§ Mr. HigginsI beg to move Amendment No. 7, in page 13, line 16, leave out subsection (1).
The purpose of Clause 16 is to remove from the Decimal Currency Board the obligation which it had under the earlier Decimal Currency Act to receive representations about compensation. There is entire agreement between the Minister of State and myself about the decision reached after the original Decimal Currency Act—that there should be no system of general compensation. None the less, it is not right at this stage in the proceedings to allow the Board to suggest to the Government, and for the Government to accept, that the Board should cease to receive any representations on this subject.
The argument put forward by the Minister of State in Committee was not reasonable. It has been agreed that there should be no system of general compensation. If the Board continues to 1914 receive representations, it may receive a case in which it is justified in making an exception and compensation should be pa1d. If that is so, there may be other similar cases. While we accept that a system of general compensation is not justified, individual firms or organisations may be able to show that they have suffered and that the Government should pay them compensation.
The Minister of State accepted in Committee that this question should not be decided by whether Government expenditure would be involved. I hope that we shall not hear it said, "The Opposition are pressing for more Government expenditure". This is most certainly not what we are doing. We are saying that in the Decimal Currency Act the Government accepted an obligation to consider the payment of compensation if a case can be made out. The Government have accepted this potential obligation to expend money, and the Decimal Currency Board ought not at this stage to give up its duty in this respect.
Since the Decimal Currency Act came into force the Decimal Currency Board has set out criteria against which it said that it would judge applications for compensation. It is debatable whether the Board made clear whether these were necessary and sufficient criteria, or whether they were necessary but not sufficient criteria. The impression of industry in general was that, if the criteria announced by the Decimal Currency Board were satisfied, this would mean that there was a reasonable case which could be discussed further by the Board and passed on to the Government. These criteria having been set up, and many firms having apparently met all the criteria, the Decimal Currency Board, instead of pursuing the matter in greater detail with those firms, has carried the matter no further, and has suggested that the obligation to consider further applications should be removed from the Board.
As a result of the decision which the House has taken this evening on the 6d., it is clear that many firms will incur additional costs which would not have been incurred had the 6d. been retained. There is, therefore, a case for saying that the Board should continue to receive representations from those affected by the 1915 decision to abolish the 6d. There may be cases of a special nature which will emerge only between now and the beginning of the transitional period, or between now and the end of the transitional period. For the Decimal Currency Board to ask the Government to relieve it of its responsibility now is quite unjustified. For that reason, I hope that the House will support the Amendment.
§ Mr. John HallMost of the arguments on this Amendment have already been deployed in Standing Committee on a similar Amendment which I moved, so I shall be brief.
The debate on the original Decimal Currency Act was in June, 1967, when the Treasury spokesman said that there was to be no general compensation but, nevertheless, special cases could be considered and were to be referred to the Decimal Currency Board for investigation to see whether there was a case for compensation which it could recommend to the Government.
It was accepted in Standing Committee that the objections that certain people and associations might have had to the introduction of the decimalisation system and to the decision of the Government not to have a general scheme of compensation were to some extent met by the promise that special cases would be treated fairly and justly by the Decimal Currency Board, which could recommend compensation. Therefore, the objections which might have been pressed still further and more strongly from both sides of the House on behalf of people likely to be affected seriously by the changeover to a decimal system were not pressed to the extent that they might have been.
