Ecclesiastical Fees (Amendment) Measure

I begin by associating myself with the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Laming, about the immense amount of work that has been done to get the Measures tabled, and congratulate the right reverend Prelate on his introduction of them. The Measures do not deal with the level of fees. They state how they are to be set—there is a great infrastructure for that—but there is a big issue about how we should set the fee. When I raised that question in the Ecclesiastical Committee, the response was that, at the moment, if anyone asked the church to justify the figures in terms of actual costs, it would be hard put to do so. An attempt was to be made to work up a realistic estimate of the cost of providing authorised ministry buildings, and so forth. If I may say so, that will require the judgment of Solomon. First, the amount of authorised ministry—I declare an interest as a clergy spouse—varies so enormously from case to case. Certainly with funerals, the amount of time that can be taken where there has been a tragic death in the family is phenomenal, and is one of the most important things that the clergy do. That is extremely difficult. I also hope that, without wanting to ramp the fees up, the committee or sub-committee that looks into it will not just look at the marginal costs. Going back to the point about cathedrals, you cannot have a wedding in a church unless the church has been kept up for the years before the wedding. Simply charging for so many hours of the clergywoman's time plus a bit of heating costs and whatever does not get to the bottom of the real value. I also had a slightly mischievous thought when the right reverend Prelate was talking about a national table of fees. Some churches are extremely sought after, particularly for weddings. It is not because the population of the parish is particularly devout. It occurred to me that without necessarily adopting the Ryanair approach to pricing for churches, there is a different quality between a wedding conducted in a country church in July and in an inner-city church in January. I wonder whether it might be possible to contemplate seasonal variation.