§ Mr. KEDWARDI wish to raise a question which is of vital and paramount importance to the agricultural community, and to ask the sympathetic consideration of the Minister of Agriculture for a suggestion that he should appoint a Select Committee to inquire into the administration of the grading system associated with tithe rentcharges, as embodied in the Acts of 1835 to 183G and 1925. There has been growing dissatisfaction for a long time with the working of the Tithe Kent Acts. This dissatisfaction has now turned into real open revolt and hostility in some of the counties. Unless something is done to inquire carefully into the reasons of the revolt, I am afraid it will spread until it will be almost impossible to collect the tithe rentcharges that are imposed by Act of Parliament. It may be said that that dissatisfaction is confined to a few counties and does not 2465 extend to the whole of the counties of England. There is a reason for that. Tithe rentcharge is imposed on probably only two-thirds of the land of the country. On one-third, it is probably not very excessive, but, on the other third, that which was arable land at the time of the commutation, there is to-day suffering, and very grave injustice. I want to ask the Government to inquire as to whether there is any foundation for the statement that tithe rentcharge, owing to the tremendous fall in cereals, has become extortionate in those places.
When tithe was commuted in 1836 into a monetary payment, it was dependent upon three factors: quality of cereals grown, price of the cereals made, and the labour and the cost of collecting and marketing the produce. Legislation assumed then, and again in 1925, that things would be fairly stable. Instead of that, there has been a reduction of 60 per cent. in the amount of cereals grown, and that in itself would have reduced tithe rentcharge by 60 per cent. There has been an increase in wages of 430 per cent., and there has been a fall in prices of 30 per cent. The whole ground upon which the legislation was passed and administered has been vitiated by the changes which have taken place. I know-it was said in the Acts that tithe rent-charge was to "issue out of the land". In the county of Kent now, and in East Anglia, the county courts are literally crowded—[Interruption]—with people who have not the money to pay, and who are seeking redress.
I feel quite sure that, if the Minister of Agriculture will take the trouble to read the Second Beading Debates on the Act of 1926, he will find—and these are facts that could be brought out if a Select Committee were appointed—that the Minister's speech at that time, and the evidence of the experts upon which he based his speech, were all proceeding upon the assumption that we were entering a period of unparalleled agricultural prosperity. There is not a single statement in that speech, upon which the present tithe rentcharge is based, that can stand to-day. The whole foundation has been utterly changed; the whole basis has been vitiated; and to say that, in a time of tremendous depression, when cereals have fallen and wages are up, the agricultural community must continue to pay tithe rentcharge as if they were 2466 passing through a time of great prosperity, is to give a message of despair to people who are trying to meet a difficult situation at the present time. I would ask the Minister, at any rate, to give us some ray of hope, because even the tithe owners themselves are beginning to feel that the present position must be inquired into, and that, while they have a certain legal claim to-day, there can be no claim in equity. I feel sure that by doing that we should do something to relieve the burden upon agriculture. Not only are we called upon to pay tithes at £5 above the par value, but upon this generation there falls the cost of redeeming the tithe at £4 10s. per cent., and I think that, if a Committee inquired into that matter, they might have some suggestion to make that would help us in reference to this point.
As to the administration of the Tithe Acts I think that no one who has read the papers can possibly justify the present ardour with which the tithe owners pursue their claim. They never trouble to send in a correct bill; they never trouble to ascertain whether the charge is upon the land owned by a particular person or upon land owned by somebody else. Take a case that occurred recently, and was reported in the Press. Six years ago, a pensioned Post Office worker settled in Canvey Island, and bought a plot of land for £90. He did not know that there was any tithe rent-charge on it. Four years later he received a demand for £82 for tithes. This happened simply because he was the unfortunate man who was selected to pay, not only his own tithe, but also the tithes of scores of other people. He just went on and refused, until they sent him another demand for an additional £48, so that, although he had only given £90 for his plot, he is now faced with a demand for tithe amounting to £130, which he has no money to meet and which it is impossible for him to pay. They took him to the court; they got an order for distraint; they put the bailiffs in his house, and took everything but the beds upon which he sleeps. If I am to be told that in these days that can be justified, either by a Government Department or by the Church on whose behalf the tithe is collected, I say that this House 2467 of Commons will surely appoint a committee to inquire into the working of these Acts.
