§ For the purpose of the administration of such pensions and grants to persons who have been officers or men of His Majesty's military forces and their dependants as are hereinafter mentioned, there shall be constituted a Board of Pensions consisting of the Paymaster-General, who shall be President of the Board, and of the Parliamentary Secretary of the Admiralty, the Financial Secretary of the War Office, and the Parliamentary Secretary of the Local Government Board.
§ Mr. HOGGEI beg to move to leave out the words "For the purpose of," and to insert instead thereof the words "In order to unify."
I quite realise, in moving this Amendment at this early stage in Committee, that I am challenging the whole structure of this Pensions Board Bill, and I may say quite frankly that that is my intention. I think Members of this House, having read over this Bill, will have come to the conclusion that it is very unsatisfactorily drawn, and that we are not likely to get any very much better or more efficient administration from the Board which appears in the Bill than we are getting at the moment, and that if there is another way in which this matter can be settled satisfactorily, the Committee ought to take that method straight away. There are two things by which the whole system of pensions could be improved right away. The first of those is the overhauling of the Royal Warrants which deal with the amount of pensions, and which can be done altogether apart from any fresh machinery which requires to be set up, and there is, secondly, the setting up of a scheme of machinery which will overcome all these faults of the existing machinery. If hon. Members have done me the honour of looking through the Amendment Paper, they will see a number of Amendments there to which my own name is attached, along with the names of other hon. Members, and I should like to say that all those Amendments follow logically upon this first Amendment I am moving, and that they substitute, if accepted, a single, unified centralised scheme for the scheme that we have in 50 the Bill. I think it will save longer discussion later if I may be allowed to outline at the outset what that scheme means.
If this Amendment I am moving is-carried, and if, as a consequence of it being carried, the Government agreed to the other Amendments with which my name is associated, then we should have-a scheme something like the following. There would be created a Board consisting of, as I have put down in my Amendment, a Pensions Minister and an Under-Secretary, and I may say incidentally that if you, Mr. Whitley, do not consider that two men can make a Board—that is to. say, we cannot make a Board out of a Pensions Minister and an Tender Secretary—it would be within the power of the House to create other nominal members of that Board in order to satisfy the exact interpretation of the word "Board." But the main point is that I want to get rid of the four present members of the Board, and to substitute in their place something very much more tangible. First of all, there would be a Board consisting primarily of the Pensions Minister directly responsible to this House, and there would be transferred to that Minister four separate powers. Those four separate powers would be the powers and duties of the Commissioners of Chelsea, including in-pensions. That is to say, instead of the proposal in paragraph (a) in Clause 2, I would give to the Minister the inclusive powers which the Commissioners of Chelsea have now. Secondly, I would give them what stands in paragraph (b) of Clause 2, namely, the powers and duties of the Army Council, but I would give them power also to deal with service pensions. I make quite explicit in connection with that this fact, about which I think we ought to be quite clear in this House, that this new Board has, at any rate, the power to promulgate new Royal Warrants. If we are taking over the powers of the Army Council we want to make it quite clear that we are taking over the powers to promulgate what is urgently necessary now, new Royal Warrants. I place under that Board the powers and duties of the Admiralty with reference to the pensions and grants to persons who have been officers, etc. That is left out now, but I bring that in. Fourthly, I put in the Statutory Committee altogether; I leave none of it out. Then Clauses 3 and 4 would disappear as they stand in the Bill.
51 Whether the Committee agrees with that solution or not, it has the merit of extreme simplicity. It gets rid of the present existing tangle, whereby you have four separate bodies dealing with four separate categories of pensions, and you put them within the control of one man who is responsible to this House, and in that way you give the House a direct control over the Board of Pensions. There is only one argument I have heard that has any weight with me, and that is what is to happen with regard to what are known as the local war pensions committees. I am in favour, and have always been in favour, of maintaining the existence of local war pensions committees, because they are in direct touch with the localities. They know the conditions in the localities. They know, for instance, the variety of occupations which the disabled soldier who recovers may take up. They know the rent and food conditions in the particular locality which may determine the amount of disability pension. There is no reason at all why those local war pensions committees cannot remain in existence, and cannot work under the direction of the Pension Minister instead of under the direction of the Vice-Chairman of the Statutory Committee. Those local war pensions committees would continue in existence, and they would carry out in the various localities the desires of this House expressed through the Minister of Pensions. That is a thoroughgoing, a far-reaching and an efficient method of machinery which would get rid of the existing mess and muddle.
If the Committee will look at the Bill as it stands, this Bill has been brought in to simplify the scheme of pensions. I will read out to the Committee, if I may be allowed to do so, nine different things that will happen under this Bill, which was set up to simplify pensions. First of all, if this Bill is carried as it stands, disabled soldiers will receive their pensions from the Board, both on scale and supplement at one time of asking. Second, widows and other dependants of soldiers will receive their pensions from the Board at one time of asking. Third, disabled sailors will go to the Admiralty for both scale and supplement. Fourth, widows and other dependants of sailors will do the same. Fifth, Service pensions will be paid by the War Office. Sixth, in-Pensioners will still go to 52 the Chelsea Commissioners. Seventh, Greenwich will remain untouched. Eighth, the Statutory Committee will remain in separate existence in a separate building for all its other purposes than supplementing pensions out of State money. Ninth, the local war pensions committees will also remain, but will have three masters instead of one; they will require to correspond with the new Board, with the Admiralty and with the Statutory Committee. Can anyone conceive for a moment that that is a scheme which will simplify the present administration of pensions? Now does this House, or does this House not, want a simplified scheme? We can have a simplified scheme if we like. The Government has not given us a simplified scheme. Let us throw over the Government.
4.0 P.M.
After all, we know a great deal more about this question than the Government do. I do not know anybody who knows anything at all about pensions who has been asked by any single Member of the Government whether he has any ideas with regard to this scheme at all. There is in existence in this House a large group of Members who have been giving their time and attention to the question of pensions, and that group has never been consulted. They have not been asked if they have any ideas, and presumably they are thought not to be worth anything. This scheme has come from the Cabinet. It is not a good scheme, and it is not going to make the administration of pensions any easier. The Members of the House of Commons are responsible to the disabled men, and we can change the whole of this scheme, and I invite hon. Members to do that to-day. Supposing you overthrow this scheme. You do not deprive any man of his pension, and every man would be entitled just as he is now, but he will get it. a little quicker. I do the Paymaster-General this justice, that he is quickening up the administration of Chelsea. He has done that while he has been at Chelsea, and that side of the administration of pensions is quicker, but the right hon. Gentleman gets power from this House in that direction quite apart from this Bill. Until he gets power to alter the system of awarding pensions, the right hon. Gentleman cannot do much more. This Bill is not necessary to give that power, for it can be given otherwise, and so we are not depriving any man of his pension.
53 It is not worth the while of this House to agree to this scheme simply because the Cabinet have compromised the matter, and are demanding a single administration. I do not want to be personal, but I want to show how this Board has been constructed. One of the members is the Parliamentary Secretary to the Local Government Board, and he is put on to the Pensions Board because he happens to be a member of the Statutory Committee, and no Member in the House knows better than I do that the right hon. Gentleman knows a great deal about pensions. But supposing this Government went out of office next month, and another Member of this House went to the right hon. Gentleman's position at the Local Government Board, he would not be a member of the Statutory Committee. This Board has been constructed to get upon it my right hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary to the Local Government Board. I am only making that criticism to show that this Board is a compromise. This House docs not want a compromise, but it does want an efficient instrument by which once and for all we sions, and their widows and dependants upon us outside who are expecting pensions, and their widows and dependents who take this view that the Government ought to provide machinery by which at one time of asking and by one method a man's pension and claim ought to be satisfied. Here is another item which shows how absurd is this arrangement. We have now a full meeting of the Board on the Treasury Bench. After this Bill becomes law it will be necessary for Members of this House, if they want information on pension points, to still put down questions to each one of these four Gentlemen. What kind of unification is that? If we want to know anything about the Statutory Committee outside the supplementation of pensions, we shall have to ask the Secretary to the Local Government Board. If we want to know anything about Service pensions, we shall have to go to the Financial Secretary to the War Office. If we desire to know anything about Admiralty pensions, or the supplementation of Admiralty Pensions, we shall have to question the First Lord of the Admiralty. If you want to know anything about anything else connected with pensions, you will have to put your question down to be answered by the Paymaster-General.
54 We have to ask four Gentlemen now, and if this Bill is passed we shall still have to ask four Gentlemen for the information we require. This seems to me to be a powerful argument why this House ought to consider whether it is worth while going on with this Bill on this kind of arrangement, or whether we ought not as a House, as a thinking House that sometimes takes matters into its own hands, if the Cabinet will not do the proper thing, to so alter the structure of this Bill in Committee that it will give the country the Bill the people want. It seems perfectly easy if we agree to this Amendment to do this at the outset of this discussion, and declare, that we want a unified scheme, with a Minister who shall have full control of the existing machinery, who shall be responsible to the House for anything arising out of that machinery, in order that we shall be able to be assured that those dependent upon us, when they are in difficulty, if they apply at the Board of Pensions, a Board under the responsibility of the Pensions Minister, that Minister will exhaust for them everything they are entitled to from any source at all with regard to pensions instead of the present scheme, where the poor soldier or his widow and dependants have got to accumulate the pension somewhat on the hire-purchase system, getting something here and something elsewhere. I think the feeling of the House is behind the view which I have expressed. At any rate I hope it is, and I hope hon. Members will show that in the discussion. I hope the right hon. Gentleman will be prepared to meet us in that matter, for he himself has told us that if he had his way he would not have had a Board, but would have had a simple single scheme of administration of pensions. Now there is one set of people who can give him his way, and that is his colleagues in the House of Commons. The Cabinet does not understand this question, and has not sought to understand it. The Cabinet did not grapple with this question until it became urgent in this House, and when they did grapple with it they gave us a scheme which is not satisfactory, and I ask them to take time now and give the country what it wants.
§ Mr. J. SAMUELI think this Amendment is really one of vast importance because it touches the very vitals of the scheme. I agree with almost everything the last speaker has said, and personally 55 I am in favour of making this Bill apply to one strong Pensions Board, having full powers to deal with all aspects of the question with one exception. I am not in favour of the Service pension being handed over to this Board. I think we ought to deal in this Bill with pensions arising out of this War rather than with the Service pension, and the decorations foreshadowed in the ninth Clause. With regard to the pensions arising out of the War, I do believe that we should have one unified scheme, and we should have a Board that would deal with the problem effectively. I am bound to say that I do not believe in the efficacy of this Board. I certainly think it is a patched scheme and a compromise. If anybody were to construct this Board in a proper way, they would never think of putting upon it the three Gentlemen selected to work with the Pensions Minister, because they are practically overworked at the present time. The Parliamentay Secretary to the Admiralty has enormous responsibilities during this War. [An HON. MEMBER: "No!"] Anyone who comes in touch with the right hon. Gentleman knows that it is very difficult to get an appointment with him, and I know he is working very hard. The same applies to the Financial Secretary to the War Office, and certainly the Parliamentary Secretary to the Local Government Board, who has to overhaul the whole of the administration of this country dealing with public health and a hundred and one other things. Those are matters which require the whole attention of these three Ministers.
