CONFIRMATION OF EXECUTORS WAR SERVICE) (SCOTLAND) BILL, [H.L.] (Hansard, 13 June 1940)

LORD ALNESS

My Lords, this small Bill is a war-time measure, which is designed to facilitate the administration 572 of estates belonging to men on war service who have been reported as missing and are officially presumed to be dead. The position in Scotland is that, when confirmation is applied for (confirmation being making up a title, which entitles the executor to distribute the estate) it must be accompanied by proof not only of the death of the person whose estate is in question, but also of the date of his death. It will at once be obvious to your Lordships that, when you are dealing with the class of persons to whom I have referred—namely, men on war service who are presumed for official purposes to be dead—it is impossible to comply with that requirement, and that therefore the estates concerned cannot be distributed and are held up.

In these circumstances it has been thought proper to propose—and this is the pivotal proposal in the Bill—that, when an application is made for confirmation of the estate of a person on war service, and it is accompanied by a certificate from the competent authority—military, naval or air as the case may be—to the effect that a report of the death of the person in question has been accepted for official purposes, or that he is reported as missing and must be deemed for official purposes to be dead, then it shall be sufficient, in order to entitle confirmation to go out, that the deponent, as he is called in our Scots law, should swear or affirm that to the best of his knowledge and belief the person in question is dead. If there is an application for confirmation, accompanied by a certificate such as I have described, and an oath to the effect that the deponent believes that the person in question is dead, then it becomes competent under this Bill to obtain confirmation.

That proposal is subject to certain safeguards. I will only refer to two, which are set forth in the Bill. The first is that there must be a measure of delay, which your Lordships will agree is reasonable—namely, twelve months from the date which appears in the certificate in question—before it becomes competent to present the application for distribution of the estate. The second safeguard is that, if the Judge to whom application is made sees proper, he may order intimation of the application to the "competent authority" on the one hand or in the Press on 573 the other hand. I may further say that the Bill in its present form has the approval of the three Service Departments, and also of the legal profession in Scotland. I will only add that my noble friend Lord Addison may chance to remember that in another place in 1917, as Secretary for Scotland, I had the privilege of moving the Second Reading of a Bill which, though not textually indentical with the present measure, was substantially the same. That Bill reached the Statute Book, but it was so worded that, at the termination of the last war, it was spent, and in point of fact it was repealed by he Statute Law Amendment Act of 1927. This Bill is intended to replace that Act of Parliament, which, according to my information, functioned satisfactorily. I beg to move that the Bill be read a second time.