HC Deb 31 October 1969 vol 790 cc609-20

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Ioan L. Evans.]

4.0 p.m.

Mr. T. L. Iremonger (Ilford, North)

Perhaps it will be for the convenience of the House if I first inquire—the hon. Gentleman may wish to intervene—whether the Minister on the Front Bench is to reply to the debate. It is not quite certain what Departmental responsibility he might consider was involved, but I take it that he indicates assent to my suggestion that he is to reply.

The Minister of State, Ministry of Housing and Local Government (Mr. Denis Howell)

I am obliged to the hon. Gentleman. Since he put this Adjournment debate down and indicated that it was for my Department, I am here to listen to what he has to say.

Mr. Iremonger

I hope that the hon. Gentleman will forgive me if I take more than my customary half of the Adjournment time. The Minister has only to say that he will grant my request for an inquiry, and I have to explain why he should do so. My task is somewhat longer.

Mr. Howell

I do not know what the hon. Gentleman will say, but I have read all the long history in which he has been involved, and I think that this is the ninth occasion on which he has raised the matter in the House. Therefore, while agreeing that he has the right to say anything he wishes, I hope that he will leave me reasonable time to say some of what I shall wish to say.

Mr. Iremonger

In fact, this is the first time that I have raised the question of an inquiry into the Young v. Greater London Council case, though what I now have to draw to the attention of the House could well, as a matter of principle, be the case of any widow whose family home anywhere in Greater London, secured for her by her husband's life insurance, was compulsorily taken from her for a road development project by the Greater London Council. The home might have a market value of, say, £5,000 and, through exploitation of a legal technicality by the Greater London Council valuation officers, she might receive compensation of, say, £500. In fact, this case concerns compensation to the tune of £25,000, but the principle involved and the degree of public anxiety which should therefore be aroused are the same.

The case relates to the amount of compensation to be paid by the London County Council, the predecessor body of the Greater London Council, to Mr. S. G. Young, the leaseholder of the Kingsway subway who used it to display machinery for export, for prematurely terminating his lease and compulsorily acquiring it. The amount of compensation, naturally, depended on the time which the lease had to run. It had nine years to run when the Council decided to acquire the subway to construct the Strand underpass.

Under one clause in Mr. Young's lease, it could be terminated in six months if the subway should be required for traffic purposes. Therefore, it was important for the Council that it should be required for traffic purposes, because it would have to pay only a fraction of the compensation to the lessee if the lease had so much less than its full term to run. Whether the subway was so required depended on the say-so of the Traffic Advisory Committee to the Ministry of Transport. If the Council could persuade the authorities to give that say-so, it would be saved, and the private owner would, in effect, be robbed of, the sum of £25,000.

But the Council was squeamish about asking for the Committee's say-so on the ground that it wanted to save that money. It preferred to ask for it on the ground that it was in a hurry, that it wanted to have the Strand underpass constructed quickly.

I shall now read to the House 400 words from page 13 of the revised transcript of Lord Justice Russell's judgment in Young v. Greater London Council, which finally came to the Court of Appeal on 13th July, 1967. Lord Justice Russell said: One feature of this case I do not find altogether satisfactory. It was clearly represented to the Advisory Committee by the Ministry document No. C.367 on the 30th September, 1960 that, unless the Committee made the recommendation, the underpass project would be held up. That document says: 'The subway is the property of the British Transport Commission and is at present under long lease to Mr. S. G. Young for the storage, display and sale of machinery and non-inflammable goods and equipment, but included in the terms of the lease is a condition that the lease can be terminated at six months' notice under certain circumstances. One of the circumstances envisaged is the subway being required for traffic purposes on the recommendation of the Traffic Advisory Committee. The conversion of the subway for use as an underpass is scheduled to start during the current year 1960–61, and the London County Council desire accordingly'"— and the word "accordingly" is underlined in the transcript— 'that Mr. Young should be given six months' notice of the termination of his lease. The Council therefore asked for a formal recommendation from the Traffic Advisory Committee that the subway is required for traffic purposes as soon as possible. The Minister would be glad if the Committee would now consider such a recommendation.' Lord Justice Russell continued: It is also quite plain that the Advisory Committee so understood the document; that their recommendation was the one way in which an obstacle in the carrying out of the project could be removed, because Minute No. 2202, based on document No. C.367 and headed: 'London County Council, Kingsway Subway, Strand Underpass', is as follows: Lord Justice Russell then quoted the mittee— 'Mr. Edmonds'"— the representative of the London County Council on the Traffic Advisory Committee— 'stressed the need for the subway to be available as soon as possible to enable work to start on its conversion for use as an underpass, it was agreed that the subway was required for traffic purposes as previously recommended, the precise form of words for any report to be left to the secretary to determine after obtaining legal advice.' Lord Justice Russell went on: In truth, of course, this was not the need for the recommendation because a compulsory purchase order was in the mind of the London County Council which would override any tenancy, and the sole object of the exercise (not told to the Advisory Committee) was to affect the incidence of compensation as between Mr. Young and the British Transport Commission; at least, no other object could be suggested by …. counsel for the London County Council.

