TITHE BILL. (Hansard, 7 July 1936)

HL Deb 07 July 1936 vol 101 cc487-528 487

§ Order of the Day for the Second Reading read.

§ THE LORD PRIVY SEAL (VISCOUNT HALIFAX)
My Lords, I rise to make the Motion that stands in my name. I had the honour of moving a similar Motion in another place in connection with the 1925 Tithe Bill, and in deciding to make this Motion myself this afternoon I was not influenced by a desire to enjoy the almost unique and certainly quite unenviable distinction of moving two Bills connected with tithes so much as I was influenced by the fact that this subject is one of great importance and we hope to be providing a scheme for permanent settlement of this vexed question. It is one which is permanently going to affect the great industry of agriculture on which your Lordships have an exceptional right to speak, and for the reason that it is a permanent scheme I thought it right to ask your Lordships' leave to make the Motion myself.
488 The subject, as all of us are well aware, is one that is extremely technical, extremely complicated, one in which many different interests conflict, and which has had so long a history that it has gathered to itself almost a language of its own that sometimes makes it difficult for those unfamiliar with the language to follow all that is intended by the use of it. I would, therefore, in what I have to say in moving the Second Reading, try to avoid detail so far as I can, partly because your Lordships will remember that last February the Government issued a White Paper on this subject, and also because this is a Bill that your Lordships will naturally wish to scrutinise carefully when it comes to Committee. Therefore I shall attempt, if I may, merely to deal with the broad provisions that arise out of it.
It will be remembered that in the last Act dealing with tithe, in 1925, tithe rentcharge was there stabilised at the figure of £105, with an addition of £4 10s. sinking fund in the case of ecclesiastical tithe rentcharge to extinguish it in 85 years. Almost as soon as that Bill was passed we were faced in this country, as in others, with a sharp and, one might truly say, catastrophic fall not only in corn but in other agricultural prices, and this, along with the fact that one of the consequences of the War had been greatly to increase the class of owner-occupiers who had been hard put to it to meet their outgoings, created a situation of no little difficulty. Your Lordships will be generally familiar with those causes which led to increasing friction in the collection of tithe rentcharge. As a measure of that friction, the Department over which the noble and learned Viscount on the Woolsack presides gave evidence before the Royal Commission stating that in the year 1913 the number of applications to County Courts in respect of tithe rentcharge was 2,404, but in 1929 the comparable figure was 11,570 and in 1933 the comparable figure was 16,565. When that evidence was given no fewer than 5,500 County Court orders for the recovery of tithe rentcharge which had been in existence more than two months were still unsatisfied. It was the conviction of the Government that the reactions of that state of affairs—reactions social, economic, political, religious—were so undesirable that they thought it their duty to intervene.
489 Accordingly, it will be remembered, they introduced into Parliament two years ago a Bill to deal with this subject. That Bill, for reasons which I do not here think it necessary to retraverse, was deemed insufficient and was withdrawn, and thereafter the whole of this complicated subject was remitted to the consideration of a Royal Commission. That Commission, after full, careful and long examination, recommended treatment of the problem on much wider lines. They recommended that tithe rentcharge should be completely extinguished by a tithe redemption scheme. They further recommended that the existing stabilised value of £105 should be reduced to £91 11s. 2d. It is the main lines of the Royal Commission's recommendations, subject to certain important variations on which I shall have a word or two to say, that are incorporated in this Bill. Clause 4 of the Bill establishes the Tithe Redemption Commission. As from October 2 of this year it is proposed that the Exchequer should purchase from existing tithe rentcharge owners their interest in that property and should recompense them by the issue of Government stock bearing interest at 3 per cent. redeemable at par in sixty years, and in the case of ecclesiastical tithe rentcharge that arrangement is to be supplemented by certain cash payments to which I must refer in a moment.
The consequence or that arrangement, if it is approved by Parliament, will be that the half-yearly instalment of tithe rentcharge due on October 1 next will be the last payment of tithe rentcharge made to the existing tithe-owners, the tithe-payers thereafter becoming liable to pay to the Exchequer a redemption annuity payable half-yearly for a period of sixty years, the first half-yearly instalment becoming due and payable on April 1, 1937. The Royal Commission recommended that the appointed day for the new scheme should be fixed as early as practicable after the necessary legislation had been passed and it is with this recommendation in mind that the Government have made arrangements by which the extinguishment scheme should come into force on April 1, 1937. There is another important recommendation which the Government have adopted to which I think I should refer. That is the recommendation that in any case in 490 which the redemption annuity in any year exceeds one-third of the Schedule B value of an agricultural holding, the excess amount should not be payable or recoverable. Your Lordships will be aware that the present statutory position for remission under the Tithe Act, 1891, provides for remission where the tithe rent-charge exceeds two-thirds of the Schedule B value. It is of course unnecessary to emphasise the importance of this concession in the case of heavily tithed land.
The principal difference between the Royal Commission's Report and the proposals of the Government in this Bill is in the duration of the annuity period. The Royal Commission recommended forty years. This Bill makes the period sixty years. Your Lordships will, I think, desire to hear what were the considerations that moved the Government to make that very substantial change. The Royal Commission, although they did not conceive themselves to be empowered to deal with it, recognised that the position of the rating authorities, who, under these proposals, were going to lose a considerable amount of rate income, would have to be met. In the White Paper that was published in February last His Majesty's Government made it plain that they thought it was reasonable that the local authorities should be so met, and they there made proposals by which in outline they sketched a scheme for meeting local authorities through the means of annual payments equivalent to the present value of an annuity of £600,000 for sixty years. Your Lordships will find the detailed provisions concerning that part of the proposals in Clause 25 (4) (e) and in the Fifth Schedule of the Bill.
At the same time as they were concerned with the position of the local authorities from the angle of rates, the Government were also concerned with the position of some of the tithe-owners, and more particularly with the position of the poorer incumbents, depending, in some eases entirely, and in a great many other cases very largely, upon income derived from tithe rentcharge. Figures have been frequently given showing how considerable are the numbers of these poorer incumbents and of the proportion represented by tithe income to their total income. In many cases, as I have said, it represents the whole of it. Therefore 491 the Government felt it right, when they were considering these proposals of the Commission, to try to ease, if they could, the position of the poorer incumbents in some way. Accordingly it was stated in the White Paper that, out of the finance of the scheme, the Government thought it right that there should be provided a sum of £2,000,000 to be used by the Church at its discretion for the purpose to which I have been alluding. The provisions giving effect to that are to be found in Clause 25 (4) (f).
It will be within the recollection of your Lordships also that at the time the White Paper was laid it was there explained that the Government could not accept, in this business, any new charge upon the taxpayer. If, therefore, the claims of the local authorities and of the poorer-paid incumbents were to be held just, as the Government thought they must, it was obvious that some means had to be found from which, without imposing additional charges upon the taxpayer and without inflicting injustice upon other interests, they could be met. Within the limits as I have defined them, the Government have found themselves able to assist in the following way. Many of your Lordships will know that, under the existing law of to-day, the Exchequer is liable for a portion of the rates that are payable upon ecclesiastical tithe rent-charge, and this liability during recent years has averaged something in the neighbourhood of £550,000 a year. The Government, therefore, whose attitude has been that, while they were not prepared to accept new obligations, they did not desire to make any profit out of the re-arrangement of these matters, have agreed that the liability which lay on them under the Act of 1925 should be regarded as continuing for the duration of the extinguishment scheme, say, for sixty years. They have also agreed that, for the purposes of the finance of the scheme, they would make available certain further sums that would be naturally accruing to them, partly from the saving on the present cost of administration of the Tithe Acts by the Ministry of Agriculture and partly from the net additional revenue from Income Tax which would be payable by tithe-payers and certain classes of tithe-owners in connection with the change of system that they propose.
492 Those sums when brought together total up to a round figure of £685,000 a year, and that is the figure which is being made available by the Government towards the general finances of the scheme. Those who have any turn for mathematics may be interested to know that, as a matter of pure arithmetic, that sum would be more than sufficient to cover both the compensation which, as I have explained, is being paid to local authorities and also the grant of £2,000,000 which is being given to the Church for the relief of the poorer incumbents. In addition, the Government thought that in all the circumstances it was not unreasonable, having regard to the substantial and immediate relief that was being given to tithe-payers, to extend the period of the payment of annuities from forty years to sixty years, which, your Lordships will observe, though longer than the period recommended by the Commission, is yet a considerable shortening of the period of the 1925 Act which, as matters stand today, has another seventy-six years still to run.
