My Lords, this is my first time proposing a Private Member’s Bill and I therefore ask that your Lordships be gentle with me as I find my feet. I begin by taking this opportunity to pay tribute to my honourable friend in the other place, Tim Loughton MP, who I see is here listening today. He has worked so hard to champion these issues and it is through his determination and constructive dialogue that the Bill has progressed and is in such good shape today. To continue this theme of collaboration, I thank Tim and the officials from the Home Office and the Government Equalities Office, led by Linda Edwards, for their support in preparing its journey through this House.
In the other place the Minister summarised this Bill as being about “hatches, matches and dispatches”. This light-hearted reference, while apt, perhaps does not convey the emotional and personal impact wrapped up in the fourfold practical purpose of the Bill. I am delighted that these clauses now represent current government policy and I shall outline each in more detail.
The purpose of Clause 1 is to address an issue with marriage entries. There is currently provision for only the father’s name to be recorded in the marriage entry when couples get married, as I was surprised to discover when my eldest son got married last summer. This has been the position since 1837 and it is high time it was addressed. The provisions in this clause will enable the updating of the marriage entry to allow for the names of the couple’s mothers to be included. The clause is narrow in scope and seeks only to change how marriages are registered.
Making changes to how marriages are registered and moving to a schedule-based system has previously been the subject of debate. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans, who is also with us today, introduced identical measures in the Registration of Marriage Bill, which was debated in this House last year. That Bill is currently in the other place, awaiting a Second Reading. It has been apparent during the debates that the provisions in the clause have cross-party support. Moving to a schedule system similar to the one that has been in place in Scotland since 1855, and which also applies in Northern Ireland, will enable changes to be made to the marriage register entry much more easily in future, without the need to replace all the paper marriage registers. I believe that there are around 84,000 marriage registers in use across register offices, churches and other religious buildings.
My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson, and Tim Loughton for their work on the Bill, which in all main areas seeks to deliver equality and fairness—a task we failed to complete during the passage of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013. I say to the noble Baroness that I will certainly be as co-operative as I can, but I may not be so friendly with the Minister, because there are areas that the Government need to address.
First, on changing the law so that opposite-sex couples can form civil partnerships, in the Commons the Government, while supporting the general principle, expressed the belief, as we have heard, there were still several issues to be worked out. Tim Loughton’s new clause makes no prescription about the method, wording and reach of the legislative change required, leaving that to the Government. I therefore welcome the remarks made by the noble Baroness to the effect that she is working with the Government to prepare a suitable amendment—to be considered in Committee, I hope—which would give powers to draw up appropriate regulations for equal civil partnerships by the end of 2019. That is very welcome, but I share the concern of many that the Government may be using things such as consultation to drag their feet. We cannot wait any longer.
Talk of dragging feet brings me to my second bit of unfinished business from 2013. During the passage of the 2013 Act, the Government, instead of accepting legal recognition of humanist marriage, proposed an amendment that mandated public consultation first, as well as taking the power to bring in humanist marriage by statutory instrument. In 2014, the Government held a consultation which revealed that over 90% of respondents were in favour of legally recognised humanist marriages. In 2015, the Law Commission reported that failing to grant humanists the same rights as religious people in marriage was fundamentally unfair. In June 2018, the Northern Irish Court of Appeal ruled that there is a human right to humanist marriage. I therefore hope that in her response today the Minister will say that, without any further prompting or delay, she will use the UK Government’s existing powers to legally recognise humanist marriages in England and Wales. I hope that will happen as soon as is practicable.
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson of Abinger, for the way in which she introduced this Bill, which deals with matters of enormous importance and sensitivity to a very small number of people. I am delighted to speak today not least because my father married a lot of people. He was a nonconformist minister, and I must tell your Lordships that the day on which the Church of England took a more enlightened view towards the remarriage of divorced people was a cause of great sadness in our household.
Turning to Clause 1, in 2016, I was absolutely delighted to get married in a beautiful chapel—it was medieval and deconsecrated, I have to say—but it was none the less a wonderful day. During the preparations, my wife and I had to see the registrar, and we all concluded that the fact that we had to tell the registrar who our fathers were but not our mothers was simply and utterly anachronistic.
I am also indebted to my dad for reasons why we should accept the Bill today. Many years ago, my father was officiating at a wedding in Glasgow University Chapel. In fact, it was the wedding of some family friends. When he took the couple out to sign the register, they turned to the groom’s mother, who was in fact a professional registrar—and she had forgotten the certificate. So my father and mother had to disappear from the reception to go and get it so they could be married. Until today, few people knew that the pictures of the happy couple are in fact of them signing a bit of blotting paper for the purpose. So it is high time that we leap forward with tech and make the changes to the schedules outlined in Clause 1.
