HC Deb 16 March 1870 vol 200 cc1-9

Order for Second Reading read.

MR. P. WYKEHAM - MARTIN

, in moving that the Bill be now read the second time, said, he had been informed that the Home Secretary, in common with many hon. Members, considered that the 2nd clause, containing the words "any agreement or covenant to the contrary notwithstanding," was an interference with the rights of property, and that it went further than the Government considered necessary to secure the object in view. The right hon. Gentleman had informed him that he was willing to let the Bill be read a second time, on condition that he was allowed to frame a substituted clause that would, while avoiding the objectionable interference with the rights of property, put the tenant in a more satisfactory position with regard to game than he was at present. If the House would permit the Bill to be read a second time, he would undertake that no hon. Member should be regarded as having admitted anything further than that there was an evil in existence with respect to the Game Laws which required a remedy—the nature of that remedy being left for future determination; and he further pledged himself that the Committee should not be taken before the 29th of June, so as to allow ample time for consideration. Shooting being the great amusement of his life, he was not likely to draw up a Bill that would seriously interfere with that recreation; but, having watched the operation of the Game Laws for a considerable time, he had come to the conclusion that some alteration in them was desirable. He had based his Bill upon the declaration of the Committee which sat in 1845 to investigate the operation of the Game Laws, that the species of damage sustained by tenants under those laws was attributable to hares and rabbits, and not to feathered game. The most difficult part of the question was, how to deal with rabbits? The proposition of several of the Agricultural Chambers was to make rabbits the absolute property of the tenant; but he was certain if that was done they would be more numerous than ever—for, wherever the the right to preserve rabbits had been surrendered, he had always found the tenant took care to keep a good supply for his own diversion; and one, when he mentioned to him that the rabbits appeared to be on the increase, replied that he had put a few down for his own sport. It had also been proposed to abolish the Game Laws altogether. But no benefit would result from such a course. Feathered game was the best friend to the farmer; and the object would not be attained, as in the attempt to exterminate hares and rabbits by ferrets and nets damage would be done to the land which would come under the law of trespass. A third proposal was to make hares and rabbits vermin. They were not so; but, on the contrary, they were wholesome articles of food, consumed chiefly by the poorer classes. The consumption of rabbits in London alone was 1,500,000; and he had been informed that more nourishment was to be got out of a rabbit which cost 14d. than out of a piece of meat of the same value. Rabbits mostly lived on land not suitable for the production of beef and mutton; and an erroneous statement had been put forward that six rabbits consumed in a year as much food as a sheep. It appeared that six Ostend rabbits as big as hares were stuffed with as much food as they could eat; and a calculation was made from it, that they consumed in a year as much as a sheep. But he thought that one sheep had little superiority over six rabbits of that size. On many farms of light sandy soil it would pay better to breed rabbits than to produce corn. He knew of a farm where, with high farming, the owner, who farmed the estate, could only produce one crop of wheat in ten years; but if he were to turn his attention to rabbit cultivation, he would realize ten times more by them than he did by his corn. He admitted that on cultivated lands it was hardly possible to overrate the damage rabbits and hares inflicted on the crops, especially the corn crops; and the farmer suffered in another way, as from the sample being uneven he had to sell the produce in the market as damaged wheat. The most unfortunate effect, however, of the present laws in respect to game was the constant ill-feeling between the landlord and tenant to which they gave rise. A great deal was to be said on the landlord's side; and the reduction of rent, in many cases where game was preserved, was enormous—he knew of an instance where, besides compensation, the landlord submitted to a reduction of £1 an acre in the rent for preserving game. He was told that if this Bill passed into a law there would be an end of all sport. But Lord Leigh had given up to his tenants the rabbits and hares, and the consequence was that feathered game was as plentiful as ever; and a Norfolk friend of his said he did not believe there were so many partridges in all England—out of Norfolk—as were to be found on another estate which was managed on the same rule. The present Bill was a moderate proposal; and, if not accepted, landlords might go further and fare a great deal worse. If those who were interested in the land were to act generously and fairly by the tenants he was certain they need not fear that legitimate sport would be deteriorated. It would be far better to settle this question now than to be driven to it hereafter, in a time of popular excitement and in a spirit of exasperation between landlords and tenants. The hon. Member then moved that the Bill be now read a second time.