The House should also consider the words in the same judgment by Lord Justice Willmer which will be found on page 4 of the transcript, he said that there was … some ground for suspicion that the London County Council were taking sides with the British Transport Commission so as to keep the compensation payable to the appellant as low as possible. Lord Justice Willmer went on by contrast specifically to exclude any reflection on the bona fides of the Traffic Advisory Committee, so by implication he was positively making a reflection on the bona fides of the London County Council valuation officers.

To indicate even more precisely the view of Lord Justice Russell I quote from the transcript of the proceedings the previous day, on page 6. He said: The elbows of this Advisory Committee were jogged by the Ministry of Transport the L.C.C., … Uncle Tom Cobley and all to make quite,sure that the private citizen got the minimum of compensation. To illustrate the evidence on which this criticism of the valuation officers by the judges was based I quote from a London County Council inter-departmental memorandum discovered in the course of the proceedings. It is from the Council's Chief Valuer, who pointed out that Mr. Young could have his lease terminated and the House will note that this means nothing except in terms of reducing his compensation, because any engineering problems could be met equally expeditiously by compulsory purchase. The lease could be terminated, and money saved if the Traffic Advisory Committee decided that the premises are required for traffic purpose.

He then points out that he had been … informed that the Treasury Solicitor was very concerned as to whether the 'premises'—which comprised the whole of the Tramway Subway—could properly be said to be required for 'traffic purposes' as, in fact, the new underpass would only take up some two-thirds of the subway. It was agreed that this was primarily a matter for the … Committee, but that they ought to have full details of the proposals before reaching their decision. The Chief Valuer said that he understood that the consulting engineers to the Council took the view that the use of the whole of the subway is highly desirable fox the period of the Contract but they are unable to state that the work could not be carried out if the northern entrance to the Tramway Subway was not available. I should be glad therefore if you"— that is, the official to whom this memorandum was addressed, would ask the consulting engineers for a statement giving the difficulties, both from the engineering aspect and from the point of view of interference with traffic if they were not committed to use the whole of the Tramway Subway during construction of the underpass. It might also be helpful if some idea of the extra cost involved could be given. In other words, unless the Chief Valuer can persuade the public inquiry to the contrary, he was saying to this official, "Tell the consultant engineer to say that the property is required for traffic purposes, so that the Traffic Advisory Committee will say likewise and enable us to do Mr. Young out of £25,000." At any rate, that is what the two Lords Justices seem to have made of the evidence.

There is only one fact which I have to add to what is published in the transcript which I have quoted and the interdepartmental memorandum published in the transcript of the proceedings of the Lands Tribunal inquiry which I have also quoted. I am sure that the House will put the most charitable interpretation possible on this fact. The fact is that the Council offered Mr. Young £10,000 to drop his appeal.

