I beg to move, That the Supplementary Scheme to give effect to the proposals of the Diocesan Reorganisation Committee in the Diocese of London for the purpose of making additions to the original reorganisation Scheme in respect of the Guild Church of St. Michael Paternoster Royal, which was laid before this House on 9th November, be disapproved. I am sorry to detain hon. Members at this time of night, but this is the last of the 28 days allowed for the possible disapproval of a scheme which was laid by the Church commissioners a few weeks ago. The matter which I am asking the House to disapprove, though relatively narrow in scope, is of some consequence in three ways. There is a parliamentary and, I would almost say, a constitutional aspect of the scheme. There is a legal aspect of it. There is also what I may call an ethical consideration. I shall try to deal with these three points as briefly as I can; first, however, I must say something about the scheme itself and its background.

Hon. Members who were in this House in 1952 may remember our debates on the City of London (Guild Churchs) Act. This Act was worked out because of the dilemma with which the Church authorities were confronted in the City of London after the war and the bombing. There were a number of churches of considerable architectural merit, mostly the work of Wren, some of them damaged in the blitz, and all of them probably "redundant" in the strict sense that there was hardly any resident population left in the City.

This Act embodied a novel and ingenious device for enabling them to be preserved and to be put to a variety of uses far broader in scope than would have been possible had they remained ordinary parish churches. These churches, 16 of them, all named in the First Schedule to the 1952 Act, were to be designated Guild churches. Their vicars are exempted from the statutory obligations imposed on the incumbents of parish churches, such as holding services on Sundays. Instead, they Minister to the needs of the million or more workers who crowd into the City of London every weekday; and each of them had also a special extra-parochial function.

I need not trouble hon. Members further with a resumé of the Guild Churches scheme, except to say that when an amending Bill was discussed in 1960 it was generally agreed that the project was working well and that the Guild churches were making a contribution of value to the life of the City and its workers.

Now I come to the three objections to the Scheme before us. First, the Parliamentary one. The Scheme in question is a supplementary scheme, prepared by the Church Commissioners (and this is how they describe it): to give effect to proposals made by the Bishop of London and the Diocesan Reorganisation Committee for the purpose of making additions to the original reorganisation Scheme in respect of the Guild Church of St. Michael Paternoster Royal in the Diocese of London. This verbiage conceals the fact that the Scheme itself, in effect, but without saying that it does, amends the Act passed by Parliament in 1952, the City of London (Guild Churches) Act, to which I have already referred. It amends it by removing the Church of St. Michael Paternoster Royal from the list of Guild churches in the Schedule. I may add, in passing, that this is a church of considerable historical interest, quite apart from its architectural merits: it was founded by a great pioneer of the export trade, Richard Whittington, several times Lord Mayor of London, and it is still haunted by a noble black cat.

Yet, if hon. Members look at the scheme which has been laid, they will certainly not realise that this is its intention and its effect. That basic fact of the scheme is not mentioned anywhere in it. It would surely have been simpler and more suitable to have made this change, if it had to be made, by means of an amending Bill; then Parliament would have understood what was being done and could have treated the matter on its merits.

I am fortified in this view by a passage in Erskine May which does not refer precisely to this kind of procedure, but which seems to me to present us with a kind of analogy—not an exact analogy but a reasonable analogy—to the situation in which we find ourselves. It is in the new edition on page 887 and is under the head, "Repeal of Public Acts by Private Bills." The Guild Churches Act was not a public Act. I must make that clear. It was a private Act, but an Act of such considerable public importance that the then Chairman of Ways and Means decided that the Bill ought to go to a specially enlarged Select Committee for consideration, and so it did. Therefore, although it was neither a public Act, nor, indeed, strictly a hybrid Act, one might call it a quasi-hybrid Act and regard it, as the Chairman of Ways and Means did, as one of considerable public importance.

