THE Church of England has made “slower progress than we had hoped” on the appointment of women bishops, the Bishop of St Albans, Dr Alan Smith, told the House of Lords on Tuesday, in a debate on a Bill to enable further “fast-tracking” of women to the Bishops’ Bench.
The Lords Spiritual (Women) Act 2015 (Extension) Bill will extend rules that ensure that vacant seats on the Bishops’ Bench are filled by women bishops if an eligible female diocesan bishop is available (News, 2 August). There are exceptions for the five sees — Canterbury, York, London, Durham, and Winchester — that carry an automatic entitlement to a seat in the Lords. In accordance with the Bishoprics Act of 1878, the remaining 21 seats would usually be filled on the basis of seniority — that is, by the length of tenure.
To date, six women bishops have been enabled to sit in the Lords since the Lords Spiritual (Women) Act 2015 came into force (News, 23 January 2015). The original legislation is due to expire in May 2025; the proposed extension is to May 2030.
Dr Alan Smith, the convener of the Lords Spiritual, described the Bill as a “reasonable extension to a successful piece of legislation”.
“I think it prudent to confess that we in the Church have made slower progress than we had hoped when it came to ensuring that our senior clergy are representative of the diverse congregations we serve,” he said. “This is true both of women and of ethnic and racial minorities.”
The pattern of appointments to the episcopate had “not consisted of as many female bishops as we had hoped, and we humbly ask this House to grant us a little longer to ensure that our excellent and qualified women bishops have enough time to overcome this barrier”.
He reassured the House that the “pipeline” was “going in the right direction”, and that the number of women archdeacons, cathedral deans, suffragan bishops, and incumbents in parishes was increasing (News, 19 July).
Since the passing of legislation enabling the appointment of women bishops in 2014, nine women have been appointed as diocesan bishops, and 20 men.
“It is such a shame that the Church of England has to revisit this issue, as it was hoped back in 2015 that ten years would be long enough to ensure that there were enough women diocesan bishops that the Lords Spiritual would have some semblance of a gender balance,” Baroness Brinton, of the Liberal Democrats, said.
She expressed concern about “whether extending the law will work or could in fact be a perverse incentive not to appoint women as diocesan bishops. Is this one of the reasons that only two of the last 11 appointments have been women?” Even with the Bill in place, “we could end up with only men,” she warned. “In the next five years, there are 14 retirements due, and the replacements — bar the Bishop of Peterborough, who will replace the Rt Revd Prelate the Bishop of Worcester — would be men.”
She was among peers who raised questions about whether the Lords Spiritual should retain their seats.
The crossbench peer, Lord Birt, expressed disappointment that the Government was not preparing a “comprehensive, holistic and long-overdue approach to the overall reform of this House”. The guaranteed representation of the Bishops was a “feudal legacy” and an “indefensible, undemocratic anomaly”. Faith leaders should be appointed “on individual merit, not as exercising a right existing in one form or another for half a millennium”.
Lord Scriven of the Liberal Democrats questioned whether the Church was “really committed to equality for women within its structures and . . . to dealing with the misogyny, and believes in the true equality of women within its structures, which is the basis the Bill is established on”. Provision for traditionalists was “not mutual flourishing, but a system of institutionalised misogyny”, he said. Bishops did not have any “special insight”.
Dissent was provided by the Labour peer Lord Murphy of Torfaen, a Roman Catholic, who described the Bishops’ contributions as “first class”.
The Bishop of Derby, the Rt Revd Libby Lane, said that there were “mixed views” on the original Bill, both on the Bishops’ Bench and in the College of Bishops. The number of women bishops remained “too low”. But the House of Lords had “benefited greatly from the wisdom and service of those women who have been Lords spiritual under the term of the Act”.
The Bill now passes to the Committee Stage in the House of Lords. The Lord Privy Seal, Baroness Smith of Basildon, said that Bishop Lane “should take back to her colleagues how much support she has from Benches across the House who want to see more women bishops”.