Turning to Clause 2 and civil partnerships, there has been a huge debate about why, given that gay people are now allowed to be married and we have civil marriage, we need equal civil partnership. I have spent a lot of time thinking about this, not least because my dad often married people in church and had to think carefully about whether that was the most appropriate thing to do. He had the right to refuse to marry people—it was a right that he exercised sparingly, but he did think about it. Back in those days, he thought that there were times when it was not appropriate for people have their ceremonies in church.
My Lords, I too thank my noble friend Lady Hodgson for sponsoring the Bill in this House. I endorse her comments about the hard work carried out by my honourable friend Tim Loughton in another place.
I support all the provisions in the Bill but, in the interests of time, given that two Private Members’ Bills are waiting in the wings, I will address my remarks only to the first part of the Bill, which enables the registration of the names of the mother of each party to a marriage or civil partnership. I congratulate the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans, who has worked hard, with good grace and patience, to bring forward this reform. Of course, he started by introducing his own, more narrowly focused, Registration of Marriage Bill last January. I spoke at its Second Reading in strong support of its objectives.
Since 1837, wedding certificates have featured simply the names and occupations of the spouses and the names and occupations of their fathers. Mothers’ contribution to family life has been erased from history. Being a witness was the only thing they could do, which is what happened in my case: both my mother and my mother-in-law were witnesses. Now we have the chance to ensure that the details of the couple’s mothers can be included on the online version. This would be the first major reform of how marriages are registered since 1837, early in Queen Victoria’s reign. This is a Bill to put right what most people would be astonished to find is still the case in 2019. For some years, there has been a cross-party campaign to achieve this move towards equality in the registration of details on marriage. I am very pleased to see that remain; I hope that this cross-party work continues throughout the passage of the Bill.
Previously, it was argued that changing the paper certificates would be too expensive because there are around 84,000 open marriage registers around the country in more than 30,000 churches and religious buildings—plus the ones in register offices—and because, in compliance with existing legislation, physically they feature spaces for only the fathers’ names. If the mothers’ names were to be added, it was argued that new hard copy registers would need to be provided, at an estimated cost of £3 million. The Bill removes the requirement for paper marriage register books to be held in so many places, creating a digital marriage schedule. That should enable the schedule to be designed in a format that makes it possible to include the names of both parents of the couple.
My Lords, I thank Tim Loughton MP and the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson of Abinger, for bringing this Bill forward in the Chamber today. It is a complex Bill because it brings together a number of different issues and therefore the danger is that it could fall because a group of people does not like one particular bit of it. I know just how hard it has been working on just the focused registration of marriage part of it, let alone the other focuses. For that reason, I will resist the temptation to widen the debate beyond the scope of the Bill; for example, to explore the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Collins of Highbury. I do so because I want us to focus absolutely on what we are trying to deliver. That does not preclude us from having other debates on the points he has made but I do not believe that they are relevant today. Indeed, the danger is that it will confuse matters if we go beyond the scope of what we are trying to do.
As has already been spelled out, the proposals in Clause 1 reflect almost exactly my own Registration of Marriage Bill, which passed through this House with support from your Lordships. Perhaps I may say how grateful I am to the considerable number of people who were immensely helpful. It was only my second attempt to get a Private Member’s Bill through. I am a complete novice at this and I discovered just how complex it is to move a Bill on. I was therefore delighted to have the huge help of so many Members of your Lordships’ House. As has also been mentioned, we decided to do something which I am told is very unusual. We developed a pincer movement with Dame Caroline Spelman MP introducing a Private Member’s Bill with almost exactly the same words in the other place, because we were so determined to move this very focused piece of legislation on and try to get it into law.
The Bill before us today originated in the other place but both the respective Bills have passed through one of the two Houses and both share a core belief that marriage registration needs to be updated and modernised. Clause 1 would correct a clear and historic injustice. When a couple is married and the marriage is registered, currently there is provision only for the fathers’ names to be recorded. It is an archaic practice, unchanged since Victorian times, when children were seen as the father’s property and little consideration was given to the role of the mother, in particular any sense of them having joint responsibility.
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson, and the honourable Tim Loughton MP for bringing this legislation forward. It is about time. I want to say simply to the right reverend Prelate who has just spoken that I find it unbelievable that there is or ever has been any hesitation about putting the mother’s name on the certificate. However, I am often shocked by the way the world works.
I will address the part of the Bill which covers civil partnerships. I always say that my nephew was killed by the state. He died aged 35 in the contaminated blood scandal. He had a 10 month-old baby and had been with his partner Olga for 14 years. The financial problems which flowed from that were insupportable.