Strong representations were also made to His Majesty's Government, after the Report and the Government's proposals in the White Paper had been published, upon another point which is of not a little importance. That was the point that it was—so it was claimed—not reasonable to interfere with existing life interests of individuals, and that the existing holders of benefices and other offices in the Church whose incomes depended upon tithe rentcharge were entitled to have those life interests respected. To those representations we gave—as indeed we were bound to give—very careful and, I think, sympathetic consideration, and with the agreement of the Church authorities it was arranged that a provision should be included in the Bill—your Lordships will find it in the Eighth Schedule, paragraphs 1 and 2—by which Queen Anne's Bounty might be enabled to make good any decrease in the income of such persons by utilising for this purpose a proportion of the redemption stock to be issued to Queen Anne's Bounty as compensation for the extinguishment of tithe rentcharge. That, of course—I must not conceal it from your Lordships—means that to a certain extent the income of future incumbents will be 493 affected in order to preserve the existing life interests of present holders of those offices. Careful calculations have, however, been made, and it is not anticipated that the reduction in consequence of the readjustment of Church money will be at all material.
There is another matter, though not of such importance as the extension of the period from forty years to sixty years, in which the Government have departed from the recommendations of the Royal Commission: that is, in regard to the liability falling upon non-agricultural land, having regard to the fact that the basis for the relief contemplated by the Bill to the tithe-payer is the drop in agricultural prices. That argument obviously does not apply to the owner of non-agricultural land, and, after giving the matter a good deal of thought, the Government felt bound, in their attempt to hold the scales even, to reach the conclusion that the claim of the urban property-owners who are tithe-payers was not as strong as that of the agricultural tithe-payers. Accordingly your Lordships will see that in Clause 3 (2) the Bill differentiates between agricultural and non-agricultural land and fixes the stabilised value in the case of agricultural land, as I have said, at £91 11s. 2d., but leaves the stabilised value in the case of non-agricultural land at £105, though in both cases the liability terminates at the end of sixty years. By that adjustment, which I think myself is a fair one, and to which I do not suppose that any of your Lordships is likely to take serious objection, it has been possible to secure rather more favourable terms to the tithe-owning interests, both ecclesiastical and lay.
I must say a word upon the question of arrears. This question having the back history that we know, the matter of arrears is more important than perhaps it would have been some years ago, and it would be obviously undesirable to have two separate parties, the State and the tithe-owner, collecting amounts at the same time from the same owner in respect of the same land. The Bill accordingly provides that the State shall take over from the tithe-owner the right to collect arrears of tithe rentcharge as from the date on which the payment of redemption annuities will commence, and as from that date all steps for recovery will be undertaken 494 on behalf of the Government. As a corrollary to this procedure your Lordships will see, if you turn to Clause 20, subsection (4), that it is proposed to set up what is called in the Bill an Arrears Investigation Committee, to whom the tithe-payer will be entitled to submit his case with a view to satisfying them, if he can, that his financial circumstances are such as to render it fair and reasonable that the whole or part of the arrears due from him should be remitted.
Then I come to what I am also well aware will be a matter that will be one of some difficulty to many of your Lordships, and that is the method and machinery of recovery by the State whether of the redemption annuities or of the arrears after these have been revised by the Arrears Investigation Committee. The Royal Commission recommended that inasmuch as it was in the interests of the whole community that the redemption annuities, as and when they become due, should be easily recovered, the annuities should be collected by the same remedies as those available for Income Tax under Schedule A, and that any objections by the tithe-payers to such recovery could not reasonably be upheld. Having regard to the fact that, as your Lordships are aware, the obligation to pay tithe rentcharge rests upon the owners and not upon the occupiers of land, the Government have decided that the powers of recovery recommended by the Commission should be limited by providing that redemption annuities should not be recovered from or through the occupier. The Bill does, however, provide in Clause 16 that redemption annuities shall be recoverable from the owner of the land and not only from the land itself.
I am fully sensible of the importance of the change that those proposals represent, and of the anxiety that in some quarters they have aroused. None the less, I think that if we try to place ourselves in the position of the State we are bound to recognise that in all this business the Slate is undertaking a very onerous financial obligation. It is, after all, guaranteeing the interest on not less than £70,000,000 worth of new stock, and it has to produce a sinking fund for the redemption of that stock in a period of sixty years. Apart from the Exchequer contribution, the money required to finance the scheme is provided wholly and solely by means of these annuities. 495 Therefore it is, in the judgment of His Majesty's Government—and I hope that your Lordships will not be disposed to disagree—essential that the State should have adequate powers of recovery should they be required. One word with regard to the time-table. Your Lordships will observe that in Clause 19 it is provided by the Bill that the instalments of tithe rentcharge due on October 1 next should be calculated at the revised figure. It will obviously depend upon the date of the passage of the Bill into law whether that early relief will or will not be obtainable, and it is obvious that the provision as to October 1 would be impossible if for any reason the Bill were not to be passed until a later date than I hope will be the case.
I would emphasise to your Lordships one or two considerations in regard to the finance of the Bill. It is important that we should all realise that the finances of this extinguishment scheme represent a very fine balance, and that the estimates do not contain funds that might be available to be used for the variation of any of the main items of the scheme, such as, for example, the compensation to the tithe-owners or the annuities payable by the tithe-payers. For instance, any proposal to increase the amount of compensation to be paid to the tithe-owners, or on the other hand any proposal to reduce the amount or number of the annuities payable by the tithe-payers, would inevitably result, in the view of the Government, in the finances of the scheme becoming unsound, with the consequent result that the Government would be unable to put a scheme so varied into force without abrogating the principle that the scheme should not involve any additional call upon the taxpayer.
I think we are entitled to assert that under this scheme everybody knows where they are. The tithe-owners receive the value of their property as defined by an impartial Commission, and as expressed in the terms of a Government stock, and secure against any subsequent diminution by any further tithe legislation. So far as the tithe-payer is concerned, his liability also is clearly defined. Any risk as a result of the estimates not being realised will not prejudice him. The amount and the period of his liability cannot be increased; and, indeed, on the other hand, if the working 496 of the scheme enables the commitments under it to be met in full before the end of the sixty years period, provision is made by which the remaining annuities payable by the land-owners would be cancelled.
May I—because I think it was fairly clear—remind your Lordships of the form in which this most complicated and technical business was summed up in the White Paper to which I have alluded?. The agricultural tithe-payer, who is at present paying £109 10s. for seventy-six years, or £105 in perpetuity, will pay £91 11s. 2d. for sixty years. He will enjoy the right of the remission of excess, as I explained, when redemption annuity exceeds one-third of Schedule B assessment of his agricultural holding, instead of such remission, as to-day, being only applicable after the charge exceeds two-thirds of the annual value. The urban tithe-payer is at present paying the same as the agricultural, but he will pay in future £105 for sixty years instead of for seventy-six. The tithe-owners of all classes, whether the Church, the Welsh Commission, or the Universities and colleges, with whose interests I perhaps have a particularly close connection, will—though, as I have said, the interests of existing incumbents are preserved—suffer a diminution of income, but they will exchange an income the payment and recovery of which not infrequently excite reactions most damaging to the cause which tithe was originally instituted to serve, for an income guaranteed by the State, represented by a gilt-edged security, a security marketable like any other. As regards the Universities and colleges, I hope that because they are so provided with a marketable security, and considering that they pay no Income Tax and never die and therefore are liable to no Succession Duties, they would hot find it impossible to recoup themselves, at least in part, for such loss of income on re-investment. From the point of view of the Exchequer no new net additional charge is accepted, but the credit of the State is pledged to finance the scheme, and the State makes available for it the sums that it has hitherto paid by way of rate contribution, and those that it may expect to realise under the new arrangements.
497 I would add a word from the wider angle of the point of view of the whole society of the State. It is, happily, often the case that customs deriving from ancient days are able to attract to themselves something of the toleration, if not the veneration, that old age is generally, happily, in a position to command. But with tithe, for most familiar reasons, this is not so; and all who have followed the course of tithe history in recent years will agree that in many parts of the country an institution and a custom that was in its origin designed to ameliorate man's lot in this world and the next has become a cause of irritation and prejudice to the high causes that it was originally designed to serve. In this matter we are dealing with a case of sharply conflicting interests, but with the same breath that I say that I will also say that nothing has been to my mind more remarkable than the extent to which those interests, or many sections of them—and I think I may say the preponderant numerical representation of them—whether of those for whom the most reverend Primate speaks and other tithe-owners, or of tithe-payers, have been willing to show readiness to place national before their narrower sectional interests in their approach to this difficult and baffling problem.
