§ 5.45 p.m.
§ The Joint Under-Secretary of State for Scotland (Mr. Niall Macpherson)I beg to move, in page 31, to leave out lines 12 to 17.
This Amendment to Part II of the First Schedule, dealing with consultative councils in Scotland, deletes subsection (4) of the new Section 7A which is inserted by that Schedule in the 1947 Act. Subsection (4) provides that
A person shall be disqualified for being appointed or being the chairman of a Consultative Council so long as he is a member of the Commons House of Parliament…but that other members of a consultative council shall not he disqualified from membership of this House. That provision is now inappropriate since neither members nor chairmen of consultative councils as such are to be disqualified from being Members of Parliament by the House of Commons Disqualification Bill. As the House of Commons Disqualification Bill details the offices which render a person ineligible to stand for Parliament or to sit and vote in Parliament, there is now no point in stating in a Statute that a member of a consultative council is not disqualified.The House of Commons Disqualification Bill disqualifies members of boards. The chairman of Scottish consultative councils will be caught by that provision since they are, in fact, members of am respective boards, although there is no statutory provision which makes themex officiomembers, as there is in England and Wales. The proposed Amendment will bring the Scottish code into line with that for England and Wales as the' corresponding provision—Section 7 (3) of the 1947 Act—is being repealed in the House of Commons Disqualification Bill.
§ Amendment agreed to.