HC Deb 18 May 1962 vol 659 cc1766-75

As amended (in the Standing Committee), considered.

3.6 p.m.

Mr. Nicholas Ridley (Cirencester and Tewkesbury)

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time.

This Bill was, unfortunately, not debated on Second Reading, and it received a remarkably swift Committee stage passage, lasting only 35 minutes. I hope that the House will, therefore, forgive me if I put some of the principal features of the Bill on record. I think that it would, indeed, be an insult to a Bill, which is greatly welcomed by all those concerned, if it were allowed to go through all its stages with so short a consideration.

The Bill has nothing to do with gramophone records. It is an entirely serious Measure which, so far as I know, is welcomed by all the authorities which have to do with this matter, from the various local authority associations down to the British Records Association, the Society of Archivists and all the other bodies concerned with the keeping of records in this country. We spend so much time on the present and on the future that it is perhaps not a bad thing occasionally to consider aspects of recording the past.

The definition of the word "records" occurs in Clause 8. It has been drawn as widely as possible to provide for any new means of keeping records which may emerge in the future such as tapes, discs or other forms of storage of material, including micro-films. Perhaps the Bill, together with legislation which has been passed quite recently, will bring the position with regard to keeping records thoroughly up to date.

The other Measures to which I refer include the Public Records Act, 1958, which deals with national records as opposed to local records with which the Bill deals. The Bill does not apply to the City of London. It applies only to local authorities. The previous powers under which local authorities have kept records derive from the Local Government Act, 1933. Section 279 gives them the right to keep and maintain their own records. Lately, I think that there has been a development in the interest of keeping records and a renewed desire on the part of students of local history, local archaeological and historical societies to delve into the past of their regions and to be a little more conscious of the need to preserve the evidence of events of the present time. There has been renewed interest in these matters. In addition, many people wish to write biographies, books and travel books and to delve into the history of certain areas.

I think it right that we should provide a regular means of preserving such records, which is what the Bill seeks to do. There is also a need for some people who own records, either ancient records as in the case of ancient families who reside in certain districts or present-day records as in the case of landowners, businesses, persons or organisations of any sort wishing to have a place to put records because they have not a suitable place for them nor, perhaps, the money to finance a muniment room of their own. There is, therefore, a great need in country districts for a place where records can regularly be deposited.

The Bill makes it clear—and I am sure that all hon. Members would agree that this is the right course—that it is principally the local authorities, and the major ones at that, which should be responsible for this function. Many of them do this work already under powers contained in the Local Government Act and some authorities do it under powers derived from private Measures which they have proposed.

Clause 1 gives local authorities power to make records available to anyone who wishes to study them and enables the local authority to index and catalogue records which it has in its possession and to issue guides and arrange exhibitions and lectures, and so on, on the documents which it possesses. It gives power to lend documents, not, in the sense of a lending library, to anyone who wishes to borrow them, but to anyone conducting a joint study who requires to borrow a set of records for the purposes of a serious investigation into a problem.

Clause 2 is probably the most important Clause and contains the Bill's major provisions. It allows local authorities, by agreement, to buy records which they feel essential to their collection or to their district. It does not contain powers of compulsory purchase of any sort. Buying can only be done by agreement and in the normal course of the market. The Clause also gives the major local authorities power to accept gifts of records or deposits of records by those who have nowhere to keep them themselves and who want to make sure that they are in safe hands.

In connection with these two functions, the Bill provides that there should always be respect of the conditions on which records were given, lent or deposited. There is no means by which the legal conditions of deposit or gift can be altered. Nor does the Bill in any way alter or infringe the law of copyright which operates if the local authority is not the owner of the records.

Clause 4 gives power for financial assistance to be provided by a local authority to persons or organisations who might undertake the function of storing and keeping records on their own. It may be that there is in some area a person or institution which can do this work more easily and satisfactorily than any of the major local authorities in the district. Therefore, if it should be thought preferable, the local authority can give or lend its documents to this institution or person and make a grant to cover part of the running expenses.

It also gives the authority the power, which is necessarily inherent in that idea, to deposit its records either with another local authority or with an outside person or institution. As an example, I will mention the National Library of Wales, which holds quite a lot of records belonging to some of the Welsh counties, particularly the smaller counties, and serves this purpose for these counties at present. The Bill considers that that is a good arrangement and gives the local authorities statutory power to carry on giving or lending their records to the Library, and even permits them, if they wish, by agreement to make financial contributions towards so doing.

The Clause also contains powers for the smaller local authorities, or any local authorities for that matter, which wish to combine and to set up a joint muniments room. In one case this is already happening, and it probably is the solution to districts in which the main unit, either the county council or county borough council, is not very big or wealthy and it would be unjustifiable for it to set up the necessary muniments room and to pay a good archivist or whatever is necessary to maintain its own records as a single unit.

It is surely correct that it should be allowed to amalgamate and so form a joint committee of members of all the authorities concerned to govern the functions of that records department. Parish councils are not included in the Bill because they already give their records to or deposit them with a higher authority. This arrangement works very well and there appears to be no need to disturb it.

