HC Deb 23 March 1959 vol 602 cc1043-50
(1) Where a notice to treat was served before the sixth day of August, nineteen hundred and forty-seven, by a public authority possessing compulsory purchase powers, and—
(a) the conditions specified in paragraphs (a), (c), (d) and (e) of subsection (1) of section thirteen of this Act are fulfilled in relation to that notice, but
(b) on a date after the twenty-ninth day of October, nineteen hundred and fifty-eight, and before the commencement of this Act, the acquiring authority exercised a right of entering upon and taking possession of land in pursuance of that notice,
the following provisions of this section shall have effect.
(2) It shall be the duty of the acquiring authority, before the end of the period of six months beginning with the commencement of this Act, to serve on the person for the time being entitled to the relevant interest a notice in the prescribed form.
(3) The form prescribed under the last preceding subsection shall include such explanation of the provisions applicable by virtue of this section as appears to the Minister to be requisite for informing recipients of notices under that subsection of their rights and obligations under those provisions.
(4) Where subsection (1) of this section applies, the provisions of section fourteen of this Act (except subsection (5) of that section) shall have effect as if the notice to treat had been a notice to which section thirteen of this Act applied, and the acquiring authority had served a notice of intention to proceed in respect of the compulsory acquisition of the relevant interest in pursuance of that notice to treat, and as if that notice of intention to proceed—
(a) had been served on the date on which the acquiring authority served a notice under subsection (2) of this section in respect of the relevant interest or
(b) in default of service of such a notice under subsection (2) of this section, had been served at the end of the period of six months beginning with the commencement of this Act.
(5) In the application of this section to Scotland, for the reference to the sixth day of August, nineteen hundred and forty-seven, there shall be substituted a reference to the thirteenth day of August, nineteen hundred and forty-seven.—[Mr. Bevins.]

Brought up, and read the First time.

Mr. Bevins

I beg to move. That the Clause be read a Second time.

This Clause gives effect to an undertaking given in Committee by my right hon. Friend to my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucestershire, South (Mr. Corfield), by making it impracticable for an acquiring authority to frustrate Clauses 12 and 13 by taking possession of land under long standing notices to treat between the date of the introduction of the Bill and the passage of the Bill into law. I think that those hon. Gentlemen who were members of the Committee will be conversant with this relatively narrow point which was at issue.

Question put and agreed to.

Clause read a Second time.

10.30 p.m.

Mr. MacColl

I beg to move, in line 6, to leave out from "the" to "and" in line 7 and to insert: seventeenth day of February, nineteen hundred and fifty-nine". This Amendment is an attempt to reach a compromise on a position which is not, perhaps, of very great importance. Nevertheless, I think that the Government are going a little too far in the other direction. The date that we suggest is the date when the debate took place upstairs and when the Minister made his original announcement that he was going to consider the position.

It seems reasonable to us that a local authority which after that announcement and after it had had a warning that there might quite likely be an alteration of the date then took action was acting as a result of the knowledge of what was proposed. But, other things being equal, I should have thought that even the Government would have agreed that it was desirable to avoid making things retrospective.

This really is retrospective legislation, though not of major importance. Those local authorities who have had long- standing notices to treat had recognised powers under the law as it existed at the time. In many cases it is not their fault that the notices have been of long standing. Very often it may have been due to difficulty in getting loan sanctions and other approvals from the Government. Therefore, it is a little hard that when such local authorities have been acting perhaps under restraint from the Government, at any rate acting in full conformity with the law, their position should be altered for the worse by legislation which is, as I say, retrospective.

In order to steer a mid-course between the position at present defined in the Bill and this very drastic proposal put forward in the new Clause, we suggest the date which is quite specifically that when the local authorities received notice that something was going to be done to alter the position as set out in the original draft of the Bill. I hope it will be possible for the Government to accept the Amendment as a reasonable compromise.

Mr. Mitchison

I wish to say a word or two in support of the Amendment which, I hope, the Minister is going to accept. As my hon. Friend the Member for Widnes (Mr. MacColl) rightly said, it does not involve a very large sum of money or any very serious considerations from that point of view. It is, of course, a question of whether a Bill having been introduced in one form we ought to penalise people who exercised a right which they had under the Bill in its original form by a new Clause brought in afterwards.

