My Lords, I am chairman of the Ecclesiastical Committee. As the right reverend Prelate has said, we have declared that this Measure is expedient, but I have to tell the House that that was after a prolonged process.
The most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury informally told members of the Ecclesiastical Committee that he was extremely anxious to deal with obsolete and unnecessary legislation within the Church that had been running for years and years and was quite simply impeding the modernisation process. We took the extremely unusual course of inviting members of the Ecclesiastical Committee to come informally—not as the committee, because we are a statutory committee—to discuss with the members of the Church of England what they really wanted from us. They produced for us a draft that was not quite the same as the present, which was quite simply too wide. I made it very clear to the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury that I could not get it through the House and nor should it get through the House. That was totally understood by the Church of England, and the lawyers took it away and tidied it up. They reduced that part, as the right reverend Prelate has explained to noble Lords, which, at the start, made it possible for the synod to change our laws that were not ecclesiastical laws, which is not of course ever what they intended. Consequently, we held some further informal meetings and the absolutely splendid secretariat of the Ecclesiastical Committee—particularly the lawyer advising and the House of Lords clerk of our very large committee—took a lot of trouble to discuss this. We were satisfied that what was required by the individual members of the committee, not sitting as a committee, was in fact found within this present draft.
I am extremely happy to tell the House that we took this very unusual, rather interesting step and that it turned out to be most successful. I hope that we might repeat it with other important pieces of legislation to make sure that we are all, if I may say so, singing from the same hymn book. I am very happy to say to the House that the committee at its most recent meeting, within just 10 or 15 minutes of discussion, said that this was expedient.