HC Deb 30 June 1896 vol 42 cc437-46
THE PRESIDENT OF THE LOCAL GOVERNMENT BOARD (Mr. HENRY CHAPLIN,) Lincolnshire, Sleaford

moved the Second Reading of this Bill. He remarked that the object of the Measure was to facilitate the use and construction of what were called in the Bill light locomotives, which were designed to afford the public a convenient and cheap mode of transport. This mode of transport was largely made use of in America and in various countries on the Continent of Europe, especially in France, but, owing to the existing law, it was not available to the people of this country. There was no doubt that in this matter England was greatly behind other countries, and it was a singular commentary upon our backwardness in this respect that, as he was informed, the chief patents for the manufacture of vehicles of this description were entirely in the hands of foreigners. The object of the Bill was to remove what he could not help regarding as a great reproach against themselves, and to afford the people of this country the opportunity of enjoying the same facilities in this respect as were at present enjoyed by their Continental neighbours. The Measure, he ventured to think, could not be regarded as contentious, and in this respect it differed very remarkably from the Bill with which he had been so recently connected. [Laughter and cheers.] A Bill for this purpose was introduced into the last Parliament in a somewhat different form, and this fact encouraged him to hope that the present Measure might pass speedily into law. The Bill was designed to facilitate the use of light locomotives in this country, and it proposed to relieve them of all the disabilities by exempting them from the provisions of all the existing laws to which they were subject at the present moment. A light locomotive, as described in the Bill, was a vehicle which was propelled by mechanical power, which was to be under four tons in weight unladen, which was to be so constructed that no smoke or visible vapour was to be emitted from it, which was not to draw more than one vehicle and their united weights were to be under four tons unladen. Some of the restrictions which prohibited their use at present were as follow: It, was required under the existing law that three persons should always be in attendance to drive and to conduct a locomotive; one of those persons was always to precede it on foot by at least 20 yards, waving a red flag in his hand. The speed was under no circumstances to be more than four miles an hour, and in towns it was never to exceed two miles; and the wheels were in no case to be less than three inches in width. This was not all. These locomotives were at present subject to the bye-laws which were made by County Councils and the Councils of county boroughs, but with regard to their use upon highways, the hours during the day in which they might be on the highways, which were not to be more than eight during the whole 24, and also with regard to their use of, and passage over bridges. In addition to this they had to pay a licence of £10. They proposed to relieve them of all these disabilities, by exempting them from the provisions of the existing laws on the subject. It would be provided that in the future these locomotives should be under Sub-section B of the present Bill, which provided that a light locomotive shall be deemed to be a carriage within the meaning of any Act of Parliament, whether public, general, or local, and of any rule or regulation or bye-law made under any Act of Parliament; and if used as a carriage of any particular class shall be deemed to be a carriage of that class, and the law relating to carriages of that class shall apply accordingly. They were also to be subject to Section 26 of the Highways and Locomotives Amendment Act, 1878, as extended by Section 41 of the Local Government Act, 1888. In addition, he might explain that Section 3 of this Bill provided that the Local Government Board should be empowered to make regulations with respect to the use of these light locomotive? on highways, and that any breach of these regulations should be subject to a fine. These regulations would enable the Local Government Board to deal with the question of the speed at which they were to be driven, either in towns or in the country; the question of the carrying of lights and other matters connected with their use. There was also the question of taxation, which would have to be considered, and upon which, as upon all the other questions to which he had alluded, he need not say that, as they were dealing with an entirely new question, the Government were perfectly open and anxious to consider any suggestions which might be made from any quarter of the House, by those conversant with the subject, and which might tend to improve the character of the Measure. He believed himself that this was calculated to be an eminently useful Measure—one which, if carried into law, would give great satisfaction in many quarters, and, among others, many whom he happened to know were waiting the progress of this question with great interest and anxiety. ["Hear, hear!"] If the Bill became law during the present Session, he believed it would undoubtedly develop a very great, and, having regard to their experience in connection with bicycles, quite possibly an enormous trade, and give a vast amount of employment to the people of this country. ["Hear, hear!"] He thought it was even possible that these motor cars might become a rival to light railways—[laughter]—and that they were not at all unlikely to tend to decrease railway fares. He was convinced that they would be a great advantage and boon to the agricultural interest, in that they would enable the farmers to transport their produce wherever they wished to send it at much less cost than they were able to do at present. ["Hear, hear!"] He could not help thinking the House would agree with him that this Measure was one which would be generally advantageous to the public at large, and he would conclude by saying if it were read a Second time that night, in order that it might be duly considered in all its details and thoroughly thrashed out by gentlemen competent to deal with the subject, he should move to refer it to the Standing Committee on Law. Under these circumstances he sincerely hoped the House would allow the Bill to be read a Second time. ["Hear, hear!"]