There is an Amendment on the Paper which appears very absurd, for it gives power to the Board to meet not less than once a month. This Board ought to sit daily if it is going to do its work thoroughly. It ought to sit every day because of the enormous number of disability pensions which will have to come up for consideration. Then there are the supplementary pensions and grants, and the work is enormous, and the Board ought to sit daily at least for the next two or three years with the growth of pensions which must arise out of this disastrous War. I have been in touch with the local secretaries of various local committees. The points which were made by the hon. Member for East Edinburgh do not arise in this respect because the Paymaster-General has put down a new 56 Clause under which he proposes to handle and annex the whole of the work of these local committees to serve this Board with information and recommendations. That is an important new Clause and one which I hope will be carried. What they complain about is that there is an enormous-waste of time. In my own Constituency 1,250 cases were examined in three months, and now they have to write to eight or nine different Departments. Under this Bill they will have to write to four different Departments. Why cannot we concentrate the whole work under one head, so that they know exactly where to write to, and the Board should have the necessary information. I think this Pensions Board ought really to have a grip and knowledge of what every man is going to get, and every woman. This will be public money, because there will be no voluntary gift in the future and all of it will come out of the State. It is most important that this Board should have a full knowledge as to what every man will get in the form of a pension or supplementary pension and grant, so that they can check any waste in any part of the country. I am quite certain that the Board we are setting up now, without unification, will not be adequate to meet the demands of the country and the House of Commons, and therefore I hope the right hon. Gentleman in charge of the Bill will see his way to accept this Amendment.
§ Sir H. CRAIKI have also upon the Paper an Amendment which is more or less on the lines of that proposed by the hon. Member for East Edinburgh. Naturally, I would prefer my own Amendment because I think it would give more general control and powers of supervision, but as against the Bill I am fully persuaded that the Amendment of the hon. Member for East Edinburgh more expresses my own view, and, if he goes to a Division, I shall be bound to support him. What is the real purpose of this Bill? It is not to introduce new executive administrative machinery, but to bring about unity in the whole thing and some power of control and supervision that will be exercised by the Pensions Minister. We want it. Everyone who has worked at it knows that it is wanted. We know that it is wanted on the Statutory Committee. We come to differences with the War Office or with the Admiralty, or with Chelsea, or with 57 Baker Street, and when we remonstrate we want someone to whom we can go and appeal and who will be able to settle matters. I am quite certain that the great body of the House feels in this way. We may have differences as to the extent to which the right hon. Gentleman should interfere with the administration. Personally, I think it would be better to leave a good many of these bodies existing and to keep a complete control. I would be quite ready to propose to give to the right hon. Gentleman, not only the power of control, but even the power of telling each of these bodies how much they should do and of taking away from them that which he thinks they do not perform properly.
I think it is a great mistake that that the Bill should only lead to the creation of a new administrative executive office. There is in the whole of this Bill the flaw and the vice that it is an attempt at a compromise and patchwork. That is the defect of the Bill. We know perfectly well what in the Constitution a President of a Board means. The President of the Board of Trade does not think very much of the other people who sit upon the Board; the President of the Board of Education does not think very much of them; and the President of the Local Government Board does not think very much of the other Members who sit upon his Board. The central power is in the President, and you do not try to compose a sort of patchwork, variegated board with the idea possibly that other opinions may prevail. The right hon. Gentleman knows perfectly well that he will be the master. The President must be the master. I have myself served under the President of a Board, and I know quite well, although the Board is occasionally called together, that they have no executive power. The President can act alone and does act alone, and, if he differs from them, he can override their decision. The master ought to be, and will be, the President, and there is no use attempting to reconcile differences of opinion by making A make-believe board. I am quite certain that the House desires unity. I would prefer it perhaps in another form of words than that proposed by the hon. Member, but I am certain that the Amendment really expresses the views of the House, and that he will have very large support if he goes to a Division.
Mr. HENDERSONIt is for me to put briefly before the Committee our views with regard to this very drastic Amendment moved by the hon. Member for East Edinburgh. I was not very much surprised at the terms of the speech of the hon. Member. I am fully aware of the very keen interest he has taken for some time in this question of pensions and pensions machinery, but I must confess that I was surprised very considerably at the speech to which we have just listened from the hon. Member for Glasgow and Aberdeen Universities (Sir H. Craik). I do not know whether he has seriously examined the purport and inwardness of the Amendment before the Committee, but to find that he, a member of the Statutory Committee, is prepared to become a wholehogger and to go in for such a drastic alteration of the Bill that even his own Committee, with which we have dealt very tenderly, is going to be swept away, is one of the most surprising things that I have met in the discussion of this question. There can be no doubt—and I hope my hon. Friend realises it—that if this Amendment is carried the Statutory Committee ceases to exist as a separate body.
§ Sir H. CRAIKAs an independent body.
Mr. HENDERSONAs a separate body. I followed very closely the speech of the Mover, and there is no mistaking what he wants. If the members of the Statutory Committee, who are also members of this Committee, agree with my hon. Friend opposite, I hope that they will say so in the Debate on this Amendment. We have been at some trouble to find out exactly what is the position of the Statutory Committee, and I have had it impressed upon me very much—and if I had not had it impressed upon me, the Amendments on the Order Paper would show it—that the last thing that the Statutory Committee desire is to be swallowed up in any such body as has been hinted at. There are, in fact, several Amendments on the Paper which go to show that they really want to have back the supplementation that we have taken from them in one of the provisions of the Bill.
§ Sir H. CRAIKUnder your supervision?
Mr. HENDERSONLet me examine the position put before the Committee by the Mover of the Amendment. He does not like the scheme of the Bill. It is a 59 compromising scheme. He proposes to substitute for it what he calls a single, central, unified scheme. That single, central, unified scheme is to consist, as I understood his speech, of a president and an undersecretary. I am not quite sure whether I have to interpret this Amendment in the light of other Amendments which he has upon the Order Paper.
Mr. HENDERSONI am a little perplexed to find out exactly what he and others really want. I have been at some trouble to put some of these Amendments together, and we find that some of them really want to set up a board or a committee of commissioners from six to ten in number.
§ Mr. HOGGENo, no. I do not want to be misunderstood. You will find among the new Clauses a separate scheme which does that; but the speech I made hangs entirely on the Amendments with regard to unification, and those alone. The alternative scheme in the new Clauses is an entirely separate thing.
Mr. HENDERSONI asked my hon. Friend if I had to interpret his Amendment in the light of other Amendments that stood in his name upon the Order Paper and—I am in the recollection of the Committee—he nodded assent. Those Amendments propose to set up the scheme to which I was making allusion. They propose to bring in commissioners; in fact one of the sets of Amendments proposes that twenty-two persons shall be engaged on pensions administration.
§ Mr. HOGGEOn a point of Order. I do not want this Debate to be confused, and I hope my right hon. Friend will not do me the injustice of pursuing that argument. He is now interpreting my Amendment in the light of something which occurs in the new Clauses. My scheme rests logically on a uniform scheme, and it has nothing to do with the new Clauses. I hope that he will not mix the two up.
Mr. HENDERSONIt is all very well for Members to move Amendments and talk about unification if they leave us to grope about in the dark and find out what they mean by unification.
Mr. HENDERSONI have only these different Amendments on the Order Paper to guide me. I have gone into them, and I put the question to my hon. Friend, I think very properly, whether I was to interpret this Amendment in the light of subsequent Amendments. That, surely, is very fair. I do not want to misrepresent him, and I do not want to read into this Amendment propositions contained in his subsequent Amendments if there is no connection, but I am anxious to find out what he really means by his substitute of a single. central, unified scheme. He dealt with the powers, and he complained that the new Board did not deal with Service pensions. He proposes, I suppose, that his unified Board should deal with all the questions that he cited—Service pensions, Admiralty pensions, Greenwich, and, in fact the eight or ten different points that he brought before the Committee.
Mr. HENDERSONThere, again, I must say, if we wore prepared to favourably consider taking in everything, that the Committee would be very seriously divided as between the members of the Statutory Committee who are against taking in everything and those members of the Committee who have no connection with the Statutory Committee and who are in favour of taking in everything. I pointed out on the introduction of the Bill that if we had been beginning de novo it is just possible that we should have introduced a different scheme, and I think I ought to remind the Committee that some ten months ago the House had an opportunity of dealing with this question, and, instead of reducing, as I am attempting to do, the number of authorities dealing with the pensions question, they actually set about and created another one. The Statutory Committee has only been in operation some nine months. I am, of course, talking about the House of Commons. The work I am representing is the work of the Government, and I say if we complain about the large number of bodies dealing with the pensions question we have to remember that this House accepted the proposition for setting up the Statutory Committee.
Mr. HENDERSONI am sure the hon. Member for Liverpool will remember the old adage about "wait and see." I am prepared to wait and see whether we are going to put it right or not. But I do not agree that this Amendment is going to put it right because I am sure of this: there are a number who believe that the Statutory Committee ought to have a further opportunity of doing the work which we are leaving to them outside this Bill and who will not be prepared to sweep away that Statutory Committee at this moment.
Mr. HENDERSONI am not a member of the Statutory Committee, and I am not going to say why not. There are Members who take great interest in the Statutory Committee's work who will no doubt be prepared to give an answer. Another reason put forward was that the hon. Member's new scheme would give power to deal with the Royal Warrants. I thought I made it clear in the previous Debate—I do not know if the hon. Member for East Edinburgh was present—that we had the power to deal with the existing Warrants and to replace them by new Warrants, and we do not, therefore, need a unified scheme such as is suggested in the Amendment in order to secure that power. I thought, too, I had made it clear that it was my intention at the earliest possible moment to bring the conditions on which the new Warrants were based before the House of Commons, with the consent of the Prime Minister, in order that the House might have a full opportunity of discussing the proposals which the new Warrants would cover. Therefore, I do ask my hon. Friend to consider, knowing, as I do, his deep interest in this question, whether he is justified in trying to upset the scheme of the Bill for the purpose of getting power to deal with the question of Warrants—
Mr. HENDERSONI thought that was one of the arguments advanced in favour of the Amendment. I am in the recollection of hon. Members who agree with me.
§ Mr. HOGGEI said it did not matter whether we destroyed the Bill, because we had power to deal with Royal Warrants interfering with any man's pension.
Mr. HENDERSONI do not want to put the position unfairly, and if the hon. 62 Member stated, as is quite correct, we. have the power to deal with the Warrants, and we are going to deal with them, I quite agree, but I rather thought that in raising the question at this moment he was under the impression we had not the-power. Then he referred to the leaving out of the Admiralty. My right hon. Friend the Secretary to the Admiralty (Dr. Macnamara), in a most impressive speech on the introduction of the Bill, dealt with that question, and I do not know that I need take up any time by further referring to it. All I need say is that if I thought that the position of the sailors under the administration of the Board of Admiralty was in any way going to suffer, or if there was going to be any lack of uniformity of scale by their remaining outside, I should most strongly oppose their not being included in the Bill. When this question was inquired into by a Cabinet Committee, I may say that the members of that Committee started with the opinion that the Admiralty ought to form part of the scheme, but the evidence put before us was such that the Committee unanimously agreed that the case as between the War Office and the Admiralty was so different that the work could be best done by those who have had it in charge from the beginning of the War. The problem was different. It was very much smaller, it was done-under one roof, and in order to secure uniformity and to secure the interchange of information my right hon. Friend was included as a member of the new Board.
