HC Deb 14 October 1976 vol 917 cc759-60

Order read for resuming adjourned debate on Second Reading [26th May].

Question again proposed, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

Mr. Speaker

I should remind the House that I have not selected the amendment that appears on the Order Paper.

9.56 p.m.

Mr. Philip Goodhart (Beckenham)

For me, the trouble with the Bill is that I have no real interest to declare, yet any sensible Public Lending Right Bill ought in my opinion to be giving considerable assistance to authors such as myself.

During the last 18 years I have written six books, only one of which, by the remotest stretch of anyone's imagination, could conceivably be described as a best seller. However, all those six books have been fairly extensively reviewed and some of them have even on occasion been been praised by the reviewers. I have ascertained that they are fairly widely held in Britain's public library system, and occasionally I have checked up and found that they are even taken off the shelves from time to time.

Therefore, it is possible to argue that I am more than six times as likely to benefit under a public lending right system as put forward than the average author in Britain. Yet what benefit shall I get from the Bill? If I am six times better off than the average author in regard to library holdings and loans, the

best that I can hope for is about £30—which will, of course, be taxed. If one assumes that one is paying the basic rate of tax, which I fear is rather an optimistic thought, it will be found that at the end of the day I am getting the equivalent of three parking tickets in central London.

The average author will be getting each year, when this scheme is introduced, something between the equivalent of the price of a bottle of gin and the price of a cup of tea—not very much. Indeed the Under-Secretary, in an intervention in a speech made on one of the earlier occasions when the Bill was before the House, said: The Bill is not designed to supplement the incomes of authors at large."—[Official Report, 26th May 1976, Vol. 912, c. 594.] When one looks at the figures involved, one can see that the hon. Lady was certainly right, because the price of a bottle of gin or the price of a cup of tea, which is what most authors will get, is certainly not a real supplement to their income. To produce these very small payments under the Bill and under the schemes that are devised there must, however, be a very elaborate administrative machine involving a registrar with a staff of perhaps 35 or 40 and a lone—

It being Ten o'clock, the debate stood adjourned.