Lords Sitting of 2 July 1959

Preamble
The House met at three of the clock, The LORD CHANCELLOR On the Woolsack.
Prayers—Read by the Lord Bishop of Liverpool

COMMONWEALTH EDUCATION CONFERENCE
3.5 p.m.
LORD OGMORE: My Lords, I beg to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
[The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they will make a statement on the scope and objectives of the forthcoming Commonwealth Education Conference.]
THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR COMMONWEALTH RELATIONS (THE EARL OF HOME): My Lords, the Commonwealth Education Conference will be held in Oxford from July 15 to 29. The Conference will work out detailed arrangements for the new scheme for 1,000 Commonwealth scholars and fellows, agreed on by Commonwealth Ministers at the Trade and Economic Conference held in Montreal last September. The Conference will also review existing arrangements for co-operation between the Commonwealth countries on education generally. The Agenda will be settled by the Conference; the supply and training of teachers and scientific and technical education will be subjects of particular importance.
Lord Halifax will be President of the Conference, and Sir Philip Morris, who of course has most distinguished experience in this field, will be Chairman. The delegations will be composed both of officials and of representatives of universities and other educational bodies. I hope that from the Conference there will emerge practical schemes for furthering co-operation in this vitally important matter of education, where the needs are so great and where Commonwealth countries have so much to offer one another.
LORD OGMORE: My Lords, I am sure we all welcome the statement which the noble Earl the Leader of the House has just made, and we wish the Conference every success. May I ask the noble Earl whether a report will be published at the end of the Conference and whether we shall have an opportunity of considering it?
THE EARL OF HOME: My Lords, I have no doubt that the findings of the Conference will be made public in one way or another, and I will take steps to see that this House and Parliament is acquainted with the results. I might have added to my reply that the officials and the university people who are coming from the Commonwealth countries—and they are going to be well represented by people of very high standing—will have an opportunity to tour the United Kingdom on several different tours before the Conference begins. So that I think the preparations and arrangements will help them to understand the system we have here before the Conference convenes.
LORD REA: My Lords, may I ask whether, if the Conference should recommend some financial developments, Her Majesty's Government will look sympathetically at any such recommendations that might be made?
THE EARL OF HOME: My Lords, I cannot answer for the Treasury, but we have had it in mind that if schemes are launched they will almost inevitably cost money.

BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE
THE EARL OF HOME: My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper.
Moved, That Standing Order No. 35 be considered in order to its being dispensed with for the purpose of giving precedence on Tuesday next over the other orders of the day, to the Second Readings of the New Towns Bill and the National Assistance Bill.—(The Earl of Home.)
On Question, Motion agreed to, and ordered accordingly.

CONSOLIDATION BILLS
THE LORD CHANCELLOR (VISCOUNT KILMUIR): My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper. The procedure is that to which I drew attention when I moved the Second Reading of the Town and Country Planning Bill.
Moved to resolve, That it is desirable that, in the present Session, all Bills for re-enacting in the form in which they apply to Scotland the provisions of an existing Statute be referred to the Joint Committee on Consolidation Bills.—(The Lord Chancellor.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.
Ordered, That a Message be sent to the Commons to communicate the Resolution and to desire their concurrence.

NUCLEAR INSTALLATIONS (LICENSING AND INSURANCE) BILL
Returned from the Commons, agreed to with Amendments; the said Amendments to be printed.

PENSIONS (INCREASE) BILL
Order of the Day for the Second Reading read.
3.10 p.m.
THE MINISTER WITHOUT PORT-FOLIO (THE EARL OF DUNDEE): My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time. The Bill provides for certain increases in the retirement pensions of those public servants whose pensions are paid from the United Kingdom funds and who are over the age of 60 or who have retired under the age of 60 owing to ill-health. The principal classes of public servants concerned are local government employees, National Health Service employees, Government civil servants and some other categories which your Lordships will find in the Schedule, such as the police and firemen. Armed Forces pensioners are not included in the Bill because they will receive parallel benefits under the Prerogative Instruments, which will differ very little, of course, from the increases provided for Civil
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Service pensioners in this Bill. The number of people who will probably be affected will be about 110,000 Armed Forces pensioners, about 140,000 civil servants, roughly 100,000 teachers, and 100,000 local government employees, making a total of rather more than 450,000 altogether.
There have been a number of Bills, all of them what might be called ad hoc measures, making special increases in pensions since 1920: there was one in 1924, one in 1944, one in 1947, another in 1952 and the last one in 1956. None of these measures has ever recognised the principle that pensions ought to be based on any cost of living index, and no Government have ever recognised any obligation, either of right or of equity, to increase pensions in accordance with the cost of living. There is only one occasion—I think in 1919—on which an attempt was made to link Armed Forces pensions with the cost of living, but that had to be abandoned in 1935 or thereabouts, because it did not work satisfactorily. At that particular time I think its effect was that the pensions had to be adjusted the wrong way, which caused just as much discontent as the cost of living going the wrong way. The Government do not recognise, and have never recognised, any principle of this kind in relation to Civil Service pensions.
There is an opinion which some people hold that it might be a good thing if we did have a pension scheme linked with the cost of living, and it is perfectly proper that that should be debated. But I do not think we are likely to get very far by discussing it in relation to this Bill, because it is quite foreign to the principles on which either this Bill or any of the previous ad hoc measures to which I have referred have been based What various Governments have tried to do in these Bills is to make purely ex gratia provisions, prompted by the unfortunate fact that we have had from time to time a good deal of inflation, and that certain former employees of the Government whose pensions are fixed in terms of money have thereby suffered hardship. Therefore Parliament has agreed to certain ex gratia measures to alleviate that hardship. But Parliament has never agreed to any proposition that there is any kind of moral or equitable obligation to take any action of this kind; it is entirely a matter of grace.

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This Bill differs from the previous ad hoc measures in only two respects. One is that it removes the ceiling of £100 which was still left by the 1956 Act. That Act abolished the means test for those additional pensions, but it left the ceiling that is now removed. The other difference, which is not a difference in principle but perhaps a considerable one in practice, is that in this Bill the increases are based, not on the original basic pension as in previous Acts of this kind, but on the existing pension—that is, the previous original pension plus subsequent increases The amount of hardship likely to be suffered by fixed pensioners is, of course, greater the earlier the date at which they retired. Therefore, the graded increases of pensions provided for under this Bill rise as the date of origin of the pension which" is to be increased goes further back. For pensions granted after April 1, 1957, there is no increase because the rise in the cost of living since then has not been sufficient to justify any special addition on that ground. For those whose pension began between March, 1956, and April, 1957, the increase will be 2 per cent.; between March, 1955, and April, 1956, 4 per cent.; between March, 1954, and April, 1955, 6 per cent.; between March, 1953, and April, 1954, 8 per cent; between March, 1952, and April 1953, 10 per cent., and for those whose pensions began not later than April 1, 1952, the increase will be 12 per cent.
In the discussions on this Bill in another place I do not think there were any positive criticisms about what the Bill contained; criticisms were confined to what it did not contain. I have already pointed out that no Government have ever admitted any obligation to relate pensions to the cost of living and that we cannot therefore accept the proposal for what is called parity—that is to say, that pensioners should all have their retirement pensions brought up to what they would have been if they had retired now instead of having retired at whatever date it may have been. Another criticism, naturally, has been that people under the age of 60 who have not retired owing to ill-health do not receive any increase in their pension. It is only if they are over 60, or if they have retired owing to ill-health do not receive any they get the increase. That again is based
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on the principle that we have got to try, or want to try, to relieve hardship where it presses most.
Of course, we all know that there are individual cases of people who are under 60 but who, although they are in good health, find it practically impossible to get employment because the work from which they have been compulsorily retired at an early age is of such a kind that they are not easily adaptable to any other kind of employment; and these cases are undoubtedly hard ones. But as a general rule we take 60 as the most normal age at which retirement under these pension schemes could begin. It is easier, in general, for people under 60 than for people over 60 to obtain employment, and it has not been felt that it would be right to ask the taxpayer to extend these purely ex gratia additions to persons who are still of working age, still under 60, because the additions would have to be paid for, of course, by the taxpayers who are equally affected by changes in the cost of living.
LORD PETHICK-LAWRENCE: My Lords, I am not clear what the noble Earl is really trying to explain to us. Is he referring to people who were in the Civil Service, or whatever it may be, and have already come out, or is he dealing with people who are in the Civil Service and will draw the pension in a few years' time? To which of those two categories is he referring?
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: The people who are in now and will draw the pension in a few years' time will not be affected by this Bill at all. This is an increase only for persons whose pension has begun earlier than April, 1957. The peak figure of 12 per cent. is not reached until you get back to the people whose pensions began before April, 1952. But some of those, of course, are still under 60 and therefore will not receive the increase until they reach the age of 60. I wished to put before your Lordships all the considerations which have affected the debates in another place. One of them has been the negative criticism that this provision ought to have been extended to persons below 60 even though they are in good health.
LORD PETHICK-LAWRENCE: People who have already retired?
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: That is what I said, people who are retired and who are under 60. They could, of course, have retired for some unavoidable reason not due to ill health.
VISCOUNT ALEXANDER OF HILLS-BOROUGH: To other employment?
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: If they are in other employment they still get their Civil Service pension.
VISCOUNT ALEXANDER OF HILLSBOROUGH: Is it increased?
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: No. They get their Civil Service pension. But what I have been trying to explain is that the 12 per cent. increase does not apply to people under 60 unless they have retired on grounds of ill-health.
LORD CROOK: Even if they have retired on grounds of ill-health surely it does not apply if they are in employment?
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: Yes. If they get their occupational pension at the age of 55, it does not mean they cannot get the occupational pension if they get some other kind of work.
LORD CROOK: But surely one of the things inherent in this Bill is that if a man retires on the grounds of ill-health and gets the pension, and in due course secures full-time employment, he will not get the increase until he reaches 60?
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: Of course he will. He gets it if he is over 60, or if he is under 60 and has retired owing to ill-health.
LORD CROOK: The noble Earl still has not got my point. It is not that the man will get it if he is under 60 and has retired on grounds of ill-health. He will not get it if he retired before 60 on ill-health grounds and is still not at the moment away from work but is in other employment. He does not get the increase notwithstanding that he is 59 and has retired on grounds of ill-health.
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: If he has retired because of ill-health he will get the increase.
LORD LATHAM: The words in the Explanatory Memorandum are not that he has retired on ill-health grounds but only that he is in bad health. He may not have retired on the grounds of ill-health but he may have bad health subsequently.
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: The operative part of the Bill is on page 2, Clause 1, subsection (2):
"A pension payable…shall not be increased…unless the pensioner—