§ Sir C. KINLOCH-COOKEThey did not say so.
§ Mr. ELLIS GRIFFITHTo what Committee is the right hon. Gentleman referring?
Mr. HENDERSONA Committee appointed by the Prime Minister representative of the Board of Admiralty and the War Office gave evidence before it. I feel that the strongest point my hon. Friend made in moving his Amendment was that the Government have taken the responsibility of setting up the scheme contained in the Bill without making any inquiry whatever from those who are interested* in the question of pensions. Surely my hon. Friend must have been suffering from a lapse of memory when he-made that statement. May I remind him 63 that, on the 12th September, he received a letter from myself containing a questionnaire, and that one of the questions dealt with total disablement and with partial disablement. Another question was, "What changes do you suggest in the pensions administrative machinery, national and local?" That questionnaire was not sent to my hon. Friend in his individual capacity; it was sent to him, and I think to another hon. Member, as secretaries of what was then, I believe, a newly-created House of Commons Pensions Committee. The questionnaire asked some very important questions with regard to disablement pensions. I hope my hon. Friend admits that he received it. It was sent to a good many Members of the House—to all the Members who had taken part in the previous Pensions Debate.
§ Major H. TERRELLWhy was it not sent to all hon. Members?
Mr. HENDERSONMy hon. Friend said he had never been asked about the machinery. I think the question I am putting to him is a very proper one. The committee exists and in fact is very active. I have had scores, if not hundreds of letters, from its official representatives, and I took the trouble to reply to them. I have a right to call the attention of the Committee to this fact, that the Mover of the Amendment makes a point against the Government's present scheme as embodied in this Bill, by saying that we have been setting up new machinery without consulting those who have taken an interest in the pensions question, whereas, on the 12th September, I sent him this questionnaire and one question embodied in it was what suggestion he had to make with regard to pensions machinery, national and local. May I add that to this moment I have not had an official reply to any one of the questions, including that dealing with national and local machinery.
§ Mr. HOGGEI think I ought to reply at once to my right hon. Friend's statement. It is perfectly true he did send me that questionnaire. I remember quite well, and perhaps he will also remember quite well, that I told him I was not going to fill it up, as the questions were put in such a way that they did not admit of an answer worth anything. I added that the only thing to do in regard to the pensions schemes was to scrap them all, and to have 64 a proper uniform scheme. That was my own personal view which I expressed to him. I told him that I would not fill up the paper. With regard to whether it was sent to the Pensions Committees, I am certain, as Secretary of the Pensions Committee, that I never got it, and that it was never sent. As far as I am personally concerned I admit quite freely that my right hon. Friend showed it to me, and I have told the committee the answer that I gave at the time.
Mr. HENDERSONI do not know whether the questions were so drafted that they did not admit of an answer, but I do know that I did not get an answer.
§ Colonel Sir HAMAR GREENWOODDid the questionnaire refer to this Bill or to any Bill?
Mr. HENDERSONI asked my hon. Friend to give me the benefit of his views with regard to local and national machinery. If my hon. Friend the Member for York wishes I will read the questions. [HON. MEMBERS: "No, no!"] The hon. Member for Stockton (Mr. Samuel) who rose to support the hon. Member for East Edinburgh, opened his speech by at once taking exception to a point made by the Mover—that his unified scheme included certain pensions. The hon. Memeber for Stockton said he did not agree with their inclusion. Here we have two hon. Gentlemen supporting a scheme of unification and yet differing on what, in my opinion, is a fundamental point. May I say at once that I cannot accept this Amendment. I am well aware of the strong feeling that exists in this House. I admitted on the introduction of the Bill the difficulties of the position. On the Order Paper will be found Amendments which lead us to two extremes; the Bill supplies the middle course, and, so far as I can see, the Government would have been pursuing a mistaken course if it had permitted its scheme to ignore entirely the position as it has existed since the beginning of the War. It is quite true we have not secured complete unification, but we have improved the position and if we bring under one roof five different authorities dealing with disablement pensions, it seems to me that this is an immense improvement. If we also effect such relationships with the Admiralty and the Statutory Committee as will lessen the possibility of friction and delay, and as will secure something in the nature of uniformity of decision and of scale, it seems to me that that, too, is a 65 step in the right direction. I can only ask those hon. Members who believe in the one extreme and those who take the other extreme to look more carefully at the matter, and if they will do that I think they will see that the middle course is an immense improvement—at any rate, that is the course which the Government propose to abide by.
Mr. GRIFFITHWe have listened with great interest to the speech of the new Minister of the Pensions Board. May I begin the remarks I have to address to the Committee by quoting from the report of his speech on 21st November, in which he said:
It is quite true that the Debate has revealed differences of opinion as to method, but I am quite sure that there has been a marvellous degree of unanimity in the object that we are all aiming at."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 21st November, 1916, col. 1370, Vol. LXXXVII.]That is the point which the Committee ought to bear in mind during this discussion. We are all united in the purpose that we have in view. There really is no need for any bitterness or controversy about this matter. We are all genuinely anxious to do what is best; therefore I am quite sure there ought not to be a cross word or a bitter word imported into this Debate. As I understand it, the substance of this Amendment is the subject of unification. The right hon. Gentleman has been a Minister and in the Government for some time, and he used a very old argument which, I regret to say, I heard many years ago, when he said, "There is one extreme on the one side and another extreme on the other side; I am in the middle, and therefore I must be right." To anybody with a sense of humour, which I do not profess to have, that must have appeared to be a very humorous observation. The real question is which is the right thing to do, not whether it is extreme on the one side or extreme on the other, or whether the Government stands in the middle. The Government generally is in the middle. It has not pleased anybody, but must it therefore be right? The point is which, on the whole, is the best view for the Committee to adopt? I see the whole Board before me. It is not often that that happens. I am bound to say they do not look extremely happy.
§ The PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY to the ADMIRALTY (Dr. Macnamara)We were all here on the First Reading.
Mr. GRIFFITHOne has forgotten the First Reading now. The fact that the Board should remain united up to the Committee stage would be a remarkable thing. It would be a poor point and I do not make it, but the fact is that the Board are not united even up to this stage. The right hon. Gentleman the Parliamentary Secretary to the Local Government Board made a speech in November, 1914, and on the Second Reading he was very proud of it. I wonder whether his pride survives the speech of his right hon. Friend the President of the Board?
§ The PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY to the LOCAL GOVERNMENT BOARD (Mr. Hayes Fisher)I am quite proud of it.
Mr. GRIFFITHIs he proud of it after the Paymaster-General's speech? He told us:
I have had experience of all these bodies for many years, and for the life of me I cannot conceive why we do not amalgamate all these bodies—he meant his natural life, not his official life—under one roof, so that these cases may be considered by one body always controlled by the Government of the day and always answerable to Parliament. I believe that will be the only satisfactory solution of this great problem."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 18th Nov. ember, 1914, col. 457, Vol. LXVIIL]Does he still think so? I do not say that he ought to sacrifice his natural life, because that would be too hard a sacrifice. But I must say that I do think his official position is not quite consistent with the views he expressed on 18th November, 1914. I, for one, am of the same opinion in November, 1916, as he was in November, 1914. I follow him at a respectful distance, but I follow his views two years late. He is still ahead of me in November, 1916. He is so difficult to catch up. That is the view many of us take now. It is, at any rate, advisable—I put it no higher for the moment—at least to unify under one central control all these vast questions of pensions. That is our view. If I may say so to the Committee, there is only one answer to that. I think we are all agreed that it is advisable. It may be said to be impossible. That is a perfectly good answer. But is it impossible? The right hon. Gentleman in 1914 thought it was possible, because he would not have thought it was advisable unless he had thought it was possible. I want to know what has happened during the two intervening years to make what was advisable in 1914 impossible in 1916? That is the difficulty we are in. Now the Admiralty stands out. The right hon. Gentleman who 67 has just sat down said that the Parliamentary Secretary to the Admiralty had made a very convincing speech. [An HON. MEMBER: "Impressive speech!"]
§ Dr. MACNAMARAHe hoped it was convincing.
Mr. GRIFFITHQuite so. This is what the Parliamentary Secretary to the Local Government Board said on 21st November, 1916:
Many of us heard the very powerful speech, to my mind a very effective speech, made by my right hon. Friend and colleague who represents the Admiralty (Dr. Macnamara). It was a speech "full of the tender sentiments which we would have expected from him in this matter. We all know how much he has cared for the sailor under his charge, and how much he has tried to do for him. But, although I admire the speech, I am unconvinced, and as latitude was given to him, so I hope latitude may be extended to me."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 21st November. 1916, col. 1273, Vol.LXXXVII].He took his latitude, I have no doubt, quite correctly. Really there is a little difference of opinion between the different members of the Board. There is only one answer to the claim of the Admiralty to stand out of this Bill. The right hon. Gentleman (Dr. Macnamara), whose tender sentiments are always appreciated by me, told the Committee that there was no ground but one, which is that the Admiralty can manage this matter better than the Pensions Beard.
Mr. RUTHERFORDOn a point of Order. Will this discussion cut out the specific Amendments which follow on the Paper with regard to the question of the Admiralty?
§ The CHAIRMANNo; that difficulty has been growing in my mind as the discussion proceeded. If I may say so, the Committee is rather too much inclined to cover points which ought to be raised specifically later on. This first Amendment will not, although it may have some reference to it, rule out the Amendment just referred to. If the Committee takes a decision upon this Amendment, hon. Members will have clearly in their minds that they will be able to raise subsequently in some form or other the matter referred to.
Mr. GRIFFITHIf, as you, Sir, say, your difficulties grow more, so my speech will grow less. I will try to avoid any detailed reference to matters which are on the subject of separate Amendments. Of course, the right hon. Gentleman quite unavoidably had to deal with all these matters at one time. All I have to say is that there are a great 68 many of us in this Committee who are anxious, without reference to any controversial matter, to bring this very great question under one central authority. First of all, we think it necessary; secondly, we think it possible. I was present at the First Reading, I have read very carefully the Second Reading Debate, and I have heard the speeches to-day. I am bound to say that I have not heard a single sentence which convinces me that it is not possible. The Parliamentary Secretary to the Local Government Board thought it was possible in 1914. I am going to be perfectly fair. As I understand it, he said in his recent speech that, although it was possible in 1914, it was less-possible in 1916, because of the intervening circumstances. I put it to the Committee that nothing has happened in the intervening two years to render it impossible to have this real scheme of unification. The Paymaster-General, in the speech from which I quoted first, said there was unanimity in the House as to the object to be achieved. We are all united about this.