My only comment on the whole case is this. This case was technically decided against Mr. Young and in favour of the Council, that is to say, the valuation officers' zeal in the councils' interest prevailed and Mr. Young lost his £25,000. Mr. Young's counsel did not impute to the valuation officers any motives in their "elbow-jogging". It was only the judges who did that. It takes a lot for two Lords Justices to censure public officers who have won their case on a matter which was not even raised as an argument by their victim.

Therefore, the House should not lightly brush aside my request for an inquiry into the circumstances of this case. The House, I know, is not disposed lightly to brush it aside. This is not a lonely little battle of mine demanding an inquiry. A Motion to the same sense attracted 20 signatures from hon. Members last Session. I ask the House to repeat this demand to the Minister and I ask him to respond constructively. I should like to explain briefly why it is so important that he should do so.

The first reason is for the sake of the valuation officers themselves. They resent criticism. They have effectively silenced any questioning of their rôle by the elected members of the Greater London Council by making it clear that the consequence of any criticism will be a writ for libel in the name of the entire department, two or three hundred people, backed by staff association funds. They particularly resent criticism made—as it was by the two Lords Justice in the Court of Appeal—under the protection of absolute privilege, which stops them suing the judges.

The privilege of the courts is necessary, as is the privilege of this House, to enable truth to be aired and examined without fear. But if the privilege protecting the judges inhibits the valuation officers from redress, they should be given the opportunity of a public inquiry to explain themselves and their motives and excuse their conduct in this case. They are honourable men, acting according to a high code of professional conduct. I am convinced that they do their best to be fair both to the interests of the council that employs them and to the people whose property their employers are compulsorily acquiring.

Second, however, on general public grounds, an inquiry would ventilate questions and widespread public anxiety and lack of confidence in the whole system of the Greater London Council's compensation for private property compulsorily acquired. Let me explain what this lack of confidence is about. There are, broadly, two systems of assessment of the valuation of private property compulsorily acquired by local authorities. One puts the duty of valuation on the district valuer, who is employed by the Board of Inland Revenue and is therefore independent both of the Treasury and of the local authority. The other system puts the duty of valuation upon employees of the local authority which must pay the compensation and which is acquiring the property compulsorily.

The Greater London Council uses the latter method. That method was described by the then Chief Whip of the majority party on the London County Council, its predecessor body—the hon. Lady the Member for Peckham (Mrs. Corbet)—in these terms: There is a large staff of valuers who acquire land for the use of the council, who negotiate to get the best terms … in the Council's interests". At that point I intervened, and the hon. Lady very frankly replied: Yes … the valuers should get the best terms they can".—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 20th February, 1962; Vol. 654, c. 283.] An illuminating exegesis of this philosophy was given some years later by the hon. Member for Dundee, West (Mr. Doig), who is in his place opposite and to whom I gave notice of my intention to quote him. The hon. Member said this: I used to be a city treasurer, and many times I have objected to what I considered to be an exorbitantly high figure fixed by the district valuer". That is the independent valuer. That may be called pressure, but it was pressure in the interests of the ratepayer. In a number of cases I got the figure reduced, not by the district valuer but by the person selling the property. Hon. Members opposite may consider that to be unfair, but it is a matter of where one's concern lies. In one case the parties were the owner of a public house and the ratepayers. I know where my sympathies were in that case—they were with the ratepayers and not with the publican. I succeeded in getting £1,000 knocked off the valuation. This sort of thing happened more than once with my own local authority, and I should imagine that it has happened with many other local authorities ".—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 7th June, 1967; Vol. 747, c. 976–7.] For a judicial assessment let us note what the Lands Tribunal said in Ansaldi v. the Stoke-on-Trent Corporation in 1960. It said that the local valuer employed by the Council was bargaining, not valuing. It is desirable to distinguish his function from that of a district valuer who is an independent official … the local authority valuer acts as the local authority's agent and he reflects the obligations of his principals to ensure that the ratepayers acquire property as cheaply as is reasonably possible. The House must ask, if this is the system and spirit under which home owners whose homes are in the way of Greater London Council mammoth road schemes are to be compensated, if this is the system, ought not the system and Mr. Young's whole case to be examined in a public inquiry? I suggest it should, because every home owner is asking the question, "Is my compensation for my home and my life savings to depend upon the valuation of an independent valuer, or is it, as in the Young case—so it seems, according to what the judges said—to depend on the interested judgment of the compensating council's own employees! Am I going to be done by a bureaucratic mafia?" That is the question that will be asked, and its implications are tragically unfair to these honourable, professional men; and it undermines public confidence in them if it cannot be examined.

