HL Deb 23 June 1910 vol 5 cc958-71

[SECOND READING.]

Order of the Day for the Second Reading read.

THE EARL OF CAMPERDOWN

My Lords, this Bill to which I am going to ask your Lordships to give a Second Reading is a Bill devised for the purpose of meeting two grievances which have been mentioned very frequently in Parliament in previous years, and which exist in some of the burghs and particularly in some of the larger burghs of Scotland. One of them is that which is known as letting houses by means of "missives." That being explained is this. In the month of January, or thereabouts, it has for a long time been the custom of house factors and house owners to issue to tenants of houses what is called a missive, which the tenant is required to sign and return. The purport of it is that the tenant undertakes to take the house for a year from the Whitsunday following the January in which the missive is sent to him. Your Lordships will at once see that for a labourer, whose employment may be intermittent, to be required to take a house practically for fifteen months to come without any certainty that his employment will last during that time is prima facie a hardship. The hardship is not so great in the smaller towns, where, as a rule, the various kinds of employment are much the same in quantity, and persons live in the same houses, generally speaking, for a considerable time. Where the grievance has been mostly felt is in large towns, especially in the City of Glasgow and in other towns where shipbuilding is the principal occupation, because shipbuilding varies very greatly indeed from time to time, and if your Lordships take the last two years you will see in what a very bad state that business has been.

This Bill, so far as the letting of small dwelling-houses in Scotland is concerned —and this is the only subject except that of hypothec with which the Bill deals—is precisely in the same terms as the measure which was before your Lordships' House last year. The Bill proposes to deal with this matter in this way. Clause 2 defines as a "small dwelling-house" a house entered on the valuation roll at a yearly rent of £10 or under in a burgh of under 20,000 population; of £15 in burghs up to 50,000; and £21 in burghs over 50,000 population. I do not think it is necessary to go at length into those figures, because they were largely discussed, and I believe agreed upon, at the end of the last session of Parliament. Then the Bill provides in Clause 4 that no agreement, whether verbal or written, for the let of a small dwelling-house shall be binding if the same has been made more than two months prior to the commencement of such let. Then the Bill continues, in Clause 6, to say that at certain dates which are given cither the owner or the occupier is to have a right to terminate the tenancy. By Clause 9, if an occupier of a small dwelling-house is in arrear with his rent for a period of seven days the owner is entitled to give him forty-eight hours' notice of removal. And then in Clause 13 there is a provision that, where the population of the burgh does not exceed 10,000, this Bill is not to come into force in that burgh until it has been adopted by resolution of the town council. That is the whole part of the Bill which relates to the letting of small dwelling-houses.

This Bill, of course, has been given very careful consideration by a variety of the public authorities concerned, and especially by those authorities who will, if this Bill becomes law, become the authorities to administer the law. I may say that the Bill, which is in large part due to the efforts and the legal knowledge of Mr. Scott Dickson and Mr. Clyde, has been approved, first of all, by the Parliamentary Committee of the City of Glasgow by a very large majority—by thirteen to two—as the proper way of dealing with this business. It was confirmed by the Glasgow Corporation, and, out of the whole body of eighty, only five voted against it. It has been approved by the Convention of Royal Burghs, from whom I have presented a Petition to the House; and it has also been approved by the Association of Burgh Officials, a body of men who, of necessity, take great interest in this proposal. The one or two smaller burghs which have considered the Bill themselves have approved of it. I have presented to your Lordships a Petition from the Burgh of Partick, and the words used in their Petition convey so completely the contents of this measure that perhaps your Lordships will allow me to read them. They say— The main purpose of this Bill is to remove the grievance presently complained of by occupiers, that missives of let of small dwelling-houses are issued by owners and factors to occupiers early in each year and the return of such missives is demanded several months before the following term of Whitsunday. Your Petitioners are satisfied that the said Bill, which does not raise any difficulties as to rating and franchise, will effectually deal with the objections to the present missive system, and be of great public utility if passed into law. I cannot use any stronger words than those, or words which will explain more clearly what I believe this Bill contains.

There is another matter—a comparatively small one—which is dealt with in the Bill, and that is what is known as the right of urban hypothec—the right which a landlord in Scotland has to sell up the goods of a very small tenant. Your Lordships will see, in Clause 12, how that matter is dealt with. The Clause runs— All bedding material as well as all tools and implements of trade used or to be used by the occupier of a small dwelling-house or any member of his family, as the means of his, her, or their livelihood, which are in the dwelling-house, and furniture and plenishing in a small dwelling-house to the value according to the sheriff officer's inventory, of ten pounds, shall be wholly exempt from the right of hypothec of the landlord. This right of hypothec was abolished in the case of the country a good many years ago, and in reality, if you look into the matter, there were better reasons for retaining this right of hypothec in that case than there is in the case of urban districts. This Bill proposes, as has often been proposed before, to abolish that hypothec. I have now dealt with the contents of the Bill.

