DUNOON BURGH BILL [LORDS].— (By Order.) (Hansard, 24 August 1909)

§ Mr. A. C. MORTON
I beg to move to leave out the word "now," and at the end of the Question to add the words "upon this day three months." I have been asked by some of the ratepayers of Dunoon to call the attention of the House to this Bill, and especially to the cost of its promotion. As far as I understand it has had a very queer origin. Nobody seems to know what this Bill means to do. It consists of some twenty or thirty clauses and it came first to the House of Lords. The House of Lords struck out some 18 clauses—in fact, they "gutted" the Bill. Notwithstanding the remarks of hon. Members opposite, I am inclined to think that the House of Lords were right. I have on more than one occasion been of the opinion that a House of Lords Committee can deal with these matters better than a Committee of the House of Commons. I do not want to dwell upon that point now, except to repeat that I think the House of Lords has saved the position by "gutting" this Bill. They have left very little in it. It would probably have been dear at any price, because it proposed to run steamboats and all sorts of things at the expense of the ratepayers. I have always objected to speculations with the ratepayers' money. There is nothing now left to object to in the Bill, because it has all been taken out. I have been asked to call attention to the costs in connection with this measure. Even members of the municipality of Dunoon cannot find out what the costs are going to be, and they cannot get an estimate of them. In some cases information on this point has been refused to members of the council. I have been told that this Bill will probably cost at least £2,000. The 2072 cost has been put as high as £4,000, but I will take the cost at £2,000. This Burgh of Dunoon has already got a debt of £120,000, which is more than one and a half times the rateable value of the Burgh. A rate of 1d. in the £ realises £300, and therefore this Bill means a rate of 7d. in the £. That is an enormous expense to go to for one Bill. On this basis I have calculated that at the same rate the London County Council would spend £1,000,000 a year and the City of London £150,000.
That shows what a hardship it is to impose upon the rates a charge of this kind for matters of speculation. I have not been able to get any information as to how those charges are made up, or why they should be so much, and I have brought the question forward in order to obtain some explanation. It is quite time this House seriously considered these enormous charges in connection with private Bills. There have always been complaints in regard to it, but it seems very difficult to deal with, and perhaps in this case it is worse than ever before. We are told there was a petition sent to the House of Lords Committee, and I am informed there were a good many things of which the petitioners were not informed. There was to be a loan of £80,000, and there was this £600 per annum or a twopenny rate for advertising. It is very unfortunate for Scotland that Bills for all sorts of things can be promoted without first getting, in a formal way, the consent of the burgh voters as in England and Wales. It is time that reform was made, so that the ratepayers may be consulted in Scotland, the same as in England, before money is spent in promoting Bills. I propose to move, formally, in the first place, that this Bill be read this day three months, in order to allow anybody who can to make an explanation, but I do not desire to kill the Bill entirely, and therefore it will not be necessary to take a Division on that point. I am, however, going to move an Amendment, limiting the expense in this Bill to £600. If I am in order in first moving that the consideration be taken this day three months, I will do so, and afterwards move the Amendment standing in my name.

Mr. DEPUTY-SPEAKER
The hon. Member may move his motion, and also the Amendment, but it is not necessary ho should move that the consideration be adjourned for three months.

§ Mr. H. A. WATT
I desire to second the Amendment, in order that we may have some defence of this extraordinary Bill. It arrived at the House of Lords a Bill of 14 pages and 28 clauses, with three pages of preamble. After one day's discussion, the House of Lords, on the morning of the second day, threw the Bill out ignominiously. The question then arose as to what should be done in the way of getting the expenses which had been incurred, and the rather ingenious plan was instituted of preparing the present scrap of a Bill, consisting of five clauses, two of which are mere interpreting clauses, two of which are the body of the Bill, and the fifth of which is the one to which my hon. Friend and I take exception, namely, that all the expenses connected with the Bill are to be put on the rates of the burgh. The scheme in the original Bill was that the borough, which consists of 7,000 inhabitants, should start a fleet of steamers. In order to do that, £80,000 was to be borrowed, and on repayment there was to be power to re-borrow. Considerable expense was run up, and the promoters were in difficulty as to where it should come from; the plan adopted was to put it in this Bill. The first two clauses are interpretation clauses; the third enables the town council of Dunoon to make charges for admission to the park at certain hours of the afternoon and evening, and as for 20 years they have been doing that nothing is thereby obtained. The next clause enables the town council to regulate the erection of stands on the sea shore, and for 20 years they have been doing that. Why, then, did they bring in this Bill? The reason appears in the fifth clause, and that is that the cost shall be thrown on the rates of this small but important burgh. There a rate of Id. in the £ produces £300. The cost of this Bill are estimated by optimists at £2,000, and by pessimists at £4,000, so that if the optimists are right the cost would be met by a rate of 7d. in the £, and if the pessimists are right it will be 1s. 2d. in the £. It is well the House should understand what this Bill means.