(a) has attained the age of 60 years; or

(b) has retired on account of physical or mental infirmity from the office or employment in respect of which, or on retirement from which, the pension is payable"

LORD CROOK: I do not want to embarrass the noble Earl, but this affects what I am going to say myself. Surely all this is related to subsection (6) of Clause 1. If it really means what I think it does, a man who has got his pension on grounds of ill-health, having retired from the Service, will not get this increase, according to subsection (6), if he is capable of being engaged in any full-time regular employment now.
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: I think it would be better if the noble Lord makes the point in his speech and I will deal with it in reply. I am not sure that I have apprehended the case he is trying to put, but he will no doubt put it later.
Although these increases apply only to those who have been in Government employment and whose pensions are paid from the United Kingdom or local authority funds, it is, of course, possible that other pensioners whose pensions are paid from the funds of Colonial Governments may receive a parallel increase if the Colonial Government so decides; but the responsibility is with the Colonial Government. What the Colonial Office here does when an increase of pensions of this kind is given to British ex-civil servants is to send a circular to the Colonial Governments pointing out what we are doing and implying that they might perhaps like to do the same. There are some Colonies whose scales of pensions are better than our own; some are the same, and some worse. But whether any Colony or Dominion or member of the Commonwealth should decide to make a parallel increase is the responsibility of that Government.

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The cost of the increases provided for in this Bill will be about £8½ million, of which rather more than £6 million will come from the Exchequer and £2½ million from the local authorities. In addition, the Armed Forces pension increases under the Royal Warrant will cost a further £2¼ million. The factors which have always governed the decision of Parliament and of successive Governments in making these ex gratia increases in order to deal with hardship arising from inflation have always been mixed ones. They have to balance one thing against another. First there is the desire of the Government to alleviate hardship among its former employees. Next there is the duty of the Government to the taxpayer. We must remember that there are many taxpayers who are suffering great hardship on account of inflation and whose circumstances might often be considerably worse in that respect than those of the pensioners.
Thirdly, every Government has always to consider the effect of increased Government expenditure on our national economy, particularly in relation to the price level. At the beginning of this year, as your Lordships know, we were advised by our economic advisers that during 1959 we might expect a gradual strengthening of the national economy, but it was not expected that the improvement would be enough to justify this additional Government expenditure during the course of the year; and it was not until just before the Budget that it was realised that the estimates upon which we were proceeding had been too cautious, and that the improvement in the national economy was, in fact, proceeding faster than had been anticipated. Although it is always agreeable to find that things are better than expected, it has this disadvantage, that you may have to alter your arrangements without a great deal of preparation. In this case, there was no time for the local authorities, who are considerably affected by this Bill, to be consulted before the Budget. But my right honourable friend the Financial Secretary met them as soon as possible afterwards, on April 14, and I should like to repeat the expressions of gratitude which have already been made in another place by my right honourable friend to the local authorities for the way in which they have cooperated at such short notice with the
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Government in making the arrangements from their side for carrying out the intentions of this Bill.
My Lords, the Bill has not met with any opposition in another place, As I have mentioned, the only criticisms have been concerned with what it does not contain, rather than with what it does contain, and I hope that your Lordships will now give it a Second Reading. I beg to move.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 2a.—(The Earl of Dundee.)
3.32 p.m.
LORD PETHICK-LAWRENCE: My Lords, the main purpose of this Bill, as of previous Bills along the same lines that have been carried through both Houses of Parliament and received the Royal Assent during the last decade, and earlier, is to deal with the results of inflation. At the present time, we in this country, as in most other countries, live on a monetary economy; and where we are dealing with contracts that run over a considerable number of years, as they do in the case of a civil servant who makes a contract with the Government when he enters employment, retires forty or fifty years later and gets a pension based on the conditions which prevailed when he entered the employment, we are thrown into complete and total confusion by inflation. The people whom we are considering at the present time, and with whom this Bill essentially deals, are the people who have suffered as the result of inflation.
I think I am right in saying that these people have a double grievance. The first is the one to which I have referred. The other is that what was considered a reasonable standard of life for them and their social and economic equals fifty or sixty years ago, is at the present time regarded as grinding poverty. What I gather from this Bill is that while it attempts to meet the first and the major evil, that of inflation, it does not, and is not intended to, do anything with regard to the second. Whether that be right or wrong, I do not know; but certainly that is not the purpose of the Bill.
Now I come to the Bill itself. To a large extent of course, it is not a Party matter at all. During the last fourteen or fifteen years—in fact, further back

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even than that—we have had this enormous inflation whatever Government has been in power. We had inflation under the Coalition Government; we had inflation under the Labour Government, and we have had inflation under the various Conservative Governments that have followed. It is equally true of all Parties and of the Coalition. The result is that unless these unfortunate people are to be left absolutely to fight an impossible battle against the odds that have been created by inflation, any Government with any heart at all must try to do something for them. The noble Earl correctly said that the State, in its hard-hearted form, has neither a legal nor even a moral obligation to do something for these people. That may be true. But I think that any Government of flesh and blood must feel a moral obligation towards these people who have served the State or the local authority to the best of their ability, and who, owing to some effect of inflation over which they have had no control at all, find themselves in this deplorable position.
Having said that, I have, in effect, subscribed to the principle underlining this Bill. I think that noble Lords on this side of the House will take the same view as I do; that the principle governing this Bill is a sound one, and that we should certainly offer no opposition to it in all its stages. Nevertheless, there arise a number of minor points which no doubt some of my noble friends behind me will illustrate, and which require bringing to light. I do not suppose that these increases will satisfy a large number of these people, partly because, as I have said, they are concerned not merely with inflation but with the other change in the position and ideas of the standard of life between to-day and twenty or thirty years ago. They will no doubt feel that, because they undertook this long contract with the Government, they are singled out by fate, if you like, for a particularly unfortunate lot. However, as I have said, there is no major issue involved. There may be minor issues which no doubt some of my noble friends will raise, but these figures, for what they are worth, are an alleviation of a lot of these people. As the noble Earl has said, however, while it is easy to be generous with other people's money the Government cannot
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go beyond a certain point with regard to the taxpayer. Whether this Bill will last for all time or whether, as in the case of another Bill which the noble Earl was dealing with from that Box a little while ago, this is only a step and will have to be covered by further steps in the future, I do not know. But so far as it goes, in its very limited objective, and particularly with the exclusion of any ceiling, we give it our support.
There are two questions that I should particularly like to ask. The first is, since the Bill has no ceiling, how far does it go? Does it go right up to people at the top of the Civil Service who have incomes of £2,000 or £3,000 a year? As it has no ceiling in the sense that the earlier Bill had, is there any limit beyond which these increases do not take place? The second question I should like to ask (though it may not be possible for the Government to give me an answer) is, can the Government tell us whether there are any persons—and if so, can they give us some rough idea of the number—who have been in public employ, either by the Government or by local authorities, to whom this Bill applies who are at the present time in receipt of National Assistance? I think it would be useful to know the answer to that question, because, in the setting of that fact, we shall get a clearer idea of what help is really being offered to the people who are dealt with here. Having said that, I think there is nothing further I need add at this moment with regard to this matter.
3.40 p.m.
LORD MILVERTON: My Lords, in rising to make a few comments on this Bill I should like to say at once that I am one of those people who entirely approve of its principles, and I have no criticism to make of what is in the Bill. I have, however, a certain number of criticisms to make about what is not in the Bill. I am indebted to the noble Earl who introduced the Second Reading for his frank and—if he will pardon me for saying so—unashamed confession that the forgotten man and the forgotten woman, otherwise the members of the Colonial Civil Service, are abandoned to their fate. I think those are not too strong words. We all know that Colonial Governments are responsible for the payment of these pensions, that there is now a no-man's-land of colonial territories

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which have become independent, and that requests made to the Colonial Office meet with that kind of response: that it is the responsibility of the Colonial Government concerned.
There are two Secretaries of State whose honour is involved in this matter. There is also the Department of Commonwealth Relations, and their reply would be that they have no authority in the matter. Technically, that is quite true, as we all know; but it should be remembered that these men and women were appointed by the Secretary of State and worked under him in their earlier years. They were moved all over the world at his behest, and it is purely a matter of their luck, or ill-luck, whether they happen finally to finish in, and have their pension paid largely by, a Colony which is able to pay it, and to pay these parallel increases, or whether they end up in one which either cannot or will not do so. One has to consider the political circumstances which arise to-day in which certain Colonial Governments have a prejudice against these payments to expatriates and are not prepared to grant any increases which may involve them in all kinds of local difficulties with their own staff. But surely it is a point of honour with the British Government to do something rather more than merely to adopt this kind of tepid indifference of attitude.
I know that, when this Bill goes through, the Colonial Office, as the noble Earl has said, will inform Colonial Governments (and the Commonwealth Relations Office will do the same to territories which have become free) that these increases have been made here; and perhaps they will express a hope that those Governments will be able to make parallel increases. But that kind of tepid goodwill is surely not enough. I want to be fair about it. I realise the difficulties that would arise if Her Majesty's Government were to say that where these Governments will not pay the parallel increases Her Majesty's Government will undertake to do so: because, of course, in that event no Colonial. Government in future would dream of giving the increases.
When this matter was raised in another place the Financial Secretary to the
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Treasury said [OFFICIAL REPORT, Commons, Vol. 606 (No. 116), col. 130]:
"Most overseas Governments are at least as generous as Her Majesty's Government in this matter."
That is not correct. The actual figures are these. There are, roughly speaking, 42 of these overseas Governments concerned in this matter, and in regard to pension increase schemes, 21 out of the 42 are far less generous over the arrangements than the United Kingdom is. Five Governments out of the 42 have adopted the United Kingdom standard; and 16 have given terms which are rather more generous than those prevailing in this country. But when this Bill has gone through, unless parallel action is taken, the majority of colonial civil pensioners will he considerably worse off than United Kingdom pensioners.
I would suggest that it is, not enough for this Government to tell these men and women who have served us well in the past and helped to build up the Commonwealth that their pension is no longer any concern of this Government. Looking back on my own recollections in many of the bigger Colonies, I recall, that in Malaya, for instance, we Colonial servants had our own widows' and orphans' pension fund. The Government took it over compulsorily, and with the liabilities they absorbed the funds. Now it is no longer the Government in Whitehall that is concerned, but the Government in those territories. Surely, in those circumstances, there is a moral obligation of a very strong kind to see that the widows and orphans do not suffer owing to that transfer of authority. I appreciate that this Bill is perhaps not the right place for such provisions, but I feel that when discussing the Bill one is entitled at least to draw attention to these matters. I know that in another place the representatives of Her Majesty's Government said that this matter would be constantly under review. But that is very poor consolation to the widow and the orphan, or to the ordinary pensioned civil servant, because he, with his Government experience, knows what a phrase like that really means in practice.
Apart from that, there is one other point which I raised a year or two ago in this House on the last of the matters mentioned in the Schedule to this Bill

