CHURCH OF ENGLAND CONVOCATIONS BILL [Lords] (Hansard, 17 December 1965)

§ The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Sir Frank Soskice)

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second Time.

I have it in Command from Her Majesty the Queen to acquaint the House that Her Majesty, having been informed of the purport of the Church of England Convocations Bill [Lords], has consented to place her prerogative and interest, so far as they are affected by the Bill, at the disposal of Parliament for the purposes of the Bill.

The Bill takes us back a long way in the history of our lay and ecclesiastical institutions. It is closely intertwined with the development of our people over centuries. The Convocations of Canterbury and York are of great antiquity. Their origins can be traced back to an ecclesiastical synod which met at Hertford in A.D. 673, the Archbishop of Canterbury presiding. The years went by. By 1170, the two Provinces of Canterbury and York had their provincial synods, which became known as the Convocations.

The House will know that the Convocations each comprise the Upper House, that is, the bishops, and the Lower House consisting of certain ex officio members together with elected representatives of the lower clergy. The representatives are known as proctors. The Convocations are primarily concerned with doctrinal and spiritual matters, and they alone have the function of making canons or rules binding on the clergy, which, having received the Royal Assent and licence to make, execute and promulgate, have the force of ecclesiastical laws of the realm. Unlike Church Assembly Measures, the canons are not subject to Parliamentary approval, although, under an Act of Henry VIII, they must not be incompatible with any law or customs of the realm.

The object of this Bill, which the Government have introduced at the request of the Archbishops of Canterbury and York after consultation with their clergy in the two Convocations, is to facilitate the work of the ancient 1625 assemblies of the Church of England and their association with the lay element in the government of the Church.

Under arrangements which have their origin in the 13th and 14th centuries, the two Convocations of Canterbury and York, composed of the bishops and the proctors to whom I have referred, are summoned together by the Crown. The summons is by writs issued at the same time as the writs issued for the election of a new Parliament.

After the Reformation, certain canons or rules made by the Convocations in 1640, at a time when Parliament was not sitting, were declared invalid, but it has now become established practice not only to summon but also to dissolve the Convocations at the same time as Parliament. There was a period which lasted from 1717 until 1852 when the Convocations did not meet save for the transaction of purely formal business, but, since 1852, the summoning and the dissolving of Parliament and the Convocations of the Church of England have been done simultaneously.

This custom—for custom, in essence, it was—has now become so well established that the Law Officers of the Crown, whose advice was taken, advised that it would be wrong to make any change in those arrangements save with the authority of Parliament. We have, therefore, brought before Parliament this Bill which comes from another place.

In the circumstances of the 20th century, it is no longer appropriate that the life of the Convocations should necessarily be regulated by the life of a particular Parliament. The dissolution of Parliament for reasons unconnected with the interests of the Church can lead to unnecessary interruption of ecclesiastical business and the unwelcome expense, which the Church has to bear, of new elections of representative clergy. It is far more appropriate that the duration of the Convocations should now be linked with the duration of the House of Laity of the Church Assembly. The House of Laity, as the House will know, is elected for a five-year period. In the circumstances, with this object in view, Clause 1(1) of:he Bill provides that the power of Her Majesty to dissolve and summon Convocations should be exerciseable independently of powers to dissolve and summon Parliament.

1626 By subsection (2) of Clause 1 the maximum life of the Convocations is fixed at five years. There is an exception to that. In the case of the present Convocations a six-year period is provided so that they will be dissolved in 1970 at the same time as the House of Laity of the Church Assembly, which was elected for a five-year period in September this year.

Subsection (3) provides for the continuance of the present practice whereby the election of the representative members of the new Convocations and the calling together of these bodies takes place as soon as convenient after the dissolution of the old Convocation.

Subsection (4) is simply designed to remove any doubt as to whether the Convocations may continue to sit notwithstanding the demise of the Crown. The Representation of the People Act, 1867, already provides for the continuance of Parliament in such circumstances, and it has in those circumstances been the practice since that time to apply the same principle to the Convocations. The subsection is declaratory in terms and simply confirms these existing arrangements.

That is the content of the Bill. It is a Bill brief in scope but of great significance to the Church, and it makes what the Government put to the House as a necessary change to conform to modern conditions as embodied in the Bill. It certainly represents a departure from the long tradition of association between the ancient assemblies of the Church and Parliament. I hope that hon. Members will be willing to approve these new arrangements which I have outlined, knowing that they will assist, as they undoubtedly will, the Church to carry out its business more conveniently and more expeditiously and without what would seem to be a completely irrelevant interruption from time to time.