May I not suggest to the Government; that this is a point upon which the Committee might be consulted. When the right hon. Gentleman said that he could not accept this Amendment he turned, L am sure quite unintentionally but perhaps unconsciously, to the Chief Whip. That may be a mistake on my part. In any event, may I ask him now to let the Committee decide this question on quite nonparty lines? I am quite sure that he wants a scheme which will commend itself to the House of Commons. There is only one way of finding out what the House-of Commons intends, and that is not to put on the party Whips in a Division of this kind. I see all the other three members of the Board making notes. It will be quite a long time before the Division comes on. I am quite sure that the right hon. Gentleman wants, to make his new Department a great success. It will concern millions of people, the men and women who have really suffered from this war, to whom we are anxious to give, not only justice, but ample generosity. We are all agreed upon that. May I beg of the right hon. Gentleman to let the Committee make up its own mind upon this subject, so that the new Board over which he presides may represent not merely the machinery of the Government, but a body to which the House of Commons has given its approval and all the support it can 69 give? I feel certain that there is a very strong feeling in this country that there have been very grave derelictions of duty in the authorities which have been in charge of this Department. I admit frankly and gladly that those omissions of duty are becoming fewer from day to day, and I am sure we are very glad of it. It is important, in order not merely to do justice to those who have fought for us, but in order to encourage those who are going to fight for us. That is an important point, because every matter that comes before this House or this Committee now has a relation to whether it tends to win the War or not. If you put this matter upon a firm and solid basis you will find it would help to win the War, because every man who goes to the front to fight will know that his wife, children, and relatives will be in a certain position. whatever may happen to him. This is one of the most important matters that has ever come before the House of Commons, and I would therefore invite the Government, and especially the right hon. Gentleman in charge of the Bill, to let the Committee, without stress of the party Whips, to proclaim an unfettered opinion upon the great point we are now discussing.
§ 5.0 P.M.
§ Mr. BARNESI was not present when the hon. Member for East Edinburgh (Mr. Hogge) made his speech in moving the Amendment, therefore I have not in my mind what he had in his mind. I did not intend to take any part in the discussion on this Bill, and would not have done so now but for what might be called the challenge the right hon. Gentleman in charge of the Bill made a little while ago. I heard the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow and Aberdeen Universities (Sir H. Craik), and I take it that that speech was regarded by the right hon. Gentleman as one made on behalf of the Statutory Committee. The challenge was thrown out that if it was not other members of the Statutory Committee were present and might give their views. I will give mine. This is a most unfortunate Bill—a Bill calculated to make existing confusion worse confounded. The matter of substance in the Bill is raised in this Amendment, and if my hon. Friend goes to a Division—I do not care twopence whether or not the Whips are put on—I am going to vote for it. It is perfectly 70 clear that there are two experiments, so to speak. I am in favour of one extreme which, I understand, is contrary to that put forward by the hon. Member opposite. I am in favour of letting things alone. Possibly I have few supporters in that view in this House, and I know I am not supported in that view by the hon. Member for East Edinburgh (Mr. Hogge).
I think the time most inopportune to approach this question from a theoretical and academic point of view. I have heard a lot of talk for months about unification, supervision by one body, and a lot of fine phrases which were intended to cover proposals for a new Department and a new Minister. I do not care a row of pins for any of them. What I have had in my mind all the time has been getting the money into the hands of the soldiers and sailors or their dependants at the speediest possible moment, and in order to get that done it seemed to me that the most important thing was to leave all the existing authorities with all their existing imperfections upon their heads to go on their way, but to strengthen them with money and personnel as much as possible. That has been my view, and, consistent with that view, I should say that Statutory Committee, as one of the existing authorities dealing with this matter, ought to be let alone. What is the alternative? As far as this Bill is concerned it is neither fish, flesh, nor good red herring. It neither leaves it alone nor does it take it over. It does neither one thing nor the other. It takes away from it the supplementation of pensions to the soldier and gives that to the new body. It takes away the supplementation to sailors and gives that to the Admiralty, and in doing so it puts the poor unfortunate local committees into this position, that they must deal now with three authorities instead of one. There are some who say it does not matter; that if it is a matter of pension they can write to the Admiralty. But it is not so simple as that. In the first place, the new authorities have to make themselves acquainted with new Regulations, and, if I know anything about central authorities, through acting under them, there is nothing dearer to their hearts than regulations.
Consequently, I can say that one of the first duties of my right hon. Friend (Dr. Macnamara) will be to fix up new Regulations and Instructions. Then the new Board, probably, if we can judge from the speech we have had to-day, 71 will have their Regulations and instructions, and the unfortunate local committees, after having gone through the Regulations and Instructions of the Statutory Committee, which we discussed in this House some time ago, and, after having mastered them—not at all an easy job, my hon. Friend the Member for East Edinburgh knows that—having mastered all of them, are to be called upon now to master two other sets of new Instructions and Regulations, and then, having done that, and having had cases submitted to them from their district, they have to use their discretion to decide under which set of Regulations any particular claim comes. That is not so simple as it looks, because six months after a man dies his family may be on separation allowance. If on separation allowance, and it is a matter of separation allowance pure and simple, the local committee will in that case have to deal with the Statutory Committee. If it is a question of pension they have to deal with the Admiralty, and so on. All this is going to create confusion, and, instead of getting the money quicker into the hands of the soldiers, or the widows and dependants, it is more than possible that it is going to create further delay. For that reason I object to the Bill. I would rather act in the direction of leaving all the other bodies as they are. The Amendment, as I understand, proposes to make the best of a bad job. We have a new Department, a new body, and a lot of new jobs, and all that sort of thing; therefore, we have, according to the Amendment, as I understand it, to make it effective in lessening confusion. I can conceive of no better way of lessening confusion than to have all the existing authorities dealing with this matter of pensions under one control. That brings me to my final argument, with which I shall sit down, namely, that now we have got a Bill, let us make the best of it. Now that we are proposing to set up a new authority, let us take all the existing authorities and put them under the supervision of that authority. That seems to me the essence of simplicity, and the proper thing to do.
§ Sir RYLAND ADKINSI hope the Committee will allow one of the members of the Statutory Committee to say a word on this matter. I shall endeavour to follow the hon. Member for Anglesey (Mr. Ellis Griffith) and other speakers in the tone in which I approach this matter. 72 This is really not a matter for acrimony. It is purely a matter of finding a solution for one of the most difficult problems that the Government ever had to or can undertake. We have an imperative duty to discharge to those who have earned pensions, and we have at the same time to bear in mind the less popular duty that public funds must be administered with care, and that a large number of these matters should be decided so far as possible in a judicial spirit and temper. In what I have to say I would like to put forward two different points of view. My right hon. Friend the Paymaster-General tried to fix on the Member for Aberdeen University (Sir H. Craik) the onus for speaking for the Statutory Committee. Neither he nor my right hon. Friend who has just spoken had of himself any right to speak for that Committee officially, but it is only fair to the Committee to state its attitude, as the Statutory Commitee is very naturally the Committee at which everybody else throws stones. That is very natural; I do not complain; stones must be thrown, and it is as well to throw them where they would not do any injury. I should like to point out what is the attitude of the Statutory Committee to this Bill and to these proposals. They have been set out in a letter to the Prime Minister to which I venture, by permission of the Committee, to quote four or five sentences. The Committee say:
The Committee have been at work a little over nine months, and they have carried out the duties imposed upon them by Parliament. Local committees are now formed throughout the Kingdom with the exception of a few places in Ireland. Great pains and care have been expended on the drafting of Regulations, which have been submitted to Parliament and generally approved. The transference of the work previously done by voluntary societies to the new committees has been effected without friction and with mutual good will, and there has been no hitch in the arrangements; at a. time when ordinary staff was unprocurable, the Committee have gradually. with the help of volunteers, built up an organisation, and many of their own members have devoted their time to administrative work. The Committee would wish that the Government would allow them to carry out the work for which they have so carefully prepared, and they believe there would be great advantage in the supplementary pensions based on individual needs being administered by an independent committee representative of all sections of the community and that these pensions should be kept separate from the flat-rate pensions claimed by all alike. They feel that their object and that of the Government is the same, namely, to ensure that the best possible measures shall be taken for the benefit of the men who have fought for their country. Consequently, if the Cabinet decide that they desire the Committee to hand over the portion of their work suggested above (i.e., the portion referred to in paragraph (e) of the Clause), they are willing to co-operate loyally with the Pensions Board in such way as the Government may direct.73 I think it is only fair to say to the Committee that that is the attitude of the Statutory Committee. They have respectfully expressed the opinion which they have come to from their experience, and they are perfectly ready to work loyally not only with the Government, but with any decisions that this House puts upon the Government in order to help in this work. I think myself that there are certain aspects of this work which demand the appointment of a Minister specifically to do them. The Statutory Committee have no responsibility, and ought to have neither praise nor blame for many acts of delay in pensions and allowances reaching the people who ought to have them. The delay has been partly due to Chelsea, but the criticism has been reduced in its gravity by the influence and leadership of my right hon. Friend. It has also been partly due to the utter congestion of business in what is familiarly known as Baker Street. The Statutory Committee have had to go step by step, working with different Government Departments, and not least of all with the Treasury, and everybody knows how in this country for the best of reasons swiftness of movement on the part of the Treasury is an impossibility. I do desire to say, on behalf of the Statutory Committee, that there has been no slackening of energy on their part and that their officials and their members have done everything they could to speed up the working of the Pensions Act; but it is far easier for a Minister who himself is a member of the Cabinet to deal with other Government Departments which have to be consulted in the great work of speeding. Therefore, I, for one, am not sorry to see a Bill introduced which has in it the element of a responsible Minister who will be charged with that side of the administration.On the other hand, I really think we ought to face the fact that we are deaing with pensions, and, still more, with temporary allowances, which are not according to a flat rate, but which are meant to vary with the needs of the individual. That most difficult and invidious task should be undertaken as far as possible not by the clerks in an ordinary Government Department, but by a body which, at any rate, has the opportunity of exercising judicial or semi-judicial qualities. I am certain that all of us would be terrified by the prospect of pensions varying in individual cases according to political pressure exer- 74 cised upon Members of Parliament or by Members of Parliament upon this House. The real difficulty of the problem is to combine proper Parliamentary control over the expenditure of large sums of public money with getting the decisions in individual cases as much judicial and as little political or local as it is possible. For that reason I believe that if you abolish the Statutory Committee to-night you would have to create some similar body whose decisions in individual cases should be regarded as judicial; while if those decisions indicated in any considerable period that they were not calculated on a sufficiently generous scale or had not taken into cognisance certain facts and aspects that ought to be taken into consideration, then that would be put right-by Parliament or by the Government of the day. Therefore, when an Amendment is moved like this we are all of us in the greatest difficulty as to how we can express our views in voting one way or the other. I want a Minister at the head of a pure administration, and I do want some judicial or semi-judicial body to deal with pensions which are intended by Parliament to vary with the circumstances of the individual, and by comparison between the positions of the persons concerned before the War and their positions now. I hope before these discussions are over that these apparently divergent ideals may be harmonised. I cannot vote for this Amendment, because, while I think it clearly has everything to be said for it, I do not quite see how now, in the middle of a great War, you can combine these elements which I have mentioned by wholly new machinery. I know it is always easier to listen to speakers who are whole-heartedly in favour of a particular form of words or whole-heartedly against them. I hope the Committee will forgive me for taking up time in expressing what I know to be the attitude of the Statutory Committee, which is one of loyalty to this House and the Government, and one desires to use any experience they have for the benefit of these pople, and at the same time to ask the Committee to consider how best it can unite in getting proper responsible administration and proper judicial decisions.
