CLAUSE 10.—(Provisions for preventing evasion of this Act by means of collateral transactions.) (Hansard, 25 October 1939)

I beg to move, in page 8, line 20, to leave out Sub-section (1).

If I may, I will say a word or two about all the Government Amendments to Clause 10 and to Clause 11, because they all hang together, and they are for the purpose of meeting certain objections that were raised on the Second Reading of the Bill. The Committee will see that the first of these Clauses is devised to prevent what it is very difficult to prevent, namely, the kind of practice by which a trader does this: I will give the instance of sandbags. A sandbag is offered for sale at a price which is in itself reasonable, but the person selling the sandbag will not sell it unless the buyer will have it filled, and the trader charges very stiffly for the process of filling. That illustrates the kind of transaction at which Clause 10 aims, to prevent it being possible to link together two transactions, to take your profit on one, and, therefore, ostensibly to get outside the Act. In the Clause, as drafted, we left it open. It is a very difficult matter to deal with, for some quite general reasons. It was said, for example, that we had caught this kind of case. Suppose a person said, "If you want one pair of socks, it is 2s. 6d., but if you have three pairs, it is 6s." That is the condition of taking other goods in order to bring the price down to 2s. Hon. Members could say that that condition was made an offence under the Act, whereas, of course, it is the ordinary wholesale, as distinct from the ordinary retail, sale. We have, therefore, reconsidered the whole of Clause 10 and have dovetailed it in with Clause 11.

Cause 11, as the Committee will remember, is the Clause dealing with the case where a person has a stock of goods and will not sell them. Here, again, nobody wishes to force people to sell out of their ordinary course of business goods to the first person who comes along, and provisions are made for excepting transactions of that kind. Subject to that people who have goods are no longer to be allowed to hold them up. We have dealt with the mischief I have described 1502 in Clause 10 by the Amendments to Clause 11. That has, therefore, resulted in our being able to eliminate from the Bill the first Sub-section of Clause 10. In other words, we have thrown into Clause 11, by the addition of the words, "For the purposes of the preceding Sub-section," and so on, the kind of transaction which we were aiming at preventing in Clause 10. The other Amendments on these two Clauses are of a drafting and clarifying character.