After considering all the evidence from a number of associations, the Decimal Currency Board found that it was necessary to draw up certain criteria which had to be met by any person or organisation seeking compensation. The Automatic Vending Machine Association of Britain which was affected by this wrote to the Chancellor of the Exchequer protesting at the dismissal of its representations by the Decimal Currency Board. In the course of its letter dated 13 th September, 1968, addressed to the Chancellor, 1916 it said that the impression created with the Association was that
… no claim, no matter how morally justified, shall be permitted to succeed, and leaves us with little doubt that references in the Government White Paper and in the Act to ' special circumstances' compensation has no substance and that there was never, at any time, any intention to pay compensation no matter how justified.Understandably, the Chancellor reacted strongly to that accusation of bad faith and, in his reply dated 16th October, 1968, he said:You are completely mistaken if you suppose that the Government have approached this question of compensation otherwise than in good faith.Then we come to the next stage, when the Decimal Currency Board asked to be relieved of responsibility for deciding these special cases for compensation, and it recommended that no compensation be paid at any time. That must leave the impression in the minds of those likely to be seriously affected by this decision that they have been led up the garden path and have been the victims of bad faith on the part of the Government.If one examines the criteria established by the Decimal Currency Board, one finds that the first one is:
they must be necessarily and directly incurred as a result of decimalisation and would not otherwise have been incurred".In the case of the Automatic Vending Association of Britain, there is no doubt that the costs would not be incurred but for decimalisation.The second criterion is:
they must be clearly identifiable and measurable".That, too, is very easy to do in a case of this kind.The third criterion is:
the must be manifestly disproportionate, after taking into account all tax allowances, both to the costs incurred generally by organisations and to the benefits deriving from the changeover ".That, again, presents no problem.The fourth criterion is:
they must be for the conversion or replacement of machines purchased before 14th July, 1967".That, too, could easily be done.The only one which might be difficult to meet is the fifth and last which says:
they must extend so far beyond the normal financial fluctuations and hazards of business 1917 that they cannot be readily absorbed in normal operating costs ".That is capable of such wide and general interpretation that it is difficult to imagine any organisation which could meet it if it was the intention of the Decimal Currency Board not to allow it to meet it.The Decimal Currency Board having created the criteria, it seems very odd that it should find itself unable to adjudicate on cases brought to it. Unless the Amendment is accepted, in my view the Government will remain accused of bad faith in this matter.
§ 9.0 p.m.
§ Mr. TaverneThe Government approached this question with a certain amount of regret. At the start, we had an open mind on the issue of compensation. As the hon. Member for Worthing (Mr. Higgins) conceded, we ruled out any general scheme of compensation. But we asked the Decimal Currency Board to look at the possibility of a special scheme of compensation, and it was charged with examining whether it could recommend such a scheme in special cases. It was not always to be the exceptional case which was to be the subject of a scheme, if any. The hon. Member for Worthing said that there was an obligation on the Government to pay compensation in exceptional cases. This is not so.
§ Mr. HigginsIt was not my intention to give that impression. In fact, I do not think I d1d. I said that there was an obligation on the Board to receive representations, and I thought that would be reasonable.
§ Mr. TaverneIndeed, there was a statutory obligation. I apologise if I did not hear the hon. Gentleman aright.
I should make it clear that there was never any obligation on the Government to give compensation to anyone. We said that the Decimal Currency Board was to receive these representations to see whether it could recommend a scheme, but it was also made clear that it was possible that it could recommend no scheme and that it should recommend that there should be no compensation for anyone. This was made clear in the original White Paper which said:
If it can be shown to the Decimal Currency Board … that there are grounds for… assistance in special cases the Government will 1918 consider any recommendations the Board may care to make. But such cases, if there are any at all, will be exceptional.I mentioned in Committee, but it is important to repeat it to the House as a whole, that during the debates in Standing Committee on 2nd May, 1967—the debate on the former Decimal Currency Bill—the then Financial Secretary said specifically at column 232 that it was possible that the Board would recommend no compensation.The hon. Member for Worthing is right in saying that the issue is not one of Government expenditure. Indeed, it is with reluctance that the Government have accepted the advice of the Decimal Currency Board that a special scheme was not feasible. We would have liked a special scheme, but when the Board said that it could not draw up a fair one which could be properly administered, reluctantly we had to accept its advice.
It was the Board's duty to receive representations, and it did receive them. It was the right body to examine the problem. It was an extremely experienced body, and it went into the matter in very great detail. It found by the summer that none of the representations which it had received justified a special scheme, it is not that some of these representations did not make out a strong case for a particular industry or firm; it was impossible, on the basis of the representations, to see what a scheme would look like. For that reason, the Board published criteria, first, to remove doubts about the minimum that would be required and, second, to help it to decide whether representations could be such as to justify a special scheme.
