CARRIAGE BY AIR (SUPPLEMENTARY PROVISIONS) BILL (Hansard, 18 May 1962)

§ Mr. Airey Neave (Abingdon)
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time.
The Bill has so far been generally acceptable to the House. It has not been amended in Committee. I think that hon. Members have found it to be in the public interest.
It standardises the legal position of carriers by air and clarifies many of the points as to their legal liability under the Warsaw Convention of 1929, which has been amended by The Hague Protocol of 1955. My hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary cleared up a number of points during the Committee stage in reference to documents, known to us as "blood chits", exonerating the Crown from liability to a passenger in a Service aircraft. That point was satisfactorily dealt with.
The Parliamentary Secretary also told us as the result of researches that he had made that no special provision would be required to cover the application of Article VII of the Guadaljara Convention, which this Bill implements, to the Northern Ireland and Scottish courts since the necessary changes in the court rules would have the attention of their Rules Committees.
I do not think it is necessary for me to say anything more than this, except that when the Bill becomes law the Guadaljara Convention, which eliminates considerable ambiguity in regard to the definition of different types of air carrier, can be ratified. The date will not be tied to the ratification of The Hague Protocol of 1955, and I think speedy ratification is absolutely essential, and that is the reason why I introduced the Bill and why I commend it to the House.
On the other hand, I hope that Het-Majesty's Government will use some persuasion with the United States Government to get The Hague Protocol on the limitations of liability ratified as soon as they can.
1777 In conclusion, I should like to thank all hon. Members who have supported me in the Bill. Also, I am grateful for the official advice which I have received. I commend the Bill to the House.

§ The Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Aviation (Mr. C. M. Woodhouse)
I do not think I need take up much of the time of the House on this Bill, which has so far met with no opposition, nor even amendment.
I should, however, like to take the opportunity, first, of congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Abingdon (Mr. Neave) on the skill with which he has brought the Bill to this stage of its progress, and, secondly, of assuring him that I shall convey to my right hon. Friend the request that he made that we should do all we can to persuade the United States Government not to delay its ratification of The Hague Protocol. This is, of course, a matter of the domestic jurisdiction of the United States Government, and the difficulties that they may have in their own law are for them to resolve. I do not think we can do anything more than ask them to take note of the feeling we all have that the sooner The Hague Protocol and, of course, the Guadaljara Convention are ratified the better it will be for all of us, because the object of bringing these Conventions into force is to diminish the danger of unnecessary litigation in a very complicated field of private international law, and we hope that both the Protocol and the Convention will contribute materially to tidying up that complicated situation.
Finally, I should like to take the opportunity of correcting an error of fact which I committed in my speech on the Second Reading of the Bill. I am sorry to find that I represented inaccurately the view of the Air Transport Licensing Board when I was speaking on the subject of compulsory insurance, when I unintentionally implied that its first report shared the opinion of the Government that, on balance, compulsory insurance was not necessary.
The offending phrase which I used in my speech was that: This conclusion was endorsed by the first report of the Air Transport Licensing Board which pointed out that no case was known to it in which anyone had failed to recover 1778 damages as a result of a company involved in an accident lacking insurance."—[OFFICIAL. REPORT, 23rd March, 1962; Vol. 656, c. 750.] It is true that the Board's report drew attention to the fact indicated, namely, that there had been no such case, but I have since learnt from the Board's chairman that the statement in the report was intended to do no more than recognise the fact that the problem of the uncompensated or inadequately compensated victim might be rare even without a compulsory insurance scheme, and that it should not be taken as endorsing the Government's own view that compulsory insurance, on balance was not necessary.

§ Dr. Alan Glyn (Clapham)
Would my hon. Friend clear this up, because there has been a certain misunderstanding? Have there been any accidents in which victims have not received compensation from the companies as a result of the accident?

§ Mr. Woodhouse
I am very glad to have the opportunity to make it clear that there have been no such cases and that the Report of the Licensing Board confirmed that there had been no such cases. What it did not do was to take the further step which the Government took, not only on those grounds, of saying that compulsory insurance was, on balance, unnecessary. What the Board was concerned to point out was that the licensing system which it was its duty to administer could not of itself guarantee that passengers in British aircraft or innocent victims on the surface would be compensated to the full legal liability of the operator in all circumstances.
Having looked at the matter very closely again, I can assure the House that I am completely satisfied that that does not affect the Bill in any degree, the Bill being simply concerned to resolve an ambiguity, which has been latent in the Warsaw Convention ever since it was signed in 1929, as to whether the carrier to which it applied was the actual or contracting carrier, and the simple answer now arrived at is both. I hope that the House will accept my assurance that this is the simple outcome of a very complicated Bill and will agree to give it a Third Reading.