It is not on a very large scale, but it is still retrospective legislation as far as the local authorities involved are concerned. The local authorities which, reading the Bill in its original form, woke up and proceeded to take action were doing something which at that time was perfectly lawful and which would have remained lawful if the Bill had been passed in that form. On this day in February, 17th February, the right hon. Gentleman in Committee announced that he was going to make the change in the Bill which would make that form of action unlawful. If he applied that change backwards, as he proposes to do in his new Clause, he would be enacting retrospective legislation in relation to authorities who acted before the date he made the announcement.

The right hon. Gentleman has one piece of retrospective legislation in the Bill already. We are trying to save him from putting a second into the Bill. He is, of course, an expert on what warnings are required in case of retrospective legislation, an expertise he derives from dealing, in the Finance Bill last year, with a question connected with dividend stripping. I am quite certain that in that instance, at any rate, he gave a clear and sufficient warning. We take no objection to that warning, but what we do take objection to is any action in relation to what was perfectly lawful and within the rights of local authorities before the warning he gave.

I make one other qualification. I could understand the original form of the Clause if there were any question here of malpractice or even of sharp practice, if I may put it that way, on any large scale. The right hon. Gentleman told us in Standing Committee he had not heard of a single case. There may have been one; I do not know; but he had not heard of it at that time. Certainly there is no question of a widespread practice, and the amount involved is pretty small and, so far as I can see, there is no moral question in it at all. In these circumstances, is it really right to introduce what is retrospective legislation—for a very small amount, in cases where no real moral question arises at all, and where it is very doubtful whether there has been any action of the kind during the relevant period?

I suggest to the right hon. Gentleman and his hon. Friend that it is really just as well to keep to the tradition of the Committee and the reason which inspired the tradition, the tradition that we do not have retrospective legislation unless we give a warning beforehand, and certainly that we should not extend it to a case like this where nothing unlawful has been done, where indeed it is doubtful whether there is any single case at all of such a thing, and where, on any view of the matter, nothing but a trivial amount can be involved.

It would be unkind of me to say at this hour of the night that principles seem to have been sold rather cheap in this Bill, but one would seem to have been sold bargain cheap. I do not know for how much, but it seems to be for a trivial amount. I hope the Government are going to do the right thing in a small way for once rather late at night.

Mr. Bevins

This really is a very small point both in amount and in practice as well. As I understand it, what hon. Gentlemen opposite are saying is that the new compensation should apply only in cases where possession of land is taken between the date of the Committee undertaking and the Act itself, and that, therefore, there would be excluded from the provision earlier cases which may have occurred between the date of the Bill and the undertaking given by my right hon. Friend.

I entirely agree, of course, that there is a small element of retrospection in the Government's new Clause, but, as the hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for Kettering (Mr. Mitchison) himself pointed out, my right hon. Friend did say, during the Committee consideration of this matter, that to the best of his knowledge there had been no cases since the Bill had been tabled. The best information I can get at the moment is that that is still the case. The Committee would be well advised to look not only at the principle of retrospection, small as it is here, but also at the intention that lies behind the Bill and the Clause. My right hon. Friend's feeling is that on any view it would be rather intolerable that a local authority, having waited for at least 11½ years since giving notice to treat, should be able at this stage to defeat the plain intention of the Bill. That would be rather unreasonable. It would be unfair to penalise the owners in that way.

As to retrospection, I have had plenty of advise about it in the House of Commons. I know that the hon. and learned Member for Kettering will not take it unkindly if I remind him that the Opposition welcomed the principle of retrospection in the case of what has come to be known as the "Banstead" Amendment.

Mr. MacColl

Why thunder and roar and wave the rod of argument if there are no cases? If there have been no cases and the local authorities have behaved like perfectly reasonable and respectable people and have not disregarded the plain intention of Parliament why depart from the principle of not indulging in retrospective legislation, if it can possibly be avoided, in order to shake a fist at the local authorities? It is a little offensive. If there is not the evidence to show that the local authorities have done this, why not be reasonable and assume that they have not? At the worst, if it turns out that one or two have not behaved respectably, the loss will be very small. But it would at least have saved the principle not to have made this provision and we should have avoided this gratuitously offensive treatment of local authorities.