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the Governors Pensions Act, 1957. I do not want to raise all the questions which were raised at the time over that Act, except to say that, in my humble view (and here I have to declare an interest, because I was personally interested in the matter), to take the Governors' pensions and entirely alter the method of computing them, giving all kinds of rights and privileges which had not been given before, and then, for some inscrutable reason, to ante-date the arrangements and give them retrospective effect to 1955, and to exclude from all benefits under the Act the 30 governors who were left, who had retired before that time, is a disgrace.
To their honour, be it said, the protest in another place came from the Front Bench of the Opposition. A former Labour Secretary of State asked why Her Majesty's Government had excluded these men, who presumably had served their country well. I do not wish to raise questions about the amount of the pension and so forth, but I do wish again to raise the point that never until 1957 in this country has Her Majesty's Government or the Government of this country recognised that a Governor has a wife. If, for instance, I had died within a week of my retirement my wife would have got precisely nothing after my eighteen years' service as a Governor. I suggest that this is a matter of principle. It is a public disgrace. To my own personal knowledge there have been, over the past few years, wives of Governors who have lived in considerable penury and distress because they were entitled to no pension at all. I know that this is not generally known, but it is a thing which ought to have received attention, and no attention has been paid to it.
I know that the usual reply is that the ordinary Colonial Governor has, before he became a Governor, had service in one or other of the Colonies and has subscribed through the contributory schemes to a widows' and orphans' pension fund, and he has been allowed to go on subscribing during his period as a Governor. That subscription lasts over thirty-odd years and the maximum pension which his wife could get under that would be between £400 and £500 a year, less tax. That, I suggest, my Lords,
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in modern conditions is a very inadequate amount; and it has nothing whatever to do with the Government in this country, because payment of those widows' and orphans' pensions is one of the things that the noble Earl disowned any responsibility for, because it is the responsibility of some Colonial territory. And so the Government of this country escape paying anything to the widows of people who have borne those responsibilities.
May I say, in conclusion, that I think nobody will deny that the wife of any Governor has rendered a great public service, and no successful Governor could possibly succeed without owing 50 per cent. of his success to his wife, who has contributed to the service of this country as much as he has. I suggest that when these questions of pension arose it would have been easy to include something in the Bill for the widows and orphans, yet nothing has been done about it. I support the Bill entirely, but I thought that this was the proper time to draw attention to some of the things which have been left out.
3.53 p.m.
LORD CROOK: My Lords, I seem to have lived a life almost permanently with Pensions (Increase) Acts coming into operation or Pensions (Increase) Bills about to be the subject of campaigns. I am made almost to feel very old to-day when I recall that I was in the 1920 agitation as a young trade union official of 19; and for local government and Civil Service officers I took part in campaigns to secure Pensions (Increase) Bills in 1920, 1924, 1944, 1947, 1952, 1954, and 1956. I assure your Lordships that I do not recall those facts merely to recount my life story, but because of their relevance to some of the observations which, for a few minutes, I seek to offer to your Lordships in respect of this Bill.
I want to start, at any rate, by saying how much I welcome the Bill, and I am sure it is welcomed by all those who will benefit from it. For over eighteen months representatives of the Civil Service and local government officers have been pressing Her Majesty's Government to produce a fresh measure to remedy the disabilities of the 1956 Act. That Act did not apply to those retiring after March, 1954, which meant that

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some of those who retired after that date have in fact borne the full effect of the rise in the cost of living of approximately 20 per cent. What is more, before the 1956 Act Pensions (Increase) Acts have contained, as the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, said, both means tests and "ceiling" provisions. The 1956 Act removed the means test but retained the "ceiling", and as a result some ex-civil servants to this day are bearing an uncompensated increase in the cost of living which amounts in the extreme case to as much as 66 per cent.
Having welcomed the Bill, may I offer a few criticisms relating to improvements that some of us would like to see in the measure, if we could secure them before the Royal Assent? First, I join with those in another place who regarded the amounts as inadequate, although approving of the new system which the Government have put into this, the best of eight measures which have come in front of Parliament in the course of nearly forty years. The postman who retired in 1939 with a pension of £91 per annum is now getting £162, and under this Bill, if passed, he will get £182. If he had been in post as at to-day and was retired to-day he would get £235. A clerical officer who at the beginning of the war in 1939 retired with a pension of £175, now as a result of the 1956 Act is getting £271, and under this Bill he will get £303. If retired to-day he would get £316. He has, in fact, one of the nearest approximations to parity I have so far seen under the terms of the Bill. But that is not bringing pensions up to a level which provides that the pensioners can buy what they expected to buy when they retired from the service.
I would remind your Lordships that they had a right to expect certain conditions when they retired. They were taken into a service where they were told that their pay was fixed lower than it otherwise would have been because the Treasury would in due course provide an adequate pension for them, the cost of which, it was stated again and again in arbitration tribunal cases, was to the State approximately 12½ per cent. of the value of their remuneration. I know that there are many arguments which can be advanced against parity, but there are many arguments which can be advanced for it. I would remind your
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Lordships that we had the most astonishing support for parity during the 1956 debates, when no less a newspaper than The Times, in an editorial—I ask your Lordships to note, The Times; not any other paper—said:
"Pensions should be kept in line with those payable to currently retiring servants of comparable status."
I could never have hoped to put it in such good language to make a case to your Lordships this afternoon.
If we look at the senior grades, which the Treasury has had such difficulty in recruiting that it has had to raise the general standard considerably to get from universities the recruits that it wants, we see how bad the system proposed by the Government in this Bill really is. A principal who retired in 1939 with a pension of £550 per annum is, under the 1956 Act, getting £694: and under this Bill, if passed, he will get £774. The principal recently recruited who retires in the next couple of years, having received for the three-years' averaging period under the Superannuation Act the present remuneration given to a principal, will retire on a pension of no less than £1,025. In fact, this Bill in general gives only about half compensation for what these pensioners have suffered. If the pound is taken as being worth 20s. at the end of 1951 (the operative date in respect of the calculations under the 1956 Act), its value at January of this year was 15s. 2d., a decrease of 4s. 10d. or very nearly 25 per cent., as against the 12 per cent. which is the maximum anybody can get under the present Bill.
I am bound to confess that I am not sure what we in this House can do about this matter, because, as I understand it, the question of a Money Resolution in another place is obviously involved, and that has already been passed in limited terms, but I wonder whether we could not, in the course of later stages of discussion on this Bill, deal with the point of retrospection, which was raised in another place and in respect of which the Government has, so far, been adamant. The decision in principle to take action to produce this Bill was announced in April, and it is in respect of April, instead of August 1, that I suggest that retrospection of payment could be made. The dates of April 1 each year are the effective dates in the

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Schedule in respect of the amounts of increases, and appear in both the Explanatory Memorandum and in the main clause of the Bill.
I know that in another place it was argued that retrospection in these matters was quite impossible. My Lords, it is not true that it is impossible. Royal Assent to the 1944 Act was given in this House on May 24, 1944, and the operative date for the payments was December 31, 1943. In 1947, Royal Assent was given on February 18 of that year, again with an effective date of December 31, 1946. In respect of the last Act, as many of your Lordships will remember, in 1956 Royal Assent was given well into May, with an effective date of April 1. I do not want to keep your Lordships unduly on a point like this, but I do want the noble Earl responsible for the Bill on behalf of the Government to know that those are the lines along which some of us are thinking, and might well be the lines of Amendments sought to be moved at the Committee stage.
But I would say that my main point involves no payment by the Government at all. My third and last point is that in respect to which I referred to my association with the past seven Acts in less than forty years. I did so deliberately, to lead to what I am now going to say. Parliament throughout this period of nearly forty years has completely failed to settle as a principle the method of dealing with the pensions of public servants. If pay increases are settled by negotiation, or if there are arbitration awards by the Civil Service Arbitration Tribunal which involve many millions of pounds of expenditure, the Treasury and the Government accept them as an automatic thing which they take in their stride. But in order to get any expenditure at all in respect of pensions, we run into not only separate Bills but the spirit of pressure groups, which I think is thoroughly bad, on the part of the organisations of civil servants, local government officers, and the like. Before we have a Bill like this coming to Parliament, there is each time a long, intensive period of lobbying and pressure, particularly in another place. Large quantities of letters and pamphlets are distributed, public meetings are held, and Members of Parliament are lobbied in the House
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by constituents in order that they may secure from the Government a benefit under a Pensions Increase Bill.
When the Bill ultimately is produced, it appears as if it is something which pressure has extracted from an unwilling Government, whereas I say quite candidly to the noble Earl that that is not really the position. The truth is that successive Governments have in due course always given practical evidence of their interest in this subject, but they have never let it be known that this was something which was going to be done at a given time. They have always taken the kind of line that the noble Earl quite candidly said just now that the Government took on this occasion. Pressure groups have been busy; constituents have been lobbying, as I know; and, suddenly, as the noble Earl tells us, in April the Government, finding they had over-budgeted and had a bit of money they could use, took such urgent action to get on with the Pensions (Increase) Bill that the noble Earl has had to repeat here this afternoon the apology the Government had already given to the local authorities: that they had been unable to consult them because they had finally acted so fast.
If these pensioners, and the people who are about to be pensioned, are left all the time with a lack of knowledge as to whether the Government will in two, three, or four years' time think about reviewing the position, there will be these pressure groups all the time; because we must accept that an Act cannot increase pensions recently awarded, so there must be some "cutoff" date. In this Bill, for instance, no increases are to be given to pensioners who retired after March 31, 1957, because the rise in the cost of living from April, 1957, until now has not been sufficient to justify it. But the civil servant who retired on that date in 1957 had his pension based on his average salary over the three previous years—that is, his salary calculation, on which his pension was based, goes back as far as April 1, 1954. So he has not been fully compensated for increases in the cost of living even up to the date of his retirement.
For instance, a man earning £500 a year on April 1, 1954, would have had from the Treasury by April 1, 1957, two economic or cost of living increases, which

