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Hello, I'm Susan Hume and this is the Yesterday in Parliament podcast. On Friday the 30th

of January, a minister told peers the government will definitely not be bringing forward an

assisted dying bill itself if the current one fails in the House of Lords. The bill would allow adults in England

and Wales with less than six months to live to be helped to end their lives. Earlier this week,

one of the bill's sponsors, Labour's Lord Faulkner, told this programme that he thought the bill

would fail, that some peers were filibustering to delay it, and maybe the mechanism of the Parliament Act might

be used to bypass the Lords to make assisted death legal. That interview had possibly ruffled

some feathers back at the office. Of course I would defend to the death the noble and learned

Lord Lord Ford was right to appear on the Today programme. There was a but coming. He threatened,

though I don't think it's in his power, he threatened the Parliament Act, he threatened us with the Parliament Act. But more particularly, he said that what was going on in all these proceedings was just a filibuster. Something Lord Moore, a non-party peer, said, was quite untrue. At the moment, the government says it's neutral on assisted dying. the government chief whip lord kennedy was clear that

he had no plans for the government to shoulder the bill and make it law in the future either

i'm going to save for the house i have enough problems getting the government's program through at the

moment let alone um trying to deal with this bill so i promise you it's not going to come back as

as a government bill turning to the bill itself some peers wanted to make sure consultations with people about

having an assisted death were face to face rather than conducted by video link or phone.

A conservative lady coffee was worried about coercion.

What happens when people making a declaration, are we sure that somebody isn't in the room, giving them the eyes, that they'll do the right answers, as opposed to understanding whether coercion can happen or not?

But the non-party peer Lady Gerada, who's a former president of the Royal College of GPs, disagreed. Video allowed patients and families to be together

for those assessments. During COVID, my lords, I assessed thousands of patients' capacity,

consent and safeguarding issues remotely with no evidence of increased coercion or harm.

Others weren't so sure.

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