HC Deb 23 April 1948 vol 449 cc2229-31
Mr. Berry

I beg to move, in page 11, line 34, to leave out from "shorter," to the end of line 35.

I would remind the House that Clause 6 was inserted during the Committee stage of this Bill with the object of preserving the accrued pension rights of any members of local authority staffs who lost their employment as a result of action taken by his employers, at the instigation of the Minister of Health, to reduce capital expenditure. The intention of the Clause is to allow such an employee who leaves the authority's service to reckon his earlier period of service in full for pension purposes. At the beginning of today's proceedings Subsection (3) of Clause 6 defined the period as: a period of five years from the date of cessation of employment; or a period ending twelve months after the expiration of the period of emergency, … or such longer period as the Minister of Health may, in any particular case, allow. I should like to pay tribute to those responsible for the arrangement of the proceedings today. One Amendment has been moved and has deleted the second of the foregoing definitions. There still remains, however, the power to enable the Minister to extend the period. I suggest that we should engage in an act of faith, because to leave in this power would indicate that in the opinion of the Government a period of emergency under which the local government employees have lost their local government posts is likely to last longer than five years. That is not my opinion, nor do I think it is the opinion of the Government, but the fact that it is left in might give rise for doubting Thomases to suggest that the Government had that opinion.

The effect of my Amendment would be to leave the period as five years so that the definition would end with the words "cessation of employment "in line 32. I hope that those responsible for the Bill will see their way clear to adopt this Amendment.

Mr. Rogers (Kensington, North)

I beg to second the Amendment.

Mr. J. Edwards

My hon. Friend will agree that there is no difference of opinion between us on the broad intentions of the Clause. Nobody has said there is anything wrong in the Clause in a general kind of way. What we have to settle is whether we should remove the discretion which the last part of the Subsection gives to the Minister of Health. One does not need to take any pessimistic or optimistic view about the likely period, as my hon. Friend suggested merely on what is on this Bill. There is a lot to be said for having this discretion. I know that discretion is often difficult to exercise and that there are people—although my hon. Friend is not one of them—who are suspicious of the exercising of discretion by Ministers. I will quote the case of an example which might arise, however, and see whether my hon. Friend will agree with me, that there is a case for the exercising of discretion.

There might be an employee possibly in his own borough, who had been displaced because of nationals retrenchments. The man might do his best to get another job and after a time does, in fact, manage to get a job. He gets it, however, in accordance with a contract that ties him for a certain period. Let us suppose that the contract expires when the man has served five years and one month after he has ceased his employment with the local authority. If such a case were to arise in Woolwich, my hon. Friend would be the first person to come and see whether we could let that very difficult case go through.

We do not intend that this power shall be used except in the most difficult and exceptional cases, but we should like to have the room in which to move in case we should ever meet the genuinely hard case where it would be everybody's wish to do the right thing. I hope, therefore, that my hon. Friend will let us retain this provision without the necessity of the House having to divide.

Mr. Berry

On the undertaking of the Parliamentary Secretary that this power will be used only for very hard cases, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the Amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Bill read the Third time, and passed.