§ 10.32 p.m.
§ Mr. H. BrookeI beg to move, in page 26, line 36, to leave out from regulations "to" any" in line 37 and to insert:
for the guidance of the Commission in the exercise of".Some doubt was expressed during the Committee stage discussions about whether the first few words of Clause 35 would enable the Minister to do what he might well need to do in the making of regulations. It is important that the Minister should be able to prescribe in regulations the considerations to which the Local Government Commissions must have regard when conducting their reviews and formulating their proposals. The Government have re-examined these words in the light of the Committee stage discussions and I am moving this Amendment for the improvement of them and to put beyond doubt that it will be possible in the regulations to prescribe considerations.We have also given thought to the Committee stage discussion about whether regulations will be needed. There was some difference of opinion about whether it would suffice for the Minister to issue in the memorandum of guidance for the Commissions the considerations which they should bear in mind. If this Amendment is accepted, as I feel sure it will be, it is my intention, when the Commissions are set up, to lay regulations, which will be subject to consideration by Parliament, prescribing theses considerations. I trust that will meet the anxieties expressed by hon. Members on both sides of the House about whether the memorandum of guidance would be sufficient. It was felt that, such a memorandum not being subject to Parliamentary control, and these Commissions having such important work to do, it might be better to proceed by way of regulations. I assure the House that that will be my intention.
§ Mr. MitchisonI have been looking again at the discussion on these matters in Committee. It was at times a little confused. But there emerged from it two things, that the Minister proposed to issue the document to be called a 1360 memorandum of guidance, which I told him sounded to me rather like the sort of thing that the Army might have issued when deliberating at Putney during the Civil War, and that he was also going to issue some regulations. I think the original language was wide enough, but I certainly have no objection to its being made even wider and clearer in this respect.
I am not, however, clear about the relation between these two documents, and it is an important matter. I am glad to hear from the Minister that the regulations are to contain something in the nature of the regulations which were issued to guide the Boundary Commission that was set up in 1945. He will remember that there were factors in that governing its consideration of these matters to which the local authorities attached some imimportance, and I gather that, while those factors may not necessarily be repeated verbatim, something of the sort will appear in the regulations.
If I am right in my understanding of what the Minister has said, the memorandum of guidance will be a minor document, and, while every local authority will not necessarily follow the suggestion of my right hon. Friend the Member for South Shields (Mr. Ede) and put the memorandum of guidance in the waste paper basket, they will not incur any very grievous penalties or suffer very greatly if they concentrate their attention on the regulations. Am I right?
§ Mr. H. BrookeI can assure the hon. and learned Member that the regulations will cover broadly the principal points which were dealt with in the Appendix to the White Paper on Local Government Areas and Status, and they will be very much in the spirit of the Schedule which he and his hon. Friends brought before the Committee. While it may, of course. be desirable to assist the Commission by explanations at greater length, as we so often do, the memorandum of guidance will, I am sure, be observed by the Commission, because, as I have said, it is an advisory body, and if it disregards what the Minister says, it cannot expect its advice to be taken. The main point that I want to make is that the regulations will be in the spirit of the nine factors. They may go beyond that, and they will 1361 certainly be subject—we shall be dealing with this in a subsequent Amendment—to full parliamentary control.
§ Mr. MitchisonI am very glad to hear that the memorandum of guidance will contain the most substantial part of the guidance to be issued to the Commission, because that will be subject to Parliamentary control.
§ Mr. TempleI thank my right hon. Friend for meeting the points which were so largely made from both sides of the Committee on the question of the instructions to the Commission. He has suggested a compromise in his Amendment between putting the guiding principles in the Bill and laying them before the House in the form of a memorandum of guidance. I believe that the Amendment. which is in terms very similar to the Amendment in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Crosby (Mr. Page) and myself, which will not be called, very largely meets the points which we had in view, and I therefore wholeheartedly welcome it.
§ Amendment agreed to.