Clause 7 - Place of registration
Civil Partnership Bill [Lords]
3:45 pm
Mr Chris Bryant (Rhondda, Labour)
As Members will know, subsection (1)(b) states that registrations may not take place in religious premises, while subsection (2) defines ''religious premises'' as premises that are
''designed for use solely or mainly for religious purposes, or . . . in use solely or mainly for religious purposes.''
There are some problems of precision. Primarily, the difficult part of defining religious premises is defining not premises but religion. I will not go into this at great length, but premises used ''for religious purposes'' could include a church hall, a youth club run by the YMCA or YWCA, or the Christian Aid operation across the river. It could include a series of different buildings that I am sure it is not the aim of the Bill to catch.
Moreover, many smaller churches do not meet in what we would recognise as traditional church buildings or buildings that were exclusively designed to be used as church buildings. Such a church may meet on a Sunday morning in a youth club, which is used as such for the rest of the week, a gym or any building that is large enough to accommodate it. Some of these churches are profoundly evangelical or fundamentalist and are unlikely to want to allow such registrations. However, the Metropolitan Community Church for instance, which is a largely gay and lesbian Church, operates around the country not in traditional church buildings but in venues of the sort that I have mentioned. The Bill would not allow a civil partnership registration service to be held in a Church of England building, but it might allow one in the Metropolitan Community Church. That imprecision must be ironed out.
The other point is that we should allow churches to do what they want. If they want to offer their premises to be used for such events, we should permit them to do so. It is up to the registration authority to decide precisely what premises can and cannot be used, but we should not preclude it from allowing religious premises to be used, particularly those that want to do so.
As an addendum, in case there is not a stand part debate, I note that subsection (5) states:
''A registration authority may provide a place in its area for the registration of civil partnerships.''
What happens if a registration authority chooses not to do so or to make somewhere available that is wholly inappropriate according to almost everybody who
wants to register a civil partnership in that area? What powers would local people have to insist that a decent and proper place is made available?