§ Order of the Day for the Second Reading read.
THE LORD PRIVY SEAL (THE EARL OF CRAWFORD)My Lords, this is a Bill of one clause, the object of which is to strengthen committees now established all over the country in dealing with the 1130 administrative side of pensions. Your Lordships will remember that the organisation which is responsible for local committee work is divided into three broad categories. At the head are twenty so-called joint committees, which either cover a single large county or certain less populous counties aggregated together. Yorkshire, for instance, has a general committee of its own; Kent, Surrey, and Sussex are combined under a joint committee. They have to deal with treatment and training. Below the joint committees is a group of local committees, for areas of upwards of 20,000 inhabitants. Birmingham and Liverpool has its own local committee. Of these committees there are 300 in the British Isles. Finally, the smallest unit in pension administration is what is called the sub-committee or district, committee, of which there are, I think, about a couple of thousand. The object of this Bill is that the local committees and the subcommittees or district committees shall be strengthened by adding to their personnel, where such persons do not at present exist, two discharged soldiers, and a woman, who must be the widow or the dependant of a man in the Naval or Military Forces who has died from causes arising out of his services during the present war. That is all that the Bill does. The first subsection states that this shall be done, and the second subsection provides the machinery for the supplemental schemes under which these additions to the personnel will be made. The last subsection is purely consequential. The duty of the committees to which the soldiers will be added are, briefly, to look after and to investigate all questions of supplemental pensions. They deal with separation allowances, and, what is very important, with emergency grants. Under the Act that this Bill supplements these committees will exist for three years from the date of their establishment, by which time it will be possible to review the whole situation from a rather lengthier perspective, and in a couple of years' time no doubt it will be necessary to have a general amendment of the whole system; at any rate, it will be possible after three years to review it.
§ Moved, That the Bill be now read 2a.—(The Earl of Crawford.)
§ On Question, Bill read 2a, and committed to a Committee of the Whole House on Wednesday next.