The difficulty throughout has been one to which I feel hon. Members opposite have not given due weight. It is not that a good case cannot be made out for, say, vending machines. If there was a good case for vending machines, it was impossible to establish any criteria by which we could distinguish vending machines from amusement machines. If a good case could be made out for amusement machines, it was impossible to draw a line and draw up a scheme which would include amusement machines but would clearly establish principles by which it would not apply to cash registers. Whichever way we looked at it, it was not a shortage of facts which led the Board to 1919 the conclusion that a scheme was not feasible. Indeed it went into a great many facts. It had a large number of representations and it made the most detailed investigations. It was not the absence of facts which led to this conclusion; it was the basic insolubility of the problem. The Board realised how insoluble the problem of working out a fair scheme was only after it had looked at all the representations it was asked to examine.
If the hon. Member for Worthing asks the House to say that it should look at further representations and examine further facts, he fails to meet the point that however many more facts we look at we still cannot arrive at a scheme which can fairly, without anomalies and inequities between one class and another or between one firm and another, say that some under the scheme are entitled to compensation and others are not.
In a sense, the argument between hon. Members and myself has been at cross purposes. They have said that case A or case B is a deserving one, and in a way I am not disputing that. What I am saying is, If a scheme is allowed for case A and case B, you must show me a principle on which I can distinguish them from case C and case D ". The Board has not been able to find such
§ a principle, and no one has been able to suggest one. In those circumstances, with reluctance, we felt it necessary to accept the Board's advice and to concede, with regret, that we could no longer place on it the burden of receiving representations which cannot solve this basic problem.
§ Mr. John HallBefore the hon. and learned Gentleman sits down, he was kind enough in an earlier debate to say that my point about the capital cost of, for example, converting the coin-operated Post Office telephone boxes would be better raised in this debate. Can he now give me the figures for which I then asked?
§ Mr. TaverneI am afraid I cannot give the hon. Gentleman exact figures. I have made inquiries, and I understand that the estimates of the cost of, for example, the conversion and adaptation which will be necessary for the 6d. coin machines have varied widely from £3½ million to £10 million. A figure somewhere between the two may be the right one, but I cannot give the hon. Gentleman the exact cost for telephone call boxes. It is the only help I can give him.
§ Question put, That the Amendment be made:—
§ The House divided: Ayes 76, Noes 91.
1921| Division No. 136.] | AYES | [9.06 p.m. |
| Allason, James (Hemel Hempstead) | Hall, John (Wycombe) | Pym, Francis |
| Atkins, Humphrey (M't'n & M'd'n) | Hawkins, Paul | Ramsden, Rt. Hn. James |
| Biffen, John | Higgins, Terence L. | Rawlinson, Rt. Hn. Sir Peter |
| Boardman, Tom (Lelcester, S. W.) | Hill, J. E. B. | Rees-Davies, W. R. |
| Body, Richard | Holland, Philip | Rhys Williams, Sir Brandon |
| Brinton, Sir Tatton | Hooson, Emlyn | Rossi, Hugh (Hornsey) |
| Brown, Sir Edward (Bath) | Hornby, Richard | Russell, Sir Ronald |