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would have meant that by then he was getting £550 a year. But when he came to apply to that the percentage on which he would get a pension, it was applied not to £550 but to £530. So that, as a pensioner, he starts already behindhand; and then he finds that the next Bill leaves him out for a couple of years. As a result, a situation exists, even to-day, where there are a large number of pensioners, unaffected either by previous Acts or by this Bill, who are already falling behind in the race with the cost of living. In the case I have quoted, the man who retired as at April 1, 1957, is drawing a pension 6 per cent. higher than his 1954 salary would have warranted, whereas the cost of living has in fact in that time risen by 20 per cent. So we start off with a hard-core of pensioners who are critical, and every day, as hundreds more go on to the pensions lists, this critical gang of people grows, building itself into a pressure group—and when this Bill receives the Royal Assent these many pensioners will not see any prospect of a further review for perhaps another four years.
One of the major factors in this continuing pressure has been the feeling that once an Act has been passed no hope can be seen of any further consideration until this three or four year period has gone by. In the case of the present Bill, for instance, the man who retired on April 1, 1957, at the age of 65 has had no benefit up till now, gets none even under this Bill when it becomes an Act, and can hardly he expected to sit down and wait for something to turn up when he is 71 years of age, if he is lucky enough to live to that age. I think, therefore, that the Government ought to face the fact that in these modern days, when the Government themselves are indulging in every possible form of good relationships in industrial relations and when they are encouraging other people to do the same, they should make some firm statement on this matter.
If necessary, I should be prepared to put down an Amendment on the lines of the Amendment which was put down on the Report stage in another place and which provides for the appointment of a small committee of experts who will examine and report to the Government at the end of every two years. I say I should, if necessary, be prepared to do so; and I use those words quite deliberately,
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because I am not particularly enamoured with that idea at all. I would far rather that the Government took themselves away from using merely these general phrases about "keeping things constantly under review" and said what would be accepted by everybody inside these organised groups and inside the trade unions that are made up by Civil Service and local government membership. A statement should be made, upon which they can rely, that for a period of two years the Government will do nothing, but at the end of the two years the Government will undertake to review the situation in the light of the circumstances then existing.
I throw that out to the noble Earl, not in the belief that he can hurriedly rise today and give some answer willy-nilly, but as an idea for examination, so that some statement may be made perhaps on Third Reading or when this Bill comes to pass, as pass I hope it will at the earliest possible date. Because nothing I have said, in what I hope has been an attempt at some constructive criticism, stops me from expressing to the Government my great appreciation for this Bill and for the fact that not only have they found legislative time to bring it in at this time and will try to get it through before your Lordships' House rises at the end of this month, but because it is the best of the eight Bills, the first one that, by trying the escalator principle, deals with the question the right way round.
LORD MOYNE: My Lords, I should like, in two sentences, to say how gratified I am to see that the Government have not forgotten to 'include in this measure their pensioners of the former Royal Irish Constabulary. Those of them who live in Southern Ireland do not enjoy many of the advantages which our richer country is able to afford, and their need is by so much the greater. I am glad to see that their pensions have not been forgotten in this Bill.
4.12 p.m.
LORD CHORLEY: My Lords, I should like to add a word to what has been said about this Bill by my noble friend Lord Crook, and to underwrite to some extent the very valid criticism made by the noble Lord, Lord Milverton. The situation which he describes to your

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Lordships' House is in some ways disgraceful. It seems to me that, as a matter of honour, the Government should underwrite the obligation to see that those who go out to work in our colonial dependencies are properly looked after in their old age, and particularly that their widows are properly looked after.
But this is a wide subject: it is really wider than the terms of the Bill before us this afternoon. I come across it a great deal in connection with those who work in our universities, now some 12,000 of the elite of the community, who are continually faced by exactly this sort of problem. They receive their superannuation from grants voted by Parliament. Undoubtedly there is nothing that has pressed more hardly upon the older university teachers during the period since the end of the war than this constant threat of being left in penury, or semi-penury, and having their widows deprived of all real position in society. This situation is reflecting itself in the way I was glad to hear my noble friend emphasise—on recruitment. We have heard how difficult recruitment is becoming in the Civil Service. Recruiting is becoming difficult in the universities, too, and largely for this reason; at any rate, this is certainly an important factor in the situation.
At the present time in industry there are generous pension schemes. I imagine that every noble Lord knows that; and it must also be known to your Lordships that during the past few years several distinguished civil servants have left their Departments in order to take posts in industry or commerce. More than one of them have told me that the reason for this is that pension arrangements are so much better. The State really cannot afford to lose its servants in this way. The State cannot afford not to attract the ablest young men from the universities both into the Civil Service and into the university teaching profession. Therefore, it is essential that this matter should be nut on to a proper footing and that the kind of situation, in which the noble Earl, in moving the Second Reading this afternoon, seemed to glory, should be brought to an end. I am very glad indeed that my noble friend Lord Crook emphasised this very point.
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In the university world, we have now succeeded in getting quite reasonable machinery for dealing with salary increases in the situation of inflation which has prevailed over recent years, but when we suggest to the University Grants Committee that the same sort of arrangement should be made in respect of superannuation, we are met with a blank wall. That is much the same position as the Government have taken up in regard lo the pensions of civil servants and other people who come within this Bill. Surely it is reasonable at the present time that superannuation and pensions should be dealt with in the same sort of way and that effective machinery should be involved.
I do not know whether the suggestion in the Amendment which was put down in another place is the right one. Possibly sufficient consideration has not been given to it. But I should have thought that any reasonable person would have agreed that the position, which my noble friend has so graphically described, of Members of another place and of your Lordships' House being circularised by all sorts of organisations, like the Association of Senior Civil Servants, who wish to see that justice is done to the people who have given their lives in the service of the State is a disgraceful one, and that this sort of thing should not have to happen.
It is good that there is this Bill before your Lordships' House this afternoon, but is it not open to the reflection that this is General Election year and that this sort of criticism, which ought not to be available, is bound to be made until proper machinery for handling this position is established? I hope that my noble friend will put down some sort of Amendment in order to give your Lordships a better opportunity of threshing out the arrangements which are required for curing what is undoubtedly a sore in the body politic at the present time.
4.17 p.m.
LORD SILKIN: My Lords, I rise first of all to reiterate my agreement with the most impressive statement made by my noble friend Lord Crook. He is perfectly right. Although we get these Pensions (Increase) Bills periodically, they always come as a result of pressure and not as a result of a recognition that it is timely to

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review the position of pensions. I know that the noble Earl has told us that the Government do not accept the principle that they have to make good to the pensioner the increase in the cost of living or fall in the value of money. But they have, in fact, recognised it eight times. And there comes a time when they must cease to say that they do not recognise the principle and yet go on doing this.
By now, no Government can afford to say that they do not propose to take any notice of the increase in the cost of living, or the fall in the value of money, and to tell the pensioners, "You have made your bargain and you have to accept it." Of course, Governments periodically have to look at the position. It is unfortunate that they should do it only when they have a little bit of money to spare, or when there is an Election pending, or when the pressure on them is so great that they can no longer resist it. I fully associate myself with what my noble friend has said. There ought to be some legal machinery for looking at this position periodically to see whether it is timely to review the position of existing pensions.
I should like to ask the noble Earl, having—if you like, without prejudice; and I suppose that is what the noble Earl would really say—accepted the position that we have to make good the increase in the cost of living, why do we not really do it? Why do we hold back and go half-way or two-thirds of the way? Why do we not go the whole way and do the thing properly? In the long run it would not cost us very much more, because each time we make an increase we have to take into account the backlog of the previous occasion. It would be so much more satisfactory if, once and for all, we recognised the principle that when we grant a pension it is granted on the basis of the cost of living—that is to say, if the cost of living goes up then the pension goes up correspondingly—and that there is a periodic review so as to ensure that the matter is properly looked at.
The noble Earl may say: "What happens when the cost of living comes down?" I am not authorised to speak for anybody, but it would be quite appropriate at the review, if the cost of living came down, to bring down the cost of the pension, if the understanding is that it is designed to give people a
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definite standard of living. I hope that the noble Earl will make these representations to those for whom he is speaking in the Government, and perhaps at a later stage of the Bill we might have a clear account both as to whether it is possible to have a regular review and as to the principle upon which the actual amounts are settled.
There is one other point I should like to raise, and I imagine that it is one for the noble and learned Viscount the Lord Chancellor. I see that all kinds of people are referred to in the Schedule, but there is no reference to High Court Judges, Judges of the Court of Appeal and others of high judicial office, although magistrates and county court judges are dealt with. I should like to ask the noble and learned Viscount whether he can say if this is intentional and if it is intended to deal with them in some other way. If so, could a statement be made as to how it is intended to deal with them? Is it going to be on something like the same basis as this Bill, or in another way? Having said that, we welcome the Bill, as we welcomed every one of the eight previous measures; but we do hope that in future it will not be done in this casual manner and that we can have a regular review of these pensions from time to time.
4.23 p.m.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR (VISCOUNT KILMUIR): My Lords, with your Lordships' permission I should like to intervene for a moment to deal with the last point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Silkin. The increases recently sanctioned in the salaries of members of the lower Judiciary in England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, have resulted in the amount of their maximum pension entitlement being automatically increased to a point where they approximate to, and in a few cases exceed, the pensions of the higher Judiciary mentioned by the noble Lord. The Government have been giving careful consideration to the situation which has arisen, and have decided that the pension entitlement of members of the higher Judiciary in England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland should be revised. Proposals to this end will be put before Parliament in a subsequent Session. It is the intention to propose at the same time that some increase be

