A move to relax the law on assisted dying was thrown out by the Lords on Tuesday night.

Peers voted by 194 to141 to reject a proposal to allow people to help someone with a terminal illness travel to a country where assisted suicide is legal.

All three major parties allowed peers a free vote on the amendment to the Coroners and Justice Bill.

The amendment was sponsored by the Labour peers Lord Falconer of Thoroton and Baroness Jay of Paddington, the former Leader of the Lords, and had been criticised by Lord Carey of Clifton, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, and other church leaders.

Debating the issue, Lord Falconer told peers that 115 people had travelled from Britain to Switzerland for help to commit suicide and, although there had been investigations, no one had been prosecuted.

“It is absolutely plain that the law is being marginalised,” he said. “The law is not being applied by the Director of Public Prosecutions because it plainly no longer fits the current situation.

“The result of the law not being applied is we have horror of people going early to commit suicide abroad without their loved ones there.”

The Bishop of Exeter, the Rt Rev Michael Langrish, who has a 30-year-old daughter with Down’s syndrome, said that the amendment would be “a legislative milestone on that slippery slope to introducing assisted suicide here in the UK by incremental degrees”.

Strongly opposing the amendment, Baroness Campbell of Surbiton, a crossbencher, who herself is severely disabled, said she “ticked every box” which would enable her to ask someone to travel abroad with her under the terms of Lord Falconer’s amendment.

She said: “By going with this amendment we turn the traffic lights from red to green on state-sanctioned assisted dying, albeit in another country.”

She added: “If this amendment were to succeed, I believe it would place a new and invidious pressure on disabled and terminally ill people, who think that they are close to the end of their lives.

“Some will consider death is preferable to fighting, with support, to live with dignity.”

The Labour QC Baroness Kennedy of the Shaws gave warning that “legal changes made for benign reasons have had unforeseen and negative consequences.

“And the consequence that concerns me is that with this legal amendment we create a climate in which the terminally ill and disabled and the elderly and the sick feel even more profoundly vulnerable or feel there is an expectation that they should take steps to end their life,” she said.

Lord Waldegrave of North Hill, who was Health Secretary in the last Conservative Government, warned that agreeing the amendment could “open the way to a shift in perception across the board”, including on the allocation of resources. The health service bureaucracy has to be able to rule that kind of resource allocation out by saying that is not something we will consider.”

He added: “Bureaucracies themselves do not have souls. Bureaucracies given broad signals can move quite quickly in ways that individual people looking at hard cases had not envisaged.”

But the Labour peer Lord Warner, a former Health Minister, supporting Lord Falconer, argued that his suggestion was a “narrow and focused amendment”.

He told peers: “It would be much more in line with the 21st-century reality of a number of Britons who are going abroad to end their lives, whether we like it or not.”

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