POLICE MAGISTRATES SUPERANNUATION (AMENDMENT) [CONSOLIDATED FUND]. (Hansard, 21 March 1929)

The UNDER-SECRETARY of STATE for the HOME DEPARTMENT (Lieut.-Colonel Sir Vivian Henderson)
The object of this Financial Resolution, on which the Bill will be founded, is to try to fix the pension scale of Metropolitan police magistrates on a basis which will be a more appropriate to the fact that they are not appointed until they reach an age which, on the average, is about 52. At present, the Metropolitan police magistrates are entitled under various Acts, one of them dating back to 1859, to retire on attaining the age of 60 on a pension calculated at 15/60ths at the end of five years, and rising thereafter by sixtieths, so that at the end of 30 years' service they are entitled to a maximum pension of two-thirds of their salary. The Committee will realise that, as they cannot obtain their maximum pension until after 30 years of service, and as the age of compulsory retirement is 70 and the average age of appointment is 52, the 1968 average time that a magistrate serves towards his pension is only 18 years, which entitles him to less than half-pay. On the other hand, a county court judge can earn his maximum pension after 15 years' service. I think that most hon. Members of the House, and particularly the hon. Member for Edge Hill (Mr. Hayes), who are acquainted with the work of the Metropolitan police magistrates, will know the very valuable work that they do—often very difficult work, done under difficult circumstances—and the very high esteem and affection in which they are held by the public in London.

§ Mr. MAXTON
And by the criminal population!

§ Sir V. HENDERSON
Even that is a compliment. I think that the prospect of being compelled to retire on a pension which is really not the pension that they were intended to receive is not conducive to efficient work, and is not fair to the magistrates themselves. The Committee will also, perhaps, appreciate the difficulty of the situation when I tell them that no fewer than 10 magistrates appointed between the years 1907 and 1922 have died while actually in office, and that their average period of office was only between seven and eight years.

§ Mr. KELLY
Does not previous service in another capacity count?

§ Sir V. HENDERSON
No, Sir. It is proposed in this Resolution that there shall be an annual increase of pension from the eleventh year onwards, rising by 2–60ths annually instead of 1–60th, so that they will be entitled to their maximum pension after 20 years' service instead of after 30 years, which will enable the magistrate appointed under normal circumstances to obtain his maximum pension before he retires.

§ Mr. BUCHANAN
Can the hon. and gallant Gentleman tell us what the salary is?

§ Sir V. HENDERSON
It is £1,500 a year. It is not proposed to alter the age for compulsory retirement, which is 70, but, in view of the improved pension scale, it is proposed that, in the case of magistrates appointed after the 1st January, 1929, the age for voluntary retirement should be extended from 60, as 1969 it is at present, to 65. So far as the cost to the Treasury is concerned, it falls on the Consolidation Fund, and to begin with, there will be a decrease in cost owing to the fact that we are raising the age for voluntary retirement. Eventually the additional cost to the Treasury will be about £1,500 a year, but that will not come into full force for a good many years to come.

§ Mr. T. SHAW
After having heard the explanation of the Under-Secretary, I think I can advise my friends behind me not to contest this Resolution, because the Bill will have to be presented, and anything that we have to say in the way of criticism, or any action that we need take in the way of voting, can be deferred until we see the actual Bill itself. It would be premature to vote against the Resolution until we know exactly what it amounts to in the shape of a Bill. When we see the Bill, we shall be better able to judge whether it is worthy of support, of criticism, or of an adverse; vote. Consequently, I advise my friends not to take the matter any further now, but simply to let the Resolution go through on the understanding that our full rights of criticism and action will be reserved to us when the Bill is presented.

