Clause 10.—(POWER TO REQUIRE INFORMATION AS TO BUILDING CONTRACTS.) (Hansard, 15 July 1965)

§ Mr. Darling
I beg to move, That this House doth agree with the Lords in the said Amendment.

§ Mr. John Hall
Is the Minister taking, at the same time, Lords Amendment No. 7, which, I think, is consequential?

§ Mr. Darling
No. That will come next.
As all hon. Members will be aware, Clause 10 empowers the Board of Trade to serve a notice requiring evidence of the existence of a building contract or information concerning the owner of the land in a case where office development is taking place in accordance with planning permission granted before 5th November. Hon. Members will also be aware that by Clause 10 the notice may specify the time within which the information is to be supplied. The Amendment establishes that it shall not be less than 28 days.
In Committee, hon. Members drew attention to the absence of a time limit for complying with a notice served under Clause 10 and suggested a maximum of 28 days. On Report, we introduced a new subsection which gave the Board of Trade power to specify a time limit in each case and also the time and place where the documents must be produced. We agreed to look at the matter again, however, and this Amendment was moved in another place pursuant to that undertaking.
The Amendment means that we have not prescribed a maximum of 28 days 959 for all cases, because we think that it would be reasonable to allow a longer period in some cases. A minimum of 28 days should, however, be a generous allowance where the information required is readily available.

§ Mr. John Hall
I think that all my hon. Friends would wish to thank the Minister for having the Amendment introduced in another place. As he has said, it was the result of suggestions made by the Opposition in Committee and, again, it is the result of a suggestion by my hon. Friend the Member for Reading (Mr. Peter Emery) that we have had the benefit of the Amendment. We are grateful that it has been introduced.

§ Mr. Graham Page
On a point of order, I believe, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, that my Amendment to the Lords Amendment, at the foot of page 4463 of the Amendment Paper, in line 5, leave out "this Part of", has not been selected. I wish, however, to raise the point that, unfortunately, this Amendment was printed in the wrong place on the Paper. I do not in any way blame the Clerks of the Public Bill Office, who are so extremely helpful on these occasions and seldom go wrong. The fault must have been entirely mine.
It will, however, be seen that Lords Amendment No. 7 and Lords Amendment No. 8 both relate to page 16, line 7, and that both of them contain the words this Part of this Act". My Amendment in line 5 was intended to be an Amendment to Lords Amendment No. 8 but, somehow, it appears on the Amendment Paper before my next Amendment, which makes it appear that it is an Amendment to Lords Amendment No. 7.
960 I was hoping that after I had dealt with my second Amendment, in line 7 of Lords Amendment No. 7, I might ask you to reconsider your non-selection of my Amendment to Lords Amendment No. 8 and have it in the right place on the Amendment Paper.

§ Mr. Deputy-Speaker (Sir Samuel Storey)
The hon. Member has had an opportunity to check this before and he should have raised the matter earlier. I cannot allow him to move his Amendment when we come to the Lords Amendment No. 8.

