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Hello, I'm Alicia McCarthy.

Thanks for downloading the Yesterday in Parliament podcast.

On Friday the 27th of February, a Labour peer warned that the House of Lords

risked becoming an irrelevant talking shop if it didn't make progress on the assisted dying bill.

Lord Faulkner spoke out at the start of the 10th day of detail consideration of the proposals,

which would allow terminally ill adults in England and Wales with less than six months to live,

the right to ask for help to end their lives. He said so far, Pierce had spent more than 80 hours on the

bill and debated just over 350 of the 1,200 proposed changes. The way it is going at the moment,

we will reach no conclusions whatsoever. We will appear to be an irrelevant talking shop. But a conservative,

Lord Blencathra, rejected recent suggestions in the press that just a handful of peers were

putting down hundreds of amendments to sabotage the bill and were trying to talk it out. He'd gone

down the list and looked at the first six areas due to be debated.

There are 41 different peers who have table amendments, not seven peers, not a handful of peers,

41 different peers, and in the first six groups to date have table amendments. And they're doing

so in order to make this very badly drafted bill better and they're

doing to try and make things safer for all concerned.

Well, when they did get on to the substance of the bill, peers focused on the role of the

voluntary assisted dying commissioner. Under the plans, each application for an assisted death

would be assessed by a panel

made up of a legal figure, a psychiatrist and a social worker,

with the process overseen by the commissioner.

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