Progression of Bills through Parliament

Andrew Ranger Excerpts

Monday 8th June 2026 Westminster Hall

[Andrew Ranger (Wrexham) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Wishart. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland Central (Lewis Atkinson) on his opening speech and thank the petitioners for the hard work that they have done on this issue.

When I first came to this place, just short of two years ago, I came with a real zeal for reform of the second Chamber. Having said that, I believe—and it is important to say—that the House of Lords in its current form offers great value to our democracy. As has been said, unlike the way in which debates sometimes function in the Commons, the Lords has the capacity to discuss, scrutinise and add meaningful substance to the way in which our laws and legislation are made. Unfortunately, over the last parliamentary term, as we have been discussing today, a minority of peers conducted themselves in a way that has let down the Lords, undermined the way in which it functions and raised serious questions about the role that it should hold in the future, as well as public trust in the parliamentary process. As you can tell from that, Mr Wishart, my reforming zeal is still in place.

We need only look back through history to find examples of the Lords blocking progress. They range from, way back in 1909, Lloyd George’s people’s Budget, which looked at old age pensions and national insurance, to the equalisation of the age of consent in 2000 and the Hunting Act 2004, among others. In all those cases, the Lords sought to frustrate the will of the elected Chamber. Scrutiny is important—indeed, vital—to our Parliament. I do not think anyone on either side of the debate about the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill would dispute that. But it became abundantly clear during the Lords process that to describe some of the contributions as scrutiny would be, at the very least, generous. There were speeches that were near identical in content and added nothing new to the debate, amendments tabled for the sake of amendments, and the use of egregious statements. One peer was quoted in The Times as saying that there were

“plenty of black arts that could be used to kill the bill off”,

and it is clear that that approach was pursued.

It is therefore not only ironic but factually untrue when we hear some opponents claim that the Bill received limited scrutiny. The facts do not support that. The Bill faced significant scrutiny—more than any private Member’s Bill in history and more than many other Bills—and that scrutiny began long before it reached the Lords. The Health and Social Care Committee inquiry had 68,000 responses from the public, more than 300 submissions of written evidence, two closed-door roundtable discussions and five oral evidence sessions, and reported in 2024. The Commons Bill Committee received evidence from 50 witnesses and 444 pieces of written evidence, and spent more than 100 hours scrutinising the Bill in 2025, as we heard. The House of Lords Committee, although weighted against assisted dying, with more opponents than supporters of the change, heard evidence from 43 witnesses.

The scrutiny was there. It happened. Ultimately, the fall of the Bill represents the frustration of a decision made by the democratic Chamber of this country. The elected House voted for the legislation. The public, when asked consistently over many years, have supported it. I have been clear that I will support, in whatever way I can, the effort to ensure that the Bill is given its rightful passage through both Houses of Parliament and becomes law, as is the will of the elected Chamber and the will of the majority of the public. That is vital to restore badly needed trust in our political process. I hope that my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House will be able to expand on how that can progress.