Civil Partnerships, Marriages and Deaths (Registration Etc.) Bill

Lord Bishop of St Albans Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 18th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of St Albans]

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.

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.