NATIONAL LOANS BILL. (Hansard, 30 April 1941)

§ THE LORD CHANCELLOR (VISCOUNT SIMON)

My Lords, I beg to move the Second Reading of this Bill. It is a Bill which comes from another place and has been certified as a Money Bill, and the House will not, I think, wish for more than a word or two of explanation from me. The first clause is a clause which confers on the Treasury borrowing powers for the present financial year, without which there would be no authority to raise 116 money by, say, National War Bonds or Savings Bonds or Defence Bonds. The second clause is a clause of a technical character and arises from the necessity of changing earlier and traditional methods of transferring Government stock. Perhaps your Lordships will allow me to state in two sentences what the difference is.

You will be aware that Government stocks before the war, unless held in bearer form, were transferred either by personally visiting the Bank of England, or by one's attorney, in order to make a transfer in the books, when the stock is called "inscribed stock" or by transfer by deed, in which case the stock is called "registered stock." In existing conditions the method of visiting the Bank of England in order to transfer your security is not guaranteed to be convenient, and at no time is it generally easy for some people, and the method of transfer by deed covers, I should think, quite three-quarters of the cases. We have now got a further provision by an Emergency Act of last year by which Government stock may be transferred, not merely by deed, but by any instrument in writing in the usual or common form. That is for the period of the emergency. The present provision in the Bill is to relieve the Government of the obligation, which still rests on them, of issuing loans in the inscribed form, although, as I have said, we have really no machinery by which it can be transferred in that form. It is a sensible provision and I cannot doubt that your Lordships will be willing to accept the Bill as it stands and approve it.