CHANGE OF STATUTORY TENANT BY AGREEMENT. (Hansard, 25 April 1968)

§ Mr. Graham Page

The Clause deals with the exchange of tenancies. The Committee should be informed of what the draftsman himself thought of the Clause. He told the Joint Committee: Could I begin by saying the whole topic is virtually of no significance whatever. Later he said: So far as one can see this section is effectively dead,… I should have thought that this is not the right thing to include in a consolidation Bill. So far as there is any little shred of law remaining to be dealt with on the exchange of tenancies it should have been dealt with by disposing of it first in some form. There are many forms in which we can now dispose of old law in consolidation. One would have liked to see the Clause on the exchange of tenancies out of the Bill altogether.

§ The Solicitor-General

The criticism is made of that Clause that it reproduces 640 law which is virtually dead. This cannot be a valid point at the Committee stage, since Section 17 of the Rent Act, 1957 is still in existence. Its effect, however small, must therefore be reproduced in the Bill.

I trust that I shall be in order in dealing with the question of what the draftsman is alleged to have said about this matter. The hon. Gentleman must be very careful about this kind of thing, because in the helpfulness that he applies to this whole matter there is a risk that the draftsmen, these servants of the public whose work he says he so greatly admires, are misrepresented, no doubt inadvertently, in a matter of this kind.

As an example, the hon. Gentleman earlier observed that a draftsman, according to him, had been obliged to throw in his hand in a certain drafting matter. What the draftsman in fact said on that occasion, as is apparent from the Report of the proceedings of the Joint Committee, was that the purport of his note was to explain why in that relevant subsection he appeared, as it were, to have thrown in his hand. That is a very different matter. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will take note of this and be careful in that kind of observation.