DR. TANNER () Cork Co., Mid

ridiculed the idea that the Bill would do anything to benefit the poor agriculturists, seeing that the cost of one of these machines was £250 and it was bound to break down in a fortnight. He regretted that the right hon. Gentlemen, whom he had looked upon all his life as his idol, and as the soul of English sport, should have fallen to such a degree as to become a tout for these non-sporting machines. What was the opinion of foreign authorities as to auto-cars? In all the places where they had been introduced they were absolutely found to have become a nuisance. In Paris they were trying to put a stop to their use in the streets, in Vienna they were not at all popular, and as far as he could understand they had even tried to exclude them from Jerusalem, although everybody knew it was a good old Semitic craze. They were called light locomotives, he supposed, because they weighed four tons, and he was told that their weight was sufficient to do £500 damage to a fairly good road in a very brief space of time if the weather happened to be moist. That was, the damage done would be twice as much as the cost of the machine. He would ask the right hon. Gentleman had he paid any attention to these points or considered the opinion of foreign countries in which the machines had been introduced? Driving down to the House that morning he could not help overhearing a conversation that took place, when he alighted downstairs in the yard, between the cabby who drove him down and one of the constables who was on duty. The cabby turned round to the constable and said "Don't let him vote for those blessed autos." He was fulfilling his duty in taking the action he was doing. These cabmen were very good and decent men like plenty of other Englishmen, and some regard should be shown to their opinions and interests. By this Bill they were invited to pass from the known to the unknown, from the ordinary London gondola to the right hon. Gentleman's auto. For his own part he sincerely hoped the right hon. Gentleman was not building up for himself an auto-da-fé. In his time and generation he had for long followed one whom he had always regarded as very wise, and notably so on the subject of horses, but he regretted to find that his idol was shattered and that the right hon. Gentleman was introducing a Bill for the popularising of machines which were antagonistic to horseflesh and therefore to genuine sport.

*MR. HUMPHREYS OWEN () Montgomery

said he could not help thinking the President of the Local Government Board had overstepped the limits of prudence in this Bill. He proposed to give power to the Local Government Board to regulate the use of engines of this kind by means of regulations to be framed by them. These would not quite meet the difficulties of the case. It was perfectly certain that in many districts engines of this character would be largely used. They would be used by a large section of the ratepayers, and the necessary payment for keeping up the roads would be no serious burden upon the public. But there were many counties in which these conditions did not obtain. In many cases the farms were small, the roads narrow, and the traffic light. In such counties one or two traction engines used under unfavourable circumstances of weight might completely cut up a road and throw on the ratepayers an extremely heavy burden which would have to be borne by agriculture for the benefit of other industries. Another point on which the Bill was faulty was that it entirely abolished the power of imposing a licence duty. At present if the owner of a traction engine used the roads and cut them up severely, and imposed on the ratepayers the necessity of spending larger sums on the roads than would be necessary for the ordinary traffic, there was some chance of the highway authority recouping itself by a licence duty. But under this Bill there would be no such chance. On that point they ought to have some assurance that it would be considered in Committee. Then there was no limit to the weight that loaded traction engines might carry. The engine and car themselves were not to exceed four tons. If traction engines were to be any use, the car would carry eight tons, and they would have, allowing four tons for the engine and car, a load of 12 tons going over our country roads. Hon. Members could imagine what would be the condition of a country road after a few loads of 12 tons had been taken over it and without any limitation as to speed. In that respect there was no protection given to the general public. They ought to have a maximum limit of speed and a second person in charge of the engine, at all events in cases of large and heavy locomotives. For all these reasons, although he would not oppose the Second Reading, he thought the Bill would require careful consideration by a Standing Committee and he hoped it would be considered in the light of the remarks he had made.

MR. HENRY HOBHOUSE () Somerset, E.