It sometimes happens that a Public Act is repealed by a Private Bill, and Erskine May says of this: But the scope of the public Acts which a private bill proposes to repeal or to amend, and the nature and degree of the proposed repeal or Amendment, have to be considered, and provisions of this kind in private bills demand peculiar vigilance, lest public Laws be lightly set aside for the benefit of particular persons or places. I admit that that is not an exact analogy, but it seems to me to express very well the spirit of what I am complaining of in this procedure— … lest public laws be lightly set aside for the benefit of particular persons or places". It is even more inconvenient, clearly, when a Private Act of considerable public importance, which received the attention which the Guild Churches Act received, is amended almost surreptitiously by means of a mere supplementary scheme to another Measure. At least, I suggest, the Church Commissioners, when drafting this scheme, should have included a specific and explicit Clause to the effect that it was altering the status of this particular church, removing its Guild church status or, to coin a word, "deguilding" it.

The scheme explains that when the restoration, which is now pending, is complete, the church is to be appropriated for certain purposes; some of it is to become offices for a, no doubt, worthy diocesan purpose, and part of it will be a small chapel. This may be an admirable and sensible arrangement. I am not arguing the merits of it tonight. But it should be noted by those who are interested in the Guild church project as a whole that, if this precedent were followed, the whole project could be whittled away, possibly without Parliament having any idea of what was being done. All the 14 surviving Guild churches—14 others will be left, after this scheme, if it goes through—could be "deguilded", the stipends taken for other purposes, and so on, by means of supplementary schemes of this unobtrusive kind.

This scheme is made "in pursuance of the Reorganisation Areas Measure, 1944"—which brings me to my second point, the legal one, which I believe to be of some substance, also. It seems to me doubtful that this scheme is legally permissible at all. It may be ultra vires. There is no provision in the 1952 Act whereby a designated Guild church can be deprived of its Guild church status or, as I put it just now, "deguilded". I suggest, therefore, that, legally as well as in order to make clear to Parliament what was being done, the Diocese of London and the Church Commissioners ought to have sought to amend the 1952 Act and not to have adopted this procedure.

The hon. and gallant Baronet the Member for Worcestershire, South (Sir P. Agnew), who, I understand, is to reply to the debate, will, no doubt, refer me to Section 27 of the City of London (Guild Churches) Act, 1952, which provides that A supplementary reorganisation scheme may in the case of any guild church (other than the church of St. Lawrence Jewry) include provisions for any of the purposes specified in paragraphs (c) (d) (e) (f) and (g) respectively of subsection (1) of section 20 of the Reorganisation Areas Measure 1944 in like manner as if this Act were a reorganisation scheme but so that references in that Measure to an incumbent and a patron of a benefice to a parochial church council and to a churchwarden shall in the case of any such supplementary reorganisation scheme be deemed to be references to a vicar and a patron of a guild church to a guild church council and to a churchwarden of a guild church respectively". It is, therefore, very important to look closley at Section 20 of the Reorganisation Areas Measure, because I believe that that is what the Church Commissioners and their legal advisers have been relying on in arguing that this scheme is legally not ultra vires and in order. Section 20 of that Measure listed a number of things which could be done by a reorganisation scheme. It said that it may in the case of churches include provision for any of a number of purposes, including (a) the restoration or rebuilding of a church, (c) the appropriation of a church or any part thereof, and (e) the complete or partial demolition of a church. I suppose it is subparagraph (c) that the Church Commissioners are relying on—the appropriation of a church or any part thereof—taken in combination with Section 27 of the City of London (Guild Churches) Act, which refers back to that Measure and says that the supplementary reorganisation scheme can include provisions for any of the purposes specified in those subparagraphs.

I honestly believe that this is a wrong interpretation of that earlier Measure. That earlier Measure is concerned, indeed, with appropriation. It is concerned with demolition. There is no proposal now, thank goodness, to demolish this church, as the Diocese of London was trying to do only three or four years ago. There is a proposal to appropriate, but there is nothing whatever in Section 20 of the 1944 Measure which allows a change in the status of a church. Clearly, there could not be any specific reference in that Measure to Guild Churches, because it antedated the Guild Churches scheme by eight years. But there is no reference in any of those subparagraphs of Section 20 to any change in the status of a church. For instance, it does not say that a parish church can be changed into a chapel of ease, or something else. It refers to closure, demolition, appropriation, and so on, but nothing about any change in status. But this is what in, I must say, a rather underhand way is being done by the supplementary scheme which is before us.