But perhaps it is right that I should call your Lordships' attention to a matter which is not part of this Bill, but which may be said to be connected with it—the collection of rates. During the last year the Corporation of the City of Glasgow tried as an experiment collecting rates at shorter periods than the year, and that experiment has been an enormous success. It has been highly approved of by the ratepayers, and the Corporation itself found it a very convenient system of proceeding. Therefore this matter, too, has been the subject of a good deal of discussion among corporations and others in Scotland, and I shall propose to introduce a Bill into this House legalising the collection of rates at shorter periods than the law at present allows. In Glasgow they claim to have a legal right at the present time to collect rates at shorter periods, but at all events other burghs have not, and I think that that is a matter which ought to be put in the shape of a Bill if for no other reason than that it will enable all the burghs individually to look at it and express their opinion with regard to it. And your Lordships will all agree that the right way of proceeding when you are endeavouring to alter such matters as the system of collecting rates is to work in harmony with the officials who will have hereafter to administer the law and not to introduce proposals of your own without any knowledge of how far those proposals will meet with the general approval of the officials concerned in their administration. I may say that if your Lordships see fit to read this Bill a second time and it makes further progress, I should propose then to stop the Bill until the terms of this second Bill which I have mentioned are finally settled. I should then introduce that Bill into this House, so that your Lordships would have the plan as a whole before you. I beg to move.

Moved, That the Bill be now read 2a.—(The Earl of Camperdown.)

THE SECRETARY FOR SCOTLAND (LORD PENTLAND)

My Lords, I thought that some of your Lordships might wish to address to the House some remarks on the proposal of the noble Earl to obtain a Second Reading for this Bill. I confess I hardly think that your Lordships' memory can be so short as must be assumed by the noble Earl who has introduced this Bill. It deals with a subject which was before this House on no less than seven occasions last year, and the noble Earl has, I think, in his introduction of the subject to your Lordships this afternoon, somewhat ignored the real heart of the controversy which made so large an encroachment upon the time of your Lordships last year.

The noble Earl proposes to obtain a Second Reading for a Bill which deals with the letting of small dwelling-houses in burghs in Scotland. The history of this question is that since the year 1895 something like nine or ten Private Members' Bills have been introduced in the House of Commons to deal with this question. In 1906 the Government of that day appointed a Committee to inquire into the whole question. No charge was ever made that that Committee was otherwise than a well-constituted, impartial, experienced, and capable body. They inquired into this question at great length, and examined witnesses from various parts of the country, and after their Report had been presented the Government introduced the Bill of last session. The noble Earl's Bill deals with part of the grievance, but it does not attempt to deal with one part of the grievance which I shall mention. It is this. In Scotland, differing from England in this practice, the rating law exacts from working-men such as those to whom the noble Earl alluded, payment of their rates in one annual sum in the winter—a time which is the most inconvenient period of the year, when work is slack, if ever during the year it is slack. This is a burden, therefore, which they feel acutely. That was part of the grievance presented to the Committee.

The Government, in attempting to frame proposals on this subject, could not ignore that part of the grievance, and they therefore included in their Bill proposals dealing with the rating question in conjunction with their other proposals. The noble Earl has admitted this afternoon, by his announcement that he proposes to introduce a supplementary Bill, the intimate connection between the rating problem and the measure which he has laid before your Lordships to-day; and I confess that it would be much more satisfactory to your Lordships, or to any deliberative assembly, that you should see the whole scheme of the noble Earl before pronouncing upon it. The essence of the difficulty of this question lies in the rating—

THE EARL OF CAMPERDOWN

No, no.

LORD PENTLAND

All the friction which exists between local authorities, burgh authorities, parish authorities, house factors, owners and tenants—the whole of the friction and difficulty comes from the rating problem, and to attempt to deal with this question without dealing with the rating problem is to court disaster and to create new injustices. The noble Earl, in introducing the Bill, intimated to your Lordships that it owed its existence largely to the efforts of two distinguished Scottish Members of Parliament and lawyers, Mr. Scott-Dickson and Mr. Clyde, and I am glad to think that they have given attention to this question. But, as a matter of fact, with the exception of one clause, which contains the limits of rental and which in those limits differs from the Government Bill, the clauses which this Bill contains are word for word the clauses in the Government Bill of last session so far as they go.

