The Labour chief whip in the Lords, Roy Kennedy, said this week that the government would not give the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill more time before the May deadline, when all legislation must have passed or automatically falls.
The team behind the bill also confirmed they now expected the legislation in its current form to fail.
There are six remaining sitting days left before May, when the King's Speech happens, and the government is not repeating what it did in December by giving more time.
Advocates for the bill did not blame the government, which it said had been helpful to date, and instead aimed their fire on a minority of peers who have been asking thousands of questions about the details of the bill.
Broadcaster and campaigner Esther Rantzen told Sky News: "This is absolute blatant sabotage. This is a handful of peers putting down 1,200 amendments not to scrutinise the bill, which is their job, but to block it.
"A few peers for their own reasons have decided that they're going to stop this going through parliament, and the only way to stop them would be to invoke the Parliament Act, which has happened before, or get rid of the House of Lords - they're clearly not fit for purpose."
She said she was still hopeful the change would come, as there is a rising cry for reform all around the world. She paid tribute to Sir Keir Starmer, who favours a change in the law, and said he had done everything he promised her before the election.
Many members of the public and even MPs were unaware that the bill was likely to fail. Earlier this week, the Welsh Parliament approved a "legislative consent order", endorsing in theory the legislation that it expected to come out of Parliament.
The debate will now focus on what happens after May, with proponents of a change in the law saying the public polling and the repeated backing of MPs means that this legislation should be given a second chance.
However, the government is likely to continue keeping the issue at arms length, since there is no single cabinet position on the issue and members of the cabinet like Wes Streeting and Shabana Mahmood are implacably hostile to the change. This makes a change in the law much more tricky.
Some MPs who backed the bill in its Commons stages have told Sky News the process was so torturous that they would not want a repeat of it. Supporters have suggested that you would not have to go through the entire process - avoiding committee stage if the same bill was resurrected - and the Commons stages could in theory be done in one day, and the Parliament Act then deployed to override the objections in the Lords.
However, the more turbulent political context for the government, the bandwidth that even this would occupy in government, and the fact the reforms would not be complete before a general election, mean that this would be a significantly bigger challenge second time around.
The Soham murderer, 52, was taken to hospital after being found in a pool of blood following an alleged attack by an unknown inmate, Sky News understands.
A spokesman for Durham Constabulary said: "The 52-year-old prisoner who was injured during this morning's assault in the workshop at HMP Frankland remains in a serious condition in hospital following treatment for head injuries.
"Police forensic teams have examined the scene of the attack throughout the day to gather evidence.
"A suspect, a male prisoner in his mid-40s, has been identified by officers investigating the incident. He has not been arrested at this stage but remains in detention within the prison."
A North East Ambulance Service spokesperson said: "We received a call at 9.23am on Thursday 26 February 2026 to reports of an incident at HM Prison Frankland in County Durham.
"We dispatched two ambulance crews to the scene and requested support from the Great North Air Ambulance Service (GNAAS). One patient was transported to hospital by road."
In a statement, a Prison Service spokesperson said: "A prisoner is receiving treatment after an incident at HMP Frankland on Thursday morning. It would be inappropriate to comment further while police investigate."
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Huntley was convicted of the murders of 10-year-olds Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in Soham, Cambridgeshire, in 2002 and is serving a life sentence with a minimum of 40 years at HMP Frankland in County Durham.
The latest incident is not the first time Huntley has been attacked at HMP Frankland.
In 2011, an inmate who slashed Huntley's throat with a makeshift knife was jailed for life.
Damien Fowkes was sentenced to a minimum of 20 years for the attempted murder of Huntley in March 2010 and the manslaughter of child killer Colin Hatch.
Fowkes inflicted a wound seven inches long on the Soham murderer's neck and the court was told it was only "good fortune" that the weapon missed anything vital.
The disappearance and murders of the two 10-year-old schoolgirls captured the attention of the nation in 2002.
Huntley killed them in August of that year after they left a family barbecue to buy sweets, and then dumped their bodies in a ditch.
He was their school caretaker and put himself forward as a volunteer to help search for them after they went missing - and was interviewed by reporters on camera.
The efforts to locate the girls in the 13 days after they disappeared have been described as one of the most intense and extensive in British criminal history.
Huntley was convicted of the murder of both girls in December 2003 and sentenced to two terms of life imprisonment.
His girlfriend, Maxine Carr - the girls' teaching assistant - had knowingly provided Huntley with a false alibi.
She received a three-and-a-half year prison sentence for conspiring with Huntley to pervert the course of justice.
Some families said that baby deaths were being misclassified to prevent further investigation.
Baroness Amos, who is leading a national investigation into maternity care, said: "Maternity and neonatal services in England are failing too many women, babies, families, and staff."
Investigators spoke to hundreds of harmed families and staff across 12 NHS trusts in England, many of whom shared shocking accounts of their experiences.
Have you been affected by poor maternity care? Email maternitystories@sky.uk
Some families alleged in the report that their babies were designated stillborn instead of dying after birth.
"They felt the system incentivised the recording of deaths as stillbirths as this prevents the case from being investigated by a coroner," the report said.