§ The CHAIRMAN of WAYS and MEANS (Mr. Emmott)
As the hour is late, I will briefly explain its meaning, and leave it to the judgment of the House to say what shall be done with it. This is a Motion to reject the Bill, and the purpose of the Motion, I take it to be, to put the costs not on the ratepayers, but on the members of 2074 the Town Council, who, in the first place, are responsible for the promotion of the measure, and who will thereby be mulct, because they have not been able to get the Bill through the House. Is that a fair, proper, and reasonable thing? That is what we have to consider. That depends, of course, on what the Bill was, the way in which it has been promoted, and also more or less upon the question of how far it really has been supported by the ratepayers of Dunoon. In Scotland, as the hon. Member who proposed this Amendment said, it is not necessary to obtain a plebiscite of the ratepayers in regard to the promotion of a Bill. There is no Borough Funds Act applying to Scotland, and therefore it is impossible for a Town Council to obtain the consent of the ratepayers, in the way in which the ratepayers' consent is obtained in England, when a Bill is opposed by any considerable number of them. Therefore the fact of this Bill not having obtained the consent of the ratepayers has really nothing to do with the question of whether this Motion should be carried or not. The hon. Member for Sutherlandshire (Mr. Morton), whose interest in all that lies between London and Sutherlandshire is well known, and is a great credit to him, has mentioned that he appeals on behalf of some of the ratepayers of Dunoon. In regard to a Bill like this—a Bill of 28 clauses reduced to 5—of course there must be some ratepayers of Dunoon who will be dissatisfied. I do not know what the body of ratepayers is whom the hon. Member represents. He did mention his regret that the hon. Member for Argyllshire (Mr. J. S. Ainsworth) is not here to-night. I am sorry the hon. Member is not here, but I received a letter from him to-day in which he expressed the opinion that this Bill ought to go through.
I had better give, and I will give in a very few words, the story of this Bill. The Bill was originally a Scotch Provisional Order, but it was the decision of the Lords' Chairman and myself that it should go as a Bill, because of the nature of its provisions, which contained clauses setting up a steamboat undertaking, and also setting up a cartage undertaking. Provisions of that kind are unusual, and we thought that this Order should go as a Bill and be examined by Committees of both Houses of Parliament here, rather than go before a body of Commissioners in Scotland. The Bill originated in the House of Lords, and, as the hon. Member for Sutherlandshire has stated, the clauses containing the provisions with 2075 regard to the steamboat and cartage undertaking were cut out of it, but it is not correct to suggest that the Bill which is now before the House is a different one, except, so far, that it is very much smaller, from that which came before Parliament at the beginning of the Session. It is merely a reduced Bill, and the two operative Clauses, three and four, have been left in representing clauses of the original Bill. The Bill was supported in the House of Lords by the Ward Committee and the Merchants' Association. The Lords Committee, as I have already stated, struck out all the clauses dealing with the steamboat and cartage undertakings, but I must point out that no costs were asked for either by the steamboat or other companies who opposed the Bill. No suggestion was ever made that the Bill was improperly promoted, and I say it would be altogether unfair and unprecedented for us to take the course which would throw the cost of this Bill upon the members of the Town Council or those ratepayers who choose to put their hands in their pockets on their behalf. The Bill came down here unopposed, consisting of five clauses. Members of the Unopposed Bill Committee introduced certain Amendments, and now the Bill comes before us. The costs have been estimated by the two hon. Members who have spoken as being from £2,000 to £4,000. They are estimated by those on whom I rely as from £1,200 to £1,500. But whatever the cost may be, unless it can be proved that the Town Council of Dunoon were undertaking some improper course in promoting this Bill with its original clauses, I feel perfectly certain that it would be a very wrong course on the part of this House to say that the members of the Town Council themselves must pay the expenses. Imagine if such a course were adopted what would be the effect in the future, at any rate in Scotland. Town Councils would be very chary about promoting Bills urgently required, because it is perfectly impossible for them to know beforehand whether the provisions which they promote will be passed or not. On every ground of common fairness I beg the House to pass the Bill.