§ Mr. CURRIEMy interest in separation allowances and pensions dates from the very early days of the War, and I am not surprised, as the War has developed, that the difficulty surrounding the question of 75 pensions has increased. I am far from thinking the present Bill is perfect, and if I have to vote for it I shall not do so without some feeling of regret. We do not know at this stage—and we never shall know until the end of the War—perhaps till some time after the end of the War—what the pensions question really in its fullness amounts to, and if we accept this legislation now I think we should do so, and the Government should do so, with the feeling that further legislation, which might perhaps bring in the Admiralty and also various other things which we have scarcely time to do now, will be necessary before anything like a final settlement can be effected. I should have been glad to hear anything from the Government to show that they realise that fact, for as such I regard it. I think it possible that this Act may raise the class of difficulty as to which we have heard something, and I think it is going to place local committees in a position of great difficulty. It is from that quarter that the right hon. Gentleman's difficulties will very largely come. At the same time, I think the Bill, even as it stands, will bring about a certain quickening up in making the money reach the soldier, which is the main object of us all, and for that reason alone I am prepared to vote for the Bill, reserving my right to ask for further legislation. I think the Government has met the Committee upstairs, perhaps not halfway, but a portion of the way. It has given us a Minister, and I am glad that the distinguished Members of the House who have been responsible for the matter of pensions have been civilians. It is an advantage that the civilian element in the administration should be strong. I really attach a good deal more importance to the Royal Warrants than to questions of machinery, and I should be glad to hear as soon as possible when we shall be able to see the new Royal Warrants. I have no feeling of soreness that the right hon. Gentleman did not consult people more as to what their views were. The suggestion that a Commission might be established something on the lines of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, entirely divorced from politics, has for me a good deal of attraction, and I am not sure, perhaps a couple of years hence, when we are trying to bring this question of the permanent administration of pensions on to a final basis, at that idea may not require to be fallen back upon. At the same time I am 76 not prepared to take the responsibility of losing the Bill, and I hope the hon. Member (Mr. Hogge), if the Government is not willing to give way, will not go the length of pressing this to a Division. We should be wiser to stop our criticism and reserve our rights to press for further legislation.
Sir H. DALZIELI do not agree with the conclusion to which my hon. Friend has arrived. There is no doubt as to the position in which the Committee is placed. There is really no driving force behind this Bill. Who is going to claim the parentage of it? No one on that bench. This is not the Bill of the Pensions Minister. I should like to hear his unrestrained and unequivocal remarks about the whole position to which the Cabinet is brought. I have no doubt my right hon. Friend intended this Bill to include all the other Departments which are to be left out. I have too high a respect for his statesmanship, his brains, and his experience. He knows this Bill is almost indefensible. I am going to stand by the Pensions Minister and his original ideas of what this Bill ought to be. What has been its progress? We are told that the Cabinet appointed a Committee. Fancy members of a Cabinet who are supposed to be overworked spending time at present in discussing all the questions of disability and all the hundred and one things that appertain to the operations of the Bill. I would much rather they were considering how to defend Roumania than wasting their time in regard to that. This is a House of Commons matter; it is not a Cabinet matter. What interest has the Cabinet in it? Except that the President of the Local Government Board has come in in the last few minutes no Cabinet Minister has taken the slightest interest in the Debate. There was a meeting of a Committee of the Cabinet, and they say, "Take it to the House of Commons." They do not pay the House of Commons the respect of coming to listen to what the House of Commons has to say. If there is one thing that the House of Commons ought to take an interest in and ought to have a right to vote upon without any consideration of party, it is surely this great question of pensions. It is an insult to the House of Commons that when we are discussing this matter the Cabinet Ministers who were responsible for the Bill are not here to defend the attitude they took up. This is one of those miserable compromises, a 77 sort of Coalition Bill, brought about, not because it is desirable, but because there are opposing interests and they must all be reconciled, and we must look a happy family.
There is no secret as to the history of the matter. The Secretary to the Admiralty was determined that he would not be brought in. The Statutory Committee, as represented by the Local Government Board, did not quite like being brought in. Therefore they said, "Bring them all in nominally and actually they will all be out." That is the position—a fine perspective to please the people outside. It is worthy of a bogus company promoter. They got the names in the Bill and pretend that there is unity, but when you look into it there is really no unity at all. They are to be members of the Board, but are they going to have any real supervising power in its operations? Nothing of the kind. No one knows it better than they themselves. Respect has been shown for their sensitiveness, and therefore they are brought in nominally without actually feeing brought in. We are asked, in my opinion, to assist in perpetrating a fraud upon the people of this country because we pretend to them that there is unity because they are all on one Board, when all the time there is nothing of the kind and it is simply make-believe. The overpowering consideration with the Committee ought to be what is going to be best for the men who are risking their lives, when they came back to England. We are all anxious to do what is best. That is the only question that guides me. Poor men walking the streets and almost dying of starvation That is the position you have brought us to. No credit is due to the Government for what they have done. It is said, Everything will be put right. It will never be put right until you have one man and one man only, at the head who takes the responsibility, without dividing it with any other Ministers. I make this prophecy. Most of us may live to see the day when the very proposal which is put forward now will be carried into effect. It is bound to come. You cannot prevent it. Fancy the great question of pensions in America ever being settled in the miserable way in which it is brought forward by the Government. There is no precedent in any other war for this sort of makeshift. It is a political truce in regard to this matter. It is mot to be for the benefit of the men themselves. We all know what Ministers think 78 about it. They know in their hearts they would never have put this forward themselves. It is a patched-up thing by the Cabinet in order to secure peace. We should be false to our duty to the men we have advised to join the Army if we did not take the very first opportunity of telling the Government what we think in regard to it. The hon. Member (Mr. Currie) talked about losing the Bill. Does he thinks we are going to lose the Bill if we defeat the Government? I should not break my heart if we did. We have had precedents when the House of Commons exercised its own mind. Three different Register Bills have been brought forward, and they are going to bring forward another. The Government did not resign.
§ Mr. CURRIEI said nothing about the resignation of the Government, but only of losing the Bill.
Sir H. DALZIELMy hon. Friend really must look at it from a Parliamentary point of view. He misunderstands the whole position. My right hon. Friend (Dr. Macnamara)) gave a most emphatic "Hear, hear!" when my hon. Friend, said he was going to lose the Bill. Is the position of the Government that if the House of Commons adopts this Amendment the Bill is defeated? We ought to be told. No matter what the future of the Bill is the men will not suffer by our voting for the Amendment. If we vote for the Amendment, we shall be saying to the Government: "Wake up and deal with this question in a proper manner." They have never really consulted the House of Commons. They threw it on the floor, and practically said: "Take it or leave it." The duty of the Committee is to exercise its own mind. Do not be misled by the eloquence of the Secretary to the Local Government Board or the violent orations of my right hon. Friend (Dr. Macnamara). Our duty is to the men whom we advised to join the Army, and I do not envy the position of Ministers when they have to say afterwards: "We have passed a Bill, but things are really worse than they were before." Let us try and make them better, and the only way to make them better is to adopt the Amendment.
§ Mr. HAYES FISHERI am sorry that the Committee should find itself in a very uncomfortable and unhappy position. It has got a Bill which it does not altogether like, and it would like to have another Bill. Is the Committee altogether free 79 from blame for the position in which it finds itself? The right hon. Gentleman has just made a powerful speech. Is he altogether free from blame for the position in which he finds himself? I have been told that two years ago I was strongly in favour of some unified system of pensions, and made speech after speech in this House in favour of a complete system of unified pensions. I gave evidence before a Select Committee in favour of that system. Again and again when I was put in charge of the Bill for setting up the Statutory Committee I avowed that I much preferred a unified system of pensions. But did the right hon. Gentleman, who never seems to me to be in the very least abashed in attacking the Government, ever once support me? Did he ever on any one of those occasions get up and advocate any system of unified pensions?
§ Mr. HAYES FISHERIt was before the House again and again. How was it that I was able from the opposite side of the House to make speeches of considerable length and vigour, attacking the Government, of which I was not then a member, because it did hot unify our pension system? I did not in those days receive any support from the right hon. Gentleman (Mr. Ellis Griffith), who now taunts me with my inconsistency. I have never seen his name in connection with any of the great societies with which I have been working now for at least fifteen years for the improvement of the position of the soldier and the sailor. I received no support from the other side of the House at that time for my proposal for a unified system of pensions. Therefore the House must really blame itself to a very large extent when it finds itself in the position in which it finds itself to-day. I have not changed any opinion that I ever held on this subject. I believed at the beginning of this War—and I believed it most fervently after long study of this question, after sitting on many different bodies, and having been a Commissioner of the Chelsea Hospital for three years during the Boer War, and having brought about many reforms in our pension system—that this War would make it absolutely necessary to unify the whole of our pension system under one body, acting through a Minister of Pensions, under one roof. But 80 two years or more have passed since then. There was then only a staff in London of 250 officials dealing with pensions in different buildings. We have now a staff of 2,500, scattered about different buildings in London, who are dealing with the pension system. I do not know how it is possible to unify all that enormous staff to-day under one roof. My right hon. Friend (Mr. Henderson) said he hoped to be able to do it some time in May or some time in June.
As I said the other day, there are many obstacles in the way to-day which did not exist two years ago. In my opinion, a system of unified pensions ought to have-been introduced before. Meanwhile, the Statutory Committee has been set up. I am an ex-officio member of all its committees. I have spent many hundreds of hours in attending the meetings of those committees, and I may say this of the-Statutory Committee, that I have never seen better work done. I have never seen more laborious hours worked. I think the-House has paid a high testimonial to the work of the Statutory Committee when, with very few exceptions, it has approved of the standard of pensions set up by the Statutory Committee—a much higher standard than has ever existed before. There is the Statutory Committee in existence. The Statutory Committee has set up 300 local committees and 200 disablement committees. It has a very powerful central disablement committee. It is incoherence with employers and employed, and it has got its rules and regulations broadcast through every local committee. Recommendations are pouring in every day to the Statutory Committee for higher rates of pensions. Much work is in hand in making preparation for training, for employment, and so on. All this work is being done by the Statutory Committee. I do not say that this constitutes an insurmountable obstacle, but it is a very formidable obstacle at the present time in the path of unification. At all events the Government think that. For my own part I think it is very difficult indeed at the present moment to carry out any such scheme of unification as is advocated by the hon. Member for East Edinburgh (Mr. Hogge). If I were advocating unification now, I should go further than the hon. Member for East Edinburgh goes. I observe that he does not unify the Civil Liabilities Committee, of which I ant chairman—
§ Mr. HAYES FISHERI think not.
§ Mr. HAYES FISHERI do not see it.
§ Mr. HAYES FISHERWell, we will deal with it when it comes. I would unify everything, if only it could be done at the right time. I advocated unification when it was possible—when you had not set up your Statutory Committee, when two and a half years had not elapsed, and when you had not this difficult question of staff to deal with.
