CLAUSE 9.—(Capacity of persons to whom salaries are payable under Act to sit and vote in House of Commons.) (Hansard, 29 April 1937)

§ Mr. Lees-Smith
I beg to move, in page 5, line 13, to leave out "fourteen," and to insert "fifteen."
667 There is one point which I can explain in a few sentences, and which, I think, the Committee will believe I am justified in raising. The point is one which surprised me when looking through the Bill. I came to the conclusion that it was not intentionally included in the Bill. We are dealing now with the Clause which lays down the number of Ministers who are to sit in the House of Lords and the number who are to sit in the House of Commons. As the Preamble to the Bill explains, at the present moment, by law, there must be sitting in the House of Lords two Secretaries of State and three Under-Secretaries. The Bill, in place of a Secretary of State, substitutes a Cabinet Minister. That is, of course, obviously sensible, because now by the Bill all Cabinet Ministers have equal status. But it happened that I spent an hour, when going through this Bill, in doing some very diligent sums in arithmetic. I found, by working out those sums—they were really only sums in simple addition—that as this Clause works out, the final result is that there will be three Cabinet Ministers in the House of Lords and two Under-Secretaries. That is to say, that the House of Lords is to have one less Under-Secretary but to have one more Cabinet Minister.
I am bound to say I was surprised to find that by a side issue in this Bill an alteration was made in the balance of the Cabinet, without a word having been said about the matter at any time during the Second Reading Debate. I had prepared. I may say, a very powerful philippic on this attempt to introduce this extraneous matter into the Bill; but last night I found that the Home Secretary had put down an Amendment which makes it clear to me that this particular result of the Bill was not intentional. Therefore, I will merely now ask the right hon. Gentleman for an explanation of his own Amendment.

§ Sir J. Simon
I think that the right hon. Gentleman's criticism of the Bill as it stands on this point is right, and I have to represent to the Committee that it was really not intended to produce the result which the Bill would produce as it stands, and that a correction ought to be made. If the Committee will turn to page 8 of the Bill, and the First Schedule, they 668 will there, very quickly, follow how the mistake has arisen and how, I think, the right hon. Gentleman would probably wish to correct it. As the Bill is drawn it provides for a distribution of Ministers between the two Houses only so far as they are found in Part I of the First Schedule. Part I contains, I think, 17 individuals, counting eight Secretaries of State; and the Bill as it stands, says, in Clause 9, that of those 17 not more than 14 should sit in this House, which would mean that three must sit in the other House. In fact, at the present moment, only two of the Ministers mentioned in Part I are sitting in the House of Lords. There was never any intention to alter the balance.
The way in which I think it would he best to adjust it—and I hope the Committee will agree with me—is to accept the Amendment and to say that, as far as Part I is concerned, we should change the Bill so that 15 instead of 14 of the names there mentioned should sit in the House of Commons. On the other hand, I think we should provide in Part II of the Schedule that not more than three of the four Ministers mentioned there should sit in the Commons; that leaves one for the Lords. That represents the present distribution. At present the House of Lords' proportion is secured only by reference to Secretaries of State. That has always been rather absurd. It has been rather ridiculous to say that if we put the Secretary of State for War in the Lords he counts as one, but if we put the First Lord of the Admiralty there he does not count at all. It is an archaic conception. Now, if the Committee agree, by the Amendment of the right hon. Gentleman, coupled with my own, we shall maintain the balance in this way: two of those in Part I shall not be Members of the Commons and therefore Members of the Lords, and one of those in Part II shall not be in the Commons but would be in the Lords. I think that would meet the case, and I am much obliged to the right hon. Gentleman for putting down an Amendment. I am sorry the slip was made.

§ Mr. Garro Jones
I have no doubt that the answer to a point which I wish to put to the Home Secretary is obvious to those who have studied this matter carefully, 669 but I do not quite understand how it happens that Ministers who are not in the Commons must necessarily be in the House of Lords. If that be the case, I shall be very glad to hear it. We all know of cases in which right hon. Gentlemen who failed to secure election have held the seals of office for a long period without having had seats in either the House of Commons or the House of Lords.

§ Sir J. Simon
The hon. Gentleman will no doubt know the constitutional position. There is, of course, no legislative provision which so requires, but it has always been secured in fact by providing that not more than so many Secretaries of State shall sit in the Commons. The working of the Constitution requires that Ministers shall be found in one or other of the two Chambers, except for very short intervals. There was the well-known case in the life of Mr. Gladstone when a General Election was held when Mr. Gladstone had ceased to be a Member of this House, and he could not carry on a Government unless his Ministers were in one or the other Chamber. It is something more than a constitutional convention; it is a necessity to our Parliamentary life. Therefore it was substantially correct when I spoke of distributing Ministers among the two Houses. The hon. Gentleman was quite right when he said that it is not a part of any Statute; it is the way in which our Constitution has worked for a very long time, and there is no need to change it.

§ Mr. Barr
Is it not the case that for a long time this House was without the presence of the Lord Advocate because he had failed to obtain a seat after contesting several elections? Is it not also the case that we were without a Solicitor-General for Scotland just now, and that there was no Minister of Agriculture when, persecuted in one seat, he fled to another and was out for a considerable time? I gather from what the Minister said that it must be for only a very short time, but evidently that has not always been so in practice.

§ Sir J. Simon
I apologise for interposing again, but I want to answer the question 670 which the hon. Member has put to me. I was speaking of the Ministers who are referred to in the First Schedule; I was not referring to the presence or absence of a particular Law Officer. There have been cases when Ministers, not of the sort mentioned in the first and second parts of the Schedule, have been absent from the House, sometimes for a short time, and, in the case of the Scottish Law Officers, sometimes for a very long time. In the particular instance mentioned by the hon. Member, it is true that the Minister failed to get elected in, I think, more than one by-election running, and perhaps the hon. Member will recollect that he ultimately gave up his office.

§ Mr. Lees-Smith
I am much obliged to the right hon. Gentleman for his explanation. If he will accept my Amendments and add the Amendments that he has put down, it will completely meet the difficulty that I found.