I know very well that some representatives of tithe-payers will urge that the figure of £91 11s. 2d. is too high and that the period of sixty years is too long. I know equally well, on the other hand, that some representatives of tithe-owners—and possibly those who speak for them in this House—will feel obliged in justice to argue that the figure of £91 11s. 2d. is too low, and that the period of sixty years should be extended in order to furnish more compensation for the extinguishment of the charge. These claims are, of course, mutually destructive, and I can only assure your Lordships that it has been the aim and the purpose of the Government, with the help of the Royal Commission, to attempt to present to Parliament a scheme that holds the scales even, and that takes reasonable account of all the different interests; and the fact that this scheme and these proposals win a complete assent from none encourages me to hope that His Majesty's Government may not have been completely unsuccessful. At all events, I can assure your Lordships that they represent 498 the best attempt to do justice and to win finality that His Majesty's Government have been able to devise, and as such I commend this Bill to your Lordships for Second Reading.

§ Moved, That the Bill be now read 2^a.—(Viscount Halifax.)

§ LORD MARLEY
My Lords, on behalf of the Opposition I desire to deal with this measure from another point of view perhaps than that mainly presented by the noble Viscount. As he said, it is an extremely complicated subject. Tithe, as he pointed out, is based on ancient custom. It arose out of conditions entirely different from those of to-day. So far as I can gather, though I think this may possibly be disputed, it was originally a common voluntary levy—certainly the Report of the Royal Commission appears to bear out that suggestion—on all productive enterprise in the country; and it was a levy paid by those who enjoyed a common return which was rendered to all the people and enjoyed by all the people. And so we got a sort of universal agreement to this tithe payment. But conditions are entirely different to-day.
Even a hundred years ago there was beginning to be a definite opposition to the whole of this organisation of tithe payment. The problem has been growing worse for two centuries. We on these Benches know that under public ownership of the land there would of course be no such problem; that were the land nationally-owned the problem of tithe would automatically disappear. But that is not the condition to-day. Under private ownership the anomaly and injustice of tithe payments continue. The noble Viscount who moved the Second Reading pointed out that what he called "a line balance" had been achieved. Thai of course means that as the result of a hundred years of wrangling and discussion as to the amount of money to be paid and received, eventually a compromise has been reached. This wrangling for so much payment to be made and so much to be received is really rather an unpleasant subject. I do not want to go into details too much. I want to discuss the matter almost entirely on general principles and as it applies only to this world; I do not want to follow the noble Viscount into the next world!
499 Even a hundred years ago, as the Report of the Royal Commission quoted, a member of your Lordships' House—I suppose he was a member of your Lordships' House—Lord John Russell, pointed out that tithe was considered to be a discouragement to industry, a penalty on skill, and a heavy mulct on those who expended the greatest amount of capital and displayed the most skill in the cultivation of the land. To-day, roughly speaking, only 7 per cent. of the population of this country are concerned with agriculture. The result is that tithe is a special burden on agriculture; and, as the Royal Commission pointed out, it amounts not only to a burden on agriculture but to a handicap on the agriculture of Great Britain in competition with that of other countries. It is unpopular because, as the Report says, it is a tax specially levied on agriculture and to-day it is no longer voluntary. There is no desire to pay it. At least I have not found many tithe-payers showing great anxiety to pay tithe. There is no service received by those who pay tithe and there is no service desired by those who pay tithe. They would much rather not pay tithe.
Noble Lords may dispute that but, broadly speaking, we see to-day that the Church—and the tithe-owners are, popularly speaking, the Church—has in a way always been resented by the English people. Let us examine that for one moment. We call ourselves the Protestant Church—the Church that protests against the original Church. From the Protestants we immediately have Nonconformists who object to the Protestant Church and refuse to conform. Then we have Dissenters who dissent. The whole religious organisation in this country is built up on disagreement rather than agreement, broadly speaking, but at any rate the result is that to-day we have large numbers of empty churches, we have widespread indifference to religion, and the Church neither renders nor can render adequate services in return for tithe rent-charge. I hope that is not an unfair statement, and I hope it is reasonably accurate, as I believe it to be. At any rate we have the Report to support me in this, that the effect of tithe is definitely detrimental to the influence of the Church. When you come to examine the fact that there are only about 350,000 tithe-payers in this country and that, if I 500 am right, agriculture represents something like 7 per cent. to 10 per cent. of the industry of the country, we come down to this, that roughly 90 per cent. of the services rendered by the Church are rendered to non-tithe payers. Yet the tithe-payers represent something like 30 per cent. of the investment and endowment income of the Church.
I am quite certain that large numbers of the tithe-payers do not want the services of the Church in return for tithe, but actively resent the Church. The Royal Commission Report is really an extraordinarily interesting and amusing document, and I venture to quote these words which appear on page 24: Tithe rentcharge…in the minds of many tithe-payers…is regarded with dislike as being associated with a Church to which they do not belong…. But the feeling is sincere… I am quoting not from the Minority Report, but from the main Report of the Royal Commission— its existence gravely complicates the working of the present system and brings unpopularity on the Church of England as the principal owner of tithe rentcharge. Now since tithe was collected by Queen Anne's Bounty we have had a vast corporation able to pit itself against the individual poor tithe-payer, and the resentment has grown and not diminished. The trouble has lasted for centuries. We have had in the last hundred years, since 1836, no fewer than sixteen Acts of Parliament dealing with tithe. Sixteen tithe children have been born, and one abortion, which was referred to by the noble Viscount—namely, the Bill that was withdrawn a year or two ago.
I would never dream of attacking the Church, but I cannot help thinking that if we examine the progressive deterioration of the Church over the last centuries the objection to tithe is perhaps more easily understood. I came across a little sentence from the early days of the Church which said: "Take nothing for your journey, neither staves nor scrip, neither bread nor money." That was a long time ago. From the eighth century we find the Church taking its share of the crops. One hundred years ago they changed that for the cash equivalent. The 1925 Act raised the amount of cash and gave additional means to extract it from unwilling payers. Now we have this Bill which will offer guaranteed three per 501 cent. stock as being far more satisfactory than the tithe payments extracted with so much difficulty during the preceding one hundred years.
The noble Viscount reminded your Lordships that there had been a constant increase in the number of County Court cases, that tithe-payers were not paying, and the position is getting still further into difficulties because of the inflated prices paid by small owner-occupiers for land immediately after the War, because of the higher wages paid in agriculture—it is quite right that they should be paid—the heavier cost of implements and repairs, due to tariffs and other things not objectionable in themselves, raising prices, all hitting agriculture; and Parliament, including your Lordships' House, has recognised this position by granting many subsidies in order to enable agriculture to continue at all. The Report reminds us that the real burden of tithes has continued to rise, and that, of course, was the real reason why the Royal Commission was appointed. The Royal Commission pointed out ten difficulties—they are contained on pages 22 to 26 of the Report—which the Bill was designed to cure. I am not going to read those difficulties, because your Lordships can read them for yourselves, but they are definitely illuminating. For example, let me quote the sort of difficulty mentioned—that the tithe-owners have rendered no service to the land; that the tithe rentcharge bears no relation to the value of the land charged; that tithe-owners introduce an unnecessary complication into agriculture, and so on. There is difficulty after difficulty; yet the extraordinary thing is that the remedies proposed in the Rill are in hardly any one of those ten cases any improvement.
That is worth while considering, because, when we get this fine balance to which the noble Viscount referred, when we get the result of this wrangling over how much and how little, we find that it is in fact the tithe-payers who come off so badly. As the noble Viscount said, every man now knows where he is, and that is, broadly speaking, "in the cart" if he be a tithe-payer, because his position is actually made worse, for the simple reason that, while there may be a small diminution in the amount he has to pay, the means for recovery are much more severe and there is no means in 502 the future as there was in the past for dealing with another fall in agricultural prices should one occur. There is no means of dealing with the intolerable difficulty of a further time of depression. Moreover, there are arrears to be collected by the Government under conditions which are much more onerous for the tithe-payer and which do represent, I venture to suggest, an utterly unfair imposition on what is still the most important industry in this country, agriculture.
In passing, I might mention the injustice to ratepayers. We are all ratepayers. The Government meet the fact that local rates are going to be hit by this Bill by payment this year of an amount equivalent to the loss in rates, but next year the amount will be less, the year after less again, and so on for something like sixty years or whatever the time may be. Each year the ratepayers will have to pay more rates to make up for the loss in rates. I hope I am not inaccurate in saying that. I understand there is to be a diminishing payment towards rates over a number of years not specified. We get an arrangement under which £600,000 or some such sum for sixty years is turned into a calculation based on a payment this year of the actual loss of rates, to be followed by diminution each year. This the ratepayers will have to make good by payment of extra rates, and it will be represented in your rates demand notes by an extra penny or twopence in the pound each year as the years go on.
