HOUSE OF COMMONS DISQUALIFICATION BILL (Hansard, 21 March 1957)

§ THE LORD CHANCELLOR
My Lords, I rise to move that this Bill be now read a second time. The uninformed may dispute as to the compensations to be derived these days from membership of your Lordships' House, but undoubtedly one of them is that we are not subject to the office of profit disqualification, which for precisely two and a half centuries has hung like the sword of Damocles over the heads of Members of the other place. We can all sympathise, therefore, with those who have from time to time fallen foul of the Succession to the Crown Act, 1707. No doubt, your Lordships will agree that the time is now ripe for sweeping away the archaisms and uncertainties of the present law and putting an end to the absurd cases of inadvertent disqualification 718 which have recently taken up so much legislative time and caused so much worry and anxiety to those personally concerned.
Your Lordships will probably not wish to concern yourselves too much with the details of a measure regulating the affairs of another place, but some explanation is due of the origins of the Bill and of its principal features. This Bill is based on the recommendations of two Select Committees of the other place, which for convenience I shall refer to as the Herbert Committee and the Spens Committee respectively. The latter recommended that, instead of attempting to modernise the general provisions of the existing law, as embodied in the Act of Anne, the Bill should set out comprehensive lists of specified disqualified offices.
Accordingly Clause 1 provides for the disqualification of five main groups of office holders, namely (a) the judiciary (as listed in Part I of the First Schedule). (b) the Civil Service, (c) the Regular Armed Forces, (d) the police and (e) the members of Legislatures of countries outside the Commonwealth. All other offices whose holders are to be disqualified are listed in Parts II to IV of the First Schedule. Part IV of that Schedule provides for certain limited local disqualifications, including those recommended by the Herbert Committee.
Clause 2, with which is associated the Second Schedule, imposes upper limits, first on the number of Ministers generally, and, secondly on the number of senior Ministers in particular, who may sit and vote in the other place at any one time. The first limit is based on a recommendation of the Herbert Committee, and in taking account of the changes and developments in the structure of Government since the Committee reported in 1941, the Bill fixes a total of 70, as compared with the figure of 60 originally recommended. The second limit replaces the existing provision in Section 9 of the Ministers of the Crown Act, 1937, and has the incidental effect of securing in practice a minimum representation in your Lordships' House of senior members of Her Majesty's Government.
Clause 5 is an essential corollary to the replacement of the office of profit disqualification by lists of specific disqualifying offices. These lists must clearly be 719 kept up to date and it will not always be possible to do so by means of other legislation. For example, new offices may be created, or existing ones abolished, otherwise than by Statute. Clause 5 accordingly enables the First Schedule to be amended by Order in Council and requires any such Order to be initiated by an Affirmative Resolution of the other place. Effect is given by Clause 6 (2) to the recommendation of the Herbert Committee that there should be a procedure for excusal of Members becoming inadvertently disqualified.
Clause 7 provides for new arrangements whereby any person claiming that a Member is disqualified may seek a declaration to that effect from the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. These arrangements will replace almost entirely the common informer procedure. As recommended by the Spens Committee, the existing disqualifications of certain Government contractors and Crown pensioners are repealed without replacement by Clause 9. These are the most important items in the impressive list of 118 complete or partial repeals which appears in Part I of the Fourth Schedule.
The Bill makes provision for disqualification from membership of the Parliament of Northern Ireland in Clause 10 and the Third Schedule, and these provisions bring in an important new principle which is likely to have the most beneficial results. Northern Ireland is a small country in population, and it is particularly desirable to keep the number of disqualifications to a minimum so as to allow the widest possible choice to the Parliamentary electors. Under the existing law any office holder who is disqualified at Westminster is ipso facto disqualified from membership of either House of the Northern Ireland Parliament. In future, however, the only offices which will disqualify at Stormont will be those which are actually incompatible with membership there. These include, of course, the groups that I have mentioned set out in subsection (1) of Clause 1; but your Lordships will observe that the Third Schedule (which contains a Northern Ireland version of the First Schedule to the Bill) omits a good many of the offices which are to disqualify at Westminster.
720 My Lords, two hundred and fifty years is a long time. It would be surprising if by the year 2207 this present Bill were not found to be in some respect defective or unsatisfactory. If we venture the hope that it will stand the test of time better than its predecessor has done, it is because the Schedule method now to be adopted, with its associated machinery for keeping the lists of disqualifying offices up to date, should prove a more flexible constitutional instrument than that which has for so long governed the qualification for membership of the other place.
This is a very complicated Bill, but it effects a most necessary reform. It represents the fruits of many years of labour by members of all the three main political Parties, and (I should like to pause, because I see a number of his old friends here, among whom I include myself) it is a gratifying memory to many of us that so many of the suggestions of Sir Dennis Herbert (as we knew him in another place) or Lord Hemingford (as we knew him here) have now been brought into legislative effect. I commend the Bill to the House with every confidence that your Lordships will speed it on its way to the Statute Book. I beg to move.

