Lords Spiritual (Women) Act 2015 (Extension) Bill [HL]

Lord Bishop of St Albans Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 10th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of St Albans]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for her opening remarks. I put on record my personal thanks and those of the Church to His Majesty’s Government for securing time to bring this Bill forward, and to the Opposition for giving their support to the proposal. I hope that this will be a relatively simple and straightforward piece of business and that we may not need to detain the House for too long.

The Bill, if passed, will extend the Lords Spiritual (Women) Act 2015, due to come to an end in 2025, for a further five years to 2030. In our view, this is a reasonable extension to a successful piece of legislation. Prior to the 2015 Act, the 26 bishops who sat in this House were determined by the Bishoprics Act 1878: the most reverend Primates the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, the right reverend Prelates the Bishops of London, Durham and Winchester, followed by the 21 longest-serving diocesan bishops in the Church of England.

The 2015 Act altered the operation of the 1878 Act, providing that, for the next 10 years, any time a vacancy arose among the 21 Lords spiritual whose places are determined by seniority, the vacancy would be filled by the most senior female diocesan bishop available, effectively allowing women to jump the queue ahead of men.

The General Synod approved legislation allowing women to become bishops only at the end of 2014. If the usual operation of the 1878 Act had continued, it would have been a considerable number of years before any female diocesan bishops—having had to wait a long time before they were able to take up these senior roles—had been able to enter this House. That was the rationale behind the introduction of the original 2015 Act, which we are now seeking, with the support of the Government, to extend for a further five years.

As a result of the original legislation passed in 2015, we now have six female diocesan bishops sitting as Lords spiritual in this House. Apart from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London, they have all come in under the existing Act. We have been able to benefit from the exceptional insights and wisdom of the likes of my right reverend friends the Bishops of Gloucester, Bristol, Chelmsford, Derby and, most recently, Newcastle. My right reverend friend the Bishop of Newcastle’s predecessor, Christine Hardman, whom I am sure many noble Lords will remember, became a bishop quite late in life. Had she had to wait in the queue, as per usual rules, she would never have come here at all. We are now awaiting the arrival of another woman, Debbie Sellin, Bishop of Peterborough, within the next few weeks.

To come to the point, which is the five-year extension of the Act, I think it prudent to confess that we in the Church have made slower progress than we had hoped when it came to ensuring that our senior clergy are representative of the diverse congregations we serve. This is true both of women and of ethnic and racial minorities. We do not yet have proportionate representation of female bishops on these Benches, or in our diocesan bishops. Were the provision in the Act to come to an end next year, as was the original plan, I fear we would not have achieved our goal of corrective action when it comes to the long delays to women’s ministry and appointments to senior positions within the Church of England.

At the time of the 2015 Act, the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury commented that the duration of the Act’s provisions was a matter of judgment and that we could not entirely predict or foresee the pattern of appointments over the coming years. Unfortunately, that pattern has not consisted of as many female bishops as we had hoped, and we humbly ask this House to grant us a little longer to ensure that our excellent and qualified women bishops have enough time to overcome this barrier.

However, the pipeline is crucial. If you look at the statistics, the number of women incumbents in our parishes has been steadily increasing. The numbers of women archdeacons, cathedral deans and suffragan bishops are increasing. Like many professions, we have the problem of getting the pipeline right when making these changes. If the pipeline was going in a different direction, I would be very concerned. It is, at the moment, going in the right direction.

The view of the Church is that we intend this to be a one-off and do not anticipate needing a further extension to the Act, although of course we are at the service of this House. Personally, I strongly hope to see in five years a proportionate number of our female colleagues in post as diocesan bishops and in the pipeline for vacancies in this House, and the usual rules of the 1878 Act to resume.