§ Mr. John MacKayI beg to move amendment No. 15, in page 17, line 4, leave out from 'he' to the end of line 5 and insert
'shall cease to be a member of that board'.The hon. Member for Falkirk, West (Mr. Canavan) tabled an amendment in Committee to do what our amendment provides and I was prepared to accept it, but the hon. Gentleman was not present to move his amendment. Indeed, he is not here now to hear me say that, having not had the opportunity to accept his amendment, I have brought forward my own.
§ Mr. Home RobertsonI must jump to the defence of my hon. Friend the Member for Falkirk, West (Mr. Canavan). I suspect that he would have been so acutely embarrassed at being supported by the Minister that he has absented himself briefly.
I understand that the amendment means that, where a person has ceased to meet the requirements for membership of the board and is no longer a qualified proprietor, he will automatically have to come off the board. Originally it would have been possible to remove a board member only by a resolution of the board. I suppose that that was in keeping with some of the principles of the Bill.
I was a little alarmed that my hon. Friend the Member for Falkirk, West had suggested the amendment, because it goes along with the characteristically enlightened principle that boards will represent and consist of the proprietor, the whole proprietor and nothing but the proprietor, which is a principle that we view with a mixture of disgust and despair.
How do we know when someone has ceased to be the proprietor of a fishery? If a board member surreptitiously sold his fishery—I admit that that is unlikely—or gave it away to a member of his family, how would the rest of the board or anyone else know that the qualifying ownership had ceased? If the member remained on the board, could that invalidate the proceedings of the board retrospectively? There is a problem for the Minister to conjure with.
§ Amendment agreed to.