§ Mr. HAYES FISHERI would ask the Committee not to be in a hurry in this matter You may have the very best of machinery and yet you may have a very bad system of pensions. You may have very second-rate machinery and a very good system of pensions. What I have been anxious about—and I am as anxious as the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy (Sir H. Dalziel)—is to do what is really practical and best for the soldier and sailor. What we want is to get a better pension, more regularly paid, into his pocket. What we want to do is to do more for his training and more for his employment. I am inclined to think that there was a great deal in what was said by the right hon. Member for the Blackfriars Division of Glasgow (Mr. Barnes), who has done good work on the Statutory Committee, when he said that at the present time we are proceeding very far towards an infinitely better system of pensions than we have at the present time. The Committee ought to be very careful that it does not make confusion worse confounded by tearing up the whole arrangement of the Statutory Committee, and transferring all that is being done by the Statutory Committee to the Pensions Board. Before I could give my consent to a unified system of pensions at the present time, I should want to have a very satisfactory answer to a number of questions. I should, first of all, want to know whether you are quite sure that your local committees are going to act under and take their instructions from the Pensions Board.
§ Mr. HAYES FISHERHon. Members say "yes." Are you quite sure of it. I do I not feel quite sure of it. It is a very dif- 82 ferent hting to fit your local committees into a voluntary system than to fit them into an official system. The local committees are accustomed to their present master, the Statutory Committee. They have been set up by the Statutory Committee, under schemes framed by the Statutory Committee. They have their rules and regulations made by the Statutory Committee. They know that the Statutory Committee are volunteers, as they are. I am not at all sure that the Pensions Board, being a paid body, an official body, will have the same power over these local committees, and will be able to work them to the very full as the Statutory Committee can undoubtedly work them at the present time. I do not feel sure about it. and this is one of those things where we ought to feel sure before we tear up the Act constituting the Statutory Committee, and allow the Pensions Board, with am official system, to take its place. I want to make an appeal to hon. Members. When, years ago, I proposed that we should have one unified system of pensions, administered in one office by one Minister, I then attached to my ideal system of pensions this proviso, that you must have outside any official system some body—a. powerful body—which would be able to-appeal for voluntary funds and which ought to be able to use those funds for the-many eases of compassion to which anyone of us would give a pension or grant, but which were turned down and refused a pension or grant by the official body. If we merely adopt a unified system of pensions such as that sketched by the hon. Member for East Edinburgh, and by so doing abolish the Statutory Committee—because that is what you do—
§ Mr. HAYES FISHEROh, yes!
§ Mr. HAYES FISHERI say you certainly do. You abolish the Statutory Committee.
§ Sir H. CRAIKNo, we do not!
§ Mr. HAYES FISHERMy hon. Friend may argue as he likes. I am entitled to my opinion upon the matter. I have studied the Bill very carefully, and I say you do. I do not say you could not alter your Bill so that you could keep the Statutory Committee alive, but I do say that by this proposal you abolish that Committee. My point is that it is necessary, if you are going to have a merely official system, if 83 you are going to have all pensions, grants, and allowances, and all the questions of training and employment dealt with by officials, however sympathetic or humane they are, there always will be a great -category of cases which are not dealt with in the same humane and understanding way as they are now dealt with by a competent body such as the Statutory Committee. I will give an instance of that. Quite lately the Financial Secretary to the War Office and the Army Council have turned over to the Statutory Committee the duty of deciding in regard to forfeiture of pensions. That is a most important matter from the individual point of view. Over 20,000 cases of forfeiture have had to be decided during the last few months. Therefore, the Committee will understand what a very important question this is to the individual. Just imagine anybody getting a letter one morning to say that their pension, which they thought they had got for life, had been forfeited owing to some act of misconduct, or otherwise. That is a very serious thing. Since we have taken over this duty we have, to the best of our judgment, come to the conclusion that in very many of these cases the official answer was too arbitrary, and did not make sufficient allowance for the individual, and we have been able by different methods to so adapt the system as to make it a little more humane, a little more kind, and a little more forgiving towards the individual. I make no charge whatever against those who forfeit these pensions, and I make no charge against any official. All that the official has to do is to act strictly within the Regulations. I say in regard to this idea of a Pensions Board, with nobody but -officials deciding these very difficult questions, that I am perfectly certain there are a great many people who would get pensions or allowances from a body like the Statutory Committee who will fail to get those pensions or allowances from a body which consists wholly of officials and is bound by strict rules and regulations.
If the Committee in its wisdom thinks fit now to say that the Government should embark upon the course of unifying our pension system so that there shall be no outside body to supplement pensions, and no outside body to give pensions where no pensions are now given, out of State funds, then I do not feel sure, looking at the matter from the point of view of the soldier and the sailor, that we shall improve 84 the position so far as they are concerned. What I have always regarded as the great merit of this Bill—it is only a halfway house towards unification—is that you do get a quartette of people who are singularly sympathetic towards the soldier and sailor. When my right hon. Friend who is to be the new Pensions Minister assures the House, as he has done again and again, that directly the Pensions Board is appointed he will overhaul all the Royal Warrants and the Orders in Council with a view to remedying the grievances from which our soldiers, and, I think, sometimes our sailors, legitimately complain, and with a view-to putting the pensions upon a footing which I believe is generally desired by all Members of this House. I do say that a Bill which only does that is worth a great deal to the soldier and sailor. I want the Committee to understand quite clearly that I renounce none of the views I ever held. I wish it had been possible, and I think it may be possible hereafter, completely to unify our pensions system; but I do say, speaking for this Bill and the Government's attitude in regard to it, that it is a half-way house towards unification. It puts no obstacle in the way of further unification. The mere fact of setting up a Board of Pensions with a Pensions Minister at its head, and he a powerful member of the Cabinet, ensures for the soldier and sailor within the next few weeks that the whole of our Royal Warrants affecting this great question will be overhauled from top to bottom, and a much more generous system of pensions will be established in this country—a system of pensions which I believe all of us have been longing for for some time past.
This is my defence of the Bill. It is difficult—I do not say it is absolutely impossible—to establish a perfectly unified system of pensions at the present time. The Bill goes half-way towards that unification. I am not quite sure that it does not go a great deal more than half-way. Certainly it goes a very long way towards unification. It enables a complete overhauling of the Royal Warrants, and it ensures that we shall be able to carry out within a very few weeks what we all desire to do, and that is to scrap a great many of these old Warrants, and to put on a proper footing a very much better system than we have at the present time. If the Committee should unfortunately take the line that they would prefer to scrap this Bill, let me say that, knowing 85 this Bill as I do, it is not a Bill which is designed to be, or in Committee could be, so altered as to carry out the additions which I, personally, and I believe the Committee, have in view. To carry out the idea which my hon. Friend has in mind would necessitate a new Bill more complex in character, for which we might have to wait some time, considering the congestion of business in this House. My desire is the immediate welfare of the soldier and sailor and the immediate reform in our pensions system by allowing this Bill to go through, even though before very long hon. Members have at the back of their minds the intention to ask the Government to reconsider the question and to go still further in this matter.
Mr. HLAWI cannot speak, as could other Members who have addressed the Committee up to the present, in any way as an expert, for I speak neither as a Minister, who is bound to have great official knowledge of these matters, nor as a member of the Statutory Committee, or of any of the great local committees which are busily engaged in the actual administration of pensions. But my very simplicity in this matter may, perhaps, have a certain advantage, because those who are themselves deeply immersed in the actual working of schemes of this sort are almost necessarily, I think, brought to think too much of the details of machinery and of perhaps, I might say, the feelings of individual officials. I have been asking myself in this Debate, and in other debates dealing with this question, not how does it affect the tender feelings of the Parliamentary Secretary to the Admiralty; not whether somebody on the Statutory Committee will think me very rude if I do not seem to give full value to the excellent work which that Committee have done; not whether or not the present Minister for Pensions is sympathetic towards our disabled soldiers. To my mind, those things are, if not irrelevant, at least transitory and of very small importance. What I ask myself is, "What scheme is it which will enable the disabled soldier, or the dependants of the disabled soldier or sailor who has fallen, most easily and quickly to obtain that which the whole nation intends them to get?" From that point of view I would like to consider the Amendment. As I understand, we have been told by the Government that they resisted the Amendment only on these grounds. In the first place, that the 86 Statutory Committee has been a very short time at work, and that after nine or ten months it was very undesirable to pull this tender plant up by the roots; and, again, that the Admiralty was actuated by such tender feelings towards its sailors that it would be very unkind both to the right hon. Gentleman and perhaps to the sailors themselves to remove them from the fatherly care of that Department.
I think that the main reason for which the right hon. Gentleman who has just sat down asked us to vote for this Bill is that we have got four Ministers who were, he said, of all men in this House perhaps the most sympathetic towards our disabled men and their dependants. I am perfectly willing to accept that. I know of the work which the right hon. Gentleman the Pensions Minister has himself already done, and how kindly disposed is the Financial Secretary to the War Office, and that is equally true of the other two. What on earth is the relevance of that? Here we are considering a Bill, not to set up these four Gentlemen, but to establish, I will not say for all time, but it may be for many years to come, pensions affecting millions of men and women, and if we can only make the work straight now we shall not have to rip it up again. The right hon. Gentleman who has just sat down told us that there are, I will not say insuperable obstacles, but very great difficulties now which did not exist when he made the speech which has been referred to. What are those difficulties? He tells us of a great staff; that the problem has grown because we need more staff; and, again, that the problem has grown in complexity. If the problem has grown in complexity, that itself is a reason not for resisting this Amendment, but for simplification and for unity. He painted a picture of the local committees and their work and of applicants for pensions, helpless in a sort of naked world in which there are nothing but Government Departments. But under your Bill applicants have to go to the Government. You do not get away from a Government Department by leaving the Statutory Committee in existence. Does anybody suggest that if you succeeded in unifying the policy you will not have people underneath the Minister dealing with the actual executive work? Of course you will. Nobody knows that better than the right hon. Gentleman. For those reasons I myself and I believe my colleagues are whole-heartedly with the 87 right hon. Gentleman who moved the Amendment.
§ Sir C. HENRYI am certain that the hon. Member who has just sat down has expressed the views of the majority of the members of this Committee. I desire to congratulate my right hon. Friend the Secretary to the Local Government Board on his speech. It was a speech of ability, and I believe that no man in this House could have made out his case on better lines. My right hon. Friend the Member for Anglesey appealed to the Government not to put on the official Whips. Since his appeal my right hon. Friend the Paymaster-General and the President of the Local Government Board have listened to this Debate, and I am convinced that they will be acting very unwisely if they do not adopt the course recommended by my right hon. Friend. If we lose this Bill it is certain that neither soldiers' nor sailors* dependants will suffer. My right hon. Friend the Paymaster-General has said that whether this Bill is passed or not he will be able to deal with Royal Warrants by which increased pensions can be made to the soldiers' or sailors' dependants. That is not dependent upon this Bill.
Mr. HENDERSONI could not make that statement, because until I get the power from the Army Council I cannot deal with the Warrants.
§ Sir C. HENRYMy right hon. Friend will recognise that the power from the Army Council is not dependent upon whether this Bill comes into law or not.
Mr. HENDERSONUntil the new Department obtains the necessary power with regard to Royal Warrants we are in the hands of the Army Council.
