UK has once-in-a-generation chance to allow assisted dying, says Labour peer

Parliament is facing a once-in-a-generation chance to hand the terminally ill a choice over ending their life, the Labour peer championing a change in the law has said.

Charlie Falconer, the former lord chancellor whose bill was introduced into the House of Lords last month, revealed he had been reassured by Downing Street that it would not stand in the way of a historic Commons vote on assisted dying should its advocates secure one.

In an interview with the Observer, he said that some of the tragic stories already expressed by politicians on the issue were “but the tip of a ­parliamentary iceberg” in terms of the strength of feeling some peers and MPs had expressed to him. He is ­proposing to allow assisted dying for terminally ill adults.

Lord Falconer said the best chance of securing a vote would be via a private member’s bill in the Commons. An attempt to secure one will be launched as soon as MPs return from their summer recess. If successful, the law could be changed before the end of next year.

He warned that history suggested any vote represented a rare window to make a change. “If we lose the vote, then it will go off the agenda for who knows how long,” he said. “Everything turns on that vote in the Commons.

“This is such an opportunity. The last time this was voted upon, there was a clear vote against it in the Commons. But of the 650 MPs who were present in 2015, 477 of them have gone. It’s a completely new House of Commons with a wholly new atmosphere, with a prime minister who is saying: ‘You must decide as a free vote – and if you decide in favour, the government will make sure that procedural stratagems don’t doom the bill.’

Diana Rigg, photographed in 2019, put the assisted dying debate in the spotlight Photograph: Joel Saget/AFP/Getty Images

“In the almost decade that’s gone by, there’s been a much greater focus on the issue. Lots of the rest of the world have addressed that issue and changed their laws. But also, there’s been an ever-increasing awareness in this country of the mess that the law is. And people have become more and more interested in the quality of their lives and the quality of their deaths.”

The issue of assisted dying was thrust into the spotlight in December 2023 when the Observer revealed that the actor Diana Rigg had recorded a message shortly before her death in 2020 calling for a law that gives “human beings true agency over their own bodies at the end of life”.

After Esther Rantzen, the television presenter who has terminal cancer, joined calls for a change, Keir Starmer said he was also in favour.

Before the election, he promised Rantzen that he would ensure parliamentary time to debate the issue and allow a free vote.

Falconer said that while his bill in the Lords faced procedural challenges in reaching a Commons vote, an identical bill proposed by an MP could succeed. “No 10 has made it absolutely clear to me that they stand by what Keir has said,” he said. “There is no doubt that Keir stands by that commitment.”

The Labour peer said that personal experience had led him to apply his legal mind to the issue years ago. “I, like so very many people, have experience of a loved one dying,” he said. “And the last few weeks and the last few months are a period where there is plainly nothing but an imminent death – the person retreats more and more. And all that they’ve got to look forward to is more indignity, more pain, more struggle.

“The option, in the context of somebody who is terminally ill, to be assisted to bring the process to an end is in my view a compassionate and necessary thing that they should be able to do. Having had the personal experience and then looking at the issue more and more, I saw how unfair the law is. Esther Rantzen has really brought a focus recently on the issue with enormous effectiveness. And that’s in part a product of a 10-year period in which people have really been talking about it.”

He said that he had restricted his proposals to cover only people with a terminal illness who had six months or fewer to live to ensure the bill was not the “thin end of the wedge”, as some opponents fear. He also said he was against the idea of applying it to anyone living with “unbearable suffering”, as some other countries have done, because he thought it could lead to unintended cases.

“In general, I don’t think the state should be assisting people to take their own lives,” he said. “I do think the state should be giving people options in their terminal illness as to how they die. And I do think the two situations are very different.

“When the law starts as a terminal illness law, not an unbearable suffering law, that’s where it has stuck in every jurisdiction in the world. It’s not the thin end of the wedge.

“The first of these was in Oregon. It started as a terminal illness law and it has remained a terminal illness law. Sometimes people say they have great anxieties about Oregon. But there are a lot of people who were opposed to it who now say it’s obviously the right thing to do – that people should have this option.

“The consequence of having the option is that, for people who are terminally ill, it makes their last months bearable. They know it’s there.”