§ Lords Amendment No. 1: In page 2, line 1, leave out subsection (4).
§ 5.50 a.m.
§ The Joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Housing and Local Government (Mr. James MacColl)I beg to move, That this House doth agree with the Lords in the said Amendment.
I must explain to the House why we have to consider this Amendment at this hour of the morning. I feel rather like the grand old Duke of York who marched his men to the top of the hill and then marched them down again. When the Bill was in Committee my hon. and Joint Friend the Member for Bermondsey (Mr. Mellish), with his usual eloquence, persuaded the Committee to put these words into the Bill. When it reached another place, my noble Friend Lord Mitchison persuaded the other place to take them out of the Bill, and so we are back where we started.
The short point is that it was thought to be desirable, where the Chairman of Ways and Means and the Lord Chairman of Committees found that the interests of people not given notice of the order might be affected by an Amendment on a Petition for Amendment, such as another water undertaking which might be included in an order for grouping, or something of that sort, for the Chairmen to be able to refuse to accept such an Amendment because it would be unfair.
That remains the intention, but, after discussion, it was decided that this could be done by Standing Orders and I am glad to say that the two Chairmen have agreed to bring before their respective Houses a revised Standing Order which will mean that the House will take control of the matter. The principle remains, but this is a more satisfactory method.
§ Mr. Graham Page (Crosby)As the Parliamentary Secretary has said, this subsection was not in the Bill when it started. It went into the Bill during Committee stage in this House, and came out of the Bill during Committee in another place. 2126 The hon. Gentleman has likened this to the exercise of the Duke of York, but I think that it is rather like a Government hokey-cokey—"You put the Amendment in and you take the Amendment out." At this hour of the morning I will resist the temptation to make an impassioned speech about the vacillations and fuddle and muddle of the Government's policy on an Amendment of this sort.
However, I want to make one comment. What it was sought to do in this subsection was that where a petition for an amendment of an order involved Amendments which, if they had been Amendments to a Private Bill, would have required a Petition for Additional Provision, then the Chairman of Ways and Means might direct the deletion of that from the Petition for the amendment of the order. However, neither Erskine May nor Standing Orders that I can discover states when Amendments to a Private Bill require to be prefaced by a Petition for Additional Provision. How did one apply the Standing Order by an undefined rule relating to Private Bills to Statutory Orders under this Bill?
It rather worried me to find that in another place it was said that this had all been solved by a Standing Order and that the wording of the Standing Order had been agreed when we shall not see that in this House before we are asked to remove the subsection. If a new Standing Order is to be made, I hope that it will be in positive terms to take the place of this subsection and not just negative terms. I hope that the Chairman of Ways and Means and the Lord Chairman of Committees will have power not only to reject a Petition for Amendment, although it is right that they should do that if it introduces matter which has not been advertised to the public, or not been before the public inquiry before the order.
I hope, also, that they will have power to accept by Standing Order at any stage a petition for amendment of the order which, the Joint Committee thinks, does not go to the substance of the order but is within the original petition and is merely a matter of form, definition or removal of ambiguity. I hope that the Standing Order can be in that positive form and thus be a help to the House and not merely a pedantic procedural refinement. On that basis, that we shall 2127 have a Standing Order of that nature, I support the removal of the subsection from the Bill.
§ Question put and agreed to.