For two years I have been looking into this matter carefully. I found at the Ashford Court only a few weeks ago quite a number of men who had been receiving demands and paying tithes for years, not only on their own but on other people's land, and they did not know it. They are left to meet these demands, and to take the chance whether they get the money back. A demand comes in every six months, and, if the man on whose behalf they pay this debt, which is not theirs, does not choose to repay them, they can take him to the court; but they are only small owner-occupiers, and it is impossible for them to understand the administration or follow it out properly if they did understand it, because they have not the means. I know that my request to the Minister will not fall on unsympathetic ears, and I fell sure that, if this matter were carefully gone into, some means could be devised, probably by agreement with the other side, because they realise that this sort of thing, which has come down from the past, cannot possibly be justified in the circumstances of to-day.
I wrote a letter to the registrar when orders were made for distraint on a number of little people who take cattle or pigs on to their land to keep. One man told me that, as he had not enough money to stock his own land, he took other people's stock in to his to keep, and he asked me whether they could be taken. I said that I did not think that these things would be seized, but I wrote to the county court and asked whether, in case of an order for distraint for tithe, they would take other people's things that happened to be on the land. The reply was as follows:
Dear Sir,—I am obliged by your letter of the 6th, and note what you say. You are aware, no doubt, that for tithe the bailiff is entitled to seize anything he finds on the land, no matter to whom it may belong.Therefore, we are faced with this position, that, if these people are unable to meet a demand for tithe rentcharge which does not issue out of the land, they are not only haled before the court and threatened with distraint, but they are 2468 told straight away that, no matter whose goods are on the land, anything may be seized in order to meet this claim. Surely, I have given the Minister sufficient justification for my request that he should appoint a committee of inquiry. The other side are not utterly unreasonable; the tithe owners are not without feeling or sense of justice; and this should be an opportunity for the Government to take this matter up and tell all those concerned to get together and see whether they cannot devise a fair and just way, which will be equitable to everyone, of getting over these difficulties. If they refuse to do that, then I feel sure that the mass of the people will say to the great national Church that it is merely clinging to the name of its Founder and forsaking his spirit.
§ Mr. MIDDLETONI would not have asked the House to allow me to detain it for a few moments had it not been for the speech of the hon. Member for Ash ford (Mr. Kedward), but I think he will agree that he has not attempted to give the House an impartial story of the operation of the Tithe Acts, and I feel that it is due to the House, and particularly to those who rather vociferously cheered some of the sentences of the hon. Member, that they should at least know all the facts before they come to a final conclusion. If I appear to be assuming a rôle that is somewhat foreign to these benches, I would like to say that there are one or two considerations which I think even my Friends on this side would like to take into account in coming to a judgment on this matter. Tithe rent- charge is a form of property—
§ Mr. KEDWARDNo.
§ Mr. MIDDLETONTithe rentcharge, in law, is a form of property which can be bought and sold like any other commodity.
§ Mr. KEDWARDDoes that refer to all tithe, or to the lay tithe only?
§ Mr. MIDDLETONIt refers, so far as I know, to all tithe.
§ Mr. KEDWARDThat is quite wrong.
§ Mr. MIDDLETONNo one would have gathered from the hon. Member's speech that there were such things as lay tithes. In fact, the whole burden of his speech 2469 was to create the impression that the Church used tyrannical power to bring a great deal of unfair pressure on very meritorious farming tenants and other people who were bearing a very heavy burden.
§ Mr. KEDWARDMy complaint was not against the Church, but against the working of existing legislation. I should not like to give the impression that I was complaining against the Church.
§ Mr. MIDDLETONI must have misheard the hon. Member's concluding words, because if they meant anything at all, they meant that he was appealing to the Church to remember the spirit of Chistianity. Tithe rent charges are a form of property. If you do not want to pay your bills, it matters little as far as morality is concerned, whether it is your baker, your butcher, or the man who owns your tithe rent charge whom you select not to pay. All these harrowing stories about the operation of the law are the ordinary working of the county court, which applies to anything. If you take a person to the county court and get judgment, the law empowers you to distrain, and what is happening here is that some of the very poor ministers, some of the lowest paid section of the community, in some cases almost as low as farm labourers, have to depend for their income, whether it is right or not, upon tithes, which are due to be paid to them from people who own land which bears a tithe rent charge.
The tithe rentcharge is not an occupier's burden at all. It is a landlord's burden, and the reason why a good many of the hon. Member's friends are feeling the burden is that they have bought their farms and have to bear this tithe rent charge not as tenant farmers but as landowners. Tithe rentcharges are payments, remissions of which, could not be made out of any of the present resources of the Church, as far as the tithes are concerned which are paid to the clergy. If the hon. Member got relief, it would not be at the expense of the State, but at the expense of a large number of very poorly-paid clergy. It is not my business to say what the Government are going to do because, for one thing, I do not know, but, whilst I should not resist an inquiry into the working of it, do not let anyone imagine that 2470 there is a monstrous injustice being perpetrated upon one section of the community because of the present operation of tithe rent charges. Although that point may be reached if the agricultural depression continues, figures show that it is hardly reached at present.
