Progression of Bills through Parliament

Debate between Andrew George and Daniel Francis

Monday 8th June 2026 Westminster Hall

[Andrew George (St Ives) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. I warmly congratulate the hon. Member for Sunderland Central (Lewis Atkinson) on the way in which he introduced the debate and the strong case he made about not only the Bill and its treatment, but the recommendations for reform of the House of Lords. As he said, we do not want to rehash the debate on the Terminally Ill Adults Bill, but as we have seen, people on both sides of the debate were disgusted by the way in which a small minority of their lordships were able to abuse the powers available to them, not to scrutinise but to block the Bill. Indeed, a strong opponent of the Bill, Rod Liddle, described his side winning “by cheating”, which is exactly what happened.

Their lordships on many occasions in a rather condescending way told the democratically elected Chamber of the House of Commons that the Bill it passed on Third Reading was not fit for purpose. The fact is that if we all designed a private Member’s Bill, there would be 650 different versions. The concept of a perfect Bill can no doubt be debated by everyone that looks at it, and they would say, “I would prefer it to be amended in this manner” or “in that manner”. The fact is that the way in which the hon. Member for Spen Valley (Kim Leadbeater) proceeded, accepting very sensible amendments, meant that we ended up with a stronger and very effective Bill.

[Daniel Francis]

Is the hon. Member aware that I fought long and hard on the learning disability issue in the Bill Committee? The sponsor in the House of Lords had amendments that would have undone some of those commitments. If the Bill had passed in the Lords, we could have then been stuck in a ping-pong situation with the amendments that had been passed in the Commons being undone by the Lords.

[Andrew George]

The hon. Member makes a very strong point. There were more than 100 hours of debate and scrutiny in Committee and in the Chamber. I am sure that we all in this Chamber engaged in thousands of hours of discussion with specialist bodies and had private meetings and investigations on the matter. I am on the Health and Social Care Committee and therefore take these issues very seriously.

I have mentioned the early-day motion that I tabled at the end of January, which castigated the House of Lords and proposed that if it continued with its filibuster, we needed to accelerate reform of the House of Lords. It has certainly precipitated a justification for that from the House of Commons and the Government, and I hope the Leader of the House will follow that accelerated reform through in the light of what has happened, which I think is quite disgraceful.