HC Deb 10 February 1965 vol 706 cc401-7

4.45 p.m.

Sir D. Renton

I beg to move, in page 5, line 35, to leave out subsection (4).

I must "come clean" straight away and tell the House that this is a drafting point, but it is a very important drafting point. Potentially, it affects every one of us and governs the amount of pension that we would receive on reaching 65, provided that we had retired from Parliament.

I find subsection (4), in relation to the Clause as a whole, a bit of a brain teaser. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Wirral (Mr. Selwyn Lloyd) drew attention to what appeared to be a difficulty in the drafting when the Chief Secretary moved an Amendment to the earlier part of the Clause in Committee. Since then the Chief Secretary has writ-

to my right hon. and learned Friend and kindly sent me a copy of the letter. The hon. Gentleman says in his letter that, having taken advice, he is satisfied that the words have the effect intended, namely, that payment of the pension should be suspended for a period which is to include both periods of membership of the House of Commons and periods of candidature.

I wish I thought that that were really so. Having studied the matter very carefully, I find great difficulties about it. The best way of getting the mind of the Chief Secretary on to the point will be for me to ask him some specific questions about the effect of the subsection. As he might find it very valuable to have to assist him the fresh mind of the Minister of Technology, who is sitting beside him, may I say how very kind we think it is of the Minister of Technology to pay such close attention to our proceedings, when we realise how very heavily pressed he is with the affairs of his Department, which are so vital to the future of the country.

The first point I want to get clear is this. Am I right in thinking that, for the purpose of calculating reckonable service, the period when any of us are candidates for election between Parliaments and the time between the dissolution of a Parliament and adoption as a candidate or nomination as a candidate is reckonable service, provided that we are re-elected but not otherwise? The subsection seems to read like that, but I should like an assurance, especially in view of what the hon. Gentleman says in his letter.

The example of an hon. Friend of mine might well illustrate the difficulty I have in mind over the calculation of a period of service before 16th April, 1964. My hon. Friend first became a Member in 1950. He resigned his seat in 1957. He was out of Parliament from 1957 to 1963, when he was reelected at a by-election. What he would like to know—I think that we would all like to know—is whether the time that he spent as a candidate at that by-election is to be counted as reckonable service. The matter is obscure at the moment.

Then there is the position of those who are over 65 and who decide, having given up parliamentary life, that they cannot live without it and seek re-election once more. They may well have drawn a pension during the time they were out of Parliament. I concede that it is clear from the Clause that, when they return to Parliament, the time that they spend as Members of Parliament and as candidates, presumably after having been re-elected, is reckonable service for the purpose of getting an even larger pension if they ever retire again. What we need to know is whether their candidature, on the occasion when they first sought re-election after retirement after 65, is also reckonable service.

On a matter purely of wording, I should have thought that many difficulties could be overcome if a drafting suggestion which I am about to make were accepted. I am sorry that I have not tabled a specific Amendment to cover the point, because I must confess that it occurred to me only last night when I was thinking about this matter all over again. It was then too late to table even a starred Amendment, because the House had risen.

I ask hon. Members to turn to page 5, lines 36 and 37. I suggest that a great deal of difficulty would be overcome if the words towards the end of line 36 not be payable in respect of were replaced by the words be suspended during". That is my suggestion. Although this is a money Bill and there are limits to what can be done to it in another place, this is the sort of drafting Amendment which is allowed there provided that the question of privilege is properly attended to.

Even if the Chief Secretary cannot say now that the Amendment I propose would be a solution to some of the difficulties which I have mentioned, perhaps a less equivocal wording than that which appears in lines 35 to 37 would be possible, and he might be able to have the matter adjusted in another place.

Mr. Wise

At the risk of being described, once again, as frivolous, I wish to draw attention to a point in this rather involved subsection which, I think, constitutes a serious injustice. The subsection provides that a pensioned ex-Member who becomes a Member of the House again loses his pension. I agree that this circumstance is most unlikely to arise. After a man has reached the age of 65, it would, unquestionably, be a rare occasion for him to offer himself once more for election, and get in. But it has happened on a fair number of occasions.

The provision to which I have referred seems unjust. A pension is something given as a result of past service. A Service pension is the same. A soldier coming into the House after retirement does not lose his pension. A civil servant coming into the House after retirement does not lose his Civil Service pension. I cannot see why a Member of Parliament should be subjected to this treatment. Why should he not keep his pension, which has come to him as a result of long service and which, I trust, he will have fully earned?

I hope that the Chief Secretary will realise that this provision may well perpetrate an injustice against Members of the House of Commons as compared with other pensioned persons who draw their pensions from the Exchequer.