§ Mr. MAXTON
I agree that my right hon. Friend is probably doing the correct thing in reserving the rights of the Opposition to a further stage of this matter, but I think it would not be out of place for a back-bencher to make a few observations on the position. I have remarked before on the indecent haste with which the Conservative Government are rushing into the House with proposals to put largesse into the hands of persons who are in a fairly comfortable position in society. I have had to call attention to their action with reference to retired diplomats, and others of my hon. Friends have referred to the question of Colonial Governors. There was also the question of the Southern loyalists, and now this is piling on another one. The hon. Gentleman, in reply to an interrogation, said the salary of these persons was £1,500 a year. I have worked out a simple sum in arithmetic, and I find that £1,500 will pay an old-age pensioner's pension for 57 years. The average member of the working class, a skilled engineer or a house-builder, or a worker in the textile trades, 1970 if he could count on a secure annual salary of £300 a year would think he was in paradise.
I want my hon. Friends to know that, while we were discussing problems affecting unemployed, men and women, whose allowance is 17s. for fully-grown men, the total strength of the great Conservative party was three. The Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury has come in since then, and has presumably brought some of the more faithful sheep along with him. There are not many now, but there were only three, all on the Front Bench, for an hour and a half while the problems of the Ministry of Labour were being discussed. Now they have swollen to about 400 per cent. over that position. They are now 12, because the question under discussion is the superannuation of police magistrates with a salary of £1,500 a year. [An HON. MEMBER: "Less Income Tax!"] Yes, but remember the wages I was talking about and the old age pension are less Tea Tax, Sugar Tax and Tobacco Tax, and there is more left out of £1,500 after Income Tax is deducted than out of 10s. after Tea, Sugar and Tobacco Tax are deducted. The argument for making special concessions here is that these men only start at the average age of 52. As far as I know, there is no special reason why we should appoint elderly men to these jobs.

§ Sir V. HENDERSON
A stipendiary magistrate cannot he appointed unless he is a qualified barrister of, I think, five or seven years' standing.

§ Mr. MAXTON
That is quite legitamate. That puts the age for starting at about 26 or 27. A man can be called to the Bar when he is 21, and five years of experience after that only makes him 26. What has he been doing—wasting his time leading a riotous life, till 52, and then he becomes a stipendiary magistrate in his old age, and says, "Employ me and pay me £1,500 a year on this job." [AN HON. MEMBER: "Less Income Tax!"] The Tory party has absolutely no idea in its mind beyond Income Tax. Its whole conception of government and statesmanship revolves round that. I am here representing the workers, a big proportion of whom, if they ever paid Income Tax, have ceased to pay it under the Tory Government's administration. When the Government came into office, 1971 there was a fair proportion of manual workers paying Income Tax. Practically none of them have an income high enough to enable the State to call upon them to pay tax. I ask hon. Members opposite to examine their wage statistics.

The DEPUTY-CHAIRMAN
I must ask the hon. Member to keep this digression from the point a little shorter.

§ Mr. MAXTON
I accept your Ruling, Sir, but I think you will agree with me that an interruption from the Front Bench calls for a greater digression than from a mere back bencher. This magistrate takes on this job at 52 years of age and he is only entitled to a five-sixteenth pension at the beginning.

§ Sir V. HENDERSON
After five years' service.

§ Mr. MAXTON
He is entitled to a quarter of his salary after five years' service. When the diplomats' pensions were brought in, the justification for singling that lot out for special treatment was that their position was anomalous. I am suggesting that you are creating an anomalous position here. The ordinary standard position for the pensioning of the public services is that forty-eightieths is the proportion for a man after 40 years' service. He starts with nothing, and he has to serve 40 years before he becomes entitled to a pension. Here you are entitling a man to pension after five years, for only a quarter of his salary I admit, but a quarter of £1,500 is a lot of money—some £375. At the expiry of 10 years more, he is to be entitled to two-thirds of £1,500—£1,000 a year. That is after only about 15 years of public service in a job which is not onerous.

§ Sir V. HENDERSON
The hon. Gentleman is quite inaccurate in that statement, and it shows the wisdom of what the right hon. Gentleman said. We are not saying that a magistrate can retire after five years because he becomes entitled to a pension on the basis of 15/60ths after five years' service. He cannot retire. There is a minimum age for retirement for all services, and it is not after five years' service in this case. I think that in this case the minimum age is 60. I am speaking from memory, as I have not the details in front of me.