The noble Viscount referred to the White Paper, and we ask ourselves: why was a solution leached which did appear to be so unjust to the tithe-payer? The explanation of this is in paragraph 13 of the White Paper, where it is said that the Commissioners discussed with the Church authorities the question of a rearrangements within the Church to meet the case of the poorer clergy, and the representatives of the Church in their evidence throughout concentrated on the economic effect on their total income, and never by any possibility upon a rearrangement within the Church so that the total funds available might be more equitably divided to secure that the poor clergy upon whom the Church rested their case should not be compelled to suffer. Here let me say at once that there is, I venture to suggest, a definite misleading 503 of the House in one respect, and that is the statement that the aggregate income of the total number of clergy whose incomes are under £300 a year is derived, as regards 66 per cent. of it, from tithe, and in some cases the whole income of individuals is derived from tithe. What was not mentioned, and which I think should have been mentioned is that of the total tithe payments collected from the tithe-payers only 10 per cent. goes to these poorer clergy whose incomes are under £300 a year. There was a possibility of re-arrangement in that matter.
We have a total tithe payment of nearly £2,000,000 a year, and about half of that goes to the wealthier recipients whose incomes are more than £500 a year, while only 10 per cent. goes to those whose incomes are under £300 a year. In another place a number of hard cases of the poorer clergy were quoted, but I think I may remind your Lordships that there is available a considerable sum of money for a rearrangement within the Church. In the last hundred years the income of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners has risen by £2,250,000; in the last fifteen years the Commissioners income was up by £750,000, and last year their income was £71,000 above that for 1934. If you take the total income of the Church it amounts, as far as I can make out, to an average of over £1,000 a year for each of the 12,700 incumbents. I suggest that it is quite possible to have found a little extra for the 1,100 whose incomes are under £300 a year out of a total income of something like £12,500,000. If I am wrong in those figures no doubt I will be corrected. Anyhow, tithe rentcharge only represents 15 per cent. of the whole of this income. I venture to suggest that use should have been made of the Union of Benefices Act, which we passed not so long ago. It should be possible to join together country benefices.
It would have been possible, and I believe it would have been in the interests of the Church, to make a gesture in this matter. I want to inflict a very brief quotation on your Lordships in my final words. It is a quotation from page 78 of the Report, in which the writer of the Minority Report uses these words: …the conclusion has been reached that it is only by a sacrifice voluntarily accepted 504 by the Church as an act of faith that a basis either for continuation or extinguishment of tithe rentcharge can be achieved with harmony and general good will, and that the creation of this good will would prove an immense gain to the Church in the pursuance of its spiritual mission, and would be more potent to promote the well-being of the Church and the nation than the more nicely calculated balance of material claims— to which the noble Viscount referred. I think it is a pity that this pursuit of pecuniary gain or political position, manoeuvring for position, has taken up so much time and that the Church was not able to make the gesture of rearranging its whole position and letting us get a real solution of the tithe problem without the fine balance which is contained in this Bill.

THE MARQUESS OF CREWE
My Lords, I only propose to detain your Lordships for a very few moments and only to speak on this measure in general terms. It is a common occurrence in your Lordships' House, after a speech in criticism of a Bill, for the Minister in charge to say that it really would appear that the noble Lord who has just spoken has not read the Bill. If anybody brings that charge against me I am afraid I should have to plead guilty to it, in the sense of not studying it clause by clause and line by line in the endeavour to apprehend the whole of its provisions. Therefore I shall only make one or two very general observations. In the first place I must express my sense of the moderation and clarity with which the noble Viscount who leads the House introduced this Bill. It is quite impossible to exaggerate the complications of many parts of it, and I think we shall all agree that he presented a most lucid account of the general effect of the measure. When the terms of the Bill come to be considered in Committee I have no doubt that they will be considered with a most unusual degree of knowledge and skill, because your Lordships' House contains a number of tithe-owners, not a few in their private capacity, and also representatives of the Church on the Episcopal Bench. Although the Church's point of view was presented with great force in another place by some members of that House, it could not, of course, be stated there with the same authority as it can be presented in your Lordships' House by the most reverend Primate. The interests of tithe-payers also are strongly 505 represented by many members of your Lordships' House. Therefore, when the Bill reaches the Committee stage, I have no doubt that some of its provisions will be scanned with some severity and certainly with the utmost care.
I am sure the noble Viscount will agree with this Bill can be regarded from various points of view and judged by totally different standards. There are those represented by the noble Lord who has just spoken on behalf of the Opposition, who object altogether to the payment of tithe whether on historical grounds or on grounds of practical reality, and who would like to see the whole thing disappear in conjunction with nationalisation of the land. What precisely then would be the position of the present tithe-payer I do not know, but I think it may be anticipated that he would not be allowed to pocket the whole of the difference of income which would come to him by the abolition of tithe. On the other hand, as the noble Viscount in charge of the Bill frankly pointed out, there will be those who consider that the terms offered by the measure to the owners of tithe, and especially to the Church, are not sufficiently liberal. That point of view undoubtedly will be developed at length. Then there is the point of view which I have no doubt will be strongly urged by noble Lords representing the landed interest, who will point out the extreme difficulty in which some payers of tithe are still likely to be left even under the ameliorated conditions proposed by this measure. Therefore I am quite sure that we may look forward to a discussion in Committee of the greatest interest.
Some features of the Bill, I think, will gain the general approval of your Lordships' House. I feel that the safeguarding of the life interests of incumbents, which in the first instance was not properly provided for, will be seen by everybody to be necessary for an equitable solution of the question, There are one or two points which I should think will raise a certain difficulty and a certain amount of discussion. We shall all, I think, agree that the collection of annuities by the public authority instead of by private individuals marks a real stage of improvement. The amount of hardship in that collection must, however, 506 depend upon its actual working by the Tithes Commission as applied to individual cases. One may naturally hope that it will be large-minded and humane, but I confess that I agree with one criticism that was made in another place, that in the event of final default the circumstances ought to be examined and weighed, and possibly allowance made, by the Judge of the County Court rather than that a direction should be given by the Commission to the Court to apply the final personal remedy of distraint; that the change should be made in the direction of leaving that to be a legal process rather than one carried out by the Tithe Commissioners.
The main fear that one has in this connection is that there should be any repetition of the painful scenes which have disfigured the course of collection of tithe during the past few months. It is clear, I think, that the provisions of the Bill are not only designed but are so framed as to have a good effect in that direction. As one, however, who has had much to do with Irish land legislation in the old days, the word "arrears" comes to me with many painful reminiscences, and I trust that it will be found, not merely in the case of refusal to pay an annuity, whether on presumed conscientious grounds or on any other, but also in the collection of arrears, that the utmost care will be taken to provide against any recurrence of those lamentable events of which we have read such painful accounts.
I have really nothing else to add. I conceive, and the noble Lord on the Opposition Front Bench, I think, made it clear, that he does not propose to offer any opposition to the Second Beading of this Bill. At least, I presume from the somewhat depleted state of those Benches that that is the case. So far as my friends here are concerned, there will certainly never be the slightest desire to impede the full consideration of this measure in every way. All that we can do is to wish it as much success as it can possibly attain in the exceedingly difficult circumstances with which we are all so well acquainted.

THE LORD ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY
My Lords, I do not propose to follow the noble Lord opposite, Lord Marley, either in his history of tithe rentcharge, which I think would give rise to a certain number of questions, or in his 507 interesting and to me quite original estimate of Church history: that the Church in this country has for some centuries shown signs of progressive deterioration. I should only like to know at what period that lamentable process began. I should have thought that, if the position of things in this century compared with last century were taken into account, the noble Lord might feel some satisfaction that the process was beginning to be arrested.
There were two statements which he was good enough to make to which I should like, before I proceed with what I have to say, to allude. One was that I think he described the attitude of the ecclesiastical tithe-owner as a struggle for pecuniary gain. I should have thought that it was a struggle on the part of men already most inadequately paid not to suffer further reductions and to be able to fulfil the services which at least they offer to the whole people with some reasonable remuneration. No doubt the noble Lord would say—I think he did say—that these services were not desired by the people of their parishes. I can only reply that I think I have a further and wider acquaintance with the life of the country parishes, probably in every part of England, than the noble Lord, and I can only say that in the great majority of cases these services are appreciated not only by the members of the Church of England but also, increasingly, by Nonconformists, who are in a position of friendliness with the Church such as I have never known before in any period of our history—perhaps, since that period of progressive deterioration began! The other statement to which I should like to allude was that the tithepayers all over the country resent the payment of tithe. On the contrary, the great bulk of the tithepayers have in the past paid, and do still pay, tithe rentcharge with the utmost willingness. It is only in certain parts of the country and in special circumstances that this resentment, to which I shall allude later, has appeared.
