Clause 1.—(CONTINUATION OF WORKMEN'S COMPENSATION IN CERTAIN CASES.) (Hansard, 10 May 1967)

§ Mr. Graham Page (Crosby)
I wish to protest at the form of the consolidation in Clause 1. It is a most difficult form of consolidation when one is referred to an Act and the Schedule to an Act which is being repealed in the very Schedule to this Consolidation Bill.
This means that anyone who reads this Bill is required to refer to a repealed Act, and that will not be found in print. It will not be printed in future editions of any current Statutes to which one refers. When an Act is repealed, Her Majesty's Stationery Office does not continue to print it. It will, therefore, be extremely difficult for anyone to find out what is meant by the Clause.
I cannot understand why it is necessary to make the consolidation in this form, that one should refer to Schedule 9 of the Industrial Injuries Act, 1946, and then, when turning to the Schedule of this Consolidation Bill, find that that Schedule is repealed. I hope that the right hon. and learned Gentleman will explain this in greater detail to the House and tell us why this has been necessary.

§ The Solicitor-General (Sir Dingle Foot)
The Bill has been fully considered by the Joint Committee, on which all parties in this House are represented. That Committee contains practitioners in both branches of the legal profession. Those practitioners considered this Consolidation Measure and were perfectly satisfied with this form of the Clause. It would. therefore, be an impossible exercise for us in this House to do the Committee's work over again for it.
I respectfully inform the hon. Member for Crosby (Mr. Graham Page) that I cannot see that the Clause raises any difficulty at all. In 1946 we brought 1454 workmen's compensation to an end after many years. It had been a fruitful source of litigation. I suppose that no statutes have been litigated more than the workmen's compensation Acts. They were brought to an end and the system of industrial injuries was put in their place.
It was necessary to save the rights under the workmen's compensation Acts of those who had been injured and whose claims had been adjudicated before 1946. There was, therefore, included a saving Clause, which was Section 89 of the National Insurance (Industrial Injuries) Act, 1946. This Clause has a similar purpose. It simply saves the rights of those who are still entitled to benefit under the Workmen's Compensation Acts.
The hon. Gentleman said that these repealed Acts will no longer be printed by the Stationery Office. Of course, they will not, but I cannot imagine that that will cause any difficulty to anyone who has to interpret the Statute. The hon. Gentleman knows perfectly well that in my chambers and in his office and throughout the legal profession there are sets of statutes which are available to all of us and which go back for a very long time. They are available to hon. Members in the Library.

§ Mr. Graham Page
What then is the purpose of consolidation? Surely the purpose of a Consolidation Measure is to include in one document the law on a subject as it then stands. Here we are told that Schedule 9 of the 1946 Act will continue to apply to certain cases. Surely a better form of consolidation would have been to repeat that Schedule in this Consolidation Bill instead of leaving it to be found somewhere else. This is not consolidation; this is legislation by reference and it only makes Consolidation Bills that much less valuable to those who have to work with him.
As the hon. and learned Gentleman said, of course he and I probably have the old Statutes on dusty shelves in our offices, but that is not the purpose for which we are consolidating these Acts. When our clients come to see us, they should not have to ask us to get on the step-ladder and reach down from the 1455 tenth shelf a Statute which contains Schedule 9 because the Consolidation Measure says that there is a Schedule 9 of the 1946 Act which still applies to the client's case. We ought to be able to refer to the Consolidation Measure and find the law as it stands on that day and as we have consolidated it. not needing to look further for the law. It would have been better to set out Schedule 9 in the Bill and to say that it applied to such and such cases.