I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.
May I pay tribute to the Minister who has just spoken, the Under-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, my hon. Friend the Member for South Derbyshire (Mrs Wheeler)? Her speech was a masterpiece of clarity, conciseness and succinctness on a Friday morning on which there is important business to proceed with.
We had a very thorough and constructive Committee stage. I thank all the Members who took part in it, as well as the Minister, the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins). She is not in the Chamber today, but she has been part of the Bill process. I welcome the Minister for Immigration, my right hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes), who I hope will deftly manage the Bill without incident on its passage through these important stages. I am sure she will want to carry on the continuity of support that the Government have given, because there is very widespread support from both sides of the House for all four major parts of this Bill. Virtually all of them are now Government policy, so there is therefore no reason why they should not want it to proceed. I anticipate that today should be a breeze, and that we can get on to the Third Reading of my Bill and swiftly go on to the Organ Donation (Deemed Consent) Bill, which so many of us support. We offer our good wishes to the Bill’s sponsor, the hon. Member for Coventry North West (Mr Robinson), who cannot be in the Chamber today.
Since the Committee sitting on 18 July, there has been a crucial change regarding the extension of civil partnerships, which is why the new clause and the amendment are necessary. That change is of course the announcement by the Prime Minister through the medium of the media—namely, the Evening Standard, on 2 October —when the Government confirmed that, for the first
time ever, gay and straight people will have the same choices in life, which will be achieved by new laws to extend civil partnerships to opposite-sex couples. There are now some 3.3 million such couples cohabiting in the United Kingdom. That was welcome news, and I was expecting a call beforehand from the Government to discuss how we could collaborate on my Bill to bring about that Government policy in the speediest and most effective way.
The change was of course spurred on by the ruling of the Supreme Court on 27 June, in the case of Steinfeld and Keidan, which revealed that the Government were in breach of the European convention on human rights. That followed a nearly four-year battle by Rebecca and Charles, which was almost as long as my own campaign in Parliament on this subject. I have proposed amendments going back as far as the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill, I had a subsequent private Member’s Bill and of course there is the ballot Bill that we are debating today.