§ Sir C. HENRYThen I say let the War Office and the Admiralty act. We want this Bill thoroughly understood. If we take the risk of throwing out this Bill no one can say that it prevents either soldier or sailor from receiving additional pensions. That should be perfectly understood. This Bill seeks to marry different Departments which deal with pensions. In my opinion that is divorce? before marriage. Take for instance the Admiralty. Under the existing Bill of 1915 the Admiralty is dealt with by the Statutory Committee. It divorces the Admiralty. Then what about your process of unification? The hon. Member for East Edinburgh (Mr. Hogge) referred 88 to service pensions. I consider that service pensions should continue to be dealt with by either of the Departments, the War Office or the Admiralty. Service pensions are deferred pay. They are not in the shape of pensions at all and do not come into this category. My right hon. Friend the Secretary to the Local Government Board laid special stress on the desirability of this Bill on account of the Minister whom we have to administer it. He will, however, recognise that the right hon. Gentleman will not always be the Paymaster-General and that other members who may form the Board may not have the knowledge of pensions that he has, and it will not be administered with the same knowledge as he possesses. No one knows how long a Minister in these days will be in his present position. After all, this is only a temporary Board; he must recognise that. If for no other reason I maintain that that Board cannot be looked upon as a satisfactory Board. I have an Amendment down on the Paper which practically scraps the Statutory Committee. I was not quite certain of my ground when I put down that Amendment, but after hearing the remarks of my right hon. Friend the Member for Blackfriars (Mr. Barnes) and the hon. Member for Glasgow and Aberdeen Universities (Sir H. Craik), I feel certain that those members of the Committee would rather see that Statutory Committee scrapped entirely than that it should be relegated to the duties which are placed upon it under the Bill. My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Middleton (Sir R. Adkins) gave the views of the Statutory Committee very half-hearted support. The duties which are proposed to be laid on the Statutory Committee are the duties of administering voluntary funds. They have also the duty of looking after aftercare.
§ 6.0 P.M.
§ Sir C. HENRYThat would be dealt with by the Board of Pensions—that is the supplementary. The pensions should be administered by the Board of Pensions, and not by the Statutory Committee. Am I right or am I wrong in saying that I believe the Statutory Committee will only have the administration of voluntary contributions? I am sorry to think that voluntary contributions may not be very substantial. There are Amendments to scrap the Statutory Committee—
The DEPUTY-CHAIRMANI would point out that the hon. Member, in dealing with the general question, is going too much into detail.
§ Sir C. HENRYI will not further pursue that point, and in conclusion I trust that the Government will not persist in the course they are following, but that they will accept the Amendment of the hon. Member for East Edinburgh, which embodies our views of unification and co-ordination of the system of pensions I believe would not only meet the wish of this House, but the wish of the country.
Mr. RUTHERFORDI think we ought to approach this subject not as politicians, not as either for or against the Government, but as business men dealing with a business proposition. It is not a political question that we are dealing with; it is a serious matter of business affecting hundreds and thousands of our wounded, as well as widows and orphans. I do not support this Amendment out of any hostility to the Paymaster-General; nor do I approach it out of any hostility to the Parliamentary Secretary to the Admiralty or to the Financial Secretary to the War Office, both being perhaps the very best Parliamentary Secretaries we ever had. The amount of work which they have done and have to do is perfectly stupendous, and the way in which they have attended to it commands the admiration of all sections of this House. Having said this, I wish to address myself to the purport of the Amendment, which is that we ought to unify and consolidate the administration of pensions—a most important subject. What are we to get out of the Bill? We are to get out of it a Board of four members, representing different Departments of the Government. We object to that very strongly. We would prefer that the Parliamentary Secretary to the Admiralty and the Financial Secretary to the War Office should be left to continue the work of their Departments—which, some of us think, wants looking after very badly. We have only got to mention, for instance, the word "Roumania," heard this afternoon —[HON. MEMBERS: "Order, order!"] I say that we would prefer the Parliamentary Secretaries of these two Departments to continue their work, which is so important that it should be done wholeheartedly.
What are we to have under this Bill? The Paymaster-General is to have a third office. He is Paymaster-General and 90 Labour Adviser to the Government; he is now going to take up this matter of pensions. We do not want a half-timer in charge of these pensions and allowances. We are going to get about a third of the right hon. Gentleman's time, and about 1 per cent. of the time of the other members of the Board. The whole business instinct of the House of Commons objects to this kind of muddle and mess. We want the whole thing unified and co-ordinated and that, as I understand it, is the object of the Amendment. The Parliamentary Secretary to the Local Government Board told us quite frankly that we were in a very difficult position in this matter, and he mentioned, as an illustration, that 20,000 cases of forfeited pensions had been referred from the different Departments to the Statutory Committee —work, by the way, which had nothing to do with their original appointment. The mere mention of a fact of that nature, that there are 20,000 such cases to be dealt with, surely can be cited in support of our claim that the administration of these pensions should be on a unified and co-ordinated system, under one head. The right hon. Gentleman who replied on the Amendment on. behalf of the Government said that the effect of passing this Amendment would be that the Statutory Committee would be swept away—it would cease to exist. That argument has been repeated by all those who have supported the Government in any shape to-day. The object of the Amendment is not to sweep away the Statutory Committee; we do not want to do that. There are 2,000 clerks at present engaged on the work; the last figure given was 2,500, but perhaps the whole of them are not necessary, if we had the entire business properly unified and co-ordinated as proposed by this Amendment, and it could be carried out under one head who would be responsible for it. That is the object we want to attain, and under such a system the one person at its head would be responsible to Parliament.
As a matter of business, pure business, submit that is a practical proposition. No firm in the City of London would dream of tackling a subject of this kind excepting it was put under one responsible head. The Parliamentary Secretary to the Local Government Board admitted that this was an ideal system, but he blamed the House, and said that it was the House's fault that they had gone wrong some little time ago, that they had 91 taken the wrong step. I would remind hon. Members that we are only at the beginning of this pensions matter, and that in America pensions arising out of the Civil War, now so many years ago, are still going on. How many years will this Pensions Board have to continue their work none of us can tell—at least sixty years. Is it not necessary, whatever mistakes may have been made in the past, at all events to take a step in the right direction now, and to see that the muddle and mess is not perpetuated, and that it is put an end to as quickly as possible. The Parliamentary Secretary to the Local Government Board told us the other day that some millions of letters have had to be written by one or other of the Departments. That I can readily understand from my own personal experience. I represent an artisan constituency in Liverpool, and a great many of the men have been wounded at the front, and a number of them have been killed. I have received many letters, and I can only say that the amount of correspondence one has to deal with, even in so small an area as that to which I refer, is overwhelming. I have found that in almost every case these people have been sent from pillar to post, from one Department to the other, and in several cases extra money which they should have obtained they did not get because they did not know, and I did not know, that they could get it.
When you consider that the Regulations the Statutory Committee have issued as to these pensions occupy over 100 pages of close print, indicating the way in which they are going to deal with one of the six Departments on this subject, it becomes perfectly plain that the whole administration of pensions urgently calls for co-ordination and for unification. This great War in which we are engaged is an argument in support of my contention that unification and co-ordination are as essential to the administration of pensions as they are in other matters. To what do you ascribe the great successes which our enemy has had? Simply to the fact that the organisation of his forces and what he has been able to do has all been done under one head. I am convinced that unless this Committee can see its way to adopt the businesslike suggestion of co-ordination and unification there is very great trouble ahead. The muddle and mess which we have at present is simply appalling. I admit to the full the courtesy 92 and consideration extended to me, and to-those on whose behalf I have made communications, by the Financial Secretary to the War Office. No one could have been more courteous than he, and nothing could have been more speedy in any of the Departments during the last four or five weeks than the way in which the matters-in which we are interested have been conducted by the hon. Gentleman, though some of those matters were not within his Department. What we want in behalf of our soldiers and sailors, and in behalf of widows and orphans, is a business man, and we business men have come here this afternoon to plead for absolute unity and co-ordination of administration, so that we may have one Minister responsible in this House for the whole of the work connected with pensions. We want one head to take under his control the whole of the different branches and organisations—and there are six of them—which are at present dealing with this subject. We want somebody responsible for the Statutory Committee—it is only an accident that two Members of this House are upon it—and we want somebody responsible for every department of this exceedingly complicated, difficult, and important subject.
§ Sir GEORGE TOULMINI think this discussion will give the right hon. Gentleman the Paymaster-General a very valuable indication of the feeling of the House. Judging even from the speech of the Parliamentary Secretary to the Local Government Board, the new Board, so far as it is constituted, is possibly willing to-be pushed on rather than to have the proposals cut down. As far as I have been able to judge from the utterances of the various hon. and right hon. Gentlemen who have spoken, three out of four are in favour of the Amendment. The Parliamentary Secretary to the Local Government Board confesses that he is in favour of unification, but he says not to-day, and. he. tells us that the Paymaster-General hopes to carry unification forward some time in May or June next. I wish to know is that to be done under this Bill. If it is in prospect, why not take power under this Bill to do it? Confessedly, this Bill is a half-measure, and the House does not want half-measures at present. We have been told that the House is responsible for the position, which is admittedly a position of confusion. If that is so, the House will take the responsibility for the position, and will also take the responsibility at the present 93 moment of endeavouring to cure that confusion now. It is most necessary that we should endeavour to get on the right lines at once. And is not it a question of exercising the judgment of the House after it has had further experience, which should be left to the House? I wish to know from the Paymaster-General whether the House is really being consulted on this Bill, or is it a Bill which is presented to us as a question of confidence as to whether we accept it as it stands or not? There are many subjects on which the naval and military experts frown upon us, and possibly very properly so, and that they are quite right in doing so. I never offered to give my opinion either on Roumania or on the Channel question, but this is a civil matter and ought entirely to be within the competence of the House.
There is an outstanding demand to unify and simplify the whole of our pensions system, and the demand is that there shall be a Minister who shall be supreme in all sections in policy. That does not mean that the Minister when he takes command shall scrap every bit of machinery which already exists to perform the duties. I cannot imagine my right hon. Friend being so foolish as to sweep away all those who are engaged in doing this work now and to divorce every man of experience from the duties which he is now supervising. The hon. Member for Middleton (Sir B. Adkins) referred to the voluntary work of the Statutory Committee. The value of their work, I believe, will be recognised when it is known. We do not know, I think, the value of a great deal of the work done by the Statutory Committee, but that Committee, as I understood the hon. Member, are quite willing loyally to accept the decision of this House. Personally I cannot see that there will be any difficulty in the Statutory Committee continuing as an organism not independent but exercising its powers under the control of a Minister. It need not, as I look upon the matter, be abolished, but I wish to ask, Is the Statutory Committee beyond the influence of this House at the present moment? Do the House understand that it is so? If it is, then we desire there should be a Minister to exercise that control. If it is under our influence we desire that the control of this House should be in the hands of a definite person who can exercise that control. If the Statutory Committee is not now under the control of the House I am quite sure that the House would desire that it should 94 be under the control of the House. If the Paymaster-General will only look at it in. this light this Amendment is really a vote of confidence in him. He appears in rather protean character here: He is a very influential Cabinet Minister; he is Labour Adviser; and he is the prospective Pensions Minister. Personally I see no incompatibility in the Labour Adviser performing also the duties of Pensions Minister, and no doubt in that capacity he gets some very valuable information which. would be very useful in what will be one part, I hope, of his duties.
My. hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh (Mr. Hogge) mentioned nine points. I think there is a tenth point in the Amendment which has been put down to insert a Clause with reference to local committees under the Pensions Board. Under that Amendment there would be two sets of local committees responsible to three bodies. I think that is putting local committees in a very unsatisfactory position. The local committee is really the cutting edge of the machinery of this Bill or of any machinery of this kind which you may set up I do not think any one could exaggerate the value of the work which they will have to do. The Statutory Committee may or may not have to set up one of these committees. If they have, then that committee has to do the work of the Pensions Board. If they have not, the Pensions Board has to set up a committee. The Parliamentary Secretary to the Local Government Board is not sure that the local committees will accept the Pensions Board in the same way as they have accepted the Statutory Committee, yet he is actually incorporating them under this Bill. I consider that the local committee is the strongest argument for unification. It is the work of those committees which makes it necessary that for each family there shall be-one record. Whether the case has been before the Civil Liabilities Committee or whether it is a question of disablement or-a question of a widow and dependants, there should be in the locality only one dossier, and there should only be one place for that dossier in London, in order to-avoid waste of effort in duplicate inquiries. This Amendment aims at unity and equality and justice, without which I am quite sure the public will not be satisfied.
§ Mr. HOHLERI have listened to the argument, and I understood the right hon. Gentleman to say that he desired to 95 consult Members as to this Bill. If that is so, I do not see why he should not be? willing to accept this Amendment, as it is clear that members of the Committee are in favour of it. The Paymaster-General said that this not an appropriate occasion for the Amendment, and I gather that he tells us that our history in regard to pension legislation in the past has been a failure, and yet in substance he says, "continue the failure." I cannot agree with that argument. This Bill is really an immense departure on, the question of pensions, and for this reason. We know that the pensions of soldiers and sailors depend upon Royal Warrant, but under this Bill you are going to frame a Royal Warrant to provide supplemental pensions, which is a wholly new departure. The Naval and Military Pensions Act of]915 was purely a voluntary Act. There was not a brass farthing in it except salaries for the Chairman and Secretary. We ask now to have direct control with the Minister and Secretary responsible to this House, and responsible for the pensions and supplemental pensions. If the House finds the Warrants are defective, they can call attention to them and get them altered. I think this is the only occasion on which we can raise this point. This is a question in which I take a great interest. I opposed the first Bill for all I was worth along with others, and we did our best to wreck it, because there was no money in it. What happened was that the Chancellor of the Exchequer promised a million of money. But even on Third Reading it was a question whether the Bill would go through, for nobody was really interested in it, as they were not alive to the importance of this question. We were then told, "if you do not have this Bill you will have nothing at all," and, rather than that those men should not get the million which was an initial step, I supported the Bill, which went through. That was done only to catch the million, and it was not that I liked the Bill, which was a hateful Bill, and a Bill whose meanness was beyond words, since it only dealt with the contributions on the charitable public.
I am satisfied that the Parliamentary Secretary to the Local Government Board is heart and soul against this compromise. We ought, I think, to have a Pensions Minister from the first, and there is no doubt about it that we will get that. The Parliamentary Secretary says that he 96 doubts whether the local committees will deal with the Pensions Minister. If the money comes from the Crown it is what they love, and I will tell you why. Some of the local committees refused to work the voluntary Naval and Military Pensions Act of 1915, because they said that you were going to get hold of their private funds received from private benevolence to pay a debt the country owes, and that they would not have it. The Corporation of Birmingham, for instance, absolutely refused to work the Bill until the Chancellor of the Exchequer came down and gave the money. We then had a statement from the Chancellor. We are now told that existing councils, urban or borough corporations, will not work the Bill. Let me remind hon. Members that there is the voice of the elector, and if the present councillors and mayors will not work the Bill we will get somebody through the electors who will do so. I am quite sure that all these local bodies will have great pleasure in doing the work and a pleasure all the greater when the country is paying for it. Do not let us destroy this Bill when everybody is agreed we ought to have it. We want it in appropriate form and the Government have asked us to advise them on it. I have risen simply to voice what is not only the feeling of this House but of the country at large that this matter ought to be put in order at once.
Mr. HENDERSONOn a point of Order, Mr. Chairman. I have had a question put to me as to whether the Government Whips would be kept off in connection with this Amendment. I do not like that method of dealing with a question. If, as I am convinced, the majority of the House, so far as all indications go this afternoon, favour the principle of the Amendment, I am rather disposed to accept it without troubling the Committee to go to a Division. I want, however, to be quite clear on the very important question of procedure. I want to ask you, Sir, whether, in the event of my accepting this Amendment on behalf of the Government, you think it would be possible afterwards for me to move to report Progress in order that the Government might have an opportunity of putting down its own Amendments to give effect to what it conceives to be the desire of the House for a fuller scheme of unification? I want it to be clearly understood, in accepting that position, that I do not undertake to put into the Bill all the suggestions that have 97 been made. I am prepared to go a long way, but I think the Government are really convinced on one point—that is, that the question of service pensions ought to remain where it is, seeing it is linked up with the question of discipline. If that is clearly understood, I am quite prepared to ask my colleagues to go a long way with me in what I really recognise is clearly the view of the House. I would therefore ask your ruling as to the Government being able to put down Amendments, as I should very much regret having to lose time with the Bill.
§ The CHAIRMANIt is difficult, of course, for me to give any ruling on Amendments that I have not seen, but I think I may say, broadly, that it does seem to me that it will be quite possible to introduce Amendments such as have been indicated in this afternoon's discussion, whether in the form of some of those on the Paper or in other form, broadly speaking, to carry out what appears to be the general view of the Committee. The right hon. Gentleman will understand that I am not committing myself to any particular Amendments until I see them. I think, however, that I should be taking a pedantic view if I ruled subsequently that it was not within the competence of the Committee to carry out in specific terms what has been indicated in respect to the Amendment now before us.
Mr. HENDERSONOn that understanding I am prepared to accept the Amendment before the Committee, and then I shall immediately move to report Progress.
§ Amendment agreed to.
Mr. HENDERSONI beg to move, "That the Chairman do report Progress and ask leave to sit again."
I do so for the purpose, as I have stated, of putting down Amendments. I hope next time the Committee meet that the Amendments will be such as will be acceptable, and that we will get the scheme that has been hinted at in the speeches. We are all agreed as to the object. That is one of the things which encourages me in moving to report Progress, for I believe it will be possible after to-day's Debate, to put forward Amendments which will give effect to a much more comprehensive scheme.
Mr. M. BARLOWI would like to ask one question that clearly follows from the considerable and very gratifying concession on the part of the Government. In order to make it widely effective, might I ask that the Amendments, which appear to recast the Bill entirely, should be put down so that we shall have plenty of time to consider them. I would also suggest that, if possible, the Bill should be reprinted, showing what the Government are going to do.
Sir H. DALZIELI think the Government have really taken the right course in this matter. I am sure that it is the general view of the House that it would have been a very great misfortune for them to have suffered defeat in the Lobbies at a moment like this. Apart from that I think they have taken the right step in order to improve the Bill. As I understand the statement of the Pensions Minister, the Government are going to take a cue from this Amendment for the whole of this Bill. Therefore we need not look forward to controversies on the Bill and as to whether or not the Navy is to be brought in. I take it that is practically settled to-day. Everything is settled now except the service to which my right hon. Friend alluded. That, of course, is for the decision of the House. Therefore, I take it that the Bill will not require much consideration when it comes back to us. I hope the Government will not bring it back until they have fully considered it, so that it may be passed practically as an unopposed measure.
Mr. HENDERSONIn reply to the question of the hon. Member (Mr. Barlow) I think it will be possible to take the Committee stage on Thursday. I do not want to lose time if it can be avoided.
Mr. BARLOWIn that case it will be desirable to have the Amendments on Wednesday morning at the latest?
Mr. HENDERSONI see the reasonableness of the question, and I will see if it is possible to get the Amendments by Wednesday morning.
§ Colonel Sir H. GREENWOODI should like to emphasise a question put by my right hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy, and I want to put a question or two. Does the Paymaster-General promise to put into the new Bill the spirit of the Committee, namely, for unification to include the Admiralty; and, secondly, I hope the Paymaster-General will make it 99 clear to the Government that at any rate certain Members of this House will not obey any party Whip nor be intimidated in any way upon this question.
§ The CHAIRMANWe are on a Motion to report Progress.
§ Colonel Sir H. GREENWOODI am sorry.
§ The CHAIRMANI have already indicated that it will be competent for the Government, or for any hon. Member, to raise the point of the inclusion of the Navy, if the foreshadowed Amendments of the Government do not cover the point.
§ Mr. DILLONI want to ask a question entirely relevant to this Motion to report Progress. That is to say, can the Government give us any information as to the business that will be taken to-morrow, and also give us some assurance that in arranging the business we shall not waste more than half the time of even the three days on which we are permitted to sit during the War? I may point out to the Patronage Secretary that since we commenced the Session we have only been sitting three days a week, and on those three days we generally adjourn before dinner for lack of something to do. We are now getting towards Christmas, and many of us are very anxious to get home. We would be able to finish the whole business of the House by next week if there had been a rational method of putting it down. I would be very obliged to the Patronage Secretary if he could tell us now what business will be taken tomorrow in place of this Bill.
§ Mr. GULLAND (Joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury)In reply to the hon. Member may I say that it is not the fault of the Government that this day has not been fully utilised, for the Government had put on the Paper what appeared to be a full day's work. It was further stated that if the Committee stage of this Bill was not concluded to-night, it would be continued to-morrow. The circumstances, however, have altered, and therefore we have to readjust the business. The only other Order for to-day is No 5, the Report of the Government War Obligations, in order that the Bill may be introduced.
To-morrow, we shall take as the first Order the Registration of Business Names Bill [Lords], as amended, the Local Government Emergency Provisions (No. 2) Bill, 100 Committee stage, and the Second Reading of the Sailors and Soldiers (Gifts for Land Settlement) Bill. I do not see any other Orders on the Paper to-day that we can. take to-morrow, but I think that those I have mentioned we certainly shall take.
Mr. GRIFFITHI quite agree with the Patronage Secretary. I cannot find any fault with the Government in this matter. It is their misfortune. In regard to this particular Bill I hope the Paymaster-General will be able to put down the Amendments of the Government on such a day, and in such a form, that it will be possible for us to have the opportunity of putting down Amendments to the Government Amendments before the discussion comes on.
§ Sir NORVAL HELMEUnder the circumstances, if the Government will, at the beginning of next week, give us the time arranged for this Bill to be considered in Committee we shall have time to deal with it.
Mr. BARLOWWould the Government undertake to give us at least twenty-four clear hours before they bring on the discussion after the Amendments have been circulated?
§ Colonel YATEI would like to ask the right hon. Gentleman in charge of the Bill one question, and that is whether the Government Amendments he will bring in will or will not lay down definitely that we are to have a full-time Pensions Minister?
§ The CHAIRMANThat is a matter that does not arise on the Motion to report Progress.
§ Sir G. TOULMINMay I put the suggestion to the Paymaster-General that as soon as the Amendments are decided upon they should be issued as a White Paper? This can be done more rapidly than if they had to wait, perhaps, for the Amendments to be handed in at the Table here. By this means we would get to know as soon as possible what they are, and possibly save a day.
Mr. HENDERSONI will take that suggestion into consideration, and I assure the Committee that if the Amendments are not circulated -on Wednesday, the Committee stage will not be taken on Thursday.
§ Question put, and agreed to.
§ Committee report Progress; to sit again to-morrow (Tuesday).