§ Miss WILKINSONWhy cannot the Church of England pay its own clergy, like every other Church has to do?
§ Mr. MIDDLETONIt does, but that is a long story which one could not go into now. The clergy of the Church of England draw their stipends from various sources. There are thousands of them who do not get anything from tithe rentcharge, but get their money from their congregation. There are others who are endowed through tithe rentcharges on land in their parishes and in other parishes which are a form of property to which they are just as much entitled as any landowner is to the land that he farms.
§ Mr. KEDWARDIt is a tax on property and an owner tax.
§ Mr. MIDDLETONI agree that it is a landowners' tax. The burden is on the man who owns the land.
§ Mr. KEDWARDAnd it is passed on, is it?
§ Mr. MIDDLETONIf the hon. Member goes into the market to buy a house, he may buy a freehold or a leasehold house or one with a good many restrictive covenants. The conditions which the covenants impose will largely govern the question of the price that he pays for the house. If he buys a piece of land which bears no burden, other things being equal, he will expect to pay more for it than if he bought land burdened with annual charges. He complains that what people are doing is buying land and finding that there are charges on it of which they knew nothing, and he comes to the House of Commons and complains because people do not know the terms and conditions under which they have made their purchase. It is possible for anyone who buys a piece of land, if he exercise" the most elementary care, to find out exactly what are the burdens on it. An hon. Member on this side came to me a few weeks ago with a complaint of a similar nature. He had bought a 2471 piece of land in order to have a larger garden, and he was very much surprised at its cheapness, but he found, shortly after the bargain had been completed, that it bore a tithe rentcharge, which altered the story altogether. He ought, of course, to have found it out when he bought it. As the law stands now, if there is an estate that is burdened with tithe rentcharge, and it is sold in plots, it still has to bear the tithe rentcharge, and the law permits the tithe rent owner to alight on any one of the tenants and draw the lot from him.
§ Mr. KEDWARDThat is a scandal.
§ Mr. MIDDLETONI am not defending it, but, no doubt, the Minister will be able to tell the House that the law provides relief from that. It enables the tenant to apply to the Ministry of Agriculture and get a reapportionment of the tithe rentcharge, so that each owner only bears his proper share.
§ Mr. KEDWARDThe cost that falls on the applicant for an apportionment of tithe rentcharge of 8s. is £15.
§ Mr. MIDDLETONPeople who have dealings in property may reasonably be expected to find out the conditions and covenants which they enter into. May I come back to my point about the operation of a sliding scale? From 1837 right down to 1918 the value of tithe was based on the price of corn over a period of seven years, and from 1837 to 1884 it worked without complaint. In other words, £1 of rentcharge was usually equal to about £1 in cash. There were variations. They went up and down, but generally speaking the two things, the tithe rentcharge and the cash value, were parallel. In 1884 it began to fall until in 1901 £1 rentcharge was only worth 13s. 3d. less rates, and then set in a number of very lean years for the clergy who had to depend upon tithe rents for their incomes. They had those very lean times until we came to the War, and, of course, gradually a change came over the scene. During the War the rentcharge rose until in 1918, £1 of rentcharge was worth 21s. 10d. Notwithstanding the rise in prices it had only risen by 1s. 10d. because the operation of the seven years' average had kept it down, that is up to 1921. In 1918 it 2472 was, as I have said, 21s. 10d., and then prices continued to rise and we had the boom years until 1925, when the average began to fall. £100 of tithe rent was worth £170, so that the parson lived in hope and began to look forward to a very prosperous time. He began to see his income going up, and at that stage Parliament stepped in and Parliament and the Church then devised the present system, which, I think, is the one which my hon. Friend opposite is finding difficulty about.
§ Mr. KEDWARDDo you agree with it?
§ Mr. MIDDLETONI agree with the equity of the system, but I am going to admit that under the continued depression in prices obviously the people who have to pay this charge are going to be hit very hard. I think that the hon. Member opposite will agree that it is not confined to that particular form of property. If, say, anybody bought Southern Railway stocks last year they will know that the ordinary stock was £31 and that to-day it is worth £13 10s.
§ Mr. KEDWARD rose—
§ Mr. SPEAKERI understand that the hon. Member for Ashford (Mr. Ked ward) has already made his speech.