The noble Earl went on to enumerate a list of local authorities who had given their support to this Bill. I remember, on one of the earlier occasions when your Lordships discussed this subject last year, the noble Earl announcing to the House a number of authorities who had expressed themselves entirely in favour of the scheme which he then produced; and I shared his disappointment when, on the next occasion, he was obliged to announce that he found there was considerable opposition to the proposals, and he desired to replace them by an entirely new scheme of Amendments. It may be perfectly true—I do not doubt it for a moment—that the authorities whom the noble Earl has mentioned have expressed themselves in favour of this Bill, but they are all burgh authorities dealing with the burgh rate. They have no responsibility for the collection of the poor rate, which is the largest rate in Scotland and amounts to 38 per cent. of the whole money collected in rates. He leaves out of sight entirely another very important interest in this matter—the interest of house-owners. Therefore, out of three large interests, not to speak of the tenants, who must be really the foundation of any scheme of consideration—of the three other large interests, namely, the burgh authorities; the parish authorities, who are responsible, as I have said, for two-fifths of the whole rating assessments in Scotland; and the house-owners, the noble Earl can only bring forward evidence—and that, I think, not complete evidence—from one set of authorities who undoubtedly would be benefited by the provisions in his Bill. And how would they be benefited? They would be benefited because it would be in their power to adopt the provisions of the Burgh Police Act in regard to rates, and so to carry on, as far as their rate is concerned, a system of short lets with a system of short collection of rates.

THE EARL OF CAMPERDOWN

They have the power now to adopt those clauses.

LORD PENTLAND

I know; but they have never exercised it, because it would be a perfectly unworkable system. Surely the experience of years and years must go for something in this matter. Surely, also, the experience of England must go for something. This whole question was considered in England after the Franchise Act of 1868, and Parliament had immediately to set to work, in 1869, and revise what it did in the Franchise Act. The result is that you have in England now a flexible system of collection of rates, and a flexible system of short lets adapted to the needs of modern industry, which require that workmen must be enabled, without real damage to their own interests, to remove from one house to another. Your Lordships, with those facts before you last year, rejected a Bill which came before you with practically the unanimous consent of the Members of the other House representing Scotland.

I really cannot understand quite how to deal with the situation which the noble Earl presents to us on this occasion. The Government, and the noble Earl himself, if I may be allowed to say so, during the discussions of last year came under certain obligations to the house-owners. Your Lordships' House, too, came under a certain obligation to the house-owners, who are an interest to be considered in this matter. Though your Lordships were not willing to consider the Government's proposal of an allowance to house-owners, you consented to the justice of house-owners having an allowance if they were obliged to collect the rates. Are you going back upon that? Are you going to accept a scheme which gives no allowance? Or is that to be part of the second Bill which the noble Earl is going to introduce? I hesitate to trouble your Lordships further on this question. The attitude of the Government is quite clear. Their attitude remains as it was as embodied in the Bill which came to your Lordships' House last year with the support of the Scottish Members after they had given it very full consideration, and which in that form, I make bold to say, had a very large measure of support. I think it satisfied, if not completely, yet in its main lines—and slight amendment would have been quite possible—opinion in Scotland with regard to this question.

This is a very intricate question. Your Lordships, I am sure, will believe that nine or ten Private Members' Bills could not be introduced, and that the labours of a competent Committee could not take place without showing evidence that this is a very complicated and difficult question. It was said last year that the Government had some reserved motive, some concealed motive, in bringing this forward; that they wished to tamper with the franchise. I have repeatedly disavowed that statement in this House; and I make bold to say that any Government or any individual—the noble Earl himself is an instance of it—who takes up this question and cries to deal with it cannot do so without dealing or attempting to deal with the rating problem. We are compelled to deal with it by the necessities of the situation, and the Government gave their best efforts last year to arrive at a solution. The noble Earl brings this forward at a time when, by common consent and by the speeches of the Government itself, it is not possible really to entertain any substantial hopes that this measure can be treated as non-controversial. I am a new member of this House, but I should have thought it was highly unusual to initiate rating legislation in this House. That, however, is not a matter to be determined by myself, and therefore I simply make that remark.

But I do regret that, as the noble Earl has seen fit to bring forward this question, he has not brought it forward in a way and with proposals which should put before your Lordships the whole bearings of the case to enable you to form a sound judgment upon it. I do not think I am entitled, considering how much time the House gave to this question last session, to follow the noble Earl into the details which he enumerated of the provisions of his Bill. I will only say that it has been a bitter disappointment to those interested in Scotland who are concerned in this question that your Lordships did not see your way to give a more indulgent consideration last session to the proposals which the Government then laid before you.