§ LORD SILKIN
My Lords, I am sure every noble Lord who has taken the trouble to study this Bill will agree that it is a most desirable and important measure. We have had experience after almost every General Election of finding that a number of persons who have been elected to the House of Commons have found themselves disqualified from serving because they have taken what has been called "an office of profit under the Crown." Many of them were not aware that the job they were doing did constitute an office of profit under the Crown. They had gone to election quite innocently, and then it was necessary to submit an Indemnity Bill. Well, it is a good thing that that should be stopped, and that people should really know, if they take the trouble to look at these various Schedules, whether the position that they hold is one which disqualifies them or not.
721 There are still, I imagine, a number of offices which, in the generally accepted sense, are not offices of profit, in the sense that they confer no remuneration, but are nevertheless regarded as disqualifications. I do not propose, nor do any of my noble friends, to go through this list and seek those out, but I should like to be informed whether there has been any attempt to sort out the various disqualifications; whether, in fact, the Schedules constitute any reduction in the number of disqualifications that existed before the Bill was introduced, and whether any additional disqualifications have been introduced. Whether that be so or not, I should welcome the measure, because, by the method of the Schedule, it will be possible to eliminate some of these anomalies at any time, I imagine, without the need of the introduction of an Act of Parliament, and therefore this method is a most welcome one.
There is one point which I should like to refer to and which the noble and learned Viscount, I think, did not touch on at all—that is, Clause 11 of the Bill, which requires that: a candidate's consent given under this rule shall contain a statement that he is aware of the provisions of "— this Disqualification Act— and that, to the best of his knowledge and belief, he is not disqualified for membership of the House of Commons. If I read that correctly, it means that the candidate has to make that statement not when he is returned but before he submits himself for election, and therefore he has to give up the particular office which he is holding, even though he may not be returned to Parliament. That seems to me to be a hardship.
Many people—I do not know whether the noble and learned Viscount himself has, in his time, but certainly I have—have deliberately fought hopeless seats. We knew that we were not going to get in, but we were young and we were seeking experience and it did us good. But if we had been holding certain offices at the time, which we would have had to give up before we could even become candidates, I think that many of us would not have done it. It seems to me an unnecessary restriction on the liberty of the subject. Surely it would be quite sufficient if a person had to give up his office before he took his 722 seat in the House, if returned. It seems wholly unnecessary to go as far as Clause 11, as I read it, actually goes. I should be grateful if the noble and learned Viscount would say whether I am right in my interpretation of this clause, and whether he agrees with me that it goes far further than is necessary in the circumstances.
That is all I want to say in regard to the Bill. I agree with the noble and learned Viscount that it is much more a House of Commons matter than a House of Lords matter; nevertheless, I feel that the point I have made is a matter of interest to the general public. I think it is quite wrong that we should discourage people from standing for Parliament. It is a worthy ambition, as many of us have experienced, and I think that the provision I have mentioned is a wholly unnecessary one.

§ THE LORD CHANCELLOR
My Lords I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Silkin, for what he has said about the general position in the Bill. The difficulty in giving him numbers in reply to his first question is that under the Succession to the Crown Act and the law that has been built up one is constantly discovering, as he himself said, offices which were caught by the disqualifying provision but which one had not seen before. Therefore it is difficult to compare the potential under that way of approaching the matter with the actual under the present method. But I should like to assure him of this. The matter started before the change of Government in 1951; it then came up again when the 1951 Government was formed—as the noble Lord may remember I was Home Secretary at the time, so it naturally came my way. It was worked on for a long time before it went to the Select Committee, and I should like to assure the noble Lord that first the Select Committee and then the appropriate figures in Her Majesty's Government considered all these matters, bearing specially in mind the point which the noble Lord raised: that one does not want to make trivial disqualifications, because of the need for the widest field of recruitment to another place. Indeed, the noble Lord will remember that that was the burden of my I song with regard to Northern Ireland, where of course the position is more acute in view of the size of the population.
723 The noble Lord has raised an interesting point with regard to the effect of Clause 11. That arises out of a recommendation of the 1946 Select Committee on Elections, in paragraph 12 of their First Report, dated 11th February, 1946. They proposed that the law should include: a provision requiring a Parliamentary candidate to sign on nomination a general declaration relinquishing and resigning from any office of profit under the Crown which he may then hold. They put it in that way. The Bill, as it has ultimately come up, departs from that in this respect. First of all, it covers all disqualifications and not merely those arising from the holding of offices of profit; and secondly, it does not provide for the actual relinquishment of disqualifying offices. That is because of the difficulty of notifying those concerned that the position is relinquished. Indeed, someone may forget that he held such an office when he was making the declaration.
But it is more difficult to consider the point which the noble Lord made—it is one which I am sure will attract a good deal of sympathy—that a person should be able to make his attempt without having to relinquish an office. The noble Lord is quite right in saying that I have been in the position which he described—at least, I think his description would fit fighting Wigan in the Conservative interest. Therefore, I have sympathy with his point. But I hope that on consideration the noble Lord will feel that the position has improved, because we have definitely limited disqualification to offices which are incompatible with membership of the House of Commons. I think there is some difficulty in the approach which the noble Lord has adumbrated. I feel that this is par excellence one of the subjects in which there is always the possibility of improvement. I can only say to the noble Lord that in my experience of nearly a quarter of a century of dealing with Bills, I have never seen one which has had so much consideration as this one has. Therefore I ask the noble Lord, even if he thinks there are some imperfections, to forget them in view of the many improvements made.

§ LORD SILKIN
My Lords, I hope the noble and learned Viscount will not mind 724 if I put down an Amendment when this matter comes up on Committee stage, so that we may discuss it at greater length. I feel that it is an important point.