Hello, I'm Susan Hume and this is the Yesterday in Parliament podcast.

On Thursday, the 8th of January, peers agreed to sit for more time to deal with the terminally ill adults' end-of-life bill.

The assisted dying bill is making slow progress in the House of Lords. More than

a thousand changes have been proposed to the bill, which would allow adults in England and Wales

with less than six months to live to ask for help to die. It's already been given extra time to make

it past peers and another 10 days are scheduled. But so far, they've barely scratched the surface of the work.

It's prompted suspicions that some opponents are trying to run down the clock, as the bill's sponsor,

Labour's Lord Faulkner explained. If we continue at the rate we are going, this House will fail to

complete the process of scrutiny. We will reach no conclusions on the bill

as to how it should be amended or whether it should return to the Commons. Instead, the bill will

fail through lack of time. The bill has until the end of this parliamentary session, probably in May, to make it into law.

So Lord Faulkner was asking Peers to agree to sit longer to get the bill done.

He thought any hold up in the unelected House of Lords was a very bad look.

We should not allow our justified reputation for high-quality scrutiny to be tarnished by the way that we failed to reach conclusions.

A non-party peer Lady Butler-Sloss firmly agreed with that,

but she did feel a little self-discipline would also help.

I do believe that it would be possible for noble lords to speak more briefly.

I do believe it would be possible for noble lords not to repeat what other noble lords have said.

And for noble lords to recognise they don't actually have to say everything that they've written down in their speeches.

But at the end of the day, we've got to get it through.

The reputation of this house, it seems to me, is at stake.

Labour's Lady Jay said that when earlier attempts to bring in an assisted dying law had come before the Lords,

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