| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. Brazier: Even if, as my hon. Friend says, some religious charities may be excluded, adoption agencies, orphanages, children's homes and so on will be included in the definition of public organisations, because they carry out public functions. If Church schools require special treatment, how much more essential is it that those bodies, which have even more power over children in their most formative years, should enjoy the same special protection?
Mr. Leigh: That is an important point. It is difficult to imagine how such bodies would not be charities.
The model of incorporation that the Government have chosen is far reaching. In addition to designating a range of bodies to be public authorities, the Bill states in clause 3 that all legislation must be interpreted in line with the convention. Not only will religious bodies that get caught in the definition of "public authority" be hit, but all religious
bodies will find that people who want to sue them will start putting a human rights spin on existing legislation to try to get what they want. That will become most apparent in employment law. Unfair dismissal cases will begin to take on a new gloss as a result of people pleading human rights in conjunction with the existing law.
Only last Friday, I visited St. Barnabas's hospice in my constituency. It is a religious foundation designed to care for people who are terminally ill. By its very nature as a religious foundation, it is opposed in principle to euthanasia. What would happen if a nurse employed by a hospice started to distribute pro-euthanasia leaflets? Would the hospice have the right to dismiss that nurse? The answer is that it would have the right to dismiss the nurse, but under the Bill, as amended by the Home Secretary, that nurse could sue the hospice. The Government and the Committee should be worried about that.
I shall give another example from my constituency. Members of the Plymouth Brethren came to see me in my surgery this week. The Plymouth Brethren are a fine organisation. I believe that they have lobbied many Members of Parliament, as they are worried about the Bill. By their very nature, they regularly exclude members. In a recent case, they excluded a member who then threatened to take them to court. Under existing law, he could not do so.
The Home Secretary will assure me that because, in that case, the Plymouth Brethren were not acting as employers or as a public body, there is no way in way in which the member who had been excluded and who wanted to pursue his Church in a court would be covered by the Bill. I am sure that the Scottish Secretary will want to reassure the Plymouth Brethren on that point. They have lobbied Members of Parliament throughout the country making that point. They are a serious body and need reassuring.
Mr. Tim Collins (Westmorland and Lonsdale):
My hon. Friend is making a powerful case, which is shared and endorsed by people of many faiths in Cumbria and north Lancashire, as I know from personal experience. In the light of what he has said and his references to the cardinal archbishop and the Archbishop of Canterbury, will he comment on the remarks of the hon. Member for Hull, North (Mr. McNamara), who has just returned to his seat, that the issue has been got up by right-wing fundamentalists and does not matter much?
Mr. Leigh:
I have great respect for the hon. Member for Hull, North (Mr. McNamara), but I do not think that his points are valid. I know that he spoke sincerely and that he would not accuse the mainstream Churches, such as the Church of England or the Catholic Church, who have serious concerns about the legislation, of being fundamentalist sects. His point regarding proposed new clause 9 simply does not add up for the reasons that I have given. Through no fault of his own, the hon. Gentleman has been absent from the Chamber, so I shall not dwell on that point.
There is no doubt that Church schools will be protected, and we give credit to the Home Secretary for that. However, he has not made the case that religious charities will receive similar protection, and he must do so. The
only way in which to avoid the problems of litigation that challenges the core beliefs of religious groups as "public authorities" is to exempt them from that definition. That is what new schedule 1 would do.
It being Ten o'clock, The Chairman left the Chair to report progress and ask leave to sit again.
Committee report progress.
Motion made, and Question put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 15 (Exempted business),
Again considered in Committee.
Question again proposed, That the amendment be made.
Mr. Leigh:
In conclusion, I believe that exemption as proposed by the shadow Home Secretary is the obvious course. However, it would not be enough because religious bodies--even if they were not public authorities--would suffer as a result of all laws being interpreted to comply with the convention under clause 3. The amendments agreed to in the other place that the Government are deleting would have provided a defence, and the Home Secretary's amendment will prove to be inadequate.