Noble Lords may or may not be aware that as a Minister in the coalition Government, I was the originator and architect of the same-sex marriage law. My story began right at the end of the journey to equal marriage rights and I stood on the shoulders of giants. The credit for the same-sex marriage law goes to them and to lifelong campaigners, some of them in this House. I mention my noble friend Lady Barker and the noble Lords, Lord Cashman, Lord Alli and Lord Collins, along with many others. But I could never have done what I did if it had not been for civil partnerships. We would not have same-sex marriage if the Labour Government under Tony Blair had not taken that tremendous step forward for equality. But at the end of the same-sex marriage journey, as has been mentioned, an inequality was left; that is, you can get married or enter into a civil partnership if you are gay, but you can only get married if you are straight. I want to take this opportunity to put on the record the history or story of straight civil partnerships. I am not talking out of school because this is all in the public domain in my book, Equal Ever After. It had to be approved by the Cabinet because if you have been a Minister you are not allowed to publish a book without its approval.
My Lords, I take the opportunity, as others have, to congratulate both Tim Loughton and my noble friend Lady Hodgson on the progress made on this Bill so far. I have given them an indication of the subject on which I want to speak, and it will come as no surprise to many people that it is Clause 2 and the question of same-sex marriage in Northern Ireland. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Collins, for his reference to my Private Member’s Bill.
Before I move on to that, I am prompted by a comment made by the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, who referred to her father. We live in a much more liberal and open society than many years ago, and I thank all the different Governments and people who have campaigned on behalf of that. I once sat in the Strangers’ Gallery in the Commons with the noble Lord, Lord Cashman, Ian McKellen and Boy George. It was reported in the papers that the four of us were there for a debate on the age of equality. That happened to out me to my parents, so I went back to my parents to discuss the subject with them. My father was completely relaxed about it. He said: “I don’t mind what you do in your life, with one exception: please never get mentioned in the same sentence as Boy George again”. We have moved on, and are now in a position where we can consider the whole question of same-sex and heterosexual equality in one form or another.
I am today wearing the tie of the Kings Cross Steelers, the world’s first gay and inclusive rugby club. I hope not to wear it so often, because I have worn it on each occasion that I have spoken on same-sex marriage in Northern Ireland. Sooner or later, I want to make progress on this. I have pursued it in a number of different ways. As the noble Lord, Lord Collins, said, I have worked with the Member for St Helens in the other place, introducing exactly the same Bill. We have been told over and over again that it is a devolved matter. That is the answer that the Minister, Victoria Atkins, gave when the subject was debated in Committee in the other place. But we cannot go on waiting for ever. Sooner or later we have to say that, because there is no devolved Assembly, we now have the responsibility of changing the law in this place.
My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Baroness for introducing the Bill today and to Tim Loughton for having the determination to steer it through the Commons. He is building on the work done by others, and I am particularly pleased to see the Bishop of St Albans in his place today after everything he did last year.
The civil registration service is one of the hidden administrative gems in this country. Every year, around 1 million births, deaths and marriages are recorded throughout the country. It happens routinely, without drama, and provides the legal evidential base for our very existence, so its accuracy is key. Civil registration as we know it has remained largely unchanged since it was introduced in 1837. It is administered by registrars in local authorities as well as by the General Register Office in Southport. My noble friend Lady Featherstone asked how on earth we were at the point where women were not recorded on marriage certificates. The answer goes back to the fact that, when civil registration was introduced, it moved the system which was already in place for the recording of baptisms, marriages and burials. The prevailing thinking at the time was, frankly, that women did not matter all that much.
The keeping of church registers had been haphazard until 1538, when Thomas Cromwell ordered that every priest should keep a proper record of baptisms, marriages and burials. Later, they were required to be recorded on parchment and kept in secure parish chests. Copies were made regularly and sent to the bishop. The Rose’s Act of 1812 standardised all this information on pre-printed forms, which included only the father’s name and occupation on baptismal and marriage records. As I have said, civil registration imported that system. As to civil registration, copies of local events do not go to the bishop but go to superintendent registrars and then to the Registrar-General, who holds a repository.
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The creation of civil partnerships in 2004 marked a significant moment on the road to equality for same-sex couples. For the first time, same-sex couples were able to formalise their intimate partner relationships, publicly acknowledging their commitment to one another, and able to access certain rights, responsibilities and protections. We continued to celebrate the legal and formal recognition of same-sex relationships with the introduction of same-sex marriage in 2013. However, we are left with a situation in which same-sex couples are able to either get married or form a civil partnership, whereas opposite-sex couples can only get married.