Mr. Ross

If it is wrong, as my hon. Friend the Member for Widnes (Mr. MacColl) suggests, for this to be done in respect of England and Wales, how much more wrong it is in respect of Scotland? There is its Scottish application. I am sorry that the Solicitor-General for Scotland is not here. My hon. Friend the Member for Widnes has pointed out, and we have had it from the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, that the Government know of no case in which, where there is outstanding notice to treat, the local authority has raced in somehow to avoid paying out compensation. But we have the additional advantage in relation to Scotland that the whole question of notice to treat does not arise—not just cases in which local authorities have raced in since the publication of the Bill to avoid something. On the word of the Solicitor-General for Scotland, the whole thing is academic to Scotland.

Mr. Willis

Purely academic.

Mr. Ross

There was a certain amount of controversy as to whether the right hon. and learned Gentleman used the word "purely" or not.

When, in one of my shorter speeches in Standing Committee, I had asked the right hon. and learned Gentleman for information about the number of cases in Scotland, he replied: We have tried to get it from the local authorities. evidently without success— As far as we can trace, it does not look as if it reaches even double figures. I put it as an academic matter in Scotland …"—[OFFICIAL REPORT, Standing Committee D, 17th February, 1959; c. 846.] That is not the narrow point of local authorities racing in in the case of a longstanding notice to treat to get an advantage out of the existing position. This is a question of the existence at all of the problem of long-standing notice to treat. The Government could not produce evidence of the existence of any cases but they have guessed and said, "If there are any, there are probably six or seven."

10.45 p.m.

With regard to the six or seven cases, surely it should have been possible to find out. Has anyone given any indication of intending to jump the gun? Whatever else should be applied to Scotland, this should not. It is not an insult to Scotland; it is an insult to the intelligence of the Committee that it should be dealing with a very narrow aspect of something which was admitted by the Solicitor-General for Scotland to be purely academic.

I notice in the Scottish application: In the application of this section to Scotland, for the reference to the sixth day of August, nineteen hundred and forty-seven, there shall be substituted a reference to the thirteenth day of August, nineteen hundred and forty-seven. That is the only change that is made in relation to dates. So as far as I can see, this is to begin on a date before the commencement of the Act. Can anyone tell me when the Act will begin in Scotland? It will begin for England and Wales one month after it is passed; but it is not so in Scotland. That is only for Part I. Part II in Scotland is to start on 16th May, 1959. Which is to be the date for the application of the Clause in Scotland? Why should there be this slipshod idea that there are two dates in relation to the commencement of the Act in Scotland?

Clause 46 (2) states: Subject to the next following subsection, this Act shall come into operation at the end of the period of one month beginning with the day on which it is passed. Clause 46 (3) states: Part II of this Act in its application to Scotland shall come into operation on the sixteenth day of May, nineteen hundred and fifty-nine. So we have two dates for Scotland, a date for Part I and a date for Part II. Which is the relevant part in this respect? We are not given any indication.

Perhaps the Joint Under-Secretary will enlighten us as to when this retrospective provision will apply to Scotland. The chances are that it will be a greater period of retrospective legislation for Scotland, although there is no justification for its application to Scotland at all. I hope the hon. Gentleman will enlighten us as to why it was decided that the Clause should apply to Scotland and when it will apply to Scotland.

Mr. N. Macpherson

As the Clause will plainly go into Part I, it will plainly be subject to Clause 46 (2); that is to say, it will come into operation in the period of one month beginning with the day on which it is passed.

With regard to the question of the number of cases covered, as my right hon. and learned Friend explained, even if there was only one case it would still be desirable that it should be covered. We do not know that there are no cases. This matter has to cover not only local authorities but statutory undertakers and Crown departments having powers to acquire land. It very often happens when legislating that one does not know exactly what the scope will be, but if there are any cases they should be covered.

Mr. Ross

The words used by the Joint Under-Secretary epitomise the attitude of the Scottish Office to the Bill. He does not know. If the meaning is that the Clause is to come into operation with Part I, would it not be far better to say so than to say "with the commencement of the Act" when in relation to Scotland it has no meaning since the Act has a different time of operation in relation to Part I and Part II? If it is necessary to have a Scottish application, would it not be better to be precise about it?

Mr. Macpherson

I should have thought that the answer to that was simple. This new Clause refers to Clause 13 and is thus bound to be near it and thus in Part I. I should have thought that that would be clear without its being stated. If we said that it was to go into Part I, it would look funny when it was in Part I.

Amendment negatived.

Clause added to the Bill.