LONDON COUNTY COUNCIL (COORDINATION OF PASSENGER TRAFFIC) BILL. (Hansard, 7 March 1929)

THE EARL OF DONOUGHMORE

My Lords, I beg to move, That this House do not concur with the Commons in the said Resolution. I will very briefly mention my reasons for making this Motion. It is not a common Motion, 208 though it is not by any means an unprecedented one. Many of your Lordships will remember the very interesting proceedings of twenty years ago, in 1908, on the London and District Electricity Supply Bill and the London Electric Supply Bill, when your Lordships passed a Resolution in favour of submitting these Bills to a Joint Committee—a Resolution which was not agreed to in the House of Commons on the Motion of the then President of the Board of Trade. I have the report of the proceedings here, but it is not necessary for me to go into them in detail. I would sum it up by saying this: The Houses do not always agree, because they regard these matters from rather different points of view. It is of public value that they should do so. Each branch of the Legislature in these matters should be complete master in its own House.

Your Lordships have always proceeded on very definite lines in proposing, or agreeing or disagreeing with the appointment of Joint Committees. I think I am right in saying that we never agree to a Joint Committee unless one of two conditions is present, and possibly both. Firstly, of course, your Lordships would always agree to a Joint Committee if His Majesty's Government announced that in their view a Joint Committee was desirable in the public interest. All other reasons must go in that case. I would almost call that the second condition, because it is generally the second to come before us in point of time. The other condition is that your Lordships are agreeable to appoint a Joint Committee if the promoters and a substantial body of the opponents are agreed in asking that a Joint Committee should be substituted for the usual procedure—namely, two inquiries, one in each House, one after the other. I would remind your Lordships that last year in the Joint Committee on the Railway Bills, in which we were so much assisted by my noble friend opposite, Lord Chelmsford, who was Chairman of the Committee, Lord Russell, and other Peers who sat upon it, both these conditions were satisfied. His Majesty's Government communicated to me—and I informed your Lordships of it—their desire that a Joint Committee should sit. And, secondly, there is no doubt that the promoters were in agreement with a very large number of the opponents on this point, and this point 209 only—namely, that they desired the matter to be inquired into by a Joint Committee.

Now, in this case neither of those two conditions has been fulfilled. What has happened in the proceedings in which I have taken part is this. After the House of Commons came to the decision which they came to, and of which your Lordships are aware, I saw the parties—I had an application from the promoters, who asked for a Joint Committee. I saw them formally as represented by their agent. There are 29 Petitions against this Bill. Quite a number of those Petitions only refer to clause matters, and therefore can be discarded from consideration on the present point. Nine very important opponents most strenuously opposed the appointment of a Joint Committee. Not one opponent was quoted to me as being in favour of a Joint Committee. For that reason I felt that, following your Lordships' invariable practice, there was no reason for denying to the opponents their usual right to two hearings in each case. I know of no case where your Lordships have insisted on a Joint Committee in the teeth of the opposition of all or most of the opponents, and that is why I make this Motion this afternoon.

I think I ought only to say that the promoters were, as they naturally would be, quite frank with me as they would be with your Lordships. Their object in asking for the Joint Committee was that they believed it was the only way of saving their Bill in view of the fact that a great many members of both Houses of Parliament—I am not one of them—would have a very disturbed Whitsuntide holiday this year. Even on that point I disagree. I think the Bills are more likely to get through conveniently if the position is not complicated by the hearing by a Joint Committee which might not terminate by Whitsuntide. There is just a chance, I think, that a Committee of one House might be finished by Whitsuntide, in which case the Bills can go on after the General Election.

Your Lordships realise, of course, that it is our invariable custom to facilitate Private Bills by not wasting the time and energy that would be given to them previous to a General Election, by carrying them over if necessary, and I have no doubt that this year I shall have to 210 ask your Lordships to carry over quite a large number. I do not disguise from myself this fact: these are very difficult Bills, they are more or less skeleton Bills, and they were described to me as such by the opponents. They are Bills which will require very careful consideration by Parliament, and I think they are Bills where a re-hearing in the Second House, in a revising House, if I may so say, might be very useful if the Bills are to get through and to be useful from the public point of view. I appreciate the importance of the occasion, but I think, apart altogether from the merits of the case, when we contemplate the nature of the opposition, that we are doing a wise thing from the point of view of facilitating the Bills getting through in whatever form is finally approved. I submit this Motion to your Lordships.