HC Deb 30 April 1964 vol 694 cc729-31
Mr. Brooke

I beg to move, in page 11, line 42 to leave out subsection (5) and to insert: (5) There shall be a chairman, a vice-chairman and a deputy chairman of the committee of magistrates, and the chairman of the court of quarter sessions for the inner London area shall be the chairman of the committee, the chief metropolitan stipendiary magistrate shall be the vice-chairman and a person chosen from amongst themselves by the lay justices who are members of the committee shall be the deputy chairman. This Amendment fulfils an undertaking which I gave in Committee to the hon. Member for Widnes (Mr. MacColl). As drafted, the Bill follows the recommendations of the Aarvold Committee in providing that the chairman of quarter sessions and the chief magistrate be respectively chairman and deputy-chairman of the Committee of Magistrates. If the Amendment is accepted, there will be an office of vice-chairman, to be held by the chief metropolitan stipendiary magistrate, and there will be an office of deputy-chairman to be held by a person chosen by the lay magistrates who are members of the Committee from among themselves. There will be an order of precedence—chairman—vice-chairman—deputychairman—which is already familiar to many people concerned with London affairs, because there is a similar trio in that order among the leading members of the London County Council.

I hope that this plan will be acceptable to the hon. Member for Widnes and to the House.

10.15 p.m.

Mr. MacColl

The Amendment, as indeed was the undertaking given in Committee, is rather better than the right hon. Gentleman's speech. He harped on the happy precedent which he sees in the London County Council. I have two comments to make. First, historically it is not correct. Historically the deputy-chairman was a full-time paid member of the Council, who was responsible for the administration of the staff of the London County Council. I think that it was Mr. Firth. Later the idea came along of having the unfortunate deputy-chairman as the man in permanent subjugation to the chairman and vice-chairman on the dais. The chairman and vice-chairman are members of the majority party. The deputy-chairman represents the powerless minority.

I am sorry that the right hon. Gentleman used that analogy, because that is precisely the attitude to the lay magistrates which I deplore. I think that there should be an integrated legal system. I do not think that lay magistrates should be regarded as inferior beings in permanent minority, allowed to choose their tribune who can speak for them, but who have no effective authority.

That was the implication of the right hon. Gentleman's speech. I do not think that it is all in the Amendment, and therefore I welcome the fact that he has gone as far as he can.

This is not a criticism of stipendiary magistrates, who are men of great legal and judicial experience. What this is about is a Committee whose job it is to carry out a very delicate piece of pure administration—the allocation of courts, looking after the problems of the staff, and so on. I believe that this job might well be done by lay magistrates as well as by stipendiaries, because, whatever we think about stipendiaries, there is nothing in their work which gives them experience of pure administration.

To put it bluntly, this is rather a farce. There may be a man who has spent his life in public administration. He may be the chairman of an establishment committee in a local authority, or he may have considerable business experience, yet he is to be regarded as inferior when it comes to the day-to-day administrative problems of running a machine, which is what this Committee is concerned with.

My other point concerns a more immediate transitional problem. The delicate task to be performed is to bring into one service clerks of the old petty sessional division and clerks of the stipendiary court. In seeing that the centre of gravity of this Committee is on the side of the stipendiary magistrates, rather than on the side of the lay magistrates, clerks of the petty sessional division may feel that their interests are not likely to be looked after.

The right hon. Gentleman moved the Amendment in a way that made me as little willing to accept it as I could be, but it would be silly to try to make an issue of a matter of this sort. I am grateful for this concession, and I therefore welcome it.

Amendment agreed to.