Like the rest of your Lordships, I have to thank my noble friend the Leader of the House for the extraordinary clarity with which he presented a most complicated matter before us. What I have to say must, of course, be said almost entirely on the subject of ecclesiastical 508 tithe. It is not that I am indifferent to the effect of this Bill on lay tithe, whether in the case of the schools and colleges and all the educational interests which they serve, or in the case of many hospitals and charities and the good work-which they dispense. I dare say others may speak on that subject; but, as your Lordships know, ecclesiastical tithe forms the vast bulk of the tithe rentcharge in this country. The annual tithe rent-charge in England and Wales is about £3,100,000 par value and of that amount no less than £2,088,000 is administered and for the most part collected and distributed by the Governors of Queen Anne's Bounty. We could add to that a sum of £274,000 a year which represents tithe rentcharge belonging to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners and is also used for Church purposes.
In order to remove any possible misapprehensions, I want to say that this Bill is in no sense a Bill asked for, promoted by or indeed regarded with conspicuous favour by what are called the "Church authorities." That phrase, perhaps I ought to interject, is used in a very loose and popular way in the White Paper. It does not mean there the Convocations or the Bishops. It means the Governors of Queen Anne's Bounty, regarded since 1925 as the beneficiary owners of ecclesiastical tithes. I should like to add that the Governors of Queen Anne's Bounty have endeavoured, since the White Paper was published, to consult the representatives of the clergy in Convocations and other bodies interested in the life of the Church of England; and I repeat that this Bill cannot be regarded as one which the Church desires. On the contrary, the Governors of Queen Anne's Bounty have always contended that they would have been perfectly ready to deal with the situation under the provisions of the Act of 1925, without any further legislation whatsoever, and they had reason for that confidence. Up to 1930 the collection of tithe, in spite of what the noble Lord has said, moved easily without trouble in almost every part of England. It is true that then, owing to what the noble Viscount rightly described as the catastrophic fall in agricultural prices, difficulties began. In 1931 agitation, spreading, I regret to say, from the County of Kent, passed to different parts of the country, and, as has been rightly 509 said, the forced sales resulted in scenes which were most undesirable and in some cases disorderly, although I confess I regarded with more amusement than concern the various effigies in which I was consigned to the flames in different parts of the country.
I think also the extent of that agitation has been very greatly exaggerated. But as soon as these difficulties appeared the Governors of Queen Anne's Bounty immediately arranged to have a careful investigation of all possible cases of hardship. They appointed four skilled investigators, who moved in different parts of the country, and I think the results are interesting as showing partly that Queen Anne's Bounty might have gone on, and partly that the difficulties were not so great as had been represented. Up to last June there were 14,566 cases investigated. Of these 10,893 were settled by acceptance of reduced sums, 1,665 by payment by instalments, and the number not yet settled is 816. Concession was refused in only 1,192 cases, because in those cases it was plain that the difficulty was not inability but unwillingness to pay. I may add that the arrears last year Were reduced, not increased, by £64,700. I find that in Suffolk, which I am sorry to say must now be regarded as the worst—or possibly from the noble Lord's point of view the best—of the counties, the arrears were reduced from 20 to 17 per cent., and this at a time when there was wide expectation not only of the appointment of a Royal Commission, but also of further legislation, which might offer an excuse for the suspending or withholding of payment.
In those circumstances there was justification in the contention that if the Governors of Queen Anne's Bounty had been left to themselves they might have dealt with the situation. I mention that because, not perhaps in this House but elsewhere in the country, it is important that it should be understood that what are loosely called the Church authorities have never asked for this Bill. More-Over, I would like to add that they have never been consulted about the policy of the Government. So far as I know, the Government, before they published the White Paper, merely asked some of the experts of the Bounty Office for advice as to technical points. The Church authorities, in the wider sense, had no information 510 as to what the policy of the Government would be until the White Paper was published. I mention this in order to prevent what I know to be a widespread misconception throughout the country.
Indeed, how can anyone who represents the Church regard this Bill, so far as the tithe-owners are concerned, with conspicuous favour? Consider what is the title to this charge. I am not going to say what it was in the far distant ages to which the noble Lord opposite invited us to give attention. It is now property whose claims cannot possibly be questioned. It arises not from the produce of the land but the land itself. Its capital value was discounted when the land was bought, and it ranks before mortgages, and it would be as unreasonable for anyone to repudiate liability for this charge as it would be to repudiate the interest on a mortgage. There can be no sort of justification for a man saying: "I do not like this burden on my land, and I also dislike your religious opinions, and therefore I will not pay what is due to you." It has only got to be put in a simple way like that to see how really unjust is the refusal to pay, except in really hard cases. On this secure title no fewer than 7,200 beneficed clergy depend for their income in regard to an average of 60 per cent. of their whole income, and although any diminution may seem here to be comparatively small, it means a great deal when the total incomes, in their amount and in the provision they make for any emergencies, are so pitifully small.
Moreover, these clergy were entitled to regard the Act of 1925 as a final and permanent settlement. When my noble friend spoke of this as being regarded as a final and permanent settlement I inwardly smiled, because I remembered his words when he was in charge of the Bill of 1925. I hope that in this instance his words will prove more accurate than they did then. That was regarded as a settlement, and the loss incurred by clerical tithe-owners was considerable. It amounted to £4,000,000 or £5,000,000, but it was accepted, and they went on the basis of that Act. Now, owing to the provisions of this Bill as it stands, the total loss will be not less than £11,000,000, and after the termination of the existing life interests, about which I will say a word in a moment, it will 511 amount to about £16,000,000. There was indeed one flagrant injustice to which my noble friend has alluded which has been avoided—namely, that existing life interests of incumbents should be interfered with. It would be obviously unjust that a man who had entered upon his benefice relying upon the tithe rentcharge secured by the Act of 1925, and had made all his commitments—the education of his children and provision for the future—upon the strength of that security, should suddenly, without warning or compensation, have that sum substantially reduced. That was felt in another place. The Government, as your Lordships have heard, felt the justice of the complaint and arrangements were made. It was felt that something must be done to meet it.
I wish most heartily that this could have been done by the extension of the period of redemption from 60 to 70 years. I think it would have saved the life interest without throwing a burden upon the incumbents. I should have been glad if I had been able to move an Amendment to that effect in your Lordships' House, but I understand that the procedure in another place, to which on another matter I alluded quite recently, the passing of the Financial Resolution, bars the way, and it is held that to extend the period of redemption would involve an expenditure of money which was inconsistent with the provisions of that Resolution. Once again the discussion of vital matters occurring during the progress of a measure are hindered and prevented by the previous passing of a Financial Resolution. But although it is true, I am thankful to say, that in the manner mentioned by my noble friend the existing life interests will be saved, and every incumbent holding his benefices up to October 2 of this present year will be assured of his receiving the existing figure of his tithe rentcharge; and although I admit that that is a very great and welcome relief, I am bound to remind your Lordships that the burden of securing this is put, not upon the Government, not upon the tithe-payer, but upon the Church itself, and it will cost about £5,500,000 in order to save these existing life interests.
It is made possible by the Governors of Queen Anne's Bounty taking £3,000,000 out of the extinguishment stock which will be entrusted to them, 512 absorbing the whole of the £2,000,000 which the Government proposed should be given for the relief of hard cases, and the greater part of the sum of £732,000 which was provided by virtue of the arrangements described by my noble friend on non-agricultural land. But what is worse, as he himself admitted, the chief burden of maintaining the existing life interest of existing incumbents is thrown mainly upon the future incumbents. In order that this may be made possible—a thing which I should have thought would have been regarded as a measure of justice in the Bill itself—it is they who will have to meet the claim. In other words, they will suffer a loss, not, as they would have done in any case under the Bill of 18½ per cent. on their incomes, but of more than 23 per cent. That may seem to your Lordships a comparatively small sum, but if your Lordships knew as much as I do of the budgets of the parochial clergy, you would know that a small sum like that may make an untold difference in their lives and in their homes. Thus, I think I have said sufficient to show that the Bill cannot be regarded as favourable to the tithe-owning clergy. It inflicts upon them a very serious loss.
Now I know—and I must take notice of the fact—that it is said, and has been said not infrequently in different parts of the country, indeed by one of the Royal Commissioners, that that loss ought to be made good by the already existing resources of the Church. I think that is rather unfair. Once again, if I may use a simple analogy, it is as if one man were to say to another: "I do not want to pay what I owe you, and I will not do so, because I am told that you and your friends have other resources." It does not seem to me a proper way of meeting what is really a just claim. But in any case what does that mean exactly? There are some people who think that the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, with the vast property which they control, are a sort of bottomless purse on which we can all draw. As your Lordships know, it is not so. It is a body which is limited in its operations by the trusts imposed upon it by Parliament, mainly for the augmentation of benefices. Owing to the skilful manipulation of its capital it is able each year to have a surplus sum, but that is devoted to continuing and widening the increase of the 513 augmentation of benefices and meeting new needs, some of which are clamant all over the country, the needs of providing churches and ministers for these new housing areas which are everywhere arising. And to take out of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners anything like a sum to compensate for the loss of £16,000,000 would merely be impoverishing the Church instead of helping, and it would be, to use a popular phrase, robbing Peter to pay Paul.