§ Mr. Graham Page
In that case, I beg to move, as an Amendment to the Lords Amendment, at the end to add: Provided that subsections (2) and (3) of the said section 214 shall not apply to the service of a notice under section 10 of this Act. Section 214 of the Town and Country Planning Act, 1962, authorises the service of notices in certain different ways. Subsection (1) authorises the service of notices by manual delivery to the person on whom they have to be served, or by leaving them at the usual or last known place of abode of that person, or by leaving them at the address which that person has registered as an address for service, or by sending them by prepaid registered letter or recorded delivery to the usual or last known place of abode or address registered for service, or, in the case of a company, by sending them to the secretary or clerk by registered or recorded delivery at the company's registered office. Those are the normal ways of service set out in Section 214(1), and I have no objection whatever to any of those applying to notices under Clause 10 of the Bill.
I cannot help feeling that in another place the noble Lord who was dealing with this Clause on behalf of the Government led my noble Friends a little bit up the garden path on this matter. He said: Under Section 214 of the 1962 Act a notice may be served on a person in any of the following ways: (1) by delivering it to him; (2) by leaving it at his usual or last-known address; (3) by sending it by prepaid registered letter or recorded delivery to that address; and (4), in the case of a company, by delivering it or sending it by prepaid registered letter or recorded delivery to the clerk or secretary of the company at their registered or principal office. This, as the noble Lords will readily understand, is purely consequential, and I beg to move."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 961 House of Lords, 18th May, 1965; Vol. 266, c. 405.] The noble Lord did not cover the whole of Section 214. He recited only the normal forms of notice of service. If one reads the rest of that Section, one sees that it allows service in several different ways. It allows service by addressing a letter merely to the owner or the occupier without setting out on the notice or letter the name of the person on whom it is being served. It allows a notice to be served by delivering it to some person on the premises who may not be the person to whom the notice is addressed, or against whom future proceedings may have to be brought. It allows service of notice by fixing it conspicuously to some object on the premises, such as nailing the writ to the mast.
My objection is to those forms of service as applied to this Clause. They may be right in certain circumstances under the Town and Country Planning Act, 1962, but they should not apply to Clause 10, because this Clause concerns the requirement by the Board of Trade for information about building contracts. That is all that it is concerned with. Normally, it will be the owner who will hasten to the Board of Trade with this information.
The owner will want to say, "I am carrying out this development under a building contract which was made before 5th November, 1964. I want to show you this and to show you that I am doing it right." He may say that to justify his claim that he comes within the relief provisions of the Bill. If he does not do that the local planning authority will serve an enforcement notice on him.
Clause 10 gives the Board of Trade power to require the information by serving on him a notice and requiring it to be given in the time specified on that notice. By Lords Amendment No. 6, which the House has accepted, that notice must be of not less than 28 days. There are serious consequences if the person to whom the notice is addressed fails to provide the information. The notice may be served on the grantee of the planning permission. It may be served on the owner of the land, the developer or builder carrying out operations on the land. If he fails to comply with the notice, he may be liable to a maximum fine of £100.
962 That is not the sort of case which one contemplates in serving notices on the property by leaving them with someone on the property or pinning them up somewhere on the property. These are not cases of absentee landlords or of someone trying to hide away. People on whom notices under Clause 10 will be served are those trying to develop a site and they will be well known to the local planning authority. There is no reason why they should not be served personally or in the normal way by prepaid registered post or recorded delivery. There is no reason to place on these people the risk of failing to comply with a notice because they do not know that it has been served, for example because it was left with some irresponsible person on the site or affixed to what some not very intelligent process server thought a conspicuous object on the site.
Section 214, in subsections (2) and (3), provides for the "Give it to Charlie" or the "Nail it on the toilet door" sort of service. This is not appropriate to the type of notice under Clause 10. Subsections (2) and (3) should be excluded in these cases.

§ Mr. Jay
I regret that the hon. Member for Crosby (Mr. Graham Page) failed to serve sufficiently conspicuously his notice of the Amendment which we are not discussing. His present Amendment seeks to limit the application of Section 214 of the 1962 Act in respect of serving of notices under Clause 10 of this Bill. He thinks that we should not have the power under the Bill where there is difficulty in obtaining the name of the person on whom the notice should be served to take the exceptional measures he explained under Section 214, subsections (2) and (3), of the 1962 Act. I agree that my noble Friend in another place did not tell the whole truth about that Act, although he told a great deal of it. No doubt that was for the sake of brevity rather than any wish to mislead noble Lords.
Although I should expect it to be only rarely and in the last resort that this particular method of serving a notice would be used, nevertheless, we feel that the power should be retained because we cannot be sure that there might not be cases where it is impossible to discover the name of the owner in any other way. It is possible, for example, that the 963 original applicant to whom planning permission was granted may have sold the land and might conceivably not be able to say who the present owner is. There can also be cases of joint ownership where there would be difficulty in finding out the ownership in the relevant cases.
Therefore, I think it wise to retain this power for use in the last resort, although we would not expect that it would be at all frequently used.

§ Mr. Graham Page
I beg to ask leave to withdraw the Amendment.

§ Mr. Sydney Silverman (Nelson and Colne)
No.

§ Mr. Deputy-Speaker
Is it the wish of the House that the Amendment be withdrawn?

Hon. Members
No.

§ Mr. Jay
I beg to move, That this House doth agree with the Lords in the said Amendment.
This proposed new Clause A, as has been rightly said, is neither drafting nor clarifying, but is consequential on the previous Amendment which we have discussed. Its intention is to define what service of a notice means in this case. What it does is to make clear that service of the notice has the same meaning in Part I of the Bill as under Section 214 of the Town and Country Planning Act, 1962 which we have just discussed.
In view of the previous discussion, I do not think I need expound any further what the powers are for serving a notice under that Act.