My Lords, that set the cat among the pigeons because I thought it would be best if we took away all these bits of the Bill that were trying to constructively limit the scope of the legislation—“peerage”, “baronetcy” and great offices of state—and work out which was the best way of doing that. In his amendments, the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, proposed one method of doing so. After talking to other people, I thought that there was another, neater method of doing so. If you combined my Amendment 2 with Amendment 6, it would produce a definition of how we want the Bill to be limited as regards hereditary title. The rest of the Bill would then read logically and would achieve the aim of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, in trying to produce a gender-neutral succession. This is not a destructive proposal but is just a matter of definition. I had rather thought that we might withdraw all the amendments around this subject, gone away, thought about them and agreed on the best way of defining it, and make the Bill consistent in such a way that anyone could pick it up and understand what on earth we were talking about and what it meant. I would suggest, if the Bill were ever rewritten, that this might be a slightly less cumbersome way of achieving the objective than having to insert “or baronetcy” and so on throughout the Bill. That is why I favoured my amendment over the other.
Now that Amendment 1 has failed we should either withdraw Amendment 2 and go away to discuss it, or press it because it would at least be an improvement on the generic term, “hereditary titles”, which can encompass all the other sorts of things that we do not want to be caught in the Bill. After considerable debate in the Standing Council of Scottish Chiefs, for instance, there was general consensus that it would be better to keep that issue separate and not in the Bill. At the moment, you can leave a chiefship to a daughter, and you can change the destination if you need to if a person is unsuitable or by certain applications and approvals. That should be dealt with completely separately to the Bill. We wanted to ensure that that sort of thing
was not caught up in it inadvertently, which is why I tabled this other version of what is effectively Amendment 1 to discuss which version was better.
I am obviously very much in favour of Amendment 4 because there is no logic in separating out Ireland from this provision. We were all the same at one time. Amendment 6 is consequential on Amendment 2. If it goes through, we need Amendment 6 because it would rewrite the first clause and achieve a definition in the Bill. The rest of my amendments, in their various groupings, are all around this subject and logically follow from the combination of Amendments 2 and 6. I beg to move.
Amendment 3 (to Amendment 2)