HC Deb 24 October 1967 vol 751 cc1508-16

Order for Second Reading read.

3.49 p.m.

The Solicitor-General (Sir Arthur Irvine)

Mr. Speaker, I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

On 26th June last this House concurred with the Lords in their Resolution that it was desirable that, in the present Session, all Bills to consolidate enactments with Amendments to give effect to recommendations made by the Law Commissions, together with any report containing such recommendations, be referred to the Joint Committee on Consolidation Bills.

The present Bill is the first outcome of this procedure, designed to achieve consolidation with such Amendments as appear to the Law Commission to be required for the purpose of producing a satisfactory consolidation. It is right that I should draw the attention of the House to that fact.

The Law Commission, in the preparation of the Bill, found that to produce a satisfactory consolidation it desired to recommend a number of Amendments, and it reported accordingly. The Amendments recommended have been considered and agreed to by the Joint Committee, which reported that the Amendments proposed to be made to the existing law contained in the Bill gave effect to the recommendations of the Commissions which it approved.

In broad terms, the Acts which are consolidated in the Bill deal with methods for establishing and improving, maintaining and regulating fisheries for shellfish and for prohibiting or restricting the taking of crabs and lobsters. There are provisions also designed to achieve the elimination or the prevention of the spread of disease and pests affecting shellfish.

One of the matters revealed by a study of the laws to be consolidated was the degree of discrepancy between the fines for similar offences under different Acts. For taking spawning crab maximum fines ranged from £2 for a first offence to £10 for a second or subsequent offence. For landing lobster carrying spawn the maximum fines were £100 for a first offence and £200 for a second or subsequent offence.

The Law Commission recommended assimilation of these penalties, reporting without hesitation that existing discrepancies between fines for similar offences were an accidental anomaly. But it reported that it did not think that Parliament would look to the Commissions for advice on the proper level of fines. The maximum penalties in Clause 17, namely, £25 for a first offence and £50 for a subsequent offence are those which the Home Office after consultation with the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food recommended.

With those few observations and bearing in mind that this is the first application of the procedure to which I referred earlier, I express the hope that the House will give the Bill a Second Reading.

3.53 p.m.

Mr. Graham Page (Crosby)

May I, first, from this side of the House, welcome the hon. and learned Gentleman in his new office and wish him well personally? From our association in other spheres I feel that I have almost a vested interest, which I ought to declare, in his appointment.

In this Second Reading debate we are embarking upon a new procedure, and perhaps the House will not begrudge a little time looking at that new procedure and how it affects our discussions. It is a procedure which arises, as the Solicitor-General has said, out of a Resolution passed on 26th June when the House agreed that it was desirable in the present Session that all Bills to consolidate any enactments with Amendments to give effect to recommendations made by one or both of the Law Commissions should be referred to the Joint Committee on Consolidation Bills. As a result, in this Bill we are embodying not only consolidation but recommendations from the Law Commission.

We therefore have an entirely new wording for the Long Title of the Bill: An Act to consolidate certain enactments relating to shellfish fisheries and shellfish, with amendments to give effect to recommendations of the Law Commission and the Scottish Law Commission. The Bill deals with a rather extensive area of the law—orders for fisheries, the grants of several fisheries, the regulation of fisheries and the protection of fisheries, the prohibiting of the importation of shellfish and the close season for oysters. Quite a variety of subjects is dealt with. When consolidation of the subject was studied, it was found impossible to bring forward a reasonable consolidation Bill without introducing new law, new law as recommended by the Law Commission.

This is a fourth category of consolidation Bills. Previously, we have known the pure consolidation Bill, what one knows as the "scissors and paste" type. Secondly, we have known consolidation with corrections and minor improvements as permitted by the 1949 legislation. We have known consolidation Bills with Amendments which are wide open to debate and Amendment in the House. Now we have a modification of that third category—consolidation with special Amendments recommended by the Law Commission.

In the report of the Joint Committee on this Consolidation Bill it is said that the Joint Committee considered the Bill, together with the report of the Law Commission and the Scottish Law Commission on the consideration of certain enactments relating to shellfisheries and shellfish. It was of the opinion that the recommendations of the Law Commissions were for the purpose of producing a satisfactory consolidation of the law and the Committee approved the recommendations and, except for one, made no further comments. I will return to that a little later.

The recommendations are included in Command Paper 3267, the Report from the Law Commissions, and although the Solicitor-General dealt with only one recommendation, there were in fact 10 which have been embodied in the Bill, each of which is new law. As I understand the position, on Second Reading and later in Committee and on Report we are entitled to discuss those recommendations and how far they have been embodied in the Bill. It is true that quite a number of them are matters of small moment.

