Hansard Society

• Assisted dying - The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill: Rolling news

• The Assisted Dying Bill: A guide to the Private Member's Bill process

• The Assisted Dying Bill: Making sense of the parliamentary process [Video]

• Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill: Concerns about the delegated powers

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[00:00:00] Intro: You are listening to Parliament Matters, a Hansard Society production, supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Learn more at hansardsociety.org.uk/PM.

[00:00:16] Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, Parliament itself. I'm Ruth Fox.

[00:00:23] Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark D'Arcy. And welcome to our first mini pod in a series dedicated to the most controversial law currently before Parliament, the bill to legalise assisted dying.

[00:00:34] Ruth Fox: Yes, the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill is about to begin detailed scrutiny by a Public Bill Committee and even the preliminaries have been ominously difficult.

[00:00:49] Mark D'Arcy: And Ruth, you actually went along to that first Public Bill Committee sitting, not completely sure whether as a member of the general public you were even going to be allowed in because sometimes these preliminaries are conducted in private session rather than letting us members of the general public in.

[00:01:04] Ruth Fox: Yes, I mean there'd been speculation that it was going to be in private session, but it said on the parliamentary website it was public. I happened to be over there for another meeting earlier in the House of Lords, so I thought well, I'll pop my head in and see what's happening. So I went in and the public gallery was full, so 20-odd people sat at the back, and a very full turnout from the Committee.

[00:01:23] But I think it's fair to say the first skirmishes were somewhat tense.

[00:01:27] Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, I mean, the issue, first of all, dividing the Committee, was whether or not they should discuss the list of witnesses they were going to take in their first few hearings, because they're going to spend three days next week on taking evidence from witnesses, people like the British Medical Association, witnesses from countries where assisted dying has been legalised and they have all sorts of jurisdictions New Zealand, Australia, and the debate there was should they go into private session so that they could say things like oh such and such hasn't responded yet to our inquiries about whether they would give evidence. Or such and such just blathers and we'd rather have someone who's a bit more lucid. Those kind of discussions, which as I say, normally happen in private between the so called Usual Channels The government Whips and the opposition Whips normally agree these things in advance when it's a government bill. But this, of course, is not a government bill.