PRIVATE BILLS—PRINTING OF PETITIONS.—RESOLUTIONS. (Hansard, 16 February 1865)

§ MR. TORRENS
, in moving a Resolution that the Petitions on every Private Bill shall be printed and copies thereof, and of the Bill itself, delivered to the Members of the Committee, said, that great inconvenience arose from the fact that Committees were furnished with only one copy of a petition, and that written on a large unwieldly piece of parchment, in a text which rendered it very difficult to read it. He need hardly remind the House that, under the present system, a Member of a Private Bill Committee had no opportunity of seeing the Bill he had to consider until going into the Committee-room, when the business is immediately commenced; and it surely will be admitted, that it will be a beneficial change to afford an opportunity, however short, to Members to read the Bill to be considered, and petitions which relate to it, before the actual hearing of parties is begun. When he brought the subject forward a few evenings 283 ago he stated that he had ascertained, in answer to inquiries which he had made of various printing firms of great respectability, that fifty copies of a petition, consisting of four foolscap printed pages of matter, the paper being of the same size as that which was used for the Votes of the House, might be obtained for a sum considerably less than 28s.—a sum sufficiently moderate, he thought, to satisfy the right hon. Gentleman the President of the Board of Trade. He found, on further inquiry, the correctness of that information completely confirmed. In the Court of Chancery briefs and affidavits were now printed, to the great convenience of the public, and he believed that in another place Lord Redesdale was about that very evening to move that the petitions be printed for the more convenient reference of Members of Committees on Private Bills. The right hon. and gallant General the Member for Huntingdon (General Peel), seemed to consider it a hardship that petitioners should be put to the expense of printing the petitions which they were obliged to submit to Parliament in consequence of the action of the promoters of Bills; but, in the case of the promoters, the expense would fall more heavily on a single party than if divided among a number of petitioners. Besides, in the event of his (Mr. Torrens) proposing to throw all the expense on promoters, he greatly feared the opposition to his Motion would be so great that the contemplated improvement in the manner of conducting Private Bill business would not be concurred in by the House, and what he now proposed might be lost altogether. Moreover, the hon. Member for Haverfordwest was about to introduce a measure on the subject of costs in such Bills; and, if passed, as he hoped it would be, a remedy would be found for any hardship inflicted by promoters vexatiously dragging parties before Private Bill Committees. He hoped that the House would, for the reasons which he had given, assent to his Motion.

GENERAL PEEL
said, he would take it for granted that the object which the hon. 284 Gentleman had in view was to promote the convenience of Committees by shortening their labour; but he very much doubted whether his Resolution was calculated to have that effect. If petitions were printed and placed in the hands of the Members of a Committee a few days before they assembled, he was afraid none but the youngest Members would take the trouble of reading them; for it would be found that when the Committee met the greater portion of the petitions would be abandoned altogether, and that the substance of those not withdrawn would be repeated over and over again ad nauseam by the counsel engaged in the case. The effect of the Resolution, too, he thought, would be to increase the number of petitions with which there was no intention to proceed. The object of these petitions would be to influence the minds of the Committee by statements not afterwards proved by evidence; and it would become the duty of the Chairman, at the commencement of the investigation, to tell the Committee to dismiss from their minds everything they might have heard or read and to confine themselves to the evidence. The House, in his opinion, was hardly strict enough in dealing with Motions submitting new Standing Orders for its acceptance. It would be well that proposals of that kind should in the first instance be laid before the Standing Orders Committee, who would report to the House as to the expediency of adopting them. How did matters stand at present in such instances as that to which the Resolution under discussion related? A great company desired to take the property of a private individual, and in order to carry out that object they came to Parliament; and a Committee was appointed, which the petitioners against the measure did not at all want. If, therefore, the House was of opinion that petitions should be printed for the convenience of such Committees, the expense ought, he thought, to be borne by the promoters of Bills. In railway legislation Parliament had gone from one extreme to the other. When railroads were first introduced the rights of the owners of property were much more considered than seemed to be the case at the present day. He was old enough to recollect when, at the outset, a Bill was almost certain to be lost unless the promoters had obtained the sanction of the landed proprietors. He recollected that the London and Birmingham Railway Bill was thrown out 285 in consequence of the opposition of the proprietors of the land. Now, however, a race of speculators had arisen who were called "promoters" of schemes, who exercised their ingenuity in devising the wildest and most unnecessary undertakings, and who took little or no account of the rights of individuals, content with receiving from the shareholders a gratuity of £3,000 or £4,000, as it might be, for their exertions. He therefore proposed, in line three, to strike out the word "Petitioners," and to substitute the words, "Promoters of the Bill."

§ MR. TORRENS
said, he had not the least objection to accept the Amendment, and would have proposed it himself, had he the same weight in the House as the hon. and gallant Officer.

§ MR. MILNER GIBSON
said, he entertained no great objection to the proposal in its original shape, but felt indisposed to support the Amendment. It was true that the promoters of a Bill in one sense always entailed expense on those who had to petition against it; but there was such a tiling as vexatious opposition, and in those cases it would be highly unfair to throw on the promoters the costs of both sides. He therefore thought that if the petitions were referred to a Committee the expense should be borne by the respective petitioners. It would be also inexpedient to compel parties to print and deliver petitions two days prior to the meeting of the Committee; because it often happened that within that interval intended oppositions were compromised or withdrawn, and it became necessary to print the petitions.

§ MR. TORRENS
said, that he had already altered the wording of the Resolution from "two days previously" to the "morning of the day" on which the Committee sat.

§ MR. MILNER GIBSON
said, he had no objection to the proposal in that shape.

§ MR. CRAUFURD
thought a Motion for altering the Standing Orders ought not to be dealt with by the House till it had been referred to the Standing Orders Committee, and those hon. Members who had charge of the Private business 286 of the House. He had heard nothing to satisfy him that the proposed change would be attended with benefit; it would, in fact, tend to increase expense by adding the cost of printing to that of engrossing the petitions. The best way would be to allow these to be presented in type. He should like to hear the opinion of the Chairman of the Standing Orders Committee.

§ COLONEL WILSON PATTEN
said, the Standing Orders Committee had not been consulted on the matter, but he thought the proposal not an unreasonable one, although in practice the cases were generally so well stated to the Committees by counsel that there was rarely any need to refer to the petitions themselves. The suggestion which had just been made, that petitions in the first instance, instead of being engrossed should be printed, was a very good one, and might hereafter be acted upon, though the point, he admitted, had never struck him before. He saw no reason why the petitions should not be printed and lodged in the Private Bills Office in the same way as the Bills were.