| Buck, Antony (Colchester) | Iremonger, T. L. | Sharples, Richard |
| Bullus, Sir Eric | Jennings, J. C. (Burton) | Shaw, Michael (Sc'b'gh & Whitby) |
| Campbell, B. (Oldham, W.) | Kimball, Marcus | Smith, John (London & W'minster) |
| Campbell, Gordon (Moray & Nalrn) | King, Evelyn (Dorset, S.) | Taylor, Frank (Moss Side) |
| Cooper-Key, Sir Neill | Knight, Mrs. Jill | Temple, John M. |
| Costain, A. P. | Legge-Bourke, Sir Harry | Turton, Rt. Hn. R. H. |
| Dean, Paul | Lewis, Kenneth (Rutland) | Vaughan-Morgan, Rt. Hn. Sir John |
| Drayson, G. B. | Lubbock, Eric | Waddington, David |
| Elliott, R. W. (N'c'tle-upon-Tyn'e, N.) | Maclean, Sir Fitzroy | Ward, Dame Irene |
| Emery, Peter | Maddan, Martin | Weatherill, Bernard |
| Eyre, Reginald | Mawby, Ray | Wells, John (Maidstone) |
| Fletcher-Cooke, Charles | Maxwell-Hyslop, R. J. | Whitelaw, Rt. Hn. William |
| Fortescue, Tim | Maydon, Lt.-Cmdr. S. L. C. | Wilson, Geoffrey (Truro) |
| Foster, Sir John | Montgomery, Fergus | Wolrige-Gordon, Patrick |
| Glover, Sir Douglas | Osborne, Sir Cyril (Louth) | Worsley, Marcus |
| Godber, Rt. Hn. J. B. | Page, Graham (Crosby) | |
| Grant, Anthony | Pardoe, John | TELLERS FOR THE AYES: |
| Grant-Ferris, R. | Percival, Ian | Mr. Jasper Moore and |
| Grieve, Percy | Powell, Rt. Hn. J. Enoch | Mr. Hector Monro. |
| Gurdtn, Harold | Prior, J. M. L. | |
| NOES | ||
| Anderson, Donald | Hart, Rt. Hn. Judith | O'Malley, Brian |
| Ashton, Jos (Bassetlaw) | Hazell, Bert | Oswald, Thomas |
| Atkins, Ronald (Preston, N.) | Hooley, Frank | Owen, Will (Morpeth) |
| Atkinson, Norman (Tottenham) | Howie, W. | Page, Derek (King's Lynn) |
| Benn, Rt. Hn. Anthony Wedgwood | Hughes, Emrys (Ayrshire, S.) | Palmer Arthur |
| Bidwell, Sydney | Hunter, Adam | Peart, Rt. Hn. Fred |
| Blenkinsop, Arthur | Hynd, John | Pentland, Norman |
| Booth, Albert | Jenkins, Hugh (Putney) | Perry, George H. (Nottingham, S.) |
| Bradley, Tom | Jenkins, Rt. Hn. Roy (Stechford) | Randall, Harry |
| Buchan, Norman | Loughlin, Charles | Roberts, Gwilym (Bedfordshire, S.) |
| Cant, R. B. | Luard, Evan | Robertson, John (Paisley) |
| Chapman, Donald | Lyon, Alexander W. (York) | Roebuck, Roy |
| Concannon, J. D, | McCann, John | Ross, Rt. Hn. William |
| Crawshaw, IRichard | MacColl, James | Silkin, Rt. Hn. John (Deptford) |
| Dalyell, Tam | Macdonald, A. H. | Silkin, Hn. S. C. (Dulwich) |
| Davidson, Arthur (Accrington) | Maclennan, Robert | Spriggs, Leslie |
| Davies, Ifor (Gower) | McMillan, Tom (Glasgow, C.) | Taverne, Dick |
| Dunwoody, Mrs. Gwyneth (Exeter) | Mahon, Peter (Preston, S.) | Tinn, James |
| Dunwoody, Dr. John (F'th & C'b'e) | ||
| Ellis, John | Manuel, Archie | Tuck, Raphael |
| English, Michael | Marks, Kenneth | Wainwright, Edwin (Dearne Valley) |
| Ensor, David | Mason, Rt. Hn. Roy | Wallace, George |
| Evans, Gwynfor (C'roarthsn) | Mendelson, J. J. | Weitzman, David |
| Evans, loan L. (Birm'h'm, Yardley) | Mikardo, Ian | Wellbeloved, James |
| Faulds, Andrew | Millan, Bruce | Wells, William (Walsall, N.) |
| Fletcher, Ted (Darlington) | Molloy, William | Whitaker, Ben |
| Fowler, Gerry | Moonman, Eric | Wilkins, W. A. |
| Fraser, John (Norwood) | Morgan, Elystan (Cardiganshire) | Winnick, David |
| Griffiths, Eddie (Brightside) | Morris, Charles R. (Openshaw) | |
| Griffiths, Will (Exchange) | Morris, John (Aberavon) | TELLERS FOR THE NOES: |
| Hamilton, William (Fife, W.) | Newens, Stan | Mr. Neil McBride and |
| Harper, Joseph | Noel-Baker, Rt. Hn. Philip (Derby, S.) | Dr. M. S. Miller. |
| Harrison, Walter (Wakefield) |