LORD CLINTON

My Lords, the noble Lord the Secretary for Scotland has reminded your Lordships that this subject was before the House on no less than seven occasions last year, and I am certain that none of us who are interested in this particular question can have forgotten anything about the lengthy discussions which then took place. We must also remember the very great vicissitudes through which the Bill of last year passed both in this House and in another place, and it is now before your Lordships, as to the whole of this Bill, in the same form in which the agreed portion of the Bill of last year eventually emerged from discussion. Although it does not do the whole of what the Government included in their Bill, yet it does carry out the remedying of those great grievances which the Government put forward as the real and main object of the Bill they introduced last year. These grievances have been thoroughly put before your Lordships on this occasion by Lord Camperdown.

The Secretary for Scotland, so far as the particular matters of short letting and doing away with the missive are concerned, will realise that this Bill has actually reached all points. The noble Lord shakes his head; but the Bill lays down, in exactly the same form as the Government laid down, remedies for those grievances. The point of controversy does and must arise at the point where this Bill comes to an end. The Secretary for Scotland objects to this Bill, not for anything that is in the Bill, but for what there is not in the Bill. He objects to it because it does not do that which it never ever thought of setting out to do. It is not a rating Bill. It does not alter the system of rating as we have it now in Scotland. Nor is that an essential part of the measure. I do not believe it is in the least bit necessary, purely for the purpose of doing away with certain grievances, to deal with a matter which those grievances themselves do not touch.

It is obvious that you cannot alter a system of letting without touching a system of rating. I am prepared to agree that when you alter your system of letting from a long to a short occupation, when you give liberty to a tenant to determine his holding at short notice, varying, I think, from five to forty days, it is convenient and advisable that you should so alter the present annual system of collection in Scotland that it should meet the system of these short lets. I believe it would be advantageous to do so, as the noble Lord himself has told us, because there are many objections to an annual system of rating; but it is quite possible, as the noble Earl in charge of this Bill has shown us, that with the addition of a future rating Bill—a perfectly distinct measure from this—we may carry out the full object that we have in view. The system of collection at short intervals is, after all, one of the remedies for the difficulties which the noble Lord the Secretary for Scotland sees, and it was admitted as a possible remedy when the Government first brought in the Bill last year. Collection at short intervals can be adopted without difficulty in Scotland, and it always has been adopted in England, where rates are collected quarterly or half-yearly, and it has been shown that that system can be carried on with advantage to the collecting authority and to the tenant himself, without dragging in that system of "compounding" which every one of us objects to in theory, and which the noble Lord opposite only brought in because in his opinion there is no other way of getting over the difficulty. I do not desire to enter into a discussion upon the theoretical or actual merits of compounding now. When the other promised Bill comes before your Lordships it will be necessary to speak on the subject. But the compounding which the noble Lord the Secretary for Scotland himself so much prefers for the particular objects of this Bill has been shown in England to be really not necessary to those objects.

LORD SALTOUN

My Lords, after what has fallen from the noble Earl who moved the Second Reading of the Bill and from my noble friend behind me, it is unnecessary for me to occupy more than a couple of minutes of your Lordships' time. The noble Lord the Secretary for Scotland took objection to this Bill because it did not contain the rating clauses of last year's Bill, and he quoted to us the English Acts of 1868 and 1869, under which compounding was first done away with and then re-introduced. But since then the Royal Commission on Local Taxation and the Royal Commission on the Poor Law have both expressed complete disapproval of compounding of rates in England. They object to a man having a vote in the financial expenditure of his district without any direct responsibility. I think that clearly deals with the whole of the objections of the noble Lord the Secretary for Scotland in regard to that part of the Bill.