§ Mr. MIDDLETONBad times are not only hitting one form but every form of property, and the farm owner who finds it a great burden in having to pay tithe rentcharge probably finds that in a dozen other directions calls upon his purse are very heavy, and the fact that he cannot afford to pay the tithe rentcharge is only an indication of his poverty and some measure of the plight of agriculture. I should be the last person to resist an inquiry into the working of the formula. What I was trying to do was to give the House some figures which might be of interest to it.
Church and Parliament agreed to stabilise the tithe rentcharge at a time when it looked as though the clergy were going to get a good deal out of it. They made the charge £109 9s. instead of making it subject to the seven years' average, and it is the operation of that £109 9s., with the present fall in the price of wheat, which creates the difficulty. Of the £109 9s., the parson gets £100, the rates £5, and the redemption £4 10s. I 2473 think that the hon. Member himself confirmed those figures. Therefore the clergy are not really very much better off than they were before, and the House if ever it tackles the question of revising the formula will have to take into account, amongst other things, the claim of the clergy. I want to remove, if I can, the impression that the Church is some great monster which is going about trying to devour the people who have to pay tithes and to say that the people against whom any complaint must lie are the underpaid clergy. [Interruption.] If they are not the lowest paid of any class of the community they are certainly among the lowest paid of any of the professions. They are not probably the lowest paid in any section in the community but they are the lowest paid of comparable classes. My hon. Friend spoke in rather soft and almost seductive terms this afternoon, but I do not think that he has spoken in that way when he has been leading a band of rebels in the county court. He has earned for himself a martyrdom which, I think, is probably rather cheap, and I do not grudge it him, but I do say that the pros and cons of the case have not been fairly stated. I think the hon. Member will know that if he comes to the House of Commons and makes a statement here in which he has not given due weight to the other side, others are entitled to put the House into possession of the facts as they exist.
§ Mr. KEDWARDI am asking for an inquiry.
§ Mr. MIDDLETONI know, but I do not want the hon. Gentleman to go up and down the country as a Daniel come to judgment and then to come to the House of Commons and get away by simply saying "I should like an inquiry." I certainly should not resist an inquiry, but I think that it is right to say that tithe rentcharge is a form of property. If my hon. Friends on this side of the House—as we do—have to inveigh against this and other forms of property, I should like to remind them that they cannot single out this particular thing and say that it is some special evil and that it ought to be appropriated by the State or taken away without compensation. It is a form of property. It is marketable, and people try to sell it. Although it is not sold as freely as some other forms of property, at any rate, I 2474 think, that hon. Members will find that it has changed hands many times and that if our friends want to buy any to-day they can get hold of it.
§ Dr. ADDISONI am sure that the speech of the hon. Member for Ashford (Mr. Kedward) and the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Carlisle (Mr. Middleton) on tithes shows that the question is rather intricate and one which the House would not wish to embark upon on a Motion for the Adjournment. I am glad that the hon. Member raised the question for all that. It is extraordinarily technical and goes far back in history. I have a lively recollection of the discussions we had on the formula before it was applied. Frankly, I was glad that it was somebody else's job and not my job. It involves all manner of intricate considerations, but there is no getting away from the fact that it is a form of property. I have been required to pay tithe for other people, but while I have collected 6s. 11d., there are other sums of tithe which I have not been able to collect, and I do not expect to be successful in the endeavour. The fact is, that when people buy property with tithe attached to it, it is an ingredient of the transaction which affects the price of the property. If you have a piece of property which is subject to a tithe charge of, say, 5s. an acre, or any other sum, that tithe depreciates the price which anyone would be willing to pay for the property.
These intricate matters have been the subject of Parliamentary wrangles on a considerable number of occasions, and no one has got any satisfaction out of the wrangling. You cannot blame the church and you cannot blame the individual. We have inherited this system which is attached to certain forms of property. In regard to the case of the Canvey Island postman I cannot say that it is fair, because it is not. There are other matters connected with the system which are obviously difficult and, sometimes, in common fairness, indefensible, but it is the law. It has been altered time after time, but I am very averse to allowing myself to become entangled in endeavouring to alter the Tithe Act. I think my time could be more usefully employed in other directions in regard to agricultural interests.
2475 The hon. Member for Ashford has, however, raised matters of administration in regard to which I think we might try to get the parties who are interested to see if we could get an adjustment. Without pledging myself to any particular form of action, I will confer with those interested in these matters and see what is the best method of approach on peace able lines, but with a complete desire to prevent myself as Minister of Agriculture, from becoming entangled in complicated matters.