I think I owe it to the House to conclude on a personal note. It will be in the memory of the House that I have personally suffered at the hands of these very same London valuation officers a wound all the more deep to me because it struck at one who matters more to me than I matter to myself. For this reason, self-respect, personal honour and the honour of the House demand that I be scrupulous, in anything I say in the House, to do no less than justice to these officers. I have therefore tried to frame my submissions to the House with the strictest regard to the justice to which they are entitled. I am sure that any public inquiry will show them mercy, too.

I think I ought to say that pressure has been exercised on me in the past originating from these officers to prevent my speaking in the House on this subject. Therefore, if any hon. Member thinks that in raising this matter I am open to criticism as an hon. Member let him put down a Motion of censure, let the House debate it, let the Question be put that I be expelled from the House, and let it be carried; and I will fight the ensuing by-election, and I know on whose side my constituents will be. But if an hon. Member is not prepared to do that, let us have no personal red herrings or smokescreens to divert attention from or to obscure a genuinely difficult and important public issue.

4.20 p.m.

The Minister of State, Ministry of Housing and Local Government (Mr. Denis Howell)

I come fresh to this matter raised by the hon. Member for Ilford, North (Mr. Iremonger), but I must say that, having spent a lot of time this week examining all these matters, and the long history of them, and the number of occasions upon which he has raised this in the House, I think that this is becoming rather obsessive with him. He concluded by talking about his own involvement and that of his family, which goes back to 1963, and writs of libel, and so on, between the valuers and members of his family. It is not for me to comment on these, nor would I want to. Since that time he has raised this case nine times in the House in debates of one sort or another.

Mr. Iremonger

This is not the last.

Mr. Howell

It may not be, but when the hon. Gentleman says that people are trying to shut him up and stop him from speaking, this is nonsense. None of us wants to do that, and he is not the sort of person who would be intimidated into shutting up. If I say nothing else, I must say that his constant attacks upon the integrity of the valuers, and valuers generally, is something that has to be defended at this Dispatch Box.

I know of no other country in the world where the integrity of our public servants is higher than in this country. I know of no other country where the courts and the police, if there were any question about the integrity of local government officers, would be more strenuous to bring the matter to light and to prosecute in the most energetic way. The hon. Gentleman knows this to be the case. There has been the fullest opportunity for us to consider these matters. Indeed, the hon. Gentleman has not only raised this matter here but has referred it to the Ombudsman, who conducted an inquiry and reached the conclusion that there was nothing in it for him. He said that the hon. Gentleman's complaints had no substance.

Mr. Iremongerrose—

Mr. Howell

I will not give way now. Members of the public and of this House want to form a judgment about the objectivity of the hon. Gentleman. Out of the debate of half an hour he has taken more than 20 minutes, with all sorts of grave accusations, leaving me little time to defend public servants who are not able to speak for themselves. This is a factor people will take into account.

In this case, which went before the courts, I am bound to draw attention to certain facts. First of all, Mr. Young, the gentleman in question, entered into a voluntary agreement for a 14-year lease. He did it of his own volition with the British Transport Commission, and the lease included the clause that if this underpass at Kingsway were ever to be required for traffic purposes, then he would have to terminate on six months' notice.

Whatever the hon. Gentleman says about the Traffic Advisory Committee in London and the London County Council, we can all see, by walking up Kingsway, that this underpass is being used for traffic purposes. One drives down the underpass. Clearly, whatever the technicalities, the fact is that that clause in Mr. Young's agreement, which became operative, was very properly determined. As often happens when the valuation is challenged, it is not a case of the London valuers or any other valuers determining these matters in complete isolation from the law. If there is a dispute the citizen has rights, very properly so. This citizen exercised those rights. He went first to the Lands Tribunal, which found against him. He then went to the Court of Appeal.

