Terminally Ill Adults Bill: The House Magazine
8th June 2026
The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill ran out of parliamentary time at the House of Lords committee stage in the House of Lords in April 2026. The 2024-26 session of Parliament has prorogued and the Bill will make no further progress this session.
Supporters of the failed Bill have committed to re-introducing it as a Private Member’s Bill in the new session of Parliament, and using the Parliament Act to ensure its passage through the Lords. It is unclear at present whether any of the MPs drawn high in the Private Member’s ballot will do this.
Professor Katherine Sleeman and colleagues from the Complex Life and Death Decisions research group at King’s College London have written an article for The House Magazine arguing that the failure of the Terminally Ill Adults Bill demonstrates the inadequacy of using a Private Members bill for a change of such consequence.
“A Private Members Bill is not appropriate for legislation with significant, systemic impact…. Campaigners have every right to seek to put matters on the agenda; they do not, however, have responsibility for, nor expertise in, making law”.
The authors argue that further examination of the issue in Parliament requires a clear boundary between the role of campaigner and that of the legislator. They urge the House of Commons not to reintroduce the Bill as a Private Member’s Bill but to consider alternative ways forward. This could include an independent review, drawing on work in Jersey and the Nuffield Trust Report in August 2025 to envisage how assisted dying might work in practice, outside of the NHS, not in conflict with palliative care and suicide prevention, as part of an informed national debate, considering safeguards, commission and delivery.
The House | Big changes will need to be made to the assisted dying legislation for success next time