If the Bill is approved, some of the Private Acts under which local authorities at present keep their records will clearly become superfluous and will lapse in their use if the local authorities decide to operate under the provisions of the Bill. There is power for the Minister to repeal such Private Acts, subject to the negative Resolution of the House, which he may use in the event of its being necessary.

Clause 7 gives power to the Master of the Rolls to deposit manorial and tithe documents with local authorities, which at present he has not the power to do. He has power to say where records must be deposited, and in this instance it is right to include local authorities among the various authorities where he may deposit them.

This provision and the Bill as a whole is purely permissive in character. There is no direction or compulsion or any force of any sort to be read into these provisions. They merely empower local authorities to do these things. The intention and the hope is that throughout the country there will develop muniment rooms or record rooms which are properly staffed, aired and heated so that no damage is done to documents, and that the records are properly catalogued by qualified staff who know the value and the worth of the records which they are holding.

In this direction it is obviously desirable that we should not try to have too many such record rooms set up and that it should be restricted to the major authorities. There is provision in the Bill for a smaller authority to be given a special Ministerial dispensation to keep its own records if it were necessary, but I think that, on the whole, it is unlikely to happen, because obviously the right place is either a big county council or, where the county council is small, a combination of two or more authorities.

Some hon. Members may well wonder whether it is a good thing to keep all these records, and whether the mysteries of history are not made more attractive by the lack of documentation and records of the past itself. I do not think this question arises, because history is never certain, and no matter how much evidence we have, we never seem to know what happened. When one thinks of the undocumented history of thousands of years ago, of which we have no records, save perhaps, the spoken word, coming down through the generations, we realise that there is as much doubt still about the events of even a few years ago. The events before the war, and even the events leading up to the Suez crisis, are as unknown as the events of thousands of years ago.

I do not believe that by keeping our records we are doing anything but good. As Henry James said: The historian essentially wants more documents than he can really use. The dramatist only wants more liberty than he can take. The Bill, in so far as it helps us to keep records of what we in this generation are doing, although it is only a small Measure and will apply only locally rather than nationally, will help to extend the scope of the history of which we are keeping records without obscuring its mysteries for those who, in times to come, will wish to delve into the times in which we are now living.

For these reasons, I hope that the House will give the Bill its Third Reading, since I believe that it is wanted by all those concerned with the matter.

3.22 p.m.

Mr. Julian Snow (Lichfield and Tamworth)

The House is indebted to the hon. Member for Cirencester and Tewkesbury (Mr. Ridley) for securing the passage of his Bill up to this point, and I sincerely hope that it will receive a Third Reading.

I should like to make two points. First, I think that one of the merits of this Bill is its flexibility, which has been adequately described by the hon. Gentleman himself. Opinions differ on how far we should concentrate these records within, say, a county. A strong case can be put for a more localised concentration of records, so as to make them more readily available to people in a given locality. I think the overwhelming advantage of the Bill is that, at long last, some effort can be made, under authority, to have the methodical indexing of records which could be circulated to a much wider public.

The other point is that I feel that hon. Members of my generation, which goes for practically everybody in the House at the moment, would agree with me that the learning of history in our day was at times somewhat sterile in the sense that it was not always easy to apply what one learned of national history to one's local area. One learned about the feudal system or, later, possibly, about agricultural developments, about Coke of Norfolk and other people like him, but, by and large, one's textbooks were obviously based on national historical considerations.

I think that the objective of the history student now should be facilitated by the passage of this Bill, in the sense that, concurrent with the indexing and collection of these records, will be the establishment, such as has already started in Essex, of houses where schools can go, and where students, as opposed to pupils, can examine local historical records, so that the canvas of history can be completed at the same time as the appreciation of national history.

Drawing on my own personal experience for a moment, I remember that some years ago I was associated in a very small way with some archeological work on a small and almost forgotten church in Essex, and I remember the great interest we felt in our small team in tracing the history of the church back to pre-Conquest days and the knowledge we secured by being able to examine some of the documents relating to that church—and they took a bit of finding. One was a Papal document translating the manorial rights, which were attached to the church, from the previous Saxon holder to Stephen of Blois.

The document in question had been taken from the collegiate Church of St. Martin and vested in the library of Westminster Abbey. I remember thinking at the time how curiously casual it was that I was able to walk along to the library of Westminster Abbey and be handed a 500-year-old document which showed exactly the history of this conveyance of property following the Conquest.

I give that example merely to show that possibly our way of going about securing and examining documents is a little haphazard. I believe that the provisions of this Bill are very badly needed, and I sincerely trust that the House will give a Third Reading to this excellent little Bill.

3.26 p.m.

Mr. Jasper More (Ludlow)

I should Like to add my congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for Cirencester and Tewkesbury (Mr. Ridley) on bringing in this Bill and conducting it through its several stages. I think that it is true to say that some local authorities have, in fact, been doing the things for which the Bill provides, and they include my own county of Shropshire, where I serve on the county records committee; but I am sure that the House will agree all the same that these powers should be put on a formal basis as the Bill proposes.