There is much more justice in the plea—there I do to some extent agree with the noble Lord opposite—that the present inequality of benefice values ought to be remedied. At present, as we all know, you may have contiguous parishes, one with a fairly large population and a most exiguous income, the other with perhaps a smaller population and a much larger income. It is sometimes not unreasonably said: "Why should not there be some pooling of these incomes, or at least some measure by which this inequality is redressed?" I can only say about that that I regard it as so real a problem that the Church Assembly has just appointed a Commission, whose proceedings will last for some time, to go into the whole matter and to report as to whether some better scheme may not be provided. But your Lordships know very well the difficulties that will be involved—the difficulties of jealousies of parishes, one of the oldest and strongest features of our English life, and their reluctance to part with what they regard as their own tithe, the rights of patrons, and the rest. Still, to some extent we are trying to meet that point. And I agree that a further extension of the plan of uniting benefices may do much, though there again, if your Lordships knew the difficulties invariably created and the bitter opposition of the parishes concerned, you would know that it was easier to speak about that in theory than to fulfil it in practice.
Then again it is said, "Let the people pay more for their parsons." I agree, they might do more. I think after this Bill is passed they will have to do more. And here, greatly daring, I am going to venture on a suggestion to which some at least of your Lordships might pay heed, and others also who are not within this House. It is this. Many of them have hitherto paid their tithe gladly and willingly. Might it not be possible for them to pay over to their parson that 514 measure of loss which he will sustain under this Bill and to offer to him as a gift part of what they have hitherto most willingly paid as a debt? But, even admitting that, I venture to ask whether it is very desirable to increase the process by which the clergy will become dependent upon the contributions of the people for their maintenance. The whole object of the system of endowments is to prevent dependence. And elsewhere and in other Christian communions I know there is often a great desire that there should be more secure endowments, because they recognise the difficulty in which a minister is placed if he is to be dependent upon his momentary popularity or upon the principle that he who pays the piper calls the tune. And therefore I suggest that there is not much foundation in the plea that the Church may be able from its own resources to meet this immense loss of about £16,000,000.
I have said enough perhaps to make it plain, as I wish to make it, that this Bill is much more a Bill for the relief of the tithe-payer than a Bill which can give any sort of satisfaction to the already harassed clerical tithe-owner. But there is always another side to every question, and wisdom takes account of all sides. I must admit at once that the Government had a real problem which they were compelled to face. I need not dwell upon it; the noble Viscount, the Leader of the House, has already done so. They have been faced by this arrested but long-continued fall in the price of agricultural produce, and of corn especially. They knew that this agitation was still there, not increasing, I think, but in many parts of the country very real. They feared, and rightly feared, that if it extended all the restlessness, bitterness, and discontent would constitute a very real social problem. Therefore they were bound, I think, to take action in the matter. Moreover, there has long been a desire, a natural and right desire, that there should ultimately be an extinguishment of a form of property which undoubtedly has been fruitful in friction and discontent. Therefore I recognise that the Government were bound to act, and I must also recognise they had to do what, alas, in this imperfect world, all Governments have to do—namely, to reach the best 515 compromise possible between the rival claims of the tithe-owners and the tithe-payers. Also, I am bound in fairness to add that if the terms of the Bill are, as I think, very oppressive to the clerical tithe-owners, they can scarcely be called markedly unjust. I might mention, for instance, that they mean that the interests of the incumbents, even of future incumbents, are to have a 27 years purchase; and to future incumbents it may be some comfort, though I fear very cold comfort, that if the septennial averages which prevailed before 1925 were to continue they would be receiving now less than they will receive even under the provisions of this Bill. I mention that because I do not want to use any exaggerated language about injustice, confiscation and the like.
Further, I gladly admit that in certain respects, not unimportant, the Government have shown themselves ready to receive suggestions from those who represent the Church in these matters. I shall not weary your Lordships with details, but I may just mention, for instance, their willingness to allow the stock transferred to Queen Anne's Bounty to be marketable, which will enable, I hope, arrangements to be made which will alleviate to some extent the hardships which the Bill imposes. They have agreed, as you have heard, to take over the collection of all the arrears existing on March 31, 1937, and they have allowed the figure at present obtaining for tithe rentcharge in non-agricultural land to remain. I would add, in case the point is raised later in the discussions, that they have accepted the arrangement made by consent to deal with that exceedingly technical and difficult matter, the repair of chancels by the tithe-owners. I ought to add, of course, that, above all, the tithe-owning clergy and the Church which they represent will be liberated from exacting those payments from the owners of land which excite so much unpopularity, dislike, and even bitterness. It would, I know, make for a real strengthening of the influence of the Church and of the spiritual life of the parishes if that stumbling block could finally be removed. Speaking for my brothers of the clergy, I know they would be willing to accept some sacrifice to achieve that admirable end. I am only sorry the sacrifice they are asked to make is so heavy.
516 But, my Lords—and this is my final word—if it is certain that this Bill will inflict real hardships on the tithe-owners, it is equally certain that if this Bill were rejected or withdrawn, the hardships would be greater far. It would mean, quite certainly, that the agitation would be renewed, intensified, and extended. The resentment against the Church would be increased, the collection of the tithes would become increasingly difficult, and the results increasingly unsatisfactory. Therefore I could not possibly advise the rejection of this Bill, nor could I myself bring in Amendments whose passing might mean its withdrawal. I can only hope that by prudent management of its finances by the Governors of Queen Anne's Bounty, of whom I am the President, by increased liberality on the part of friendly tithe-payers and parishioners, by encouraging those reforms to which I have alluded in the way of the union of benefices and the like, the hardships of the Bill may be alleviated. Most of all, I hope that a new and more wholesome atmosphere may be created in many of our country parishes, and that the clergy there may be enabled to carry out unhindered the sacred work they were ordained to do among their people.

THE LORD BISHOP OF NORWICH
My Lords, there is always such a charm, such a sweet reasonableness, and so great a persuasiveness about the Leader of the House that one desires to agree with him, but I cannot say, looking dispassionately back upon his speech, that I have been quite converted to this Bill. At the end of his argument he said that the Bill was being attacked from both sides. I never could see that a man who is being attacked from both sides is necessarily right. Sometimes I have found such a man to be doubly wrong. In regard to what was said by the noble Lord speaking on behalf of the Opposition, it is curious how entirely he omitted any mention of the fact that tithe is a right, as the most reverend Primate has pointed out, in the same way as rent is a right. There is no reason why that right should not be secured, and we should get quite a wrong angle in looking at this thing if we ignore rights which are established and which have had full recognition for such a very long time.
I may say that we in the Church are doing several of the things that the noble 517 Lord was good enough to suggest we should do. Since I have been in this building, within the last two hours, I have signed a paper which has done two things. One is to consent to the union of two benefices, and another is to agree to the proposal that some of the income of the united benefice should be transferred to another and poorer benefice. The Church is not deaf to these things. We are intelligent, we are anxious to do the right thing with our resources. The noble Lord omitted to point out that while the resources of the Church may have increased by good management, the population of England has increased ever so much more, and the Church therefore has a larger area over which to spend the money that it acquires. I think, if I may venture to say so, that the noble Marquess put before us a much happier strain when he made plain that in this House there is perhaps a greater knowledge not only of tithe-paying obligations but of Church interests than can be found in another place, and I really hope that the words which he used, speaking with his long and ripe experience, may have effect and that when we come to the amendment of this Bill we may set to work with a good will, believing that we have among ourselves the right resources, the power, and the intellect to make it a better Bill than it is at the present moment.
I venture to address your Lordships early because, from the beginning, I have been very closely identified with the day-by-day administration of Queen Anne's Bounty. Here I feel bound to say that we all owe an immense amount of credit to our Committee and to the secretary, for the way that they have worked the whole matter of tithe in recent years is beyond all praise; and at the same time, there has been conferred a great benefit upon the country at large. I am not quite certain that the position of Queen Anne's Bounty in the whole matter of tithe is quite understood. We had the Act of 1925, and let me emphasise the fact that the Government were behind that Act of 1925. That Act had to be worked, and I confess I had some little part in suggesting that Queen Anne's Bounty as a representative body should work that Act. The proposal was accepted, and Queen Anne's Bounty has been working that Act with growing success, 518 as the most reverend Primate has made plain to us.