It is clear that when the City of London (Guild Churches) Bill was passing through Parliament no one had any thought that such a power resided in Section 27. That Section was the subject of a report by the then Attorney-General, who addressed himself solely to the possibility that a Guild church might be demolished under it. The Select Committee—I was among a number of hon. Members who served on it—was assured that Parliament would never consent to the demolition of a Guild church. So the Attorney-General of those days clearly did not think that the Section contained a hidden power to deprive a Guild church of its status.

This is equally clear if one reads the very long and exhaustive contribution by Mr. Wigglesworth, who was and is the Chancellor of the Diocese of London. He gave a long exposition before the Select Committee of the meaning of all the Sections in the Bill. It is clear that he did not think about this at all, because if he had suspected that this power lay hidden in these paragraphs it would clearly have been his duty so to have informed the Select Committee when he addressed it on the subject of Section 27 on 29th April, 1952. He did not do so. The theory that such a power resides in this section is quite a recent discovery for the Diocese of London.

I know that the Church Commissioners have obtained learned counsel's opinion which fully supports their action and I have no doubt that the House will be told as much. But I would say to the hon. and gallant Baronet that, as he knows, lawyers do sometimes differ. I myself have taken the precaution in the last few days of taking another counsel's opinion—the opinion of a learned Queen's counsel of great experience in matters such as this—and his opinion differs diametrically from that of the counsel whose opinion the Church Commissioners took. So there is at least some legal dubiety about this matter. It cannot be said to have been proved, hard and fast, that the Church Commissioners are quite in the clear about it.

In any case, the methods used to push this scheme through seem to me to have been less than worthy of the high ideals which no doubt animate its promoters. Since St. Michael Pasternoster Royal has not yet been restored, no formal appointment of a Guild church vicar has yet been made. The clergyman in charge is Canon John Satterthwaite, who is well known to many hon. Members as an adviser on foreign relations to the Archbishop of Canterbury. It is an extraordinary and regrettable fact that he received no notice that this scheme was being hatched. Even as a courtesy one would have supposed that he would have been officially informed.

In fact, he learned of it, to his astonishment, by chance, two months after the closing date for the lodging of objections to the scheme, when he happened to telephone Diocesan House to ask what progress was likely to be made on another matter, the restoration of the Church. This was on 29th October. He was told that the scheme had been issued in the summer and no objections had been received by the Church Commissioners before the closing date, 31st August.

What they had done was to send one copy of the scheme to the Secretary of the Guild Church Council at his private address during the holiday season. When he returned from holiday he found it awaiting him and assumed—perhaps he should not have done but he did, as, I think most of us would—that copies had been sent to the clergyman in charge of the Church and to the churchwardens. No such other copies were sent and Canon Satterthwaite himself, soon after, had to be abroad, in Germany and Rome, in fulfilment of his duties to the Archbishop.

Canon Satterthwaite, naturally, asked the Church Commissioners for an extension of time so that objections could be lodged. His request was refused. It would be perfectly easy, even at this late date, for the Commissioners to withdraw the scheme and reissue it, in fairness to the clerygman concerned and the Church Council. I hope that they will do so. If they do not, justice will certainly not be seen to have been done, and they will be seeming to take unfair advantage of what one must take to have been a series of accidents and misunderstandings.

One final point, to emphasise the unfortunate way in which the matter has been handled. Hon. Members will recall the sequence of events I have just described—what happened in the summer and the holiday season. I am rather shocked to learn that the Diocesan Reorganisation Committee was told at its meeting on 20th November that a copy of the scheme had been sent to the Secretary of the Guild Church Council and that Canon Satterthwaite had been so informed. To say that one has informed somebody of something when he has learnt it by chance, by telephoning one about something else, when it is two months too late for him to do anything about it, is not a downright lie, but it is a stretching of the truth as economical as anything imagined by Anthony Trollope.

I hope that the hon. and gallant Baronet the Member for Worcestershire, South, when he replies, will tell us that the Church Commissioners are ready to take the scheme back and insert a clause making it clear that the real purpose of the scheme is to deguild the Church of St. Michael Paternoster Royal and so to obtain possession of the stipend, and thus both inform Parliament adequately of their intentions and give those concerned an opportunity of lodging objections. This would be an act of grace, an act—if it is not unseemly to apply such a word to this great ecclesiastical bureaucracy—of charity.

If the hon. and gallant Member cannot give this assurance, we may be obliged to divide the House.