POLICE MAGISTRATES SUPERANNUATION (AMENDMENT) BILL. (Hansard, 8 May 1929)

§ LORD DESBOROUGH

My Lords, I hope that your Lordships will give a Second Reading to this Bill, more especially as it is a certified Bill, and I hope I shall be allowed to proceed with all its stages to-day. The object is to give an appropriate pension to a very deserving class of public servants—namely, the Metropolitan Police Magistrates. They are 27 in number. These Police Magistrates are appointed after something like twenty years' service at the Bar, and the average age is 52. They are entitled to the full pension after thirty years' service. If you add that on to the 52, that would make them 82, but under the Pensions Acts they have to retire from the public service at the age of 70, so in present circumstances they are extremely unlikely to earn their pension. All that they can look forward to on the average is eighteen years service, and then they would only be entitled to retire on half pay. This has been causing a great many of these public servants the greatest anxiety, and indeed illness and mortality has been very high.

It is, I suppose, not a very pleasant duty and very often it is a painful one, but I think it is always acknowledged that the Metropolitan Police Magistrates have earned, and justly earned, the title of being friends of the poor. I find that ten of them have died in harness between 485 the years 1922 and 1927, and the average period of office has been only seven or eight years. Two others, unfortunately, have committed suicide. Of five appointed in 1917, four have died. To sum up the object of the Bill in a word, it is proposed to make the annual increase of the Magistrates' pensions scale from the eleventh year of their service onwards two-sixtieths instead of one-sixtieth, so that the maximum pension will be obtainable after twenty years, instead of after thirty years service. I beg to move.