Jack and Sarah Hawkins, whose daughter Harriet was stillborn, were not part of the Amos investigation, but have fought to get a separate inquiry launched for bereaved and harmed families in Nottingham.
Jack said: "We have met a number of people and heard reports from a number of people whose babies they say were born alive and who the hospital say were born dead.
"And that is a horrific position, a horrific thing to say, and yet of course we believe the victims, not the NHS, who have shown themselves to be sparing with the truth around some of these issues."
Neither supported Baroness Amos' inquiry. Sarah said it "isn't going to change anything".
'There needs to be a public inquiry'
"Families just want accountability and this report is not going to bring accountability," she said.
"There needs to be a statutory public inquiry and some form of justice. Because if your child died in any other circumstance in life, you would get justice. People would be held to account.
"Yet in maternity services, it doesn't happen like that and that is so unfair."
Read more on Sky News:
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The National Maternity and Neonatal Investigation (NMNI) in England was set up by Health Secretary Wes Streeting in June after he met families harmed by poor maternity care.
In her initial report released in December, Ms Amos said "nothing prepared her" for the amount of "unacceptable care" families currently receive.
Investigators have met more than 400 family members and heard from over 8,000 people, including NHS staff.
NHS England has been contacted for comment.
Members of the States Assembly voted in May 2024 in favour of drawing up laws for an assisted dying service in the Crown Dependency.
The vote on Thursday, after three days of debate, was 32 in favour and 16 against. The bill will now go for royal assent.
Under the bill, a person with a terminal illness "who is experiencing or is expected to experience unbearable physical suffering" and die within six months, or 12 months with certain neurodegenerative conditions, will be able to choose to end their own life.
In order to be eligible, the person will also need to have been a resident of Jersey for 12 months.
Campaigners in favour hope a service can be in place by the end of summer 2027.
As a Crown Dependency, for primary legislation to get royal assent and become law, the Lord Chancellor - currently David Lammy - is required to make a recommendation that it should do so.
In March last year, the Tynwald in the Isle of Man became the first parliament in the British Isles to agree a framework for assisted dying.
But the process of getting that framework on the statute book is yet to be finalised.
Alex Allinson, who is behind the Isle of Man's legislation, has expressed concern at the lengthy delay his bill has faced in gaining royal assent.
He cautioned that after royal assent, "a lot of work" is still required before a service is up and running, including setting up support systems for patients, families and medical staff on the island.
A UK government spokesperson said the length of processing time "depends on the complexities and sensitivities of a bill, as well as any legal and constitutional issues".
The Jersey legislation would allow a doctor or registered nurse to administer lethal drugs. This is in contrast to the assisted dying bill being considered at Westminster, which states that terminally ill adults must take an approved substance themselves.
Earlier on Thursday, Sky News deputy political editor Sam Coates revealed on his podcast Politics at Sam and Anne's that the Westminster assisted dying bill was likely to fall because the government will not grant it extra debate time.
Supporters of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which would apply to England and Wales and is continuing to undergo scrutiny in the House of Lords, have accused some opponents of trying to "talk out" the contentious legislation.
However, many peers insist they are simply doing their job of scrutinising a bill, which they argue is unsafe in its current form and needs to be strengthened.
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Lord Falconer said peers' attempts to filibuster are "not the end of the road" for the draft law because of plans to invoke the Parliament Act.
The Labour former minister, who is sponsoring the bill in the upper chamber, added: "The Lords prides itself on focusing on the things that matter and that most certainly is not what's been going on here.
"So, the tragedy is that a small number of people in the Lords are blocking a bill that has passed in the Commons.
"You've got the Commons, the Jersey parliament, and the Isle of Man parliament all passing it, and it's the Lords that are blocking it in England and Wales."
On Tuesday, Welsh politicians in the Senedd voted to give their legislative consent for the UK Parliament to pass the bill.
And north of the border, the Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill is expected to be voted on at Holyrood next month.
The court may have delivered justice in a case such as Ian Huntley's, but for some fellow criminals, what's really needed is revenge - to make you suffer like you made your victims suffer.
From his first day in inside, there was a price on Huntley's head - not a monetary one, but the promise of "respect" for anyone who attacked him.
Read more: Soham murderer Ian Huntley seriously injured
In the violent world of a top security jail, respect from your fellow cons is everything and there's nothing quite like hurting a prisoner considered "the lowest of the low".
An infamous villain once described to me over lunch how he witnessed a planned prison knife attack on a child sex offender, a story he told years later with relish, laughter and no grim detail spared.
Huntley would have been on Rule 43, held in the prison's unit for vulnerable inmates, mostly sex offenders, but police informants too.
But it's impossible to fully protect everyone, especially in today's chaotic jail system with overcrowding and increased violence, alongside the regular departure of disillusioned older warders who are replaced with more inexperienced officers.
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Mark Leech, editor of the Prisons Handbook, said: "The upcoming young thugs in prison see people like Huntley as a way of gaining kudos, especially if they are already serving lengthy sentences."
If Huntley recovers, he will always be vulnerable to another attack.
Some prisoners have long memories and plenty of time to think.