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Lords Amendment: In page 12, line 11, leave out from "of" to "shall" and insert:
the said section 1, that section
§ Mr. du CannI beg to move, That this House doth agree with the Lords in the said Amendment.
The difficulty which I always have when we are considering Amendments which have come to us from another place is to talk English at all. Saying these words, "That this House doth agree with the Lords in the said Amendment", almost makes me feel that I am speaking Spanish with a decided lisp.
I hope that the House will think it convenient to discuss this and the following Amendment together.
§ Mr. Deputy-Speaker (Sir Robert Grimston)If that is agreeable.
§ Mr. du CannThey are purely drafting and have no substantive effect whatsoever. The first reverses the sequence of two references to Clause 1 in paragraph 1(a) of the Schedule and the second substitutes "that section" for "the said section 1", which is consistent with an earlier reference to "that section" in line 15.
§ Amendment agreed to
§ Subsequent Lords Amendment agreed to.
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Lords Amendment: In page 12, line 23, leave out from "if" to "before" and insert:
that price was so marked
§ Mr. du CannI beg to move, That this House doth agree with the Lords in the said Amendment.
This is a very minor matter, just a tidying-up affair. The Amendment alters the wording of paragraph 2 of the Schedule. That paragraph is designed to allow suppliers a period of grace of one year to dispose of stocks of goods or containers already marked with minimum resale prices at the time when Clause 1 comes into operation in relation to the goods in question.
The Bill as drafted makes this concession conditional on the goods having been manufactured or packed before the date on which Clause 1 comes into operation in relation to the goods, instead 1300 of referring to the time at which the prices were marked. In our opinion, this would produce undesirable anomalies and to rectify the position the Amendment limits the one-year concession to the case where minimum resale prices were marked on goods or the container before the Clause came into operation.
I hope that this will be helpful as a practical matter for those who will be chiefly concerned with the operation of the Bill in this rather limited and somewhat difficult little matter.
§ Question put and agreed to.
§ Lords Amendment: In page 12, line 30, leave out "has" and insert "takes".
§ Mr. HeathI beg to move, That this House doth agree with the Lords in the said Amendment.
Paragraph 3 of the Schedule refers to the commencement of Clause 1 in relation to goods and refers to the time on which it first comes into operation. This is what it intends to do, but the wording is not entirely clear because of the use of the words "has effect". The intention is that it should be when it first has effect. What the Amendment does is to delete "has" and, with an economy of language, use the expression "takes effect". It makes it absolutely plain that we are referring in this case to when the Bill first has effect.
§ Question put and agreed to.