§ Mr. MAXTON
I do not want, with insufficient information, to detain the Committee in discussing points, and I do not want to be unfair to the men concerned, but I certainly want to raise now a line of criticism that I propose to continue at a later stage. In the interval I shall take the trouble to inform myself very accurately about the position. I know in every other branch of the public service that if a public employé who is entitled to pension has had two or three years of service, has to withdraw from the service or the account of ill-health—

§ Sir V. HENDERSON
That is another matter.

§ Mr. MAXTON
I shall want to know, when this matter becomes the subject of discussion, at what age these men become liable to breakdown pensions? My major criticism is that there are huge proportions of the population of this country suffering from serious privation at the present time. The Government, after a full 4½ years of power, have made absolutely no impression upon reducing that privation in any direction whatever. In most directions the privation has been intensified. They have been unwilling or unable to relieve the burden of the suffering masses. They are going to the country very shortly. They are not expecting to be returned to Office. [An HON. MEMBER: "Oh!"] It is no good one Back Bencher trying to interrupt.

The DEPUTY-CHAIRMAN
This digression is not in order.

§ Mr. MAXTON
It is a pity that this is the last Conservative Government, because I am sure the hon. Gentleman would be included in the next Conservative Government. There are a lot of things to be cleared up. They are going out. There are only a few weeks left of effective office, and I would ask them to consider whether they cannot withdraw this proposal altogether, and whether what spare money they have in the coffers and what spare intelligence they have in the Cabinet could not be directed towards relieving the wants of those suffering far more than those who, I am perfectly certain, are going to be pretty well off.

§ Mr. SCRYMGEOUR
I want to speak on the main line of argument which has 1973 been taken up by my hon. Friend the Member for Bridgeton (Mr. Maxton) We have before now taken exception to the Government adopting this plan of adjusting anomalies concerning pensions appertaining to those who are in a remarkably well established financial position. My view is that as the Government have time to take matters of this kind in hand, there is very good reason for maintaining that they ought to tackle an adjustment of the outstanding anomalies under the Widows' and Orphans' Contributory Pensions Act. This matter has been urged upon the Government on several occasions. There is not the slightest attempt on the part of the Government to tackle this remarkable Measure, which leaves out so many of the widows and even discontinues pensions in regard to many of those who had already been receiving them. The Government intend to produce a Measure in regard to the pensions of magistrates which will be in striking contrast to their attitude towards many widows in the country who are expressing grave dissatisfaction with the attitude of the Government. The whole trend of the Tory Government regarding pensions is to provide substantial pensions for those who are least in need of them. The proposals which have already gone through have given grave dissatisfaction to multitudes of our people. My view is that the first thing to be done should be to adjust the anomalies affecting those who are most in need of pensions.

§ Lieut.-Commander KENWORTHY
I want to ask two questions about the Motion concerning these magistrates. First of all, is this a whole-time job, and, secondly, can a magistrate for his own private purposes alter the times of the sittings of his court? Can he say: "Instead of meeting at 11 o'clock to-morrow we will meet at 1 o'clock," and so put everyone to inconvenience. The hon. and gallant Gentleman will know why I ask this presently. What redress is there if that kind of thing is done? Is the discipline of these learned gentlement under the Home Secretary or is it under the Lord Chief Justic or the Lord Chancellor?

The DEPUTY-CHAIRMAN
I think that the hon. and gallant Member is asking questions which I cannot allow 1974 to be answered on this particular Motion.

§ Lieut.-Commander KENWORTHY
I thing that my first two questions are in order—first, whether it is a whole-time job, and, secondly, whether the recognised hours of the courts are to be kept;

The DEPUTY-CHAIRMAN
Questions relating to procedure in Court cannot be raised on this Motion.

§ Lieut.-Commander KENWORTHY
I am not making a criticism of judicial functions. I think that on a question of superannuation I am entitled to ask those two questions, but I do not propose to ask the third question.