said this was a Bill of great practical importance, and the Government were to be congratulated on having brought it forward even at a late period of the Session with the intention of passing it into law. While they all wished to remove restrictions in the law which at the present time unduly fettered enterprise and invention in this country, they must be careful in removing those restrictions that they did not at the same time remove proper safeguards for the safety of the public and the ratepayers who maintained the roads. There were several points in the Bill which would require careful attention. The question of limiting the weight to be carried was most important. The weight mentioned in the Bill as originally introduced both by the late and the present Government was two tons. That weight the Executive of the County Councils Association saw no objection to, but the weight had been doubled in another place and that put the Bill in a different light, because it would bring under the category of light locomotives what were undoubtedly heavy vehicles, which, allowing for the motor power, would be able to carry four or five tons. The Select Committee on Traction Engines, which was about to conclude its inquiries, had taken sufficient evidence to convince its members that heavy locomotives, which as a rule weighed about 10 tons, might often, at a slow rate of speed, do a great deal of damage to country roads and bridges. There was, therefore, every reason to fear that the Bill, if it passed as it now stood, might throw very serious burdens on the ratepayers, especially in the country districts. He thought it would be wiser to restore the Measure to its original shape and let experiments be carried out on a small scale at first. With regard to the construction of the wheels, the Bill gave the local authority of every county power to pass bye-laws with regard to the width of wheels. That, he submitted, would be an extremely inconvenient arrangement, and it would be well to consider in Committee whether there should not be some general statutory enactment on this subject. Such a matter as the question of speed would also have been better dealt with in the statute itself, rather than by regulations of the Local Government Board. He hoped the Bill would pass this Session in such a form that it would cause no alarm to the public or injury to the ratepayers.

MR. J. DALY () Monaghan, S.

said he objected to the Bill because it left the regulations with regard to locomotives in the hands of that hide-bound body, the Local Government Board. It was admitted that those locomotives would do great injury to the road, and in Ireland the damage would have to be repaired at the expense of the cesspayers, who had no voice whatever in the expenditure of the money. If those auto-cars were introduced and became popular, he feared that the result would be to do away with one of the industries of Ireland, that of horse breeding.

MR. C. B. RENSHAW () Renfrew, W.

said that, as chairman of the Scottish County Councils Association, he must say that some of the provisions of the Bill were regarded with some apprehension. The weight of the unladen car had been increased from two to four tons and that would be serious for the roads. If the central authorities had the power of fixing the regulations great consideration ought to be paid to the obligation of the local authorities in respect of maintaining the roads. He feared that the Bill as it stood made it impossible for the local authority to exact a licence fee from these auto-cars.

MR. H. C. F. LUTTRELL () Devon, Tavistock

supported the Measure, which he thought would be of great advantage in the long run. But there were objections, one of which was that powers were conferred on too many central authorities. It would be much better to concentrate those powers on one or two Departments instead of three or four. The width of the wheels was almost as important a consideration as the speed of the cars, from the point of view of the maintenance of the roads, and with that point the Bill failed to deal. Any powers given in respect of these auto-cars ought to be elastic, because the Measure was tentative.

MR. R. B. MARTIN () Worcestershire, Mid

thought the Bill would be of the greatest use in towns. In London especially a reform was needed which would secure an economic and safe mode of locomotion through the streets. Another important consideration was that those auto-cars would probably give as great an impetus to English manufacturers as bicycles had done. The only serious agricultural objection to the Bill was that the auto-cars might interfere with the breeding of horses. But he was told that the introduction of automatic traction would improve the breed of horses. As regarded the difficulty that the bridges in country districts would not stand the weight of these locomotives, the bridges must be made to carry the traffic and not the traffic be accommodated to the bridges. It was nonsense to say that farmers and country people should be handicapped in getting their produce to market by the most economical methods because County Councils did not build bridges to support the traffic.

MR. MUNDELLA

said that unless Parliament was able to maintain the prohibition in the use and manufacture of these vehicles in England, they must pass a Bill of this kind. [Ministerial cheers.] He presided over the Petroleum Committee, and it was quite clear that the regulations which existed in the sale and use of petroleum spirit in this country were such that, even without the use of petroleum as a motive power, it was of the utmost importance they should at once pass a Bill giving some power of regulation. We had handicapped ourselves by legislation too much already, and that was the reason we were so much behind in regard to electricity and the telephone. He had seen these auto-cars working with the greatest facility and freedom from accident in the South and West of Prance. He believed there was in the future a vast industry in auto-motor cars, and the least we ought to do was to give it a fair chance. If it was to have a fair chance the regulation of it must not be in different departments; there must be one uniform system of regulation. [Ministerial cheers.] And he hoped Members would not attempt to make it statutory what the width of the wheels or the pace should be; all this should be made elastic so that the regulations might be changed or adapted according to the development of the invention.

THE FIRST LORD OF THE TREASURY

hoped that the House would now agree to the Second Reading. Another Motion must be made in order that the Bill might be sent to a Grand Committee. There were the stages of other Measures which might be taken without discussion, and then, he thought, in view of their labours last night they might adjourn.

DR. TANNER

said he would not offer any opposition if the right hon. Gentleman would undertake to take Ireland into consideration in the matter of auto-cars.

Read a Second time, and committed to the Standing Committee on Law, etc.