The first recommendation, for example, was a tidying-up of the orders granting several fisheries and regulating fisheries. It was recommended that such orders could combine an order for a several fishery and the regulation of a fishery. No one could object to that. The second recommendation was of much the same type. Under existing law the rights of a person granted a fishery by order are given to someone called a "grantee" and that leads one to believe that those rights would be given only to the original grantee. The Law Commission recommended that that should be tidied up and should therefore include assignees of the original grantee.

The third recommendation is of far greater importance and relates to the penalties upon a person who refuses to answer inquiries from a seafishery officer. As the law stands, a person who obstructs an inspector or other person in the exercise of any power or right conferred by the provisions to which the particular Section in the 1962 Act apply would be guilty of an offence.

The Law Commission apprehended that a person who refused to answer inquiries by an inspector might not be guilty of any offence and therefore introduced a penalty for a person refusing to answer questions put by an inspector. It appears in Clause 5 (7) in these words: Any person who obstructs an inspector or other person in the exercise of any power or right conferred by this section, and now the new words: or who refuses or without reasonable excuse fails to provide any information reasonably required by an inspector or other person in the exercise of any such power or right, shall be guilty of an offence and liable on summary conviction to a fine not exceeding £50. Where we have introduced such penalties in other legislation, such as the recent Companies Bill which went through the House, protection has been given to the privilege between a legal adviser and his client. That perhaps ought to be considered in introducing this new aspect of the law in Clause 5(7). Perhaps it is a Committee point, but it is a serious matter to impose a penalty on someone merely for refusing to answer questions by an inspector when there is no qualifica- tion of that. He may wish to refuse because by his answers he might incriminate himself, but he cannot do so without being guilty under this subsection. I think that this needs further consideration.

I go on with the recommendations of the Law Commission. There is a minor recommendation, the fourth, that boroughs be included with counties under the law relating to the trial of offences. Only counties were mentioned in the old law. There is the rather amusing recommendation No. 5, where the Law Commission found that it was an offence to import shellfish by vessel, but, therefore, not by aircraft or hovercraft. So we have the law modernised by the introduction of aircraft and hovercraft as being vehicles in which one is forbidden to import shellfish without authority.

Recommendation No. 6 makes an alteration in the close season for oysters. I was always under the impression that one could safely say that if there were not an "r" in the month it was a close season for oysters, but apparently that does not work. There was a close season for deep sea oysters and one for other oysters. Now it will all be one term.

Mr. F. J. Bellenger (Bassetlaw)

A rule of thumb?

Mr. Page

I do not know about a rule of thumb. I always open my oysters with something more powerful than my thumb.

Recommendation No. 7 is the important one to which the Solicitor-General referred. It deals with the provisions relating to the catching or selling, or even having possession, of crabs in spawn and lobsters in spawn. The Law Commission drew attention to the extraordinary position that the catching and selling of a crab in spawn might result in a fine of £2, whereas the catching and selling of a lobster in spawn might result in a penalty of £100 for the first offence and £200 for the second offence.

The Commission recommended that this should be brought in line and left it to Parliament to decide what the penalty should be. The Joint Committee thought that this was a matter which should be left to the House to decide. As a result, in another place an Amendment has been put in the Bill and we now have in the Bill penalties for each of these offences of £25 for the first offence and £50 for the second.

The eighth recommendation was that as the definition of shellfish bed did not cover a natural shellfish bed but only those which are man-made, the definition should cover both. The ninth recommendation was that the legislation should be applied to the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands, with alterations if necessary by Order in Council. I am a little puzzled why the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands cannot legislate for themselves in relation to shellfish, but I suppose there is a precedent for this.

The tenth recommendation says that where an order is made under a certain part of the Act of 1868, the order had to be published, actualy published and distributed by the person who had the benefit of the order. That, apparently, had not been done for a long time and the Law Commission recommended that the person having the benefit of the order should be merely required to publish notice of it. I wonder whether that is sufficent.

It might be advisable to have this requirement to publish the notice that an order has been made granting a fishery and that the beneficiary of it should have to publish a summary of the order to show what it is about. I recollect one which went through this House about 18 months or two years ago in which, when granting a fishery, the Minister had granted the right to impose any fees which the beneficiary of that order chose to fix. This was delegation of the right to tax the public. The order was amended on the recommendation of the Statutory Instruments Committee. I think the public should be told the contents of the Order when notice of it is published.