Although the hon. Gentleman has made play in quoting many things from the Court of Appeal, the Court found against him. Lord Justice Willmer said: The sole question for us to decide … is whether the Lands Tribunal, in holding that the decision of the Traffic Advisory Committee was a valid decision, fell into an error of law. That is part of the hon. Gentleman's case. He went on: I for my part can detect no error of law in the construction which the Lands Tribunal put on the phrase traffic purposes' … it seems to me that on the evidence which was before the Lands Tribunal … it is quite impossible for us to say there was no evidence on which it could come to its conclusion, or that it was a conclusion at which it could not reasonably arrive. Lord Justice Russell said: I also agree that the six months' notice was properly given … on the facts of this case it is clear that possession or occupation of the whole subway was required for the construction of the underpass. … On the factual basis I have stated … it is clear that such possession was required for traffic purposes. The point whether the underpass was properly taken over and used for traffic purposes, which is the simple point on which the whole of the hon. Gentleman's campaign has been mounted, was properly inquired into and determined by the Court of Appeal. One is very pleased that opportunities are available for the citizen in our society to appeal to somebody higher than the professional man making the valuation. Mr. Young and any other citizen, in arguing his case before the Lands Tribunal or the Court of Appeal, has the right—and it was invoked on this occasion—of taking his own professional opinion on these matters so that the argument can be fully and properly determined.

I have reached the conclusion that there is nothing much in what the hon. Gentleman told us. There is one major point left. Today and on other occasions the hon. Gentleman has tried to play off local authority valuers against district valuers. I have carefully looked into the matter to see whether there is anything in it, and I have reached the conclusion that there is nothing in it, for several reasons. The most important is that whoever fixes the valuation, whether the local authority valuers or district valuers, there are still opportunities to go on in law and to dispute the valuation and obtain a determination by a judicial authority. Those opportunities still exist. Many large authorities employ their own valuers who are professional men.

What the hon. Gentleman says in substance is that here are people whose behaviour and conduct was rather less ethical than we expect. I do not believe that for a moment. If it is right, recourse to the law would correct the matter. In any case, I am advised that even when the local authority valuer determines the matter, more often than not it has to go to the district valuer for him to determine that compensation has not been improperly paid. There are, therefore, safeguards which most of us in the House would like to see in operation.

When the hon. Gentleman says that these local authorities valuers, whose conduct is called into account time and again, whose conduct has been examined by the Lands Tribunal and by the Court of Appeal, whose conduct—[Interruption.] I do not believe that it has been censured. One Lord Justice specifically drew attention to the fact that when the bona fides of these people were under attack that charge had been withdrawn. The hon. Gentleman must look at all the evidence.

What neither the hon. Member nor anybody else can gainsay is that the Court of Appeal unanimously decided that the action taken in this case in respect of compensation and the law was correct. That was the unauimous judgment of the Court of Appeal. If the hon. Gentleman or Mr. Young thinks that there is any evidence suggesting irregular conduct by the valuers, I suggest that it would have been used by Mr. Young's legal advisers to take the appropriate action in the appropriate place, which is not in the House but in the courts. If local authority valuers determine matters improperly, then any citizen has redress.

If there is any substance in what the hon. Gentleman says, the judgment of the learned Law Lords could be taken. It is significant that no such attempt has been made.

Mr. Iremonger

It will be.

Mr. Howell

It is taking a long time. The hon. Gentleman says that such an attempt will be made. I suggest that his action in raising the matter in the House when it is intended to challenge it in the courts is an additional reason for concern about his conduct. The hon. Gentleman should not use the privilege of Parliament to raise matters which he says can be or will be ventilated in the courts. I suggest to the hon. Gentleman—

The Question having been proposed at Four o'clock and the debate having continued for half an hour, Mr. SPEAKER adjourned the House without Question put, pursuant to the Standing Order.

Adjourned at half-past Four o'clock.