§ Order for Third Reading read.
§ THE CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUERmoved the third reading of this Bill.
§ MR. HUBBARDsaid, this measure consisted of two distinct parts. To the first part, which provided for the transfer of funds from one set of savings banks to another, he saw no objection; but the second was hardly consonant with the title of the Bill, and called for some remark. It related to the conversion of a portion of the permanent debt of the country into terminable annuities. This opened up an entirely new question. He had no objection to the selection of the 2½ per cent stock with terminable annuities as the security, in which these funds should be invested; but that was not the present proposition. The present proposition, while it had the ultimate effect of extinguishing a part of the national debt, for a time increased the annual sum chargeable on the Consolidated Fund, and which bad to be provided by the taxation of the public. Thus the latter clauses of this measure had an immediate and important bearing on the amount of the burdens to be imposed on the people. It was, of course, a most proper thing to pay off the public debt; but he objected to the House being asked, hoodwinked, to do an act practically adding to the taxation of the country. Clauses, dealing with the 1589 conversion of perpetual into terminable annuities, ought to form the subject of a specific measure, instead of being made supplementary to provisions touching Post Office savings banks, with which they had no necessary connection.
§ THE CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUERsaid, his hon. Friend, as he understood him, objected to the structure of this measure because it combined certain clauses relating to the regulation of Post Office savings banks, with certain other clauses referring to the investment of the monies of depositors. Now, in regard to what were called the old savings banks, it had been customary to separate legislation on the subject of finance from legislation on the subject of management; but the necessity for that separation did not lie in any natural incongruity between those two subjects, but arose because there were other parties independent of the Government, who had a great interest in the management of the savings banks, but who, on the other band, bad nothing to do with matters of public finance. But in the case of the Post Office savings banks, where, when once the security of the depositors was provided for, the whole affair was the affair of the public, there was no reason for separating that which related to management from that which related to finance. No doubt, when they proceeded to convert 3 or 3½ per cent stocks into terminable annuities, they increased the annual charge on the public for a time, in order by-and-by to get rid of it altogether; and his hon. Friend's objection was, that that being a distinct object in itself, ought to have been proposed with more Parliamentary form and pomp. That was not necessary, because this measure did not propose the introduction of a new principle, but only the extension of an old one. In the Old Jewry, at the office of the Commissioners for the reduction of the National Debt, the Government had what might be called a shop where terminable annuities were daily bought and sold.
§ Bill read 3° and passed.