§ Sir V. HENDERSON
The answer to the question of the hon. and gallant Member for Hull (Lieut.-Commander Kenworthy) is that it is a whole-time job. If I may correct a statement, which was not quite accurate, in the course of an interruption of an hon. Member on the back bench, the age at present below which a magistrate cannot retire is 60. We propose to raise it to a minimum of 65, so that he could not become qualified for a pension even if he wished to until he was 65. The question of breakdown is another matter altogether. I do not think this Bill touches the question of retirement on medical certificate. It does not affect the normal position, which is a minimum of 10 years, I think. It is outside the provisions of the Bill altogether.

§ Lieut.-Commander KENWORTHY
Will the hon. and gallant Gentleman reply as to the fixed hour for sittings of the Court?

§ Sir V. HENDERSON
The Court is bound to be open every day by Statute except on Sundays and Bank Holidays.

§ Lieut.-Commander KENWORTHY
What happens if a magistrate comes two hours late and keeps everybody waiting?

§ Sir V. HENDERSON
That has nothing to do with the Bill.

§ Mr. MAXTON
The hon. Gentleman says it is a whole-time job, but how many hours of work is a full-time job and how many days per week?

§ Sir V. HENDERSON
There is a great deal of sickness among magistrates, and I really could not carry in my head the 1975 answer to that question. There is a Departmental Committee at present sitting, of which I am a member, appointed by the Home Secretary to consider the whole question of the conditions under which the work of the Metropolitan Police Courts are carried on, and this question of the hours which magistrates give to their work is being considered amongst other things in relation to the number of magistrates which, it will be remembered, was increased last year. I think on the average they sit four or five days a week, which for work of that kind is a good deal, because a certain amount of the work has to be done out of Court.

§ Mr. KELLY
I want to offer a protest against this determination on the part of the Government in regard to their higher paid servants, while they neglect to deal with the pensions of the lower paid. We have tried time after time to secure pensions for those who have worked 20, 30 or even 50 years in the service of the Government in various establishments, and on each occasion we are refused, because they say they cannot afford it. The curious thing is that when the higher paid come along, the Government seem to be able to look after them.

§ Mr. HAYES
Can the hon. Gentleman say what is the compulsory age for retirement, as magistrates can get too old for their jobs?

§ Sir V. HENDERSON
70 years.

§ Lieut.-Commander KENWORTHY
Before we pass from this subject, I do not want to give an impression that I have tried by a side-wind to criticise any Metropolitan magistrate. I have never been before a magistrate in London, and I do not want to suggest that they do not come at the proper time, but we have had complaints in the provinces.

§ Mr. BATEY
I want to join my colleagues in a protest against the action of the Government. The object of this Motion is not only to amend the Police Magistrates (Superannuation) Act by increasing the retiring age from 60 to 65, but it also increases the pension. If that be so, I wish to make a most emphatic protest because this seems to be 1976 a part of the policy of the Government. They have increased the pensions of all their friends. First, they came to this House and got increased pensions for the Diplomatic Service, then for the Judicial Committee and the Appeal Lords and that was not sufficient, for they came back and got increased pensions for Dominion Governors. That only seemed to whet their appetites, and, having finished with their friends abroad, they now turn to their friends at home. They are making sure of their friends, because all police magistrates are friends of the Government.

The DEPUTY-CHAIRMAN
Order!

§ Mr. BATEY
I will withdraw that. I think it is a little bit unfair and I will withdraw it, but they are increasing the pensions. Where are the Government going to stop? They are a dying Government and when death readies them we will sing the Doxology. Before they die, we shall find them giving increased pensions to someone else. They forget that the Minister of Health told the House only last Tuesday that there had been 62,416 applications for widows' pensions which had been turned down. If the Government wanted to get into the good books of the country, they should have turned their attention to those widows who applied for a mere 10s. a week, rather than to increased pensions for already well-to-do officials. I protest, and when this Bill comes in we will have an opportunity of fighting it, and saying to the country that if it is a question of increasing pensions, we prefer to give pensions to the poor rather than to already well-to-do officials.