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made to the pensions of those members of the higher Judiciary who have already retired. As your Lordships are aware, there has been no increase in the pensions of the higher Judiciary of England for some 134 years.
LORD SILKIN: Is the noble and learned Viscount in a position to go a little further and say the amount of the increases?
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: At the moment the form of the legislation is being considered, and I should be grateful if the noble Lord would leave it for some time. As soon as it is possible, I will acquaint him with what is in our minds.
4.25 p.m.
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: My Lords, I had hoped that the noble Lord, Lord Crook, might perhaps clarify the question about persons who had retired under the age of 60 which he asked previously, because I should not like any of your Lordships to be in any doubt upon the point, and I was not sure that I apprehended what his difficulty was.
LORD CROOK: I thought the noble Earl would prefer me to leave it until later. However, I will develop it if he wants me to.
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: What I said in reply to the noble Lord is, I think, correct. If the pensioner retired on grounds of ill-health, he will get the increase even if he is under 60. That is clear. If he retired on any other ground, and is still under 60, and then falls ill so that he cannot work, then he gets the increase. That, I think, is also quite clear. The noble Lord also referred to the situation which would arise if the pensioner got other employment. I do not think that makes any difference at all. This is a pension which is not subject to any kind of test in regard to other employment.
LORD CROOK: May I help the noble Earl by saying that why I did not speak was that I thought it would be a good thing on the Committee stage to put down an Amendment to Clause 1 (6) to test the point, and that I would not bother with it to-day
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: Clause 1 (6) says:
"For the purposes of this section, a pensioner shall be deemed to be disabled by physical or mental infirmity if he is permanently incapacitated by such infirmity from engaging in any regular full-time employment"
That is simply a definition.
LORD CROOK: Yes. It is Clause 1 (2).
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: It does not affect the principle, which is that he gets the pension if he is disabled. I cannot see any ground for difficulty, but if there is any further misunderstanding I shall be glad to look into it.
The noble Lord, Lord Crook, made, I think, a very good and moderate defence of the principle of parity and also of the case for retrospection. As he said, he does not expect me to agree with him on either of these points. I quite understand the case for parity. The case against it, of course, is that if a pensioner's pension is fixed on the amount of his earnings at the time when he retires, and as a result of inflation his pension falls in purchasing power, you have got to remember that a great many other people besides Government pensioners also suffer very much in this way from inflation; and I do not think there is any moral principle which requires that special action should be taken to correct the effects that arise from changes in the cost of living in respect of some particular class of person.
LORD CROOK: May I say to the noble Earl that I fully agree with him? I did not expect anything special; I was thinking merely in terms of the magnificent speech which the Prime Minister made to a conference at Brighton where he associated both pensioners and those of the rentier classes.
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: The increases which have been given over the last twenty years at various times the noble Lord was inclined to attribute to the results of pressure. I have no doubt that there is pressure of various kinds from bodies representing all classes of pensioners, but I doubt whether it is really the case that these ex gratia increases in the pensions of ex-Government servants have been wholly or mainly due to pressure. There would not have been any case for them at all had it not been that inflation took place at certain times.

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Naturally, when inflation occurs the Government, although they do not admit any equitable responsibility in the matter, want to consider whether they can do anything to ease the hardship which has resulted from inflation upon their former servants.
The noble Lord, Lord Silkin, who followed up the point, said that we had recognised the principle eight times, that we ought to compensate them for the consequences of inflation. But that is precisely what we have not done on these eight occasions. The whole point of what we have done is that, without recognising any responsibility, we have given what would have been a very inadequate increase if the responsibility had been recognised. It is precisely because the amount has not been commensurate with the rise in the cost of living that it is possible to make these criticisms on the principle that parity ought to be accepted. We have not accepted the position on these eight occasions that we ought to compensate the pensioner in full for a rise in the cost of living.
As for the arguments in favour of having a permanent Committee to review these things, I know, of course, that there is a case for that, too. I think perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Silkin, indicated one of the arguments against it when he mentioned that if the cost of living went down, the pension might have to be reduced. That was precisely what happened in the only class of pensions which we did at one time try to relate to the cost of living—the Armed Services pensions; and the results were so unsatisfactory that the idea had to be abandoned.
I should like to remind your Lordships that on every occasion when an increase of pensions of this kind has been made the Government spokesman has usually said that he hopes this is the last time it will be necessary to do anything, because he hopes that from this time forward there will not be any more inflation. Of course, if there is no more inflation there will not be any case for increasing pensions, and there will be no ground for any of the pressure to which the noble Lord referred. I am not going to be brash enough to repeat that, but I should like to remind your Lordships that for the last fifteen months prices have been stable for the first time since the war, and there are indications that we may
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be able to hold that position; and that if, in future, pensions were to be regulated in accordance with the cost of living, it is not entirely impossible that the change might be in a downward rather than an upward direction.
I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Milverton, for the support which he expressed for the Bill, which I think was not affected by the various criticisms which he made about the Government's attitude towards the position of ex-Colonial servants. He questioned the statement of the Financial Secretary in another place, who said that most overseas countries had scales of pensions which were as generous as ours. I have tried to check it again and there appears to be a conflict of information. According to the information which the Government have, the majority of these overseas territories are either as good as or better than ours, although, of course, there are some which are not. My right honourable friend the Financial Secretary referring in another place to the position of widows' and orphans' pensions—which are in some cases more unfavourable—said [OFFICIAL REPORT, Commons, Vol. 606, No. 116, col. 130]:
"The Government have that question very much in mind, but it is not appropriately dealt with in a Bill which deals only with increases in pensions paid by Her Majesty's Government, I can assure honourable Members that the Government have and will keep this matter under review."
I hope I got Lord Milverton's point correctly about the Governors' pensions. The position is that the basis of Governors' pensions was changed in 1956 and improvements were made for all such pensions that began after August 31, 1955. Under this Bill increases will be paid on the Governors' pensions and, of course, they will be larger for those pensions which began before August 31, 1955, under the old arrangements, than for those to which the new arrangements apply.
With regard to widows' pensions the Bill, of course, increases any existing widows' pensions. Obviously, it cannot increase pensions which do not exist, but I will draw the attention of the Colonial Secretary to the view that there should be a system of widows' pensions for Colonial Governors which was argued by the noble

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Lord. I am sure that everything he has said will be given due weight by the Government.
The noble Lord, Lord Pethick-Lawrence, asked me two questions one of which I can answer and the other I cannot. His question about the number of ex-Government employees receiving National Assistance was asked in another place. The reply was that the information was not available. I have made inquiries, and I find that it is still not available. It has not so far been found possible to extricate the figures from those which the National Assistance Board have, but I will certainly ask again and see whether it would be possible to do this without undue trouble and expense to the officials of the Board. To the noble Lord's other question, whether the increase in pensions goes right up to the top and includes the highest pensions of the highest grade of civil servants, the answer here is, Yes, it does. There is no ceiling at all. I conclude by saying that all your Lordships have said will be considered, and by thanking your Lordships for the unanimous support which you have been good enough to give to the Bill.
LORD LATHAM: My Lords, before the Motion is put may I ask one question? The noble Earl referred to the local authorities, and paid a tribute to them for their helpful assistance, late though the proposals were. Can he say whether the general block grant to the local authorities—who will, of course, have extra expenditure cast upon them in respect of increased pensions for their pensionable retired servants—will be increased to take account of that extra expenditure?
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: My Lords, I do not think I ought to answer that question without notice, because I might not give the right answer. I should have thought the answer would be, Yes, but I would ask the noble Lord if he would be good enough to let me write to him.
LORD SILKIN: It ought to be, Yes.
On Question, Bill read 2a, and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.

OCCUPIERS' LIABILITY (SCOTLAND) BILL [H.L.]
4.39 p.m.
Order of the Day for the House to be put into Committee read.
Moved That the House do now resolve itself into Committee.—(Lord Forbes.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.
House in Committee accordingly.
[The LORD MERTHYR in the Chair.]
Clause 1 [Variation of rules of common law as to duty of care owed by occupiers]:
THE MINISTER OF STATE, SCOTTISH OFFICE (LORD FORBES): I should like to speak on Amendments Nos. 1 and 2. At the end of subsection (1) of this clause your Lordships will see the words, "for which he is in law responsible." As the subsection now stands, there is a doubt whether this phrase relates to the word "dangers" in line 11 or to some or all of the words "the state of the premises or to anything done or omitted to be done on them." What we aim to do by these Amendments is to put it beyond doubt that this phrase qualifies the word "dangers", since it is only in respect of those dangers for which the occupier is in law responsible that the Bill defines his duty towards his visitors. As this is lawyer's law, not being a lawyer myself I have attempted and I shall continue to attempt to keep the ball in my own court. I only hope that noble Lords will not hit the ball too hard out of my court, because if they do it will be a lost ball as far as I am concerned, and I shall have to invite my noble and learned friend the Lord Chancellor to retrieve it for me. I beg to move.
Amendment moved—
Page 1, line 11, after ("dangers") insert ("which are").—(Lord Forbes.)
LORD REID: As this and the following Amendments, which are really drafting Amendments, give effect to certain suggestions made by my noble and learned friend, Lord Keith of Avonholm, and myself, I think it only right to express our satisfaction that the Government have seen fit to adopt our suggestions.
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
LORD FORBES: I beg to move.
Amendment moved—
Page 1, line 12, after ("them") insert ("and").—(Lord Forbes.)
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
LORD FORBES: For the convenience of the Committee I should like to speak on Amendments 3, 4 and 5. These Amendments effect slight improvements in the drafting of subsection (3) of Clause 1. I beg to move.
Amendment moved—
Page 1, line 20, leave out ("in relation to").—(Lord Forbes.)
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
LORD FORBES: I beg to move.
Amendment moved—
Page 1, line 21, after ("(a)") insert ("in relation to").—(Lord Forbes.)
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
LORD FORBES: I beg to move.
Amendment moved—
Page 2, line 1, after ("(b)") insert ("in relation to").—(Lord Forbes.)
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
Clause 1, as amended, agreed to.
Clause 2 [Extent of occupier's duty to show care]:
LORD FORBES: I should like to speak on Amendments Nos. 6 and 7. These Amendments are consequential on Amendments 1 and 2. I beg to move.
Amendment moved—
Page 2, line 7, after ("dangers") insert ("which are").—(Lord Forbes.)
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
LORD FORBES: I beg to move.
Amendment moved—
Page 2, line 9, after ("them") insert ("and").—(Lord Forbes.)
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
LORD FORBES LORD FORBES moved in subsection (1) to leave out "or otherwise,". The noble Lord said: To put it in the broadest terms, Clause 2 provides that the standard of care which an occupier owes to persons on his premises shall be such as is reasonable in all the circumstances. But an occupier may seek to modify his obligations towards his visitors, except in so far as they are obligations laid on him, for example by
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Statutes such as the Factories Acts, out of which he cannot lawfully contract. Where he alters his obligations by agreement, express or implied, no difficulty arises. But as the clause is drafted at present it covers the case where the occupier seeks to alter his obligations otherwise than by agreement, for example, by notice. If this happens, questions may arise whether the notice was adequate to inform the visitor of any risks he might be incurring in entering the premises and for which the occupier assumed a different degree of liability, whether the visitor saw or ought to have seen the notice, and so forth. We therefore propose, by this Amendment, that the clause should refer only to alterations of liability made by agreement. If an occupier claims to have altered his obligations in any other fashion—for example, by putting up the notice I have referred to—this will be one of the circumstances of the case to which the court will have regard in determining the degree of responsibility which in the particular case rested on the occupier.
Perhaps I might give some examples of this. A joiner comes to repair a window in a loft. The loft floor is rotten. The occupier says to him, "You go in there at your own risk." The joiner says, "I will accept that". That is an agreement, and if the joiner suffered any injury he would have no claim against the occupier. If, on the other hand, the occupier merely puts up a notice saying, "Dangerous floor", and somebody injures himself, that person can sue the owner. In the case of a normal adult the court would consider that the occupier had taken reasonable care, but in the case of small children the notice would not amount to reasonable care having been taken. I beg to move.
Amendment moved—
Page 2, line 11, leave out ("or otherwise,").—(Lord Forbes.)
LORD SALTOUN: I should like to ask the noble Lord whether he is not putting on the occupier a greater responsibility than that which is assumed by people who repair our roads. It seems to me that they are getting off very much more cheaply than the occupier under this Amendment.
LORD FORBES: In this case it is entirely for the courts to decide whether the occupier has taken reasonable care to safeguard any visitor.
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
LORD FORBES: During Second Reading the noble and learned Lord, Lord Reid, drew attention to a possible defect in the wording of Clause 2. The Bill at present provides that the care required of the occupier must be such as to "secure" his visitor's safety. The noble and learned Lord suggested that "secure" pitches the duty unreasonably high and carries the implication that the occupier's duty amounts to an absolute guarantee to his visitor against injury. We have looked at this matter carefully since Second Reading and have come to the conclusion that the noble and learned Lord is right. Since the Bill provides that the occupier's duty is to take reasonable care, no more and no less, we think that the more neutral wording, to "see" that the visitor is not injured, should be substituted. I may mention that the word "see" is used in a similar context in the English Act. I beg to move.
Amendment moved—
Page 2, line 13, leave out ("secure") and insert ("see").—(Lord Forbes.)
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
Clause 2, as amended, agreed to.
4.49 p.m.
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS moved, after Clause 2 to insert the following new clause:
As to injuries suffered by intruders
" . In any claim arising out of injury suffered on any premises by a person who has entered thereon without the consent of the occupier or person having control thereof it shall be a defence for the occupier or person having control thereof to show that having regard to all the circumstances of the case all reasonable steps had been taken to prevent access to the premises by any person not having his consent or to give warning of any danger thereon."
The noble Viscount said: This is the point of the trespassers or, as I have chosen not to call them trespassers, those who enter premises without the occupier's consent, which was raised by the two noble and learned Lords and by others on Second Reading. I have put down this Amendment in this form with the full awareness that I shall probably
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get the answer that that, in fact, is what the law, as the Bill is intended to make it, will be in any case. But I have had to do that because I realise that the question of juries is not one that can be raised to-day.
I do not want to ask Her Majesty's Government any questions or press for answers about juries, because I know that a Committee is sitting on that subject at the moment. But the decision of that Committee has not yet come and this Bill will soon become law. The decision of the Committee may be that juries should go, or it may equally be that juries should stay. If they stay, and in any case until the Committee have reported, we are still going to have juries who will decide this class of case. I have therefore thought fit to put down this Amendment, for the reason that juries never give reasons for their decisions, and one may suppose that it is more likely that they will not perhaps take as full an account of the strict law as a judge would if he were making the decision.
What I wish to do is to be able to strengthen the hand of the defence, particularly in a case where somebody who has not the consent of the occupier to enter has none the less done so and been injured. The sort of thing I am thinking of is the ruined house in the middle of a city; or it may be ruins on an unfrequented part of a country estate, or almost any dangerous thing, like a tree or one of those magic attractions which will always induce small boys to climb up them. I have no illusions about the agility of Scottish small boys to climb anything that they have set their hearts to climb; yet do what you will—block up the entrances and put barbed wire round them—they will still get in. I am afraid that there may be hard cases where the landlord has tried extremely hard to keep out these children—or they may be grown-ups—and yet has failed, and they suffer injury.
I hope that this Amendment is a constructive suggestion. It will certainly, I think, be useful in the meantime until the jury situation is decided; and as I have no doubt that, were juries to be abolished in this class of case, it would need legislation thereafter, if it was felt that this clause was not needed, it could perhaps be repealed at the same time.

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Therefore, I shall be most interested to hear the reply of the noble Lord, Lord Forbes, as to whether he thinks it would in fact be an asset to have some such defence as this in the Bill. I beg to move.
Amendment moved—
After Clause 2 insert the said new clause.—(Viscount Colville of Culross.)
LORD KEITH OF AVONHOLM: I appreciate the purpose of this Amendment but I am not at all happy about it. I would ask the noble Viscount, for instance, what exactly is mean by "consent"? If a person comes up to my doorstep or comes up my drive to make an inquiry about something, I should not have thought that he had my consent. Take the case of the person who digs a trench in his field, and suppose a trespasser—I mean a poacher, or some person with a nefarious design—enters the field in the middle of the night and falls into this trench. All this clause says is "not having his consent". That person certainly has not got the occupier's consent. But I am going to assume that he has given no warning of this particular trench. The poacher falls into this trench, and he may come forward and say, "No warning of this trench was given. I have fallen into it. I am entitled under this clause to get damages." I do not say that he might not have his claim thrown out upon some other ground; but it seems to me that if one looks at it from that point of view, this clause does not really cover exactly what is in my noble friend's mind.
My view is that, particularly looking at the position with regard to juries, the matter is adequately covered by Clause 2 as it stands, because the clause provides that the occupier shall show
"such care as in all the circumstances of the case is reasonable."
I should think that the question of the trespasser was adequately covered by that provision, and that it would be a safer clause to meet the trespasser than the clause proposed to be introduced directly to meet that situation. I do not think that the new clause does meet the situation adequately. But I am prepared, if on the Government side it is proposed that this clause shall be accepted, to say nothing more about it. I just want to make it clear to my noble
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friend that I do not think that the clause is really adequate for the purpose for which he intends it.
LORD REID: I think it was clear on Second Reading that my noble friend and I took a slightly different view on one point, and I think we still do. As regards the second point in this new clause, that it should be a defence to give warning, I would agree that that can hardly be proved because it is so indefinite that it would give rise to great difficulties. I would therefore agree with my noble and learned friend in urging the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross, not to press that part of the clause. But I am bound to say that I feel more difficulty about the first half of the clause, where it provides that it shall be a defence to show that all reasonable steps have been taken to prevent access. Not infrequently, there have been cases where children, in particular, have broken through fences, notwithstanding the repeated attempts of the landowner to stop them.
I am thinking in particular of a case where an action for damages was brought against British Railways although they had done their best, by mending a fence time and again, to keep the children out. Under the existing law it was held authoritatively that because of that fact there was no case against them. But under the Bill the matter is left at large. It may well be—I think I indicated this view on Second Reading—that some juries will accept the view that if a landowner has done his best to keep the children out he has exercised all reasonable care. But he may have on his ground some fairly obvious danger which he might, without undue expense, have fenced or removed. At present he is not bound to do that, and it may be said "You knew that these children were defeating your efforts in that they were getting through. You knew that an accident might be very serious, yet you did not spend the few necessary pounds to put this right."
That situation always arises, and one is apt to be wise after the event. In a case like that, the occupier might never have really considered the matter; he might have done it if he had been obliged to. He will he told "You ought to have considered it". I am bound to

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say that I have a fear, particularly so long as these cases go to juries, that children who persist in breaking in and then fall into some kind of danger and, it may be, sustain serious injuries, will recover damages in future in circumstances where they are not able to do so at present. I am not going to express any view about whether that is a good or a bad thing. If there was a division of opinion upon this I do not think that I should wish to press the matter one way or the other. It is a question of policy and I feel that the considerations are pretty evenly balanced. But I think it right to say that there is a point, and a very good point; but I would not support the other part of the clause.
LORD SALTOUN: I should like to support my noble friend in his Amendment. I really do not understand why, in a case of this kind, just because the whole position of juries has been questioned by a Committee, Her Majesty's Government should refuse to give us a judge in this particular case which is so well fitted for it. Juries are often swayed by their sympathy for the victim and have no particular care for the actual law on the matter. I, for my sins (though it is not a case I am thinking very much about), have a very old tower which is an ancient monument, which is gradually being destroyed by the children of the town whom I am unable to keep away; and no expenditure on my part has ever enabled me to succeed in doing so. I am afraid that ultimately the ancient monument will disappear and then I shall have no liability. But it seems to me that under this Bill I might be caught by a jury in a very unfortunate way.
I am thinking, however, much more of the countryside and of country life. If a man has to drain his field, he must leave an open trench, which is a very nasty place for a farm servant to fall into when crossing at night. I am also inclined to wonder who owns Ben Nevis and the Cairngorms, and whether juries will consider that sufficient notice boards have been put round those great areas to prevent people from hurting themselves when they go up. All those things are particularly important, especially at Ben Nevis, where in one area one can see many feet down into the mountain.
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There are great rocks, each the size of an ordinary room, piled one on top of another, with no earth covering them, where one could easily fall down. I wonder who would be responsible and who is the owner who might be liable should someone fall.
THE DUKE OF ATHOLL: My Lords, I should like to support the idea behind this Amendment by my noble friend Lord Colville of Culross, although I agree that there may be practical difficulties to the Amendment as it stands at the moment—for this reason. I believe that at present if one puts a cattle grid in a private road, and someone who has not asked permission walking down the road at night falls into the cattle grid and breaks a leg, one is responsible. At any rate, when we put cattle grids into some of our private roads our lawyers said we must put wire netting over them—which was defeating the point, for it meant that sheep could run straight across, as well as strange children. Accidents are much more likely to happen at night, so that it is no good putting up a warning sign saying, "Cattle grid ahead", because no one will see it at night. I feel that there should be some clause such as this which would enable the owner of land to avoid having any responsibility towards trespassers who, through their own carelessness, hurt themselves while they are on his land.
VISCOUNT STONEHAVEN: I also wish to support the spirit behind this Amendment. I am in very great doubt as to the liability involved where children climb over a fence. That fence may be perfectly secure when the first child goes over it, but he may swing on it and a staple may come out so that the second child, trespassing, may catch its leg upon it and may fall and break a limb. That kind of thing has happened in the past and will happen again. I do not quite see where the liability is going to rest in a case of that kind where children are climbing, perhaps on ruins. One cannot keep them out, for children are children; but I think that something is necessary at the present time to give a reasonable degree of safeguard to occupiers of land and premises of the kind where this can happen, perhaps during the night when they have no possibility of control. I think that either the position should be clarified or some Amendment of this kind should be considered.
5.5 p.m.
LORD FORBES: If I have understood noble Lords correctly, I think we shall all sympathise with the intention of this Amendment, which is to cover the position when, say, a trespasser (as we may loosely call him), climbs over a barbed wire fence, ignoring a notice which says "Danger: keep away from edge", and falls into a quarry. The Amendment seeks to give the occupier in such cases a defence against liability for the resulting injuries. But surely the point is that the occupier already has such a defence. The Bill lays upon him the duty to take reasonable care, and he can maintain that he has done so by putting up the fence or exhibiting a notice. That is his defence, which obviously the court will take into account along with all the other relevant circumstances.
I submit that the Amendment does not give any further advantage to the occupier. It provides that he must take all reasonable steps to prevent access or give warning of the danger. In fact it brings us back to the question of what is "reasonable". It will be for the court to decide what are "reasonable steps", just as under the Bill as it stands at present the court must decide what is "reasonable care". Thus, under the Amendment, as under the Bill in its present form, the occupier's liability rests firmly upon the decision of the Court. But the difference is that the Amendment attempts to specify the kind of reasonable care which must be taken—in this case, of course, care to prevent access. This is contrary to the view of the Law Reform Committee which recommended that:
"detailed elaborate codification of this branch of the law of Scotland should not be attempted but rather that liability should be made to depend upon the broad general principle of culpa."
I am sure the Committee were right in this recommendation.
The circumstances in which people can enter on to land, whether with or without the consent of the occupier, are infinitely varied, and if we try to provide for each type of case we shall find ourselves once more in the kind of confusion which the Bill seeks to remedy. If we take the case of children who, as we have already heard, are notoriously undeterred by warnings of
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danger—indeed they may be attracted by them—is the occupier of premises containing dangerous machinery on which he knows children are in the habit of trespassing to be absolved from liability merely because he puts up a warning notice? Surely the occupier should do more than that. In such circumstances it might well be right for an occupier to take greater precautions against injuries to trespassers than the occupier of, say, an ordinary house and garden ought to take towards his invited visitors. For instance, it might be more important to see that a well is fenced against trespassers than that the bannisters of a staircase are in good repair for guests. It is for this very reason that the whole aim of the Bill is to give the fullest discretion to the courts. I hope that, with what I have said, the noble Viscount will see fit to withdraw his Amendment, though I will undertake to look at this whole matter before the Report stage.
LORD SALTOUN: There is just one point on which the noble Lord did not touch. There is a very old adage which has always been dinned into my ears until I am sick of it:
"Justice should not only be done but be seen to be done."
The general public have a firm conviction that most judges are reasonable men, and they are perfectly convinced that a judge will take a reasonable view of an occupier's liability. I am sorry to say that the general public are not convinced that a jury will take a reasonable view in every case, and I should be very interested to learn the view of Her Majesty's Government on what would be "reasonable precautions" in the case of a place like Ben Nevis.
LORD FORBES: As has already been said, I cannot go into the question of judges and juries to-day, as that matter is at present being considered, and I cannot, of course, prejudge the issue.
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS: I am most grateful to the noble Lords who have spoken and, of course, to Her Majesty's Government for their answer. I thought I was going to have to say that I was sorry the answer was so unsympathetic, but I am delighted that the noble Lord has said he will look at this matter again. I am sorry that the

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clause I have suggested is so full of mistakes; and I should not dream of disagreeing with the two noble and learned Lords on the Cross Benches over the particular mistakes they pointed out. The crux of the matter is this. I believe that the present law is that there is a specified and very low liability towards trespassers as such. We are now bringing in this Bill which produces merely a standard of reasonable care in the circumstances. What we are afraid of is that the "reasonable care" standard that will be laid upon an occupier will result in a higher liability towards the trespasser than we have had heretofore. Therefore, I really think this is something that ought to be looked at again. I, of course, will not dream of pressing this Amendment as such, but I hope that the noble Lord will succeed in finding some answer to this matter on the Report stage. I beg leave to withdraw my Amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Clause 3 [Landlord's liability by virtue of responsibility for repairs]:
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS had given Notice of three Amendments, the first being at the beginning of subsection (1) to insert:
"Subject to the provisions of subsection (3) of this section".
The noble Viscount said: With the Committee's indulgence, I will speak to the next three Amendments together because they are really on the same point. I am afraid that on Second Reading I brought up these two rather detailed matters which perhaps should have been reserved for this stage, and I must confess that I was not altogether satisfied with the answer that I received on that occasion. I am afraid it was perhaps because I had not given proper notice of them. The point is this. The landlord, when he is under a lease to maintain and repair, is not liable for defects on the premises unless he knows about them. That view was supported by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keith of Avonholm. If the landlord does not know about them and the tenant does, it may well be that the tenant would in fact not have shown reasonable care. But it seemed from speeches on the Second Reading that this is by no means certain. What I seek to do is to lay upon the tenant in the cases where he
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knows there is something wrong the duty to tell the landlord that this is so; because otherwise, as I explained on Second Reading, I am afraid that there may be cases where the person who is injured should have reparation but does not get any, because the duty of the tenant was not clear. Therefore I am seeking to insert in the Bill, by this Amendment, a specific duty on the tenant to make quite sure that the land-lord knows about these defects on the premises. I beg to move.
Amendment moved—
Page 2, line 26, at beginning insert ("Subject to the provisions of subsection (3) of this section,").—(Viscount Colville of Culross.)
LORD REID: Perhaps as I said a word of two previously I might add a further word. I, of course, entirely sympathise with the desires of the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross, and it would be very desirable that there should be no loopholes. But I think the position really is all right, because the tenant is the occupier and the primary liability is on him. If he knows about some defect and does nothing at all, then I should have no hesitation in saying that he has failed to exercise the care which he ought to have exercised towards his visitors. He can do one or other of two things. If the duty is on him to repair, then obviously he must repair; but if the duty is not on him to repair, then common sense demands that he shall tell the landlord as soon as possible so as to get the thing put right. In most cases he would do it in his own interest, but perhaps he is not much interested. But, even so, he knows that he is inviting people in, or people are coming who he knows may be injured. He knows he has a duty to take such care as the circumstances allow towards them; and in those circumstances, where an occupier knew of a defect but failed to intimate to the landlord that he wanted it put right, I do not think any jury would say that that occupier had fulfilled his duty. Therefore, I think that in this case there really is no loophole that has to be stopped up.
LORD FORBES: I am grateful to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Reid, for explaining so well why it is not necessary to accept this Amendment. I would just go one stage further and say that I believe that this Amendment