The Law Commission recommended the repeal of a number of obsolete provisions of the law. These are matters which perhaps it would be better to consider in Committee. It will be seen from what I have said that these recommendations by the Law Commission have made substantial alterations in the law. It is as well that we in this House should look carefully at those when they are embodied in a consolidation Bill. We have been used to dealing with consolidation Bills as something which just include the existing law and no new law, except for a tidying up with minor corrections and amendments, no new law so far as it concerns merits and real content.

We have been concerned about whether it is the right time to consolidate and the form in which consolidation has taken place. We are now, under this procedure, presented with a new form of consolidation altogether, something we should study and, it may be, amend. For that reason I have looked carefully at and have drawn the attention of the House to the recommendations of the Law Commission in this case.

4.9 p.m.

Mr. Ronald Bell (Buckinghamshire, South)

I intend to ask for the attention of the House only for a few moments. This is the first Bill under the new procedure which, the House may remember, I had considerable doubts about. I still have them. This has been a relatively simple Bill to deal with, but even so there were points of difficulty, as the Solicitor-General will know from having read the Report of the Joint Select Committee. I join with my hon. Friend the Member for Crosby (Mr. Graham Page) in offering my congratulations to the hon. and learned Gentleman on his elevation to his present office.

The difficulty about this procedure is that members of the Joint Select Committee on Consolidation Bills are the same for every Bill and they are inevitably lawyers, and on this occasion we had to deal with quite a different subject and it is not to be imagined that we are experts on all these subjects.

When it comes to making actual changes in the law, although the Committee is fortified by the recommendations of the Law Commission it must be the purpose of the procedure that we should bring an independent judgment to bear upon the recommendations. In this case the Committee decided, following the Law Commission, that it should not make any positive recommendation about the amount of the fines in the case of the spawning crabs and lobsters, and, therefore, that was filled in through the wisdom of another place.

I must confess to still having some doubts about the penalties for not answering questions. The procedure may work all right provided that when Bills come to the House they are treated as ordinary Bills and receive the attention of those hon. Members or those members of another place who are expert in the particular matter dealt with by the Bill. The Bill before us deals with shellfish, and one would naturally hope that hon. Members on both sides who have fishing constituencies and practical knowledge of these matters would be present during the stages of the Bill to consider the not unimportant changes in the law which are brought about.

The difficulty is that, after all, about a dozen people cannot really hope to spot all the significant questions. For example, my hon. Friend the Member for Crosby mentioned a point which had not occurred to me—I do not think it occurred to any hon. Member—and that is the question of professional privilege in relation to the penalty for refusing to answer questions asked by an inspector under the enforcement provisions. This point can, of course, be considered during the Committee stage if necessary.

So I retain an open mind about this procedure. I am sure that it will work only if these Bills are given some degree of attention when they come before the House and do not get through under the rubber stamp of consolidation Bills, because the ordinary kind of consolidation Bills to which the House had been accustomed in the past are very different animals from those which will arise under the new Resolution.

4.14 p.m.

The Joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (Mr. James Hoy)

The hon. and learned Member for Buckinghamshire, South (Mr. Ronald Bell) says he still has doubts about this type of procedure, but we agree with him that it is a comparatively simple Measure with which we are dealing.

My right hon. and learned Friend the Solicitor-General would like me to thank both the hon. Member for Crosby (Mr. Graham Page) and the hon. and learned Member for Buckingham, South for the congratulations which they have offered to him, for which I know he is very grateful.

There are two substantial points here. The hon. Member for Crosby listed 10, but I am sure that he will agree that only two are of any substance. The first is with regard to the answering of questions asked by an inspector. There is some safeguard in the fact that if a man feels that he is to be incriminated he may think that a good reason for not answering, because it is provided that he may reasonably withhold answers. This is much more a Committee point than a Second Reading point.

As for the alteration in the fines, the present maximum fines for crabs under the Act of 1877 are £2 for a first offence and £10 for a subsequent offence, whereas those for lobsters under an Act of 1959 are £100 and £200 respectively. In any case, we felt that the penalties for lobsters were too high. Those penalties were provided originally for more serious offences. Let us confess on behalf of our predecessors that a mistake was made in the drafting by which lobsters were put into that category. We thought, rightly I hope, that this was the time to put it right. It was for that reason that the changes were made.

We are grateful to hon. Gentlemen who have given consideration to this matter, and I trust that the Bill will now be given a Second Reading.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill accordingly read a Second time.

Bill committed to a Committee of the whole House.—[Mr. Ioan L. Evans.]

Committee Tomorrow.