While marriage holds great value for many as a means of formalising and recognising intimate partner relationships, we know that not everyone feels that this type of relationship is for them. Some people who would very much like to have their relationship recognised in the eyes of society and the law find themselves, and often their children, without protection or security simply because they do not wish to marry. We were therefore delighted when, in October, the Prime Minister announced the Government’s intention to extend civil partnerships to opposite-sex couples. Following this announcement, my honourable friend Tim Loughton introduced an amendment on Report in the other place which now stands as Clause 2. This places a duty on the Government to legislate to bring about equality between same-sex couples and other couples in terms of their future ability to form a civil partnership. I know that the Government have concerns about Clause 2, which include the lack of detail in the regulation-making power, and I am pleased to be working closely with my honourable friend to draft an upgraded amendment to replace Clause 2. Our hope is that this will allay these concerns and ensure that the Bill is able to deliver as intended.
Clause 3 provides for the Government to prepare a report on whether and how the law should be changed to require or permit the registration of pregnancy losses, which cannot be registered as stillbirths under the Births and Deaths Registration Act 1953. Currently, parents whose babies are stillborn after 24 weeks’ gestation are required to register the baby’s name and they receive a certificate of registration of stillbirth. When a pregnancy ends before 24 weeks’ gestation, hospitals may enter a baby’s name in a local book of remembrance or issue a local certificate to commemorate the baby’s birth for those parents who want to do so. However, there is currently no formal process for parents to be able to register their loss legally.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of pregnancies end before 24 weeks’ gestation due to miscarriage, ectopic or molar pregnancy, or because parents make the difficult choice to terminate a pregnancy due to congenital anomalies. For many parents, this experience can be utterly devastating. The loss of a baby before 24 weeks’ gestation is made worse for some by the fact that there is no official recognition of these losses. That is why it is critical that the Government ensure that parents who experience a pregnancy loss receive the best empathetic care and support possible, through the NHS. As part of this ambition, Ministers should look into all options for changing the current system to recognise pre-24-week pregnancy loss. I am pleased that the Department of Health and Social Care has commissioned a review on this issue and has already made progress on gathering evidence and stakeholder views about how the current system might be improved, as well as examples of best practice. The Bill is an important part of driving this work forward and I strongly encourage noble Lords to support and contribute to the review. Losing a child is one of the worst experiences a parent can go through. By placing a duty on the Government to prepare and present a report setting out whether and, if so, how the law on the registration of pregnancy losses should change, I am confident that the Bill provides the next step in giving parents who have lost a baby the recognition they are due.
Clause 4 makes provision for coronial investigations of stillbirths. Currently, under the Coroners and Justice Act 2009, coroners have a duty to investigate deaths in certain circumstances, such as where a death is violent or unnatural or where the cause of death is unknown. This duty extends to the deaths of newborns of any age, including those who die immediately after birth. However, coroners do not have jurisdiction to investigate where the baby showed no signs of life independent of the mother, including where the baby died during labour.
The clause places a duty on the Secretary of State to prepare and publish a report on whether and how the law ought to be changed to enable coroners to investigate stillbirths. It also provides an enabling power for the Lord Chancellor to make regulations that would amend Part 1 of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 to enable or require coroners to conduct investigations into stillbirths, to provide for when, and in what circumstances, coroners will investigate stillbirths.
I realise that the House may have concerns about a power to make regulations in this way, but the safeguards written into the clause will ensure that it is used appropriately. For example, where the regulations would amend primary legislation, they will be subject to the affirmative resolution procedure, so there will be scrutiny by both Houses, and the regulations cannot be used to create any criminal offences unless the offence has an equivalent in Part 1 of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009.
The Government fully support the introduction of this provision. However, given the sensitivity of the issues raised, I understand the need for the Government to undertake a full review and produce a report before making any changes. This will ensure that the regulations take into account the views of all relevant stakeholders.
Finally, this provision will support the work currently being undertaken in the Department of Health and Social Care to improve maternity safety, including the Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch independent investigations into all English cases of term stillbirth occurring during labour—as defined by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists’ Each Baby Counts criteria.
I urge noble Lords to support the clauses in the Bill and I beg to move.
My third bit of unfinished business is our failure to deliver equal marriage for all citizens in the United Kingdom. A year ago, Karen Bradley, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, stated that same-sex marriage could be legislated for in Northern Ireland by the UK Parliament and that the Conservative Government would allow a conscience vote. My honourable friend Conor McGinn, to whom I pay tribute, introduced a Private Member’s Bill extending same-sex marriage to Northern Ireland on 28 March. It passed its First Reading but, at Second Reading in the Commons, it was blocked by a Conservative MP on 11 May and again on 26 October, and was rescheduled for debate on 23 November, before again being rescheduled to 25 January. Of course, the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, introduced an identical Bill to your Lordships’ House on 27 March and it passed its First Reading that day.
