Succession to the Crown Bill

The hon. Gentleman is right that a child who decided to be confirmed as a Catholic would be excluded, but it is perfectly possible, not least because our Churches are coming closer together, for somebody to be confirmed a Catholic at the age of 12 or 13 but to decide on finding at the age of 23 that the throne was about to be offered to him that he might prefer to be an Anglican. We need to be clear about when people are excluded, so that if an heir to the throne decided that the religious bar meant that becoming King of England was worth changing religion for, the result would be clear and decisive. We do not want the monarchy to pass from one generation to the next only for us to have to go to court to work out who our sovereign will be based on the wording of a 1701 Act of Parliament.