LEASEHOLD REFORM BILL (Hansard, 24 October 1967)

§ Mr. Speaker
Before we come to consideration of the Lords Amendments I think that it would help the hon. Member for Crosby (Mr. Graham Page) and his hon. Friend if I told him which of his Amendments to the Lords Amendments have been selected and which have not been selected.
The hon. Gentleman's Amendment to Lords Amendment No. 1, to line 4, is not selected. Amendment at line 7 of Lords Amendment No. 2, is not selected. His Amendment to Lords Amendment No. 5, page 5, line 5, is selected.
Of the hon. Gentleman's four Amendments to Lords Amendment No. 11, page 5, line 41, I am calling the first one, with which we are taking the second.

§ The Minister of State, Ministry of Housing and Local Government (Mr. Niall MacDermot)
The second or third?

§ Mr. Speaker
The second. We must be clear. Of the hon. Member's Amendments in that group I am taking the one to line 1, with which we shall discuss the one to line 7.

§ Mr. MacDermot
The hon. Member has two Amendments to line 7 and I wonder which you mean, Mr. Speaker.

§ Mr. Speaker
The second Amendment. The first one is not selected. The one at line 8 is not selected.
The hon. Member's one Amendment to Lords Amendment No. 14, page 6, line 45, is not selected. His Amendment to Lords Amendment No. 18, page 13, line 43, is not selected. His first three Amendments to Lords Amendment No. 22, page 24, line 33, are not selected. I have selected his two Amendments, at line 7, and line 10, which we shall take together.
I have selected the hon. Member's last Amendment—the Lords Amendment No. 62, page 81, line 43—his Amendment to line 6, but not the previous one to line 3.
I hope that that is of help to the House.

§ Mr. Graham Page (Crosby)
On a point of order. I understand that it is 1521 debatable whether the Lords Amendments should now be considered. I do not know whether the right hon. and learned Gentleman has put the proposition to the House?

§ Mr. Speaker
It has to be moved before we can debate it.

§ Mr. MacDermot
I beg to move. That the Lords Amendments be now considered.

§ Mr. Page
I do not think that we can let this Motion pass without some protest and objection. But before I do object to the Motion I would observe that I am having quite a distinguished afternoon in being able to congratulate two Ministers on the same afternoon, and I do sincerely congratulate the right hon. and learned Gentleman upon his new appointment. We do welcome him personally; we wish him well personally. We will give him hell Ministerially—we hope. But we do congratulate him upon his appointment.
I have great sympathy with the right hon. and learned Gentleman. When the House rose for the Summer Adjournment the Second Reading of the Bill had not been reached in the other House. The right hon. and learned Gentleman had to thumb his way through the Official Reports of the other place, as we did, to find what Amendments had been made in Committee and on Report there. He, of course, had officials to help him; we had only scissors and paste in finding out from the Official Reports what Amendments had been made. We did not have them in print until five o'clock yesterday. The right hon. and learned Gentleman, no doubt, wanted to table Amendments, as he has done, to the Lords Amendments, and reject some which were made in another place. But how could one make amendments when we did not have them in print and know to what lines reference should be made in making Amendments until about five o'clock yesterday?
The right hon. and learned Gentleman was most courteous to me in informing me of the Amendments which the Government were to put forward on Third Reading yesterday in another place. I thank him for that courtesy. However, 1522 I am not the House, and I am not all hon. Members. It is right that the House should know in advance what it is debating the following day. It was quite impossible for anyone to discover until late yesterday what Lords' Amendments were to be debated today. It was not possible until this morning for those of us who wished to make Amendments to the Lords' Amendments to so inform the House by means of the printed Amendment Paper.
It is true that the proofs of the Lords' Amendments were rushed through with great speed between five and six o'clock yesterday. This was all part of this dynamic Government, and we are grateful to the Public Bill Office for the efforts which it made. Through its help, I was able to make the line references to the Amendments which I wanted to put down on the Order Paper.
This is a most unseemly rush in connection with a Bll of this kind which is nearly as complicated as the Land Commission Bill. It needs a great deal of thought. Where Amendments are introduced at this stage, one has to be able to see the results of those Amendments, not only by their own wording but the effect of them upon the rest of the Bill.
Already the Bill reaches us with an error on page 6, line 43, where there is a mistake which cannot be put right now and may necessitate alteration whenever an application is made under the Bill to apportion rateable value between a house on one side and the garage, garden and garden shed on the other. That is what happens when legislation is rushed through.
I do not know whether it is bad management on the part of the Government to rush through legislation in this way, or whether it is just arrogance in thinking that what the Government want can be steamrollered through the House without informing us fully beforehand and giving us a chance to think out the problems raised by the Lords' Amendments.
I protest at this treatment of the House. This is a particularly difficult piece of legislation to understand and interpret, and it needs very careful thought before we put it on the Statute Book in its final form.

§ Mr. John Peyton (Yeovil)
I want to endorse what my hon. Friend the Member for Crosby (Mr. Graham Page) has said about the right hon. and learned Gentleman. Certainly, we wish him well and congratulate him on his promotion. We hope that he will enjoy his new office. I personally welcome the opportunity to say something nice to and about a member of this Administration.
However, I am particularly concerned to support and thank my hon. Friend the Member for Crosby (Mr. Graham Page). It is not always that one hears a Front Bench spokesman, while acknowledging the courtesy which has been extended to him, resenting on the part of those behind him the discourtesy which has been extended to them. I desire to endorse With all the strength that I can the remarks which he has made about the mixture of incompetence and discourtesy with which the House is being treated.
It is becoming a habit. It is unfortunate that Ministers are so inured to our protests that they take little notice of them and do nothing to mend their ways. It is something which we are learning to endure somewhat painfully, but I am certain that some of my hon. Friends will wish to voice their views about this kind of treatment.
By no standard is this unwelcome legislation to us, but by no standard is it easy to comprehend and understand. For the Government to have made such a shocking confusion of their programme that we are told only at the very last minute of their views on the Amendments proposed in another place is quite a disgraceful affront to the House of Commons. I do not recall, on any major legislation which I remember that we have been presented with a paper of Amendments every one of which was starred.
I rather hoped that, when the Minister rose to move this Motion he would seek to express regret that the House had had so little notice of it, It seems a quite intolerable burden, and I hope very much that my hon. Friends will agree with me and support my hon. Friend the Member for Crosby in his very mild and restrained protests at the combination of bad manners and inefficiency with which, once again, the Government have treated the House of Commons.

§ Mr. MacDermot
I thank both hon. Gentlemen for the courteous parts of their speeches in which they made kindly references to me. If the hon. Member for Crosby (Mr. Graham Page) thinks that I am likely to be given hell in my new office, and this is a sample of it, it is to me a very familiar type of debate after my long experiences on Finance and other Bills in my previous offices.
I agree that this is a matter which, perforce, has had to be dealt with in haste and that we have not been able to give the House the length of time to consider these Amendments which we should have liked or which normally would have been given. To achieve that, probably it would have been necessary to recall Parliament earlier. On reflection, hon. Gentlemen themselves will see that that was not really necessary when they come to consider the Amendments. For the most part, they are relatively minor matters. Where they are not, I think that they will be found to be matters which have been debated very fully before.
The hon. Member for Crosby said that I was courteous enough to let him have advance notice of the Government's Amendments. In return, he was equally courteous and had time to let me have advance notice of his Amendments to those Amendments.