have also blamed a number of Tory peers for what they see as some time-wasting amendments such as enforcing pregnancy tests, even on elderly men.The Lords will need to pass the bill before the end of the parliamentary session, which will probably be in spring 2026.
Under the Salisbury convention, it is widely held that peers should not ultimately reject a bill that was promised in the governing party’s election manifesto.This does not apply to assisted dying, which is a private member’s bill.But many peers – including those opposed to the bill – believe it would be democratically improper for the Lords to oust a bill that had passed the elected house with a significant majority and which is supported by the majority of public opinion according to polling.Others say there is nothing constitutionally binding on the Lords to pass the bill, which was never put to a democratic vote by being tested as a manifesto commitment.The government chief whip in the Lords, Roy Kennedy, has arranged extra sitting days to give the chamber more time for detailed scrutiny.
More still may be required but unless substantial progress is made or a change of tactics comes from opponents it looks unlikely the bill will reach a vote at third reading.There are more weeks of debate to come where peers will keep going through groups of amendments in committee stage.If the bill does run out of time, and automatically falls, there is a nuclear option available to backers of the bill to use the Parliament Act to carry it over into the next session.It would be unprecedented to do this with a private member’s bill – and would probably require the government to either adopt the bill or for another MP to adopt the bill in the next private members’ bill ballot as long as it is identical to the one passed by the Commons already.
Nationwide fined £44m by watchdog for financial crime control failings
Nationwide has been fined £44m by the City watchdog over “weak” financial crime controls that culminated in a serious case of Covid fraud that cost UK taxpayers £800,000.The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) fined the building society for failures stretching over nearly five years. It said the lender had been aware that some customers were using personal accounts for business activity, in a breach of its own terms.Nationwide did not offer business accounts at that point and so did not have the right processes in place to monitor potential financial crime risks, the FCA said.This resulted in a case where Nationwide failed to catch a customer using personal current accounts to receive 24 fraudulent Covid furlough payments, totalling £27
UK economy shrank unexpectedly before budget, data shows
Britain’s economy shrank unexpectedly in October as consumers held back on spending before Rachel Reeves’s budget, and car manufacturing struggled to recover from the cyber-attack on Jaguar Land Rover.Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed gross domestic product fell by 0.1%, after a 0.1% drop in output in September. City economists had predicted a 0
Disney wants you to AI-generate yourself into your favorite Marvel movie
Users of OpenAI’s video generation app will soon be able to see their own faces alongside characters from Marvel, Pixar, Star Wars and Disney’s animated films, according to a joint announcement from the startup and Disney on Thursday. Perhaps you, Lightning McQueen and Iron Man are all dancing together in the Mos Eisley Cantina.Sora is an app made by OpenAI, the firm behind ChatGPT, which allows users to generate videos of up to 20 seconds through short text prompts. The startup previously attempted to steer Sora’s output away from unlicensed copyrighted material, though with little success, which prompted threats of lawsuits by rights holders.Disney announced that it would invest $1bn in OpenAI and, under a three-year deal perhaps worth even more than that large sum, that it would license about 200 of its iconic characters – from R2-D2 to Stitch – for users to play with in OpenAI’s video generation app
Musk calls Doge only ‘somewhat successful’ and says he would not do it again
Elon Musk has said the aggressive federal job-cutting program he headed early in Donald Trump’s second term, known as the “department of government efficiency” (Doge), was only “a little bit successful” and he would not lead the project again.Musk said he wouldn’t want to repeat the exercise, talking on the podcast hosted by Katie Miller, a rightwing personality with a rising profile who was a Doge adviser and who is married to Stephen Miller, Donald Trump’s hardline anti-immigration deputy chief of staff.Asked whether Doge had achieved what he’d hoped, Musk said: “We were a little bit successful. We were somewhat successful.”Doge created chaos and distress in the government machine in Washington DC, and by May more than 200,000 federal workers had been laid off and roughly 75,000 had accepted buyouts as a result of purges by Musk’s external team of often-young zealots
Even Bazball’s implosion can’t shake Barmy Army’s crew of Ashes veterans | Emma John
Courage, soldier. Ben Stokes’s England team may be heading into the third Ashes Test already 2-0 down, but not everyone in English cricket is fazed. There is one group tailor-made for this scenario, a crack(pot) unit who can lay claim to be the ultimate doomsday preppers. Have your dreams been shattered? Are you crushed beneath the weight of unmet expectation? Then it’s time to join the Barmy Army, son.Already their advance guard are moving in on Adelaide, the city where they officially formed 30 years ago
Chess: Magnus Carlsen wins Freestyle Tour title despite defeat in final event
Norway’s world No 1, Magnus Carlsen, was shocked by a 0.5-1.5 loss to the US veteran Levon Aronian in Thursday’s final of the Freestyle Grand Slam Tour in Cape Town, but still finished the overall winner of the five-event Tour.Freestyle chess is also known as Fischer Random and Chess 960. Pieces start randomly placed on the two back rows, thus drastically limiting opening preparation
Littler lights up Ally Pally opening night as prize money raises stakes
Leinster’s Leo Cullen will use lessons learned at Leicester in bid to tame Tigers
Can a nepo baby be an underdog? The remarkable rise of Shedeur Sanders
‘The netball mum community has been insane’: England captain Nat Metcalf on her return to action
Sports Personality of the Year 2025: Lionesses square off on six-strong shortlist
‘It can be brutal’: Gian van Veen learns to fly with the stars after dartitis