Tomorrow the Welsh Senedd votes on whether to give legislative consent to the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill. We write not to reopen the debate about the principles or ethics of assisted suicide. We write because the Bill’s treatment of Wales is a constitutional and legislative failure serious enough that it deserves to be named clearly, by people with the legal and political experience to do so.
You do not need to be a supporter of devolution to find what follows troubling. You need only believe that when parliament creates institutions with defined responsibilities, it should legislate coherently with that fact. This Bill does not. Health is fully devolved in Wales. The entire delivery of any assisted suicide service, every clinical step, every assessment, every panel decision, would fall to Welsh health boards and Welsh ministers. Yet the Bill was designed for England, with Wales’s needs thoughtlessly bolted on over and above the competences of Westminster’s legislative powers for Wales. The intergovernmental processes that exist precisely to prevent this did not apply, because this is a Private Member’s Bill. Had this been a government bill it would have gone through several rounds of pre legislative scrutiny which would have necessitated intergovernmental dialogue both between the relevant Whitehall departments, and with the Welsh government.
The disregard for Wales has been consistent throughout. In October 2024, the Senedd held a conscience vote and rejected the principle of assisted dying. That vote was the Senedd doing exactly what a devolved legislature should do: deliberating seriously on a question the delivery for which rests within its sphere. Westminster’s response was to press ahead regardless, with a bill that made no serious provision for Wales. A committee amendment giving the Senedd a genuine veto over commencement passed the public bill committee and was stripped out on the floor of the Commons. A Lords debate on the bill’s treatment of Wales was met with impatience. The Welsh government has now had to introduce three separate supplementary legislative consent memoranda as the bill’s Wales provisions have been repeatedly revised. The message received in Wales has been clear: your concerns are technical inconveniences, not constitutional obligations.
Yet constitutional obligations are exactly what they are. The bill makes no financial provision for Wales. Future funding will be determined by what England spends, with a Barnett consequential for Wales and calculated with English NHS needs in mind, not Welsh ones. Welsh health boards will carry civil liability for a service whose safeguards they had no power to design and cannot strengthen. The government’s own impact assessment does not consider Wales separately. The Equality and Human Rights Commission’s statutory review of Wales documents higher rates of deprivation, documented shortfalls in palliative care, and stark health inequalities between Welsh communities. None of this features in the bill’s equality analysis, which is drafted as yet another ‘for Wales, see England’ analysis.
The Senedd should decline consent tomorrow. Not as a verdict on assisted dying, that question remains open to debate, and rightly so. But granting consent to a bill this constitutionally incomplete, still being amended in the Lords, without proper financial provision or equalities analysis for Wales, would be to endorse the proposition that Wales can be legislated for carelessly. It cannot, nor is it the Senedd’s responsibility to clean up poorly drafted constitutional legislation imposed upon it by Westminster. Rejection places pressure on the Lords and the bill’s sponsors to produce something properly designed. That is not obstruction. It is the devolution settlement working as it should.