Two years ago, without our asking for it, a Tithe Bill was introduced—I never quite knew why—and Queen Anne's Bounty was ready to do the best possible in the working of that Bill. The Bill met with such great unpopularity that the Government of the day felt it must be decently buried. If it was to be buried the Bill must first die and it died in the arms of the Royal Commission. If it had not been for that ill-starred Bill we should have heard nothing about the Royal Commission at all. Then came the White Paper. The Government have dealt rather drastically with the suggestions of the White Paper, and all the way through I have been wondering whether the Government have not been the victims of a rather factitious sort of pressure. There was agitation. It was great, but it was local, and the administration of Queen Anne's Bounty was steadily getting the better of it. I believe that if there had been no Bill and no White Paper, and no second Bill now, Queen Anne's Bounty would have held the position quite securely. It seems to be supposed that the Bill now before us is a bright idea of the Government to extinguish the payment of tithe rentcharge, but that was done by the Bill of 1925. There is nothing original in the idea. It is an idea that has been in front of us and others before. I think the tithe-payers in this House will agree with me that one great fault in this Bill is that it gives too much help where none is needed, and too little where considerable help is needed. I have great sympathy with the hard pressed tithe-payer; I have no sympathy with the policy that by a kind of flat rate offers people relief for which they do not ask. I wish I could hope that the proposal of the most reverend Primate would be generally acceptable, and that the tithe-payers who did not want relief would subscribe more generously to the support of their clergy.
But why has there been all this hurry and haste? Tithe is a very, very old business. Some think it is more than a thousand years old. Why should there have been all this haste? We have had consultations, it is true, with Church authorities but not with the general Convocations of the Church. The whole thing has been done in a quick way, and also, I may add, in a way that made the 519 conversations and the discussions rather unreal. We were told that if we did not have this Bill we should have something worse. Who was going to give it to us? What was going to be the shape of the worse thing? It seems to me a kind of terrorising. I had hoped that the work of Parliament would still be to arrive quietly and deliberately and after discussion at a reasonable settlement of the matter, but when the parties to a settlement have to meet, and one party finds that the thing is settled and that it cannot discuss the most vital elements in the whole thing, then I venture to say that a certain unreality does attach to all that is said or done.
Your Lordships have already heard figures. The clergy at present receive £94 out of £100 tithe rentcharge. If existing interests had not been respected they would have received in future £76. Now the Government have made a most generous arrangement, so we are told. The Government, feeling that justice and generosity impelled them, said that existing interests must be maintained. We all applauded. And how is that being done? By taking money out of the pockets of the future incumbents and impoverishing their work. The Gospel says that the poor should have the Gospel preached to them. I do not myself see, looking around the benefices in the diocese over which I preside, how the poor are going to have the Gospel preached to them. Many of the clergy there have miserable pittances at present. I had a long list made out for me the other day of those who receive at present less than £300 per year. Now they are to receive so much less, because the princely sum of £2,750,000 which has been handed over to Queen Anne's Bounty in order to deal with hard cases cannot possibly deal with the whole number of the hard cases. It has been suggested that some of the resources of the Church should be utilised. I do not think you will find that the overpaid clergy are so numerous or that they are so very largely overpaid that Queen Anne's Bounty will have a very large balance to give to these unfortunate men.
What do we get? we ask. "Certainty"; that is the great point that is made. We get certainty, yes, but at what a price, considering, I repeat, the splendid way in which certainty has been growing under the hands of Queen Anne's Bounty. The truth is that in 1925 nobody 520 knew what the law was. That has been the great difficulty. Bit by bit, by cases in the High Court, by cases in the Court of Appeal and elsewhere, Queen Anne's Bounty has clarified the law, and I do not think that any of the work done by its officials has been comparable to the new light thrown upon the whole business by this clarification. People now know what the law is, and that fact has enabled Queen Anne's Bounty in the right cases to follow the law and exact what has been due. Queen Anne's Bounty has behaved, as any of your Lordships yourselves behave, as a wise landlord. It has, through the investigators to whom the most reverend Primate alluded, and by means of conversations on the spot with farmers, confidentially got to know the positions of the individual farmers, and, where there has been need to make concessions, concessions, and considerable concessions, have been made, and that with the good will of the clergy themselves. The distressing scenes to which allusion has been made really took place in the main, I believe, before it was understood by the County Court Judges and others what the law was, and before the law was understood in the countryside.
The Bill is not very good for the Church. We have not heard much said about what will be lost in Income Tax, nor about the position of the clergy in the matter of rates. We ought to be guarded when talking of the gains of the clergy. We are also told that, at the moment, the septennial averages are low. That I believe to be the case. There are fluctuations in agriculture. But this proceeds upon the assumption that the efforts which the Government are making to revivify agriculture and to set it upon its legs again are foredoomed to failure. Long before it was generally advocated, I used to maintain that it should be our primary duty to grow enough in this country to tide over a certain period of danger arising from war or shipping strikes and so on. I am glad that that view is becoming more prevalent, and that the Government are taking pains now to help agriculture. Yet we have to face the argument that these septennial averages have fallen low and will presumably go on falling; I am sorry the Government should prophesy against themselves. We have heard that the twenty-seven years purchase is generous. 521 But the clergy are not pensioners. They draw salaries—I call it a pittance in many cases—to pay them for their labour; but they have to keep up the houses in which they have to live, and from which they cannot move, as part of their plant. They have to be the friend of everyone. I do not see how a man with an insufficient salary can be expected to do his best in ministering to his flock.
Many of your Lordships will remember the passage in which Juvenal points out that no man can write poetry if he is on the verge of starvation and does not know where to get his clothes or his bedclothes from. How can a man preach a good sermon and bring the consolations of the Gospel to his parishioners when all the time there is, at the back of his mind, the carking care that he cannot meet his debts and that he is financially in a wretched condition? The people of England ask for and desire to have a married clergy. If you are going to have married clergy they must have some adequate income. Your Lordships will remember no doubt the famous passage in which Lecky says that no one knows all the beneficial influences that radiate from the many parsonages of England; when he wrote those words he was not referring to church buildings but to the clergy and their homes. I have read—I do not think it has been said to-day—that odium against the clergy will cease. Will it? I believe that greater odium will attach to the Government, but I think there will be still a good many who will say to the clergy: "You began it." I believe, in spite of what we have heard about the greater contentment of tithe-payers, that there will still be disgruntled parishioners who will begrudge tithe, even under the name of annuities, going to the clergy.
It is not for us to warn the Government of what they are in for, but I wonder if they really realise all that they are going to lose by changing the two-thirds to one-third under Schedule B. That seems to be an extremely important point, and I hope that under the leadership of the noble Marquess, attention will be paid to it when we get to the consideration of proposals for the amendment of the Bill. The period of repayment has varied. It was one thing under the 1925 Act, another thing under the White Paper, and it is another thing under the Government's Bill. I still 522 hold that the alteration of the period of repayment by amendment will have no bad effect upon the tithe-payer. I believe the tithe-payer is much more interested in the cheque he will have to draw next week than in the length of time during which cheques will be drawn by his successors. I believe there would be no greater discontent if the period were made longer. We must have the Bill now, I suppose. It would be an extremely difficult thing for Queen Anne's Bounty to carry on their admirable work if the Bill was withdrawn, because after reading the Bill and hearing what the Government have said to us, it is very unlikely that the tithe-payers now will go on paying with that greater consent with which they have been paying in the last five or six years. We must have the Bill, but I very much hope, as the noble Marquess suggested, that we may get some really useful Amendments at the Committee stage when all the experience in your Lordships' House is concentrated on making the Bill a better Bill than it is at this moment.

§ LORD BINGLEY
My Lords, the right reverend Prelate who has just spoken has left us under no illusion that some Church people have any great feeling of gratitude for this Bill. All of us who had hoped that the disastrous events of the last few years might be coming to an end, and that the position of the clergy who have only been able to collect tithes with infinite difficulty and trouble would be really relieved, will regret the very grudging reception which, at any rate from that point of view, the right reverend Prelate has given this Bill. Whatever view we may take of the Bill as a whole, we shall, nearly all of us, agree as to the urgent need for some settlement of this very troublesome tithe question. We have had on the one hand the scandals of the attempted collection of tithes, and the fact that the land-owning farmers, perhaps the most law-abiding of any section of the community, have been driven to break the law, to help in trying to make the law impossible to operate and even to taking part in open riot. On the other hand, there is the undoubted fact that a great many tithe-owners have been denied their legal rights—men who could ill afford to be denied anything of that kind, but who were not willing to try to enforce those rights because they 523 felt that they would have to obtain money from those who perhaps at the moment were ill able to pay. I hope that the result of this Bill will be to make those conditions very much less disastrous.
The Bill seems to me to represent a compromise after, as we all know, a very complete arbitration by a Royal Commission. The mere fact that strong views are expressed against this Bill from both sides makes me think that probably the ultimate solution has been a good one. I know that the right reverend Prelate who has just spoken to us, the Bishop of Norwich, does not agree, but he says that, when a man is said by both sides to be wrong, he may be doubly wrong. I think you can take that circumstance exactly in the opposite sense. We all know that when two parties have gone to an arbitration and both of them complain that they are not getting full justice, the probability is that a fair, good, average measure of justice has been done.