I close by reminding the Government that the sorts of cases that religious people fear will arise, because this Bill makes that possible. When those cases come up and Churches and religious charities suffer intimidation, indignity and the expense of litigation and of losing, I believe that they will remind the Government of the opportunity that was offered to them that they did not act on. To coin a phase, the Government have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.
Mr. Brooke:
The Committee is in the debt of my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh) for a comprehensive speech on this subject, which is the product of much reading and much learning.
I shall be brief. I speak in this debate as a member of the Church of England. My paternal great grandfather and one of his brothers were ordained into the Church of Ireland of which their father was likewise a minister. He wrote a history of the Church of Ireland. My great grandfather ended his life as a Unitarian minister. My maternal grandfather was a canon of the Church of Wales and his son, my uncle, was dean of an English abbey. One of his daughters served as a Protestant missionary, became a nun, advanced to being a mother superior and ended her life in a closed order. I come from eclectic ecclesiastical stock.
I cite my Church of England pedigree because I was a Treasury Minister when my noble Friend Lord Lawson of Blaby introduced concessions for charities and measures against loopholes in his 1986 Budget. At that time, we held a seminar in Lancaster house, which the charities attended. My predecessor in this constituency, John Smith--now Sir John Smith, CH--asked the first question of the Chancellor. He said that there had been an argument in the Church of England for 400 years about what its purpose was, and the Chancellor had now decided, through a clause in the Finance Bill, that that issue would be settled by an assistant secretary at Inland
Revenue. He said that he thought that that would bring much pleasurable discussion to a close. I therefore approach Government intrusion into Church matters with caution.
I pay tribute to the Home Secretary, but I must approach his revisions, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough referred, with caution, too. As a result of the Government's stance in another place, there have been aspects if not of a deathbed repentance at least of a very late conversion on the part of the Government. One wonders whether the conversion was sufficiently early that proper thought could be given to the issue. I do not believe that the late Lord Butler of Saffron Walden would have approached the Education Act 1944 with the same recklessness.
I do have fears, as my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough alluded, about vexatious cases being brought against the Church of England. The hon. Member for Belfast, South (Rev. Martin Smyth) cited the extraordinary case of the Salvation Army in the Netherlands being sued by an atheistic Bible teacher. That is a case worthy of Mr. Justice Cocklecarrot in the pages of "Beachcomber". As I have said in an intervention, it was only settled in the Salvation Army's favour after a very expensive case. Resources were drained from the Salvation Army to fight it.
In exactly the same way, the Church of England is, very nicely, concerned about the amount of money that it has to spend on inquiries concerning church buildings which the Church of England genuinely loves. These inquiries arise from objections raised by English Heritage. So, too, I have fears about the amount of money and resources that will be drained from the Church of England by vexatious cases of which I am sure those who occupy the Treasury Bench would not approve.
All of that said, I am encouraged that the Government's heart is now beginning to be in the right place. I would give the Government a general but not universal benefit of the doubt, for they have responded to what has been said to them. It must be said that Labour Members have had universal faith in the Government. Labour Benches having been crowded during the capital punishment debate, they have been broadly empty during this debate. With the exception of the hon. Member for Hull, North (Mr. McNamara), Labour Members have been entirely silent during this debate.
I left the Chamber to consult the article in The Daily Telegraph of 19 May, which the Home Secretary quoted. He referred to various words of my noble Friend Baroness Young. I am conscious that, as with selective book reviews on dust covers, Ministers can be capable of selective quotations. I am glad that I left the Chamber to consult the article. I discovered that the Church of England spokesman's response to the Home Secretary's new clause closed cautiously as follows:
That, at this day's sitting, the Human Rights Bill [Lords] may be proceeded with, though opposed, until any hour.--[Jane Kennedy.]
Question agreed to.
"The Church will monitor closely how the Bill works out in practice and will not hesitate to go back to the Government if the legislation proves to work unsatisfactorily."
I share that caution and I hope that the Government will give a guarantee that they would react swiftly if such fears proved correct.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |