§ (1) Notwithstanding anything in any Act, a Member of the Commons House of Parliament shall not vacate his seat by reason only of his acceptance of an office of profit if that office is all office the holder of which is capable of being elected to, or sitting or voting in, that House: Provided that such acceptance has taken place less than nine months from the declaration of the polls at a General Election:
§ Provided that this Section shall not apply to the acceptance of any office mentioned in the Schedule to this Act, nor shall it affect the provisions of any Act imposing a limit on the number of Secretaries or Under-Secretaries of State who may sit and vote in the Commons House of Parliament.
§ (2) This Section shall be deemed to have had effect as from the first day of January, nineteen hundred and nineteen.
§ The ATTORNEY-GENERAL (Sir Gordon Hewart)I beg to move to leave out the words "Provided that" ["Provided that such"], and to insert instead thereof the words "and if."
§ This Amendment makes no change in substance, but makes the Clause somewhat clearer.
§ Amendment agreed to.
§ Sir G. HEWARTI beg to move to leave out the words
less than nine months from the declaration of the polls at a General Election,and to insert instead thereof the wordswithin nine months after the issue of a Proclamation summoning a new Parliament."Less than nine months" is a somewhat awkward way of saying "within nine 1310 months." "Less than nine months from" does not say whether the nine months are to be calculated before or after. The intention of the House is that they should be calculated after, and after only. The date from which the period was to be calculated was the date of the declaration of the polls at a General Election. Unfortunately, that will not be in future a day certain. It is quite true that at the recent election, because of the difficulty arising in connection with absent soldiers, the votes were all counted on one day and the declaration of the polls took place on one day. That will not be so hereafter. Hereafter the polls will take place on one and the same day, and the declaration of the polls will take place as soon as practicable after that. They will not take place on the one day. For example, the declaration in the case of the Orkney and Shetland Islands will take place on a different day from that on which the declaration in English boroughs or counties takes place. The effect of this Amendment will be that the period will be calculated from a certain day, the date of the issue of a Proclamation summoning a new Parliament. The effect is slightly to diminish the period of nine months.
§ Amendment agreed to.
§ Sir G. HEWARTI beg to move, at the end, to add as a new Sub-section,
Where by virtue of this Section a Member of the Commons House of Parliament does not vacate his seat by reason of his acceptance of any of the offices mentioned in Schedule H of the Representation of the People Act, 1867, and Schedule H of the Representation of the People (Scotland) Act, 1868, and Schedule E of the Representation of the People (Ireland) Act, 1868, as amended by any subsequent enactment, he shall, for the purposes of Section 52, Section 51 and Section 11 of those Acts respectively, be treated as if he had been returned as a Member to serve in Parliament since the acceptance by him of such office.The object of this Sub-section is to prevent what I am quite satisfied was never the intention of the House, the requirement of Ministers to submit themselves for re-election, if they had accepted office before election and afterwards accepted another office, as to which it was provided by the Representation of the People Act, 1867,and the corresponding Scottish and Irish Acts that Ministers may thereafter without further re-election pass from one office to another. I am quite certain that it was never the intention of the House when it inserted this time limit to place Ministers to whom 1311 these Acts refer in a worse position than that in which they were already under the existing law. Therefore I propose to insert this consequential Sub-section in the Bill. It happens that a similar Subsection was inserted in the Re-election of Ministers Act, 1916. It is a consequential Amendment designed to give effect to what I am quite satisfied was the intention of the House.
§ Major O'NEILLI do not know if I should be in order in saying a few words on the question of the reduction of the period to nine months from a General Election.
§ Amendment agreed to.