My hon. Friend referred to the question how far is it desirable to preserve records at all. It was, I think, said by an historian addressing himself to the problem of the history of the nineteenth century that that history would never be written because we knew too much about it and the accumulation of records was so great that it would defeat both the industry of Macaulay and the perspicacity of Gibbon. I think that it is also true that what is often regarded as one of the golden ages of history, the reign of Hadrian in the second century, is made more golden by the fact that the records of it are almost non-existent, and all historians agree that it was one of the happiest periods that ever existed.

When the Arabs conquered Egypt, in the seventh century, it is recorded that they found accumulated in the Library of Alexandria most of the records of the ancient world, and they took the view that these were not of much value, and they were able to use them for heating the municipal bath water for several months.

The remarkable feature of the records in our own country is the extent to which they have so far been kept not in public libraries or institutions but in private houses, and while we may feel that there is an easier target—if I may use the expression—if our records are to be deposited in central depots like our local authority headquarters, there are obvious difficulties in keeping them in private houses, particularly those which have central heating systems.

In view of the recent conversion to oil heating, records do not, of course, go so well into boilers, and private owners have now the obvious alternative of depositing their records with local authorities. I hope very much that they will do this. The doctrine of full employment is surely of importance for the historians of the future as well as of the present age, and I am very glad to add my support to this excellent Bill.

3.30 p.m.

Mr. Graham Page (Crosby)

I, too, would like to congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Cirencester and Tewkesbury (Mr. Ridley) on getting the Bill through to this stage. Far be it from me to delay its Third Reading, but I want to express anxiety about one point which appears from the Bill. I refer to the definition of records, which my hon. Friend said was a very wide definition, in Clause 8.

It reads: 'records' means materials in written or other form setting out facts or events or otherwise recording information. That may include documents in the hands of local authorities to which professional people, such as surveyors and solicitors, wish to refer in dealing with the conveyance of property, town planning matters, street works cases, rights of way, and highway cases and so on.

It is of great importance to professional men to be able to refer to such records. What power does the Bill give to local authorities over that type of document? Clause 1 (1, a) gives the local authority power … enabling persons, with or without charge and subject to such conditions as the authority may determine, to inspect the records and to make or obtain copies thereof This seems a very wide power in the hands of local authorities, and "with or without charge" and "subject to such conditions" could result in the imposition of something prohibitive on the inspection and the taking of copies of documents which are now quite open to people to inspect and take copies. There are local authorities who are not very co-operative about this and who would happily impose conditions which would make it difficult for people to inspect such documents.

The difficulty would mainly arise where professional men have to inspect local authority documents in conveyancing matters, but there is a more important aspect of this in cases of litigation. The Clause would enable a local authority to impose such conditions on the production of the documents as might preclude discovery in the course of an action. We have seen from reports in the papers this morning how Government Departments can become quite crazy over their privileges in refusing to disclose documents. It is possible that local authorities, given a privilege of this sort, might act unreasonably in the exercise of it.

I put this point on record now in case, if it is thought to be good, an Amendment might be made at a later stage in another place. I put it not solely as my own anxiety. It is an anxiety which has been expressed by the Law Society and to that extent I am putting it forward. I hope that it will receive consideration as the Bill proceeds through another place. If there is anything in it which will restrict the liberties of the subject I hope that it will be put right.

3.34 p.m.

The Joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Housing and Local Government (Mr. Geoffrey Rippon)

I should like to join in the general congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for Cirencester and Tewkesbury (Mr. Ridley) on the way in which he has introduced this Measure. I think that all hon. Members who were present in Committee would pay tribute to the way in which he answered the various points put to him then. He has also taken the opportunity this afternoon to explain the purpose of the Bill. There is little I need add, therefore, except to say that the Government fully endorse all that my hon. Friend has said and they hope that the new powers in the Bill will be widely used.

When Fanny Price went to stay at Mansfield Park the erudition of her cousins, which so crushed her, was little more than a list of the dates of kings and queens. This chronological approach, although we have been taken back to the seventh century this afternoon, is not sufficient these days. Social and economic historians require the great mass of information to which my hon. Friend referred. This Bill will certainly enable them to get the information. We want to ensure that important records are physically preserved and also that they are made available for study.

There is just the one point which my hon. Friend the Member for Crosby (Mr. Graham Page) raised. It is true that the definition of records is a wide one. I think that is a good thing. It is true that the powers given in Clause 1 (1) are fairly comprehensive. I will certainly undertake to look at the point which he raised, which, as he said, also concerns the Law Society. I hope that it is covered by Clause 1 (2), which provides that: Nothing in subsection (1) above shall be taken to authorise the doing of any act which infringes copyright or contravenes conditions subject to which records are under the control of a local authority. We will certainly look at the matter again, and I will communicate with my hon. Friend about it, if that is convenient.

I feel—I am sure the House feels—that this is a Bill which extends the powers of local authorities both to look after local records and to make them available for study. I think that it clarifies the powers which exist now in an admirable way. It protects the interests of the owners of the records and the public interest generally. The Bill has met with a general welcome, and I unhesitatingly commend it to the House and hope that it will be given its Third Reading.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill accordingly read the Third time and passed.