SIR DAVID SALOMONS

seconded the Motion. He was no sportsman himself; but he had some experience of the working of the Game Laws as a country justice attending petty sessions, and it grieved him, as a magistrate, to have to witness their injurious effect on the labouring classes, and have to decide cases arising from trespass to catch a rabbit. The letting the shooting to strangers acted as a great temptation to persons to enter on lands and kill rabbits, knowing the occupiers had no interest in preserving them. There was nothing that tended so much to demoralize the rural labouring population as the maintenance of the Game Laws, which now included rabbits by a recent statute. You had difficulty in making a man believe that in trying to catch a rabbit he was committing a crime by which he was either sent to the treadwheel, and his character ruined for life, or else had to pay fines and costs he and his family together found it no easy thing to collect.

Motion made, and Question proposed, "That the Bill be now read a second time."—(Mr. P. Wykeham-Martin.)

MR. KNIGHT

said, the hon. Member who had brought forward this Bill had failed to provide against the discontent caused by the modern system of letting the shooting of game to strangers. When the game belonged to the landlord, the tenant got a quid pro quo for the damage done; very few tenants existed who were not glad to see the landlord and his sons and friends shooting over their farms; and, for his part, he had never on these occasions gone over a farm with his tenant without the latter getting some benefit in the shape of an improvement. But the letting the shooting to strangers gave rise to very different feelings. For example, when a stranger, probably from some distant town, rented a shooting and sent a number of strange keepers on the farm—who were frequently regarded as a kind of foreign police—frequently he took a business view of the transaction, and attempted to recoup himself, and, if he could, to make a profit by sending the game and rabbits to market. Such sportsmen had no sympathy with farmers, and this system created great irritation in the minds of tenants against the Game Laws. To stop this power of placing a second tenant over the head of the first, he felt inclined to move in Committee a clause to the effect that the game should belong either to the landlord or to the tenant. Permission might be given to the tenant, if he chose, to let the game to another person; but he objected to the landlord bringing in a second tenant. The observations he was making did not, of course, apply to the heathy tracts in the North of England and in Scotland, but only to cultivated lands. While, then, he sincerely hoped that the landed proprietors of England might long continue to enjoy legitimate sport on their lands, he believed the Legislature should at once proceed to stop this system of double tenancy.

MR. PEASE

said, the principal fault in the Bill was that it directly interfered in the contract between landlord and tenant. He could hardly believe that the House was prepared to abolish the Game Laws, after it had passed a law for the preservation of sea birds. For his own part, he thought the Game Laws incidentally conferred great social advantages by inducing landlords to reside upon their estates during the autumn, whereas if they were abolished many of them would go abroad. Considerable alterations were necessary; but he could not approve of the abolition of the laws altogether. There was one matter which had been omitted from the Bill. It contained no reference as to hares, which he considered in many instances were more destructive than rabbits, as they were more capricious in their feeding, and travelled far from the coverts into the crops. A great alteration was required in the administration of those laws, especially in the abolition of the accumulative penalties, also of the power to fine an occupier as such over and above the penalties for poaching; especially as they were administered by magistrates who were of the class who were most interested in enforcing them, and sometimes it savoured more of persecution than prosecution.

COLONEL BRISE

said, he understood his hon. Friend the Member for Rochester was willing to withdraw all the clauses of the Bill, leaving only the Preamble. If he would do that he would surrender the principle of the Bill, which was to interfere in the right of free contract between landlord and tenant. He had voted for the Irish Land Bill on the assurance that the Irish tenant was not in a condition to make a free contract with his landlord, and that similar interference would never be attempted in England. But this Bill proposed precisely such an interference. He thought it an insult to the tenantry of England to tell them they were not capable of making contracts with their landlords. He thought the Bill, as it stood, was unnecessary, insufficient, and inoperative. It was unnecessary as regarded rabbits, as they were now the property of the tenants; it was insufficient to remedy the grievance arising from the over-preservation of game; and inoperative because landlords would be able to make, indirectly, an arrangement with their tenants which would completely nullify the Bill. The great mischief, he believed, arose from the preservation of the ground game in the coverts and preserves of the landlords, and not from the rabbits bred upon the farms of the occupiers. These animals came from the coverts and destroyed whole acres of growing crops; and for such damage the farmer had no remedy. The Agricultural Chambers had unanimously passed resolutions condemnatory of the existing Game Laws. The hon. Member was proceeding to discuss the general question of the Game Laws, recommending that they should be abolished, if a stringent law of trespass could be substituted, when—

MR. SPEAKER

said, the hon. and gallant Gentleman was not in order in discussing the general question. The fact that notice had been given of the general question of the Game Laws for a future day would be an additional reason. They had a Bill then before them for a particular object, and the discussion must be confined to that Bill.