Mr. Diamond

To answer first the point raised by the hon. Member for Rugby (Mr. Wise), it is against normal practice and wholly against the recommendations of the Lawrence Committee, on which we are basing all our provisions, that one should both receive a salary for doing a job and receive a pension for having retired from that job. The comparison which the hon. Gentleman introduced is not valid. It is not a question of a civil servant losing his Civil Service pension when he comes into the House. The true comparison is with a civil servant not receiving his Civil Service pension when he resumes work as a civil servant, which is quite a different matter and a fairly regular occurrence.

I think that I take the House with me when I say that it is against normal practice and wholly against the recommendation, which we have largely accepted, that someone should both receive his pension for having retired from a job and receive his salary for not having retired from it. It would be too incongruous for words. So we rest on the normal basis that an hon. Member, having retired, is entitled to his pension.

I take next the substance of the point raised by the right hon. and learned Member for Huntingdonshire (Mr. Renton). I shall deal with the draftsmanship point last. I submit that we are making a sensible provision here. This is not a situation in which we can talk about retirement in the ordinary way, as one can in an ordinary job. If a person employed in an office leaves that office on reaching retirement age, it is perfectly clear that he has retired and does not seek to go back. The House of Commons, as the right hon. and learned Gentleman made clear, is a very attractive place. Even with the hon. Member for Rugby here, it is still a very attractive place, and one misses it a great deal, as I know from first-hand experience, when one is temporarily, shall I say, resting.

Sir Douglas Glover (Ormskirk)

We shall do our best to give the Chief Secretary some more experience of that.

Mr. Diamond

I hope that the hon. Gentleman is not thinking of referring to the little exchange we had on an earlier occasion about the comfort or lack of comfort when sitting on the benches opposite. I gather that he is much more relaxed now and more comfortable. As the years pass, he will find it even more comfortable.

Dealing with the substance of the Amendment, it must be right to take only one real criterion of what retirement means in the case of a Member of Parliament, and this is why the word "retirement" is not used in the Bill. The only criterion is when a Member himself says, "I have retired. I have had enough", for one reason or another.

The right hon. and learned Gentleman has raised the unlikely possibility that someone being entitled to pension, that is, being over 65 years of age and having done 10 years of hard work—we know what hard work it is in this place—having definitely said that he has had enough, he is retiring and will not seek re-election, thereafter, at the age of 70, perhaps, changes his mind. He seeks re-election and gets nominated. This is not an everyday event, to put it mildly.

Sir R. Cary

It happened during the war, by nomination.

Mr. Diamond

I repeat that it is not, perhaps, an everyday event.

As I was saying, the man gets nominated. There follows then the period between nomination and the election—I am postulating now that he fails to be re-elected—when he has shown, by accepting nomination and doing all the hard work involved in his campaign for re-election, that he has ceased to be retired, or ceased to be of a mind to retire. For those two or three weeks, he will not draw the pension which he might otherwise have drawn because he has sought re-election. I do not think that it can be said that this constitutes a real hardship, or that it represents such a likely event that one should make special provision for it.

The other circumstance is much more usual. We have a Dissolution. Hon. Members go off, seek re-election, and the vast majority are re-elected. It would be absurd, in those circumstances, if the pension should begin to be paid to everyone entitled to it because the majority will be re-elected in the normal, or fairly normal, course of events. I put it to the House that we are right as we stand.

As regards the draftsmanship, the right hon. and learned Member for Huntingdonshire will appreciate that all of us, apart from the Attorney-General and the Solicitor-General, are in a difficulty. One takes the best possible legal advice available. One does not attempt to act on one's own advice in these matters. I recognise that the right hon. and learned Gentleman has doubts about the draftsmanship of the subsection and about whether it fulfils its purpose. I am grateful to him. On a previous occasion, he expressed doubts about another Clause. We accept that those doubts were wisely expressed and, later, we shall propose an Amendment to meet them, This is a most valuable exchange of views, and we are very grateful to any right hon. and learned Gentleman who is able to help us by expressing doubts about the draftsmanship.

This question was raised by the right hon. and learned Member for Wirral (Mr. Selwyn Lloyd), in Committee, and we had the opportunity to consider it, with all the advice available to us. I have written to both right hon. and learned Gentlemen explaining what the situation is and the test by which lawyers normally see whether the draftsmanship is capable of standing up. We are advised that it is absolutely right as it is.

None the less, the right hon. and learned Gentleman has asked me to look at the matter again and consider an alternative form of words. There would be an opportunity, even at a later stage, if that form of words were thought to be more clear, to suggest an Amendment in another place. Of course I will look at it, but I have gone to considerable trouble about it and have written to the two right hon. and learned Gentlemen to explain it, and I hope that, in the circumstances, the right hon. and learned Gentleman will not press the Amendment unduly.

Sir D. Renton

In view of the undertaking given by the Chief Secretary, for which I am grateful, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the Amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.