LAW OF PROPERTY ACT (POSTPONEMENT) BILL. [H.L.] (Hansard, 10 December 1924)

§ THE LORD CHANCELLOR(VISCOUNT CAVE)
My Lords, in rising to move the Second Beading of the first of two Bills dealing with the law of property, I think I should save time and reduce the speeches by one-half if you will permit me to refer to both Bills together. As your Lordships know, the Law of Property Act, 1925, which was passed at the instance of my noble and learned friend the Secretary of State for India, made great changes in the law of property. It touched that law at very many points; in fact, there is no part of it which is not very deeply affected by some provisions of the Act. That being so, it was thought, I believe, by everybody, including my noble and learned friend, that it was undesirable that the Act should come, into operation until it had been collated and consolidated with the earlier Statutes relating to real property law. That, of course, is a great undertaking, but it was put in hand at once, and it was found that consolidation could hardly take effect unless certain amendments had been made in detailed matters connected with the law of property.
Therefore I, when I was last in occupation of the Woolsack, appointed a strong Committee over which Mr. Justice Romer presided, to consider the Act of 1922 and to advise as to the changes that ought to 79 be made in it, or in the law of property, with a view to consolidation, and also to advise when it was desirable that the consolidating Acts should come into operation. I think we owe a great debt of gratitude to that Committee for the time and labour which it gave to the subject. The Committee presented to Lord Haldane, when he was Lord Chancellor, a Report upon the matter, and they advised, first, that certain amendments should be made in the law of property with a view to consolidation, and secondly, that the operation of the Act should be postponed for a year; that is to say, from January 1, 1925, until January 1, 1926. That postponement is plainly necessary. The amending Act and consolidating Acts cannot easily pass until somewhere towards the middle of next year. After that time the text writers and practitioners will require a period in which to put the now Statutes into the text books, to comment upon them, and to become as familiar with them as they can within a comparatively short time. Therefore, it is necessary to have a year's interval from the first of January next before they come into operation. That is a short statement of the reasons why I ask the House to give a Second Reading to the two Bills, and I want to say a few words about the need for carrying them further as quickly as possible.
As regards the first Bill, the Law of Property Act (Postponement) Bill, it is really essential that it should be passed through all its stages before we adjourn for the Christmas vacation. If the Act as it stands came into operation on January I next great confusion would certainly be caused and I do not know what the consequences might be. Indeed, I think everybody admits that the Act must be postponed for a year, and therefore I ask you to pass the Second Reading of the Postponement Bill to-day. I propose to ask the House to-morrow to pass that Bill through all its stages, and for that purpose I will give the usual Notice to suspend the Standing Orders. It is very important that it should be passed tomorrow, because then it can go to another place for First Reading tomorrow afternoon, and I hope that its later stages can then be gone through in due course.
As regards the second of these Bills, the Law of Property (Amendment) Bill, 80 of course it is much the longer and more substantial, but it contains, with certain exceptions, which I will mention, only changes necessary for consolidating the law. They are mainly of a technical nature, and I feel confident that your Lordships will, upon the advice of the Committee I have named, be willing to accept them. The only exceptions are three clauses or three parts of the Bill which were inserted by the late Government when they had the Bill prepared, and which do go outside the recommendation of Mr. Justice Romer's Committee. I can give them quite shortly. There are clauses at page 16 which relate to the conveyance of land subject to covenants, and to leasehold land, and their only effect is to imply in these conveyances and assignments covenants which are always to be found there, and so their effect will be to shorten those deeds by inserting in them by implication covenants which are always found in them.
Again, on page 29, there is a clause relating to decorative repairs under leases, and the effect of the clause, if passed, is that where a lessor requires his lessee to carry out certain decorative repairs during the term, and the lessee thinks that it may be oppressive upon him to be called upon to do them at once, he may go to the Court and obtain relief, as he does in certain other cases. Then, on page 30, there is another wholly non-controversial clause relating to the conveyance of part of property which is subject to a rentcharge; and, lastly, there are certain provisions which have been lately proposed by the Committee over which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Buck master, presided, which are only proposed for the purpose of enabling us to consolidate the Statutes relating to University and college estates. With those exceptions, the whole Bill is pure preparation for consolidation, and I hope your Lordships will be willing to accept it practically as it stands.
As regards this Bill, although I am not able to say that it is absolutely essential to pass it into law before January 1, as I said of the first Bill, still it is very desirable to do so, for this reason. As soon as this amending Bill has been adopted or approved, I propose to introduce at once the Consolidating Bills, and, if possible, to get them read a first time before the adjournment, so that at a very 81 early stage of next Session they may pass their Second Reading and be referred to the Committee on Consolidation Bills over which my noble Mend Lord Muir Mackenzie has presided with so much advantage to the public. If the Bill can be passed before Christmas that whole process will be greatly quickened. We may be able to get all the Consolidation Bills through both Houses in the early part—at all events in the first half—of next year, and that will be of great benefit, not only to the profession but to the public. I therefore propose to put the same Motion for suspending the Standing Orders down on the Paper for to-morrow for both Bills, and I hope your Lordships may be prepared to accept it. I beg to move.

§ THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR INDIA (THE EARL OF BIRKENHEAD)
My Lords, I intervene for one moment only because the Lord Chancellor has so clearly indicated the great urgency of these Bills that I imagine little reinforcement of that which he said is required. I rise, indeed, because I was responsible for the immensely complicated legislative Act, the genesis of which has made necessary the two Bills to which the Lord Chancellor has made reference. We were never sanguine enough to contemplate that it would be possible, in making proposals of this complexity, to make them actually operative without further legislation, of which we were sure that it must necessarily, in its content and scope, itself be complex. The Lord Chancellor does not exaggerate when he says that if the first of these Bills did not receive the exceptional treatment for which ho is about to ask the resultant chaos would be immense; indeed, I could myself assign no limits to it. The reasons in relation to the second Bill are not, as he has explained, of precisely the same urgency, but the Bill is nevertheless of great importance, and I can conceive of no objection of any kind to the proposal which the noble and learned Viscount has made. I therefore join with him in expressing the hope that your Lordships will consent to the course which he has suggested.

§ VISCOUNT HALDANE
My Lords, I rise, too, to express my full concurrence 82 with the proposition made from the Woolsack. The noble and learned Earl who has last spoken might well intervene in this debate, even for the brief period that he has, because there will always be associated with his name the great Parliamentary triumph of having passed the Law of Property Act through both Houses of Parliament. I myself thought that was a matter which would take years, and he accomplished it almost in months. As regards the proposal to treat these two Bills as matters of urgency, I think there is very good reason for it. If the first Bill does not pass, then there is not a banker in the country, there is not an intending mortgagor who will not be in uncertainty on a great many points, and there may be a great paralysis of business on January I next. Therefore, when the Government to which I belonged was in power I persuaded them to make this Bill a Bill of urgency, and we had agreed to do so until untimely events intervened. But now my noble and learned friend on the Woolsack is in a more happy position, and certainly he has my strong encouragement in the idea of treating this Bill as one of urgency to the extent of suspending the Standing Orders.
As to the second Bill I think it really is not so urgent, but it stands in very much the same position. It is a Bill which it has been my business in the past to scrutinise very closely. It came from Mr. Justice Homer's Committee, a most competent Committee, and it passed through the hands, and was the work, of the most competent draftsmen in the country, including Sir Benjamin Cherry, who has done so much work in connection with all these Bills. There, too, it is highly desirable in the public interest that this Bill should become law before the New Year. We want to see what the law is, and it will remain only to consolidate it into those six Statutes which we hope will form a fine addition, in nicely bound form, to every country gentleman's library. But that may go very slowly, or, it may be, very quickly. Whether it is to go quickly depends upon whether we can dispose of this second Bill during the present sittings of Parliament. If your Lordships have read the Bill through, you will find that it deals with all sorts of interesting subjects, such as the Statute of Uses, and other Statutes going back to Tudor times. It puts them into a much improved form, 83 so far as it does not get rid of them, and leaves the whole matter in such a shape that the Committee of my noble friend Lord Muir Mackenzie can consolidate them without difficulty. It is, therefore, of urgent importance that that should be done as quickly as it can be done, and, for my part, although I know it is an unusual thing to suspend Standing Orders early in the Session, I look upon this as a very important case in the public interest, and I am very willing to assent to the proposition that the second Bill also should be included in the Motion which the Lord Chancellor proposes to make.

§ LORD ABINGER
My Lords, it may seem rather presumptuous for me to rise after the Lord Chancellor and two ex-Lord Chancellors have spoken with such great authority, but I ought to tell your Lordships that I put down a Question, which unfortunately, as far as I can see, will not come on until the Bills have been passed, and therefore will be quite useless, and it is better for me to explain what I intended now. Of course, we quite understand that most of the Law of Property Act deals with legal technicalities, such as conveyancing, but it contains a few things of a practical nature, not so much connected with the law, and it has been pointed out to me from two or three sources that by postponing these matters, for instance, Sections G4 and G5 of the original Act, as passed in 1021, the result would be produced that we 84 should prevent the employment of labour. Those sections refer more particularly to the spending of capital moneys on roads and machinery and matters of that kind. Although it may be absolutely necessary to postpone this Act, so far as the legal technicalities are concerned, for twelve months, I fail to see why it should be necessary to postpone the parts of it which facilitate employment, which this Government particularly wishes to encourage by every means in their power. However, I leave the matter entirely to the judgment of your Lordships and in the circumstances I do not intend to press the matter.