On 1 November, Royal Assent was granted to the Northern Ireland (Executive Formation and Exercise of Functions) Act 2018, which contains sections describing Northern Ireland’s same-sex marriage and abortion bans as human rights violations. That law does not legalise same-sex marriage in Northern Ireland, but it directs the British Government to issue guidance to civil servants in Northern Ireland on the incompatibility of human rights with the region’s laws on those two issues. Again, I hope the Minister will not say that the Government will drag their feet on these issues but will commit to ensuring that all citizens of the United Kingdom are treated equally and fairly, as that Act attempts to do.
My final bit of unfinished business—I hope we will have a debate on this in Committee—relates to the role of the Church of England. In the context of the Bill, I should like to know whether it will continue to say yes to same-sex civil partnerships but no to same-sex marriage. In his recent book Reimagining Britain, the most reverend Primate addressed the tension between scripture and tradition on the one hand and contemporary reality on the other. He tells us that the Bible’s teaching on marriage is profoundly positive but, he notes, the social reality in modern Britain is radically changed today, with cohabiting, blended, single-parent and same-sex configurations. He continues:
“If fluidity of relationships is the reality of our society, then this should be our starting point for building values, because all values must connect with where people are and not where other people might like them to be”.
What are these values? According to the most reverend Primate himself,
“in Christian understanding, the core concepts of households and family include holiness, fidelity, hospitality and love above all, because God is holy, faithful, welcoming and overflowing in love, and any human institution that reflects these virtues also in some way reflects God”.
Surely, therefore, it is time for couples who wholeheartedly embrace those values to have the right to, or not to be refused, a blessing in their church simply because they are of the same sex.
On the question of civil partnership, I am greatly indebted to friends of mine. I am thinking in particular of one person who at a very young age was party to a violent and traumatic marriage. She managed to escape from that and subsequently spent more than 30 years with another man whom she loved deeply, but the idea of entering into something called marriage was absolutely not right. That is no reflection on the value of their relationship, and for her, a civil partnership would have been highly appropriate. I am indebted to her for getting in touch with me last night. When I told her that we were going to be discussing this, she said, “Look, there is a point in this. People who talk about marriage frequently talk about it being a union of two people. I do not disagree with that at all, but for me, the fact we are talking about a civil partnership—a partnership of two people who are interdependent rather than dependent on each other—is extremely important”. She, other friends of mine and others who are a part of the campaign for equal civil partnership have often talked about that point.
I too want to talk about this in the context of the role of religions. I have spent a lifetime observing and wandering around the religious sensibilities of other people. Through all the arguments we had about civil partnership and same-sex marriage, time and again opponents were quick to throw at us the accusation that somehow this was undermining marriage as it is understood by the religious bodies in this country.
No one ever recognised the fact that sometimes, a person falls in love with someone who is not of the faith into which they were born, and part of the process of managing their relationship with their family is that they do not get married. Until now, if those people are heterosexual, there has been no way to enter into a legal commitment with their partner while at the same time juggling sensitivities with their family. This is therefore an important step forward.
Later, we will hear from the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, why we should extend civil partnerships to people who are from the same family, because of the issue of tenancies and property. It is not news to him that I oppose that. I believe it is wholly wrong to take a body of legislation designed to apply to adults who, of their own volition, come together to form a family unit and apply it to relationships which are consanguineous and cannot be broken. I agree with him that there is an anomaly in our fiscal law that needs to be sorted, but our fiscal law already makes allowances for children. Those who have children’s best interests at heart should go down that route and desist from this campaign, founded and funded by evangelical Christians, to have a go at civil partnerships and same-sex marriage. We are talking about two completely different things.
I will leave it to my noble friend Lady Benjamin to talk—far more eloquently than I could—about the registration of pregnancies that cease before 24 weeks, but I believe that if we can show greater understanding and humanity to people who undergo that trauma, we should.
The noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson, is right that the involvement of coroners is a complicated subject, not least because we would not want to do anything to undermine in any way the duty of candour of obstetricians and gynaecologists in an extremely difficult area of medicine. I think I am right in saying that the largest proportion of liability claims against the NHS are to do with perinatal medicine and what happens during birth, which is one of the most complicated and dangerous areas of medicine. The noble Baroness is right to raise this subject but I do not think that we are quite there yet.
Unlike the noble Lord, Lord Collins of Highbury, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson, I think that Clause 2 needs more work. Most people think there is a need for greater consultation but nobody wants to drag this out any longer, if possible. As when we were working on the original civil partnerships and same-sex marriage legislation, there are couples for whom the need to sort out their affairs is urgent. Nevertheless, more detail is needed.
Finally, I agree absolutely with the noble Lord, Lord Collins. I am pleased to say that in this country, we are still making progress in this area of social reform. It is absolutely wrong that the citizens of Northern Ireland remain set in some 1950s view of the world that no longer pertains to their lives, and it is absolutely wrong that some of our country’s citizens do not enjoy the same status as the rest. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson, and Tim Loughton for his persistence in moving forward on this issue. I hope that we can achieve consensus today and get this on to the statute book as soon as possible.
When my noble friend the Minister responded in Committee on the right reverend Prelate’s Bill to Amendment 12, moved by the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner of Worcester—who I see in his place—she said:
“To clarify, by the names of the parents it will say ‘Mother/Father/Parent’ for both parents. That will apply to children of opposite-sex couples, same-sex couples and whatever we have to come”.—[Official Report, 29/6/18; col. 345.]
For the avoidance of doubt and for clarification about the provisions of the Bill, I would be grateful if my noble friend the Minister could confirm that Clause 1(1) and 1(4)(a) make it not only possible, but certain, that her commitment in this House will be fulfilled. Can she confirm that it is her firm expectation that the Secretary of State and the Registrar-General will exercise their powers in a way that ensures that the “Mother/Father/Parent” option appears on the schedule, and that it remains possible for people to leave the section blank if they wish?
In Committee, my noble friend the Minister also said that,
“the regulations are an early draft and further drafting is required … I will make further drafts of the regulations available in the Library in due course”.—[Official Report, 29/6/18; col. 341.]
I am grateful to the Library of this House for providing me with a copy of those draft regulations and to the Home Office for providing the Library with an updated version last night so that I could see the latest version. Speed-reading through the regulations on my iPhone last night was quite tricky but, at first sight, they do not appear to refer specifically to “Mother/Father/Parent”. Indeed, they seem simply to replicate the provisions of Clause 1(1) and (4), which gives permissive powers to the Secretary of State and the Registrar-General to prescribe the content of a marriage schedule. It is important that we have a government commitment on the record today that those powers will be used, as I am sure my noble friend the Minister will be able to say quite easily, to enable the entry of the mother’s name on the marriage record. I invite my noble friend to provide that assurance.
The road to this stage, where we have a Private Member’s Bill that stands a good chance of getting on to the statute book, has been long and winding. Even where there is cross-party support, Private Members’ Bills are the most fragile animals in Parliament. After Second Reading on 26 January last year, we made progress on the right reverend Prelate’s Bill; it made its way down the Corridor to the House of Commons in late July, just as we rose for the Summer Recess. At the same time, my right honourable friend Dame Caroline Spelman, the Second Church Estates Commissioner, had introduced the mirror-image Registration of Marriage (No. 2) Bill—this gets more complicated, I promise—to the House of Commons on 14 November 2017 and was waiting for its Second Reading.
I congratulate my right honourable friend Dame Caroline for working so assiduously on this matter for several years. She made it clear that she was ready to assist her honourable friend Tim Loughton with his more complex—but I still say welcome—Bill, which last year had been successful in getting a date for Second Reading in the Commons. His Bill successfully completed its Commons scrutiny and is before us today. Dame Caroline offered to ensure that Mr Loughton’s Bill contained provisions within it which achieved the same objective as that of her Bill and that of the right reverend Prelate. She was selfless in offering to put the reforms to the registration of marriage before her efforts on her own Bill.
As a result, in Committee on Mr Loughton’s Bill in the Commons on 18 July last—that is my wedding anniversary so it was a good day for me—the marker clause in his Bill was replaced with the text from Clauses 1 and 2 of the right reverend Prelate’s Bill—I promised noble Lords that this would be complicated—on 18 July at col. 6. Therefore, Clause 1 of the Bill before us today reflects the objective and most of the text of the Bill which was sent to the House of Commons last July. I am very grateful to the Government for their assistance in ensuring that the drafting of the right reverend Prelate’s Bill has been amended to take account of the reports of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee and indeed some of the reservations expressed at Second Reading and in Committee on his Bill in this House.
Previous attempts to achieve this reform have failed at every hurdle along the way. This one has got over so many hurdles that it is my hope today that we can continue with cross-party support, leave the hurdles behind and get it into law by the end of this Session.
