My Lords, I am afraid that I have not been able to play a part in the earlier consideration of this Bill. However, I looked at proposed new subsection (2) of my noble friend Lord True’s amendment, which says:
“A person is disqualified from succeeding to the Crown as an heir to the body of a Royal Marriage if they are not the offspring of both parties to that Marriage”.
That takes me back 20 years when, in another place down the Corridor, I had cause to study the embryology Bill, which was going through the Commons at that time. A constituency case came to me of a couple who had found that they could not have a child; the lady had no uterus, but she ovulated. They therefore found a surrogate mother and had the egg from the wife, which was fertilised by the husband, implanted in the surrogate mother. In this case, the surrogate mother gave birth to twins. My constituents brought the twins back to have them registered, and the registrar of births, deaths and marriages said, “Sorry, although you may be the genetic parents of these children, you are going to have to adopt them”. They said, “Don’t be so stupid—we are the genetic parents. Why should we have to adopt our own children?”. This was an anomaly that I took up and caused that Bill to be changed with the help of my right honourable friend Kenneth Clarke, who was the Home Secretary at the time. The change meant that in a case such as that, if an application were made to the High Court, a judge could deem that parents of children who were the genetic offspring of those parents were full parents by an order of the judge in the High Court. That, as far as I understand it, is still the law.
My question to the Minister, thinking of my noble friend’s amendment, is: what would happen in a case like that, where the offspring of both parents are created in circumstances such as the ones I just described? Would it be necessary for the royal parents to apply to the High Court? Surrogacy is becoming much more common and it is not impossible that this could happen in the future. In this sort of circumstance, when the child of a royal marriage was created in this way, would it be necessary to apply to the High Court for that child to be deemed, in the words of the amendment, the “offspring of both parties”? It is rather important that this should be clarified now because it could give rise to considerable difficulties in the future.