Claire Hazelgrove said the current law left her mother to die alone last October, and MPs just voted to keep that law unchanged

MPs have voted against the latest effort to legalise assisted dying in England and Wales, effectively ending the current push to change the law. As reported by the BBC, the House of Commons voted 286 to 270 against the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill after a debate in which opinions were sharply split. The narrow margin of 16 votes means the prospect of legalising assisted dying in the short term has been ruled out, at least for now.

The bill, tabled by Labour MP Lauren Edwards, would have allowed adults with fewer than six months to live to apply for assistance to end their own lives. It followed hundreds of hours of parliamentary debate over the previous two years. The legislation will not move forward in its current form, though it remains possible for MPs and peers to bring a version of it back in a future session.

The debate was personal for many members. Labour MP Claire Hazelgrove spoke about her mother, who lived with a rare blood cancer for half of her life, and said the current law left her mother to die alone last October. Hazelgrove argued that not all pain can be palliated, using her own family’s experience to make the case that the status quo causes real harm.

MPs weighed grief and safety against each other, and safety won out

The bill included safeguards such as requiring approval from two doctors and an expert panel for any application, but critics argued these measures were not enough to protect vulnerable people from coercion. Some opponents said the government’s priority should be fixing the NHS and improving palliative care rather than changing the law on assisted dying.

Conservative MP Martin Vickers said legalising assisted dying would make society poorer and fundamentally alter the relationship between doctors and patients, a view that echoed through much of the opposition. The debate unfolded amid a busy week in politics more broadly, including a whistleblower lawsuit over ICE misconduct making headlines elsewhere.

Other MPs raised concerns about the safety and workability of the bill’s framework. Labour MPs Ashley Dalton, Dame Meg Hillier and Jess Asato released a joint statement describing the bill as unsafe and unworkable, noting that professional groups and royal medical colleges had not attested to its safety. Labour MP Janet Daby said she had changed her mind since the previous session, explaining that she experienced nightmares after supporting an earlier version of the bill and could not vote for it again in good conscience.

This vote follows an earlier attempt in the last parliamentary session, when a similar bill brought forward by Labour MP Kim Leadbeater cleared the House of Commons on 20 June 2025. That effort ultimately stalled in the House of Lords after a high volume of amendments were tabled, and it ran out of parliamentary time. Lauren Edwards had hoped to pick up where that work left off, but this latest defeat brings the process to a halt.

Reaction outside Parliament was immediate. Dame Esther Rantzen, founder of Childline, said she was deeply disappointed that people in the UK will not have the same choices available to terminally ill adults in other countries, calling it a tragic day while maintaining that a change in the law is likely inevitable eventually. Gordon Macdonald, chief executive of Care Not Killing, described the result as a decisive vote and said he hoped attention would now shift toward repairing palliative care nationwide.

The vote was held as a free vote, meaning MPs were not bound by party lines, which produced a wide spread of positions across the political spectrum. Edwards said Parliament had dropped the ball but insisted the issue would be picked up again, calling the current law too cruel and unjust to stand. The law on assisted dying in England and Wales remains unchanged following the vote.