In England and Wales the law currently requires all marriages to be registered once they have taken place. Following the marriage ceremony, the person responsible for registering the marriage, such as a registrar or a member of the clergy of the Church of England, registers the marriage in a marriage register book and handwrites the marriage certificate. I have done that myself many times. Another aspect which features in both my Bill and this Bill is the modernisation of the system of marriage registration. For too long the system has been solely paper-based. Certificates are an exact copy of the register entry, with the prescribed particulars registered for marriages including details only of the fathers but not the mothers of the couple.
Leaving aside the obvious benefits of digitalisation, which is already available to couples in Scotland and Northern Ireland, there have been calls from both within and outside Parliament for the mother’s details to be included in marriage registration. For my own Bill, the Church consulted internally and won support from senior clergy across the Church. It has also worked for many years with the Home Office and the General Register Office on the finer points of its implementation.
Incidentally, I have been surprised by the unexpected support of groups of people who would not normally spend time engaging with the minutiae of parliamentary legislation. Genealogists, for example, have reacted with a huge sense of relief. I have received quite a number of letters from genealogists saying, “It is about time because it is so much harder to trace families back in this country where the mother’s name is not recorded at this key point”. Elsewhere, I have been glad to amplify the voices of feminists and women’s groups on this important issue.
Last year we marked the centenary of women’s suffrage, so surely it is time to bring the registration of marriage into the present age. I hope that we will all support the Bill.
I cannot say how delighted I am that the Conservative Government are supporting this move. However, I am not surprised, because my Secretary of State was Theresa May and she was always in favour of straight civil partnerships. When I first got it into my head that we should introduce same-sex marriage, even though it was not in the party manifestos or the coalition agreement, I asked my civil servant how I could do this. He said that I had to write the words to be approved by my Secretary of State. She would then use those words to write to the Cabinet. That is how new policy is brought before the Government. The words I wrote were as follows:
“During the consultation on civil partnerships in religious premises it has become clear that there is a genuine desire on the part of some to move forward to equal civil marriage and equal civil partnerships. The Government will work with those with a key interest in this to examine how we might move forward to legislation”.
Theresa May approved my words and they passed the Cabinet write-round to create this new policy. Two Cabinet Members objected but they were overruled by David Cameron. Noble Lords may notice that the original wording did not include religious marriage, which did come to pass, but did include equal civil partnerships, which did not come to pass. How did that change happen? David Cameron supported same-sex marriage because he believed in marriage. As he said to PinkNews on 10 April 2010:
“I told the Tory conference that commitment through marriage was equally valid whether between a man and a woman, a man and a man or a woman and a woman … I want to do everything I can to support commitment and I’m open to changing things further to guarantee equality”.
When I read that, I thought he would not object to what I was doing. He was open to it and supported it, but was not so keen when it came to civil partnerships. No. 10’s preference was to abolish civil partnerships altogether. The view from No. 10 was that marriage was the gold standard of relationships and that if gay couples gained the right to marry there was no longer any need for civil partnerships. There is a sort of—not very good—logic to that, unless like me and many others you believe it is not for the state to judge. Some people believe in marriage; some do not. It is the state’s role not to judge which is better but to facilitate both equally.
Although Theresa was in favour and it had passed Cabinet write-round, there was continued and continual pressure from No. 10 to drop civil partnerships. I confess that my methodology to repel this push was to stomp around the Home Office declaiming that this defining equality policy of same-sex marriage was not only right but would go a long way to detoxifying the previously toxic reputation of the Conservative Party on LGBT rights. Did it really want to wreck its whole reincarnation and detoxification by scrapping civil partnership, such a hard fought-for and hard-won step on the equality ladder?
Conservatives had begun moving in the right direction, mostly supporting civil partnerships, and David Cameron had changed the atmosphere—but whether it was the upset in the Conservative associations at same-sex marriage or he simply did not believe in civil partnerships, I do not know. This came to a head a day or two before the 2011 Liberal Democrat autumn conference, at which I was to have the honour of announcing the new policy and the consultation that would be launched. It had been a year and a half getting to this point and I was so excited about finally going public. No. 10 special advisers and Nick Clegg’s special advisers acting for me were at loggerheads. They rang me to say that No. 10’s position was basically that if I did not agree to drop straight civil partnerships, David Cameron would kill the whole thing dead and would not allow same-sex marriage to go ahead. I instructed our special advisers to fight back. But many hours and phone calls later, in the end No. 10’s position was final: drop straight civil partnerships or same-sex marriage is dead in the water.