THE MARQUESS OF SALISBURY

My Lords, I am not sure that when I listened to the noble Lord the Secretary for Scotland I felt quite certain whether he desired to resist the Second Reading of this Bill or not. I hope he will not resist the Second Reading. I think it is a much more usual course in your Lordships' House that a Bill which in the main seems to deserve the consent of the House should be given a Second Reading. Its subsequent fate, of course, must depend on other circumstances. The noble Lord the Secretary for Scotland spoke in a vague way of the friction which might arise if this Bill were passed without the additional provisions which His Majesty's Government think ought to have been inserted. He did not explain to us exactly how that friction would arise. As far as I understood him, the clauses as they stand have his approval, but he thinks they are dangerous without other clauses which he did not specially particularise. I suppose he referred to the clauses which were in the Bill of last year, but he did not explain to us why the passage of this Bill without those other clauses should cause the friction of which he spoke. It appears that my noble friend and those with whom he acts are proposing to deal with the other matters, to some extent at any rate, in another Bill. What objection can there be to dealing with a complicated subject in two Bills rather than in one? Personally I have always preferred that method of dealing with legislation, and I think the Government themselves would be well advised to accept part of their proposals if those proposals are put forward separately, and then go on with the other parts which are more controversial hereafter. Moreover, there was a certain inconsistency in the noble Lord's attitude. One of the complaints he made was that your Lordships were initiating what he called a rating Bill. Surely, it hardly lay in his mouth to complain that there were not more rating clauses in the Bill! In these circumstances I venture to- hope that your Lordships will agree to the Second Reading, and then we can consider further what possibility there may be of passing the Bill through its subsequent stages.

LORD PENTLAND

I might explain that I resisted the Bill so far as speech is concerned; but, after what occurred last year, it is not, of course, my intention to divide the House against the Bill.

THE EARL OF CAMPERDOWN

My Lords, in replying on the debate I would point out that the noble Lord the Secretary for Scotland, when he commenced his speech, was proposing to criticise the Bill which is before the House. Now the Bill before the House is a Small Dwelling-Houses in Burghs Letting (Scotland) Bill. There is nothing about rating in it. Then the noble Lord left this Bill and proceeded to talk about the Bill of last year, and to go into matters with which the particular Bill which your Lordships are now asked to read a second time has nothing in the world to do. What the noble Lord said was this, that nearly the whole of the difficulty comes from the rating question.

LORD PENTLAND

Hear, hear.

THE EARL OF CAMPERDOWN

The noble Lord says "Hear, hear." Does he mean to say, then, that he has no objection to the missive system? Has that nothing to do with the difficulty? Let him do me the honour of reading the Bill— No agreement …for the let of a small dwelling-house shall be binding if the same has been made more than two months prior to the commencement of such let. What is the grievance of these missives? Does not the Bill meet that grievance? Then the noble Lord says this Bill creates a new injustice. I should like to know what that new injustice is. "Creating a new injustice" is one of those round phrases which are so easy to use, and which the noble Lord, if I may say so, is so fond of using in this House. He uses words to which one really cannot attach any particular meaning. I should like to know what new injustice this Bill creates. I do not know of any. I have pointed out that it undoubtedly does away with two grievances. It does away with the grievance of missives; it does away with the grievance of urban hypothec. I wish the noble Lord could point out to me where this new grievance comes in. At all events, he will have an opportunity in Committee of pointing it out to me. The noble Lord has developed a new and sudden affection for the house-owners. He asks, "What will they say?" After we have read this Bill a second time we shall know what they say; but, as a matter of fact, I know that they have been considering this Bill in consultation with various of these authorities, and if they wish to say that some of the arrangements proposed in the Bill are not fair they will have an opportunity. The noble Lord talked a great deal about rating, and about his Bill of last year. He described that Bill as a Government Bill. As a matter of fact, it was Mr. Cross's Bill. It was not a Government Bill at all, but, Mr. Cross's Bill which the Government subsequently took up.

LORD PENTLAND

The noble Earl is able to refer to the record.

THE EARL OF CAMPERDOWN

I have not the record here. I have only my own recollection, and I was asking the noble Lord whether his recollection agrees with mine. The Bill was Mr. Cross's Bill and not a Government Bill. I am bound to say that when one says that, it recalls the fact that this Government have been in the habit of indulging in a practice which is very inconvenient. They more than once have taken up a private Bill which has gone through the other House, at all events through several of its stages, as a private. Bill, and then they call it a Government Bill. I do not know what the motives of the Government are. The noble Lord said something about their motives being suspected. I merely take their speeches, and I will tell the noble Lord exactly how I construe his speech. He wants to wound, but he is afraid to strike. He does not want to deal with this grievance, but to appeal to a proposal which was inserted in the other House, not by the Government, not in pursuance of the recommendation of Lord Guthrie's Committee, but which was suggested by the Labour Members as—it was frankly stated so—a means of working round the franchise legislation of the country. From the noble Lord's speech I should say he did not care in the least about this missive grievance, which is the real grievance. He says you cannot deal with it unless you deal also with rating. Why not? Pass this Bill by itself and you will have done away with missive and with hypothec. Those are all the words I need trouble your Lordships with at this stage. I shall, of course, give reasonable time before taking the Committee stage, in order that we may hear what the house-owners and other persons interested may have to say on the matter.

On Question, Bill read 2a, and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.