COLONEL BRISE

said, that the great evil arose from over-preservation. Over-preservation, however, brought its own punishment on the landlord, not only by the injury of his woods and plantations and the diminution of his rents, but by the injury to his character and the ill-feeling it engendered with his neighbours. He desired to see some alterations in the Game Laws such as would preserve their rights to the landlords, and at the same time meet the just complaints of the tenants.

SIR GEORGE GREY

said, he would confine the few observations he desired to make to the Bill of his hon. Friend. There were two questions they had to consider—first, what was the evil his hon. Friend proposed to meet? and second, what was the remedy he pro- posed to meet that evil? His hon. Friend said that he had founded his Bill upon a fact in respect to which all hon. Members were agreed, that there was in many cases an over-preservation of ground game, especially of rabbits; and that not only great injury was done to growing crops by the quantity of ground game, with which the tenant could not interfere, but also that a very bad feeling was consequently produced between landlords and their tenants. Now, what was the remedy his hon. Friend proposed for these evils; and what was it they were asked to agree to? In the 2nd clause of the Bill he read that the tenant might, on land of his own occupation, kill rabbits; and in the 3rd clause that he could do so without a licence. To the first of these clauses was added the proviso that any existing agreement between tenant and landlord depriving the tenant of the right which the law gave him, should be absolutely void. His hon. Friend, however, consented to the omission of this proviso—which, in fact, constituted the Bill. Without that proviso the Bill would make no difference at all in the existing law; for, as was well known, a tenant could kill rabbits on his farm, provided there was no agreement between him and his landlord preventing him, and no licence was required to kill rabbits. The law was the same as to hares. There was no Preamble to the Bill; and if these clauses were withdrawn, in order to substitute others for them, they would find themselves in Committee on a Bill with nothing but its title, and would be asked to frame another Bill in Committee to which the House had never given a second reading. His hon. Friend had intimated that the Government proposed to make some alteration in the Bill; but if the Government were going to deal with the subject at all, they had better do so by a Bill framed and introduced by themselves.

MR. BRUCE

was bound to say that the argument just used by the right hon. Gentleman against the second reading of the Bill was irresistible. His objection to the Bill was that one part of it was unnecessary, and that the other, that which interfered with the power of landlord and tenant to contract with respect to rabbits, would work mischievously, for if it passed very few leases would be granted. His hon. Friend, no doubt, had expressed Ms willingness to withdraw the objectionable clauses; but it unfortunately happened that when this was done nothing would be left. He agreed with his hon. Friend that some part of our legislation affecting the position of the tenant ought not to remain on the statute book. He was quite willing to meet his hon. Friend in this matter, for there existed on both sides of the House a desire that the tenant should be placed in a better position than he occupied under the existing laws. It would be very inconvenient to enter upon discussion without having any distinct proposition before the House; but he would say that the Government had undertaken to deal with this question as between tenant and landlord in Scotland, and he saw no reason why the principle adopted in the proposed measure—which would shortly be introduced by his right hon. and learned Friend the Lord Advocate—should not be extended to England. Upon this understanding he hoped his hon. Friend would not insist upon his Motion for the second reading.

MR. LOCH

said, he felt very strongly in regard to the principle that the tenant and landlord should be placed on an equal footing as to killing hares and rabbits. He thought they should be invested by law with an equal power to do so, and he was strongly in favour of the clause which prevented tenants, if so invested with legal power, from divesting themselves of it by agreement with their landlords. He had introduced such a clause in his Bill of last year, and that contained in the Bill of the hon. Member for Rochester was a verbatim transcript of it. The hon. Member had, however, seemed to admit that this principle was likely in its application to interfere with the rights of property; but he believed himself that neither would it interfere with the rights of property nor would it interfere with the power of contracting as between individuals, in any sense or in any greater degree than was already recognized by the law in a great variety of cases.

MR. P. WYKEHAM-MARTIN

said, he would be pleased to leave the question in the hands of the Government.

Motion, by leave, withdrawn.

Bill withdrawn.