With a heavy heart, I made the decision that same-sex marriage was the big social change, the big equality step forward, and vital to get through in that Parliament. I was also 100% sure that straight civil partnerships would inevitably follow, as we would be left with the inequality of gay couples having the choice between marriage and civil partnerships but straight couples only able to marry. I insisted that a question on this remained in the consultation, and it did. In the consultation responses—the biggest response to a government consultation in history with around 289,000 responses, I think, but I may stand corrected—people overwhelmingly supported straight civil partnerships. Tim Loughton tabled an amendment during the same-sex legislation but it was kicked into the long grass for a review, as it was then regarded as potentially derailing or delaying the same-sex legislation—pretty much the same as happened with humanist weddings—but here it is today, exactly as I predicted. Thank goodness. If it had not come forward, I would have felt guilty for the rest of my life, but happily we have that opportunity today, so I am delighted to support this Bill and equality in marriage and civil partnerships at last.
It is a common supposition that there is broad support in Northern Ireland for this but no support from the DUP, which blocked the legislation when there was a Northern Ireland Assembly. But I pay credit publicly now to members of the DUP for giving me assistance and advice since 27 March and throughout the last few months, helping and encouraging me to change the legislation in Northern Ireland. It is a real stain on our society that we are in a position where we can say that it is fine for everybody but the people of Northern Ireland. As a member of the Kings Cross Steelers, on a weekly basis I have to face friends of mine from Northern Ireland. Yet we say to those people that they can get married in this country but not in their own community.
When I spoke on this in the debate here in October, I mentioned that the previous week I had been present, very close to here, at a wedding that involved a friend of mine from Northern Ireland and his partner—but they could not have got married in Northern Ireland if they had wanted to. Surely that is an unacceptable position in this day and age and this society. We must find a way of making that change, whether in this Bill—I will raise it in Committee in more detail—or on another occasion in another place. We cannot go on saying to people that they can be equal in one part of the country but not another. It is utterly unacceptable.
It seems that it is our responsibility to say through legislation that it is a human right for everybody in every part of the country to share the same rights on marriage and relationships. As I have indicated previously, when this Bill gets into Committee I will therefore be pursuing the need to change the law as it relates to Northern Ireland. I wish it well, and I hope that, when it comes out, we will have changed the attitude of all those involved so that we can get a fair passage and a speedy change to one aspect of the legislation, about which I and many other people in this Chamber are seriously concerned.
This system is entirely paper-based. In an increasingly digital world, we have a totally paper system of civil registration. Each time these documents are copied, there is scope for error and the current arrangements are complex, as you can imagine, if you want to correct or change them for any reason. Basically, the system has served us well. However, it has not kept pace with technological and societal change. There is never any time for legislative change in civil registration—it never gets to the front of the queue—and yet it is where routine state administration touches some of our most personal experiences. It is therefore important.
I shall confine the remainder of my remarks to the registration of marriage. Noble Lords may have gathered that I am something of an enthusiast for this topic. This comes from my interest, which is shared by millions of people, in family history. As such, I tend to take a long view of these matters. One of the most vexing questions for serious researchers is the standard of proof to which you work. Therefore, adding details to the public record—and particularly the mother’s maiden name and occupation to a marriage certificate or baptismal record—would be important extra pieces of validation for future generations of family historians.
It has even more significance because, when you really get into family history, other people often say to you, “How far back can you go?” It is an inane question and not what it is about. You are interested in what your ancestors were like and what they did. Yet we have written women out of the record, which is both morally repugnant and difficult from a research point of view. Genealogy tends to drift towards the male line because the name does not change. Therefore, anything that can help in your research into the female line is useful. To be frank, it is the only line with which you can have biological certainty. There are currently an estimated 2 million single-parent families, of whom 90% are women, and they are absent from the marriage records of their children. Given that, what on earth will future generations make of our attitude to women?
The Government have been moving to digital systems for some time now, and civil registration should not be an exception. We should regard this now as the beginning of a sort of digital parish chest. I hope the Government will give some thought to how we can also deal with registration of births and deaths—not, I hasten to add, in this Bill, but in the future. The Minister in the Commons reflected that there are estimated savings of £33.8 million from the measures in this Bill, and I wonder whether any work has been done to quantify what might be saved from digitising birth and death records.
Not only does the Bill do good things in a range of ways which reflect new attitudes towards the formation of families and the recognition of life events such as a stillbirth, but it also helps us to modernise and future-proof civil registration so that later Parliaments can deal with, for example, how to recognise those with two female or two male parents or no legally recognised father. It is a useful Bill in its contribution to all of these matters. I emphasise the point made by one or two other noble Lords that we must be mindful of the temptation to put too much into this Bill because what is really important is that it passes.