Lauren Edwards’ campaign is trying to restart a stalled process to legalized assisted dying in England and Wales — and she’s taking cues from her native Australia.
LONDON — Britain is still lagging behind Australia when it comes to assisted dying. But one Labour MP who has seen the debate in both countries is hoping she can push forward a thwarted attempt at change in the U.K.
“If I had six months to live and I was facing a potentially very frightening, very painful, very uncomfortable death, I would want to be able to have the choice to choose to end my life surrounded by my family,” Lauren Edwards, who became an MP in 2024 — and hails from Melbourne, Australia, tells POLITICO in an interview.
Edwards’ support for assisted dying is shaped in part by the laws in Victoria, where she still has family. In 2017, it became the first Australian state to legalize assisted dying for people expected to die within six months, or 12 months for those with neurodegenerative diseases, and who face unacceptable suffering.
Though Edwards argues her own legislation is “preferable and has stronger safeguards” than the Australian model — unbearable suffering is not a criterion for eligibility in her bill — she found it helpful to see how assisted dying has worked in practice the last time British MPs tackled this issue.
It’s an experience from which many in Labour still bear the scars — and on which new Prime Minister Andy Burnham already appears to have drawn a line in the sand.
Stepping forward
MPs passed fellow Labour backbencher Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill last year by 314 votes to 291. But it failed to become law after delays in the U.K.’s House of Lords.
Now Edwards is reintroducing the bill — and is adamant that the groundbreaking social change can succeed this time around.
It means that next month, the House of Commons will once again be thrust into a divisive vote on a matter of conscience, deciding whether to legalize assisted dying in England and Wales for terminally ill adults judged as having fewer than six months left to live.
“When Kim’s bill came up, I did have conversations with my dad about how things have gone in Australia,” Edwards says. The situation reassured her compared to “more extreme examples” like Canada, where a terminal condition is not required for patients to be eligible, but instead an irreversible, “advanced state of decline” and “unbearable physical or mental suffering.”
Next year, Canadian eligibility for assisted dying is set to be expanded to include individuals whose sole underlying medical condition is a mental illness, though this change has been repeatedly delayed.
Sense-checking the legislation with family down under was “really important” when weighing up whether to support Leadbeater’s earlier proposals, she says.
Edwards has Australian friends who have settled in Britain too — and contrasts a friend able to attend his mother’s assisted death in Australia with British families currently worried about prosecution for helping relatives to die. U.K. law punishes the offense with up to 14 years in prison.
“[The] status quo is not neutral. It is not benign,” Edwards argues. “It is a situation where, if we don’t make this legislative change, unfortunately, we will be allowing that pain, fear and isolation.”
In October 2024, an independent review of assisted dying in Victoria by the state Department of Health’s Centre for Evaluation and Research Evidence found the system to be safe and “operating as intended” with “no reports of ineligible individuals” accessing substances to end their lives.
However, access to assisted dying varies across the vast state — which is only slightly smaller than the entire U.K. — and just “a few practitioners” deliver the majority of care. Victoria has been urged to press the central Australian government for more funding.
Choice of priorities
Back in the U.K., the main political parties have agreed that the decision to legalize assisted dying should be a matter for parliament, rather than any one administration. MPs were not whipped to vote in any particular way on Leadbeater’s bill, and the issue is treated as a matter of conscience.
But there was tacit endorsement for the most recent attempted overhaul from the top of Keir Starmer’s government. Before entering No. 10, Starmer promised broadcaster Esther Rantzen — who has stage four lung cancer — that he’d make time for a vote in parliament.
Leadbeater’s bill also received technical support from civil servants in the Department for Health and Social Care and the Ministry of Justice to ensure its workability.
New Prime Minister Andy Burnham appears to have other ideas. Burnham was not an MP when assisted dying passed the Commons last year and abstained in a 2015 vote during a previous stint in parliament.
More strikingly, when asked about his stance on the issue last month, Burnham said “the fixing of the funding of palliative care and social care” needs to happen first — and argued it would be “very challenging” to introduce assisted dying without substantial progress on these two running policy sores.
Edwards remains bullish. She commends the PM’s commitment to sustainably funding social care — Burnham has kicked off cross-party talks on the issue and asked for a speedier inquiry — and she insists his professed skepticism hasn’t put her off.
“It’s really important that we consider them together,” Edwards says of social care and assisted dying. “I don’t think that there is a reason to delay” changing the law, she argues, highlighting £125 million provided by Starmer’s government for adult and children’s hospices. (A Public Accounts Committee report said this one-off funding did not directly pay for service delivery or solve financial problems facing the sector.)
Edwards’ bill has a four-year implementation period. That means if it becomes law next year, assisted dying wouldn’t be permitted until 2031. She believes the two systems can work on a “dual track” and that poor palliative care won’t incentivize people to access assisted dying.
“I don’t necessarily think that lack of care is a motivator for this option,” she argues. “I think it’s a last resort when physical suffering really can’t be relieved.”
From MPs to peers
A majority of Starmer’s Cabinet backed the bill last time, including Health Secretary Yvette Cooper and Justice Secretary Alex Norris — but only 12 MPs need to switch sides for the bill to fall, making the margins tight. Indeed, suspended Labour MP Karl Turner told POLITICO he’ll vote against the bill after abstaining last June.
“People’s views are largely what I expect them to be when we next vote on this,” Edwards argues. “We haven’t seen any significant moves away from people who were supportive of the bill.”
Then there is the substantive question of the House of Lords. Edwards condemns the “small minority” of peers she blames for filibustering the previous bill. She said she is happy to work with peers on good faith amendments in the “scrutiny process” this time around.
The pro-assisted dying camp will be relying on a little-used pair of laws — the Parliament Acts — which would, in narrow circumstances, allow a bill to be passed despite being deadlocked or defeated by peers in the House of Lords again. “I want to get it back to [peers] ASAP so that they will have the maximum amount of time to finish the job of scrutinizing,” Edwards says.
An impassioned opposition campaign last time around argued Leadbeater’s bill was not safe. The Royal College of Psychiatrists, while neutral on the principle of assisted dying, said it could not support her plans due to a lack of clarity about their profession’s role in the process and whether adequate resources are in place.
While Edwards may struggle to win over Burnham, she hopes to “sit down and have a conversation” with the prime minister before MPs return from recess in September.
One open question remains: how Starmer himself will vote. As prime minister, he voted for it, but didn’t explain his reasoning. Now freed from the constraints of government, Edwards hopes Starmer will make an intervention.
“He has a well-known legal background, is very considered and is obviously a really crucial voice,” she says. Starmer’s office did not respond to a request for comment.