The point which, outside your Lordships' House at any rate, is so constantly ignored by the landowning farmers—and, after all, it is not the farmers generally, it is only those who are the owners of their land who have to complain—is one that is so obvious to all your Lordships: that any land which is subject to tithe, whether it was acquired by inheritance or by purchase, was only acquired as regards a limited ownership. Part of the freehold was held in other hands, and that land was acquired already charged with the tithe which has been demanded. Those who recently bought land bought less than the entire freehold and therefore paid less for it. I admit that, at a time when a great many farmers were having to buy their land, the price was high because of War conditions and other causes, but that does not take away from the fact that they did buy that land at a lesser price than that which they would have had to pay if the tithe had not been chargeable upon it. The recent demonstration held in London and culminating in a series of speeches in Hyde Park by gentlemen like Sir Stafford Cripps, seemed to me, from speeches which I read and which were reported as having been delivered, entirely to ignore the position that there was a definite legal charge 524 already upon the land which had to be recognised in the purchase price by any one who had recently bought it. The speakers denounced the tithe, however, as a tax in the interests of one brand of religion, which should be abolished immediately or as soon as possible. But is it not rather dangerous for those landowners who organised that demonstration—and I should very much like to know who they were—to denounce any rights of income arising out of land and to get a man like Sir Stafford Cripps to take up their cause in the matter? I do not doubt that Sir Stafford Cripps, a gentleman who is often used when it is intended to make the timid electors' flesh creep, would very vigorously denounce any rights of income arising from land, but I think it is very unwise for those who are complaining of having to pay tithes to employ methods of that sort in presenting their case.
Was it thought for one moment that, if that demonstration had succeeded in the sense of impressing the Government to such an extent that this Bill was withdrawn and the tithes completely abolished, as was suggested, it would be the landowners who would receive the benefit? Surely Sir Stafford Cripps would have been the last person to make such a suggestion as that. Suppose the abolition of tithes had really been secured by a demonstration of that kind, the money involved would not have been paid over in the form of a remittance from tithe to the landowning farmers; it would have been applied to some national purpose and certainly would not have gone to them. Any reduction of tithe payment must now come, as we have been told several times, either from the clergy, who can very ill afford it, or from the colleges and other institutions who are receiving the tithe now and whose endowment is, as far as I know, certainly not in excess of the enormous requirements that are made on it considering the immense amount they are able to do with what they have. If it does not come from them it would have to come from the taxpayer, who is already contributing a very large sum towards the settlement of this question and who certainly would not be prepared to pay any more.
I hope that this Bill wall, as we have been told, reduce to a certain extent the amount which is payable by the tithe-payer. I hope that the tithe-owner will 525 be really compensated by the security which is given to him and by the certainty that he will not any longer have to indulge in the horrible process of having to try to get out of unwilling parishioners the debts which they are ill able to pay. I hope, therefore, that the Bill will be accepted as a genuine and successful compromise, and—although both sides will undoubtedly during the course of this debate have various forms of attack to make upon it and various suggestions to make for improving it—that middle-minded men may take the view that a compromise of this sort is well worth making in the interests of security and peace.

THE LORD BISHOP OF ST. EDMUNDSBURY AND IPSWICH
My Lords, at this hour of the evening I shall certainly not ask your attention for a very long time, but I am anxious to say a few words upon the Bill, largely because I represent a diocese where the tithe conditions have been as difficult as in any other part of the country. I think I share very largely the criticisms which have been expressed upon different features of the Bill. I wish, however, to give it rather more cordial support than has been given, for example, by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich. I deprecate the thought that there has been undue haste about this measure. Not only did the Royal Commission recommend that the matter should be settled as soon as possible but, directly it was plain that the Government intended to try to settle it, speed was ready essential, because all the forces concerned that were antagonistic would be rather encouraged in their antagonism until a settlement had been arrived at. Those of us who know what those forces are and how they express themselves in private life and elsewhere are confident that the sooner this matter is brought to a close the better. It is therefore essential, or at least it is very important, that a matter of this sort should be proceeded with as speedily as possible.
May I also make some allusion to what has been referred to outside this House in several directions, that there has been a sort of collusion between the Government and Queen Anne's Bounty in the matter? There has been nothing of the sort. The right reverend Prelate 526 the Bishop of Norwich referred to the adequacy and efficiency with which the secretary of Queen Anne's Bounty and the other officials there dealt with the matter. I do not suppose there are three persons in this country who have a full knowledge of tithe in all its implications. It was quite impossible that the Government or a Government Department should deal with a matter like this without getting information from those who had this full knowledge; and the only persons to whom they could possibly go who had the knowledge were the officials and especially the Secretary of Queen Anne's Bounty. They therefore very naturally went to them. The attitude towards the Bill of those of us who particularly represent the clergy is evidence enough that there has been nothing in the nature of what may be called collusion between the Government and the Church in respect of the Bill.
I recognise that the Bill inflicts, as it is quite evident that it must inflict, considerable loss upon the Church, but I cannot regard that as being in the nature of a partial disendowment or anything of the sort. The loss will not fall upon existing clergy, it will fall upon future clergy. But, as I consider the whole of the circumstances of tithe and the alteration which has been effected in connection with it in time, past, I cannot but feel that the 1925 Act made a mistake in its figure. Those of us who know what agricultural prices and all prices have been since that Act, and what they are now, can hardly maintain that, although the future is uncertain and although we hope and feel sure that farming will have better times than it has now and that the landowning interest will be on firmer ground than it is now, it is likely that the whole of the future will show that £105 was a proper figure at which to fix tithe permanently. Even though we thought that the Act of 1925 was a final settlement, circumstances in connection with the agitation which has gone on precluded the conclusion that it could still be relied upon as a final settlement.
Some adjustment was, I think, necessary. If so, what sort of basic figure were we to get? I should have had no complaint whatever if the average based on the price of corn up to the present day had been taken, but the Royal Commission definitely ruled out the years of 527 high prices owing to the War, and it did so on the suggestion that if it did not the clergy would appear to be in the position of profiteers. But it was the general rise in prices that affected the price of corn, and the cost of living, and why the clergy should be regarded as profiteers, merely because they shared to a small extent in the result of the general rise in prices, I cannot see. Civil servants were given a War bonus, which has been retained until this day, because the cost of living was high. Why then should it be thought reasonable, in order to find a firm and proper basis for tithe, to rule out those years when other peoples' incomes were continually rising? If you take the whole period from 1836 until to-day, and work on a seven years average, you will find that the figure which results will be not £91 11s. 2d. but £97 15s., and if you cut out the War years, and go back, say, for one hundred years from 1816 to 1916, you will still find that the average is £97. It looks, then, as if the proper basic figure for tithe ought to be £97, because it is the most accurate we can get.
In the same kind of way, in some of the deductions which the Bill has made, and which the White Paper made, there has been a tendency I think to regard the tithe-owner as the person who must be made to give up. Take for instance the cost of administration and collection of tithe. It is a little over 3 per cent., apart from the special agitation of the past year or two. As to bad debts, the noble Lord, Lord Marley, thought that the position of the Church was such that people paid their tithe not readily but unwillingly. For several years past the actual loss on bad debts has been 7s. 6d. per hundred pounds—not a very serious loss for bad debts. The Commission, however, say they will round this off and make it 5 per cent., and then add another 5 per cent. for Government security. Of course, to have Government stock is to possess a very secure source of income, not so much because the other might fluctuate, but because you have a sense of security. Nevertheless, there is the fact that by the 6 per cent. reduction in the basic figure, and the 5 per cent. for the cost of collection and bad debts, and another 5 per cent. for Government security, you really inflict upon the tithe-owner a loss, even on the average figure, of some 528 12 per cent. more than I think he ought to bear.
The tithe-payers will no doubt say that they have a grievance too. They have in fact given expression to it. Yet I cannot quite think what their grievance now is, as it does not seem to me that the concessions which are being made to them leave them much room for grievance, unless they were hoping that they might get the whole tithe wiped out. If they are going to get any further reduction it must be at the expense of the tithe-owner, who, as I have already pointed out, is called upon to make great sacrifice. I suppose the Government will say that you cannot deal with a matter of this sort without there being real concessions on both sides. The tithe-owner, representing very largely the Church, may be expected to accept with good grace a fair sacrifice. From the tithe-payer you cannot expect perhaps quite so much. Personally, I feel that on the whole this is a Bill which in the circumstances we are bound to accept, and I hope it will pass and be productive of real good for all those concerned in the future.

§ LORD HASTINGS
I beg to move that this debate be now adjourned.

§ Moved, That the debate be now adjourned.—(Lord Hastings.)

§ On Question, Motion agreed to, and debate adjourned accordingly till tomorrow.