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might have the opposite effect to that intended by the noble Viscount. Let us consider the case, as may happen under the terms of a particular lease, where the onus is on the landlord to remedy any defect, whether he has been notified of the defect or not—it happens that sometimes the whole onus is on the landlord. In that case the proposed new subsection might be held to cut clean across the terms of the lease and to restrict the landlord's obligations. I suggest that this is another example of the dangers of trying to cater for particular cases, and I hope that the noble Viscount will withdraw his Amendment.
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS: I am grateful again to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Reid, and to the noble Lord, Lord Forbes. That is, in fact, exactly the answer I hoped to get; and it is only because it was perhaps not quite so clearly expressed on Second Reading that I thought I ought to put down this Amendment. However, I am glad the position is now quite clear, and I beg leave to withdraw my Amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS moved to add to subsection (4):
"; and 'tenancy under which the landlord is responsible for the maintenance and repair of the premises' shall include a tenancy under which the landlord is under an obligation to renew and replace fixtures during the term of the demise."
The noble Viscount said: This concerns the other point that I raised on Second Reading, and again, if I may say so, I do not think the answer I received was altogether clear; therefore I hope that it may be extended this afternoon. The situation I envisage is this. A landlord who is under liability in his lease to repair and maintain has an obligation put upon him by this clause. There are, however, cases of leases where the landlord does not expressly say he will repair and maintain—in fact, that obligation may be upon the tenant—but what the landlord retains unto himself is the liability to replace and renew fixtures during the terms of the lease. What I want to know is this: in such a case will he have
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the same liability if injury is suffered as the result of a defect in one of the fixtures which he has undertaken to replace and renew, and the injury is caused by a defect which ought to have been put right by him under that liability? I do not think it particularly matters whether this Amendment is phrased
"…'tenancy under which the landlord is responsible for the maintenance and repair of the premises' shall include",
or whether I say, "shall not include". The point is that I want it made quite clear that this is, in fact, the case and it is the intention of Her Majesty's Government under this clause. I beg to move.
Amendment moved—
Page 2, line 47, at end insert ("; and 'tenancy under which the landlord is responsible for the maintenance and repair of the premises' shall include a tenancy under which the landlord is under an obligation to renew and replace fixtures during the term of the demise.")—(Viscount Colville of Culross.)
LORD KEITH OF AVONHOLM: On Second Reading I was not entirely clear what the noble Viscount had in mind, but seeing now the Amendment that he is proposing I have no doubt in saying that I do not think that there is any real trouble about the matter. In Scotland there are two forms of lease: an urban lease—that is to say, the lease of a dwellinghouse—and an agricultural lease. But if a landlord Is responsible for the maintenance and repair of the premises, that certainly includes an obligation to renew and replace what is part of the premises—that is to say, the fixtures. You cannot dissociate the fixtures attached to the premises from the premises themselves; and if the obligation is to be responsible for the maintenance and repair of the premises, I should not think there is the slightest doubt that that would cover fixtures, which are a part of the premises. He will be bound to renew and replace these, if they require renewal and replacement, just as much as he is responsible for general maintenance and repair.
LORD FORBES: Once more, I am grateful to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keith of Avonholm, for answering the noble Viscount so adequately. I hope the noble Viscount will now be able to withdraw his Amendment.
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS: I am afraid not quite, because it is not exactly the point I had in mind—and I hope the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keith of Avonholm, will forgive me when I say this. I envisage the sort of tenancy where the landlord is not under a liability to maintain and repair the premises but is under a liability to replace and renew fixtures, in which case there seems to me to be a certain amount of doubt whether the liability under the clause will apply to him.
LORD KEITH OF AVONHOLM: I must confess that I never heard of such an obligation. I cannot myself quite appreciate how a landlord is liable to repair and maintain fixtures, which are part of the premises, and is not liable to repair and maintain the premises generally. It is not a case I have ever come across; and unless the noble Viscount has an actual case in mind, I must confess I shall not think that there is anything whatever in this Amendment. I say so, with all respect to the doubts and difficulty that the noble Viscount has; but I think that really his doubts are without any solid foundation.
VISCOUNT STONEHAVEN: I am in a deeper fog. In all the leases with which I am connected I think fireplaces and grates would normally be considered fixtures; but the fireplaces and grates are the tenants' property, and when the lease changes they are taken over at valuation by the incoming tenant. Who is responsible, for what, to whom?
LORD KEITH OF AVONHOLM: I am not going to offer opinions upon legal questions. I do not think that that is really the point that is covered by this Amendment.
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS: If there is no such animal, I am sorry; but I was under the impression that this sort of lease did exist. Perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Forbes, would once more see whether there is anything in what I say. Meanwhile, I beg leave to withdraw my Amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Clause 3 agreed to.
Clauses 4 and 5 agreed to.
House resumed.

LEGITIMACY BILL
5.25 p.m.
Order of the Day for the House to be put into Committee read.
Moved, That the House do now resolve itself into Committee.—(Lord Chorley.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.
House in Committee accordingly.
[The LORD AILWYN in the Chair.]
Clause 1:
Amendment of Legitimacy Act, 1926
1.—(1) Subsection (2) of section one of the Legitimacy Act, 1926 (which restricts the operation of that Act in relation to any illegitimate person born when his father or mother was married to a third person) is hereby repealed.
(2) In relation to an illegitimate person to whom it applies by virtue of this section, the Legitimacy Act, 1926, shall have effect as if for references to the commencement of that Act there were substituted references to the commencement of this Act.
LORD CONESFORD LORD CONESFORD moved to leave out Clause 1. The noble Lord said: In the debate on the Second Reading on June 16 I gave notice that, when the Bill reached the Committee stage, I should move the Amendment which I am now moving, to leave out Clause 1. Those attending the Committee this afternoon are not necessarily the same noble Lords who were present on that occasion, and I must apologise to any who were present on the previous occasion if I repeat, necessarily, this afternoon some of the arguments which convinced me, and which I hope will convince the Committee, that this clause is a bad one.
Since 1926, under the Act of Parliament of that year, the law of England has allowed legitimation of an illegitimate child by the subsequent marriage of its parents, provided always that neither of those parents was married to a third person at the time of the birth of the child. This reform of our law made our law substantially the same as it had been for many centuries in Scotland. There was the slight difference in the Scottish law that the requirement of being unmarried to a third party had to be fulfilled at the date of conception, and not the date of birth; but, subject to that difference, the law of England since 1926 has been the

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same as it has been for centuries in Scotland. The reform of our law by the Act of 1926 was, I think, universally recognised as a humane measure. It benefited some innocent children, and it harmed no one. The law as it stands today, both of England and of Scotland, draws a clear distinction between promiscuous intercourse of the unmarried and adulterous intercourse in which one party at least is married. It is that distinction which Clause 1 of this Bill seeks to abolish, and I propose to give reasons to the Committee why this distinction should be maintained.
My view that the distinction should be maintained is supported not only by the views of this House when the matter was debated in 1924, and by the view of the most reverend Primate and the Bishops at that time: it is also strongly supported by the large majority of the recent Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce. My noble and learned friend Lord Morton of Henryton and eleven of his colleagues strongly advised against the change in the law which Clause 1 of this Bill proposes. I agree with almost the whole of the reasoning of those twelve members of the Royal Commission. I would make only this one modification. I have never argued, and I do not argue now, that the prospect of the child's being illegitimate constitutes a deterrent against adultery. I have never used the argument of deterrence. But I agree with the views expressed by the majority of the Royal Commission, that the implication of the change in the law now proposed is deeply injurious to the whole institution of Christian marriage, and indeed of monogamy.
May I read again a few words?—
"It is untrue to say that the principle underlying the present law is that of penalising the child or its parents. So long as marriage is held to be the voluntary union for life of one man with one woman, that conception is wholly incompatible with the provision that one or other of the parties can, during the subsistence of the marriage, beget by some other person children who may later be legitimated. This, indeed, is the essence of the objection to the proposal. Legitimacy is the status held by a lawful child of the marriage. Any departure from that conception can only be made by ignoring the essential moral principle that a man cannot, during the subsistence of his marriage, beget lawful children by another woman."
May I invite the Committee to consider separately the case where the mother
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is unmarried but the father of the illegitimate child is married, and the other case where the mother herself is a married woman? Let me take first the case where the mother is unmarried. In that case, the wife of the father of the illegitimate child is entitled to seek a divorce, but she is not compelled to seek a divorce. She may well think that her duty lies in seeking to preserve the marriage. She may be led to that conclusion by the deepest religious convictions, or by other considerations—by considering the interests of the children of the marriage, or perhaps by her love for her erring husband. Any of these reasons may induce her not to seek a divorce and to do everything in her power to preserve her marriage. I find it abhorrent, as I think other noble Lords may find it, that such a woman should have a new pressure brought to hear upon her, that people should say that she is cruel in not seeking a divorce because thereby she is preventing the child from being legitimated. Not only is that conception abhorrent to me; I very much doubt whether noble Lords who take the other view can be quite satisfied that the legitimacy of the child should depend on the decision of the injured wife whether to seek a divorce or not.
Let me pass to the other case, where the mother of the illegitimate child is a married woman. In that case, the child will not be born illegitimate at all. It will be born apparently in wedlock, and the presumption of legitimacy will apply until that presumption is displaced. The child is born the legitimate child of the existing marriage of the mother. If Clause 1 of the present Bill becomes law, it will be possible first to bastardise a child in relation to the family into which it was born and then to legitimate it as the child of the subsequent marriage of its natural parents.
In the debate on Second Reading, I ventured to quote some sentences from the speech of Lord Phillimore, which he made in the debate in your Lordships' House on February 21, 1924. I shall not repeat the whole of the quotation, but let me remind the Committee that Lord Phillimore considered the case where the mother, unknown to the husband, had a lover and the illegitimate child was the result. The husband remained ignorant of the intrigue until his

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death. What then became the position? Let me quote Lord Phillimore's words dealing with the child [OFFICIAL REPORT, Vol. 56, col. 260]:
"Is he then to be the legitimated child of his actual parents? Is he to he bastardised from being what he has always grown up in the belief that he was? He has always supposed that he was the son of the husband of his mother, he has lived with his brothers and sisters in that belief, and has enjoyed all the comforts of the family. Is he then to find that his real parents are going to say that he was their child, and therefore he is to be legitimated as their child, and necessarily bastardised as regards the position he has always been in before?"
I pointed out that this was not an imaginary example or difficulty, and that two earlier Lord Chancellors, Lord Finlay and Lord Cave, had spoken in the same sense in the debates in 1924. I am delighted to see on the Cross-Benches my noble and learned friend Lord Simonds, and to know that he will be intervening later upon this Amendment.
On Second Reading, when the noble and learned Viscount the Lord Chancellor came to deal with this passage in my speech—I will not quote his exact words but I know that he will not quarrel with my description—he said quite fairly that the problem of the bastardisation of the child might conceivably arise apart from the present measure altogether and, secondly, that the courts would be able to sort the matter out when the question arose. Let me say a word about each of these points. I admit that this question of the bastardisation of the child could conceivably arise apart from this Bill altogether, but I think that noble and learned Lords will probably agree with me when I say that in most cases it is unlikely that the presumption of legitimacy could be displaced unless the mother were prepared to give evidence to secure that result, and that the mother would have little reason to give evidence to secure that result, unless the bait were held out to her by Clause 1 of the present measure, whereby she could secure the legitimacy of the child with a different father.
I do not doubt for one moment that, if we were so ill-advised as to allow Clause 1 to become law, our judges would sort out the ensuing problems. It is not any doubt about the ability of the
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courts that troubles me. What I ask your Lordships to consider is this: whether your Lordships feel that such legal proceedings, first to bastardise and then to legitimate a child, is in the interests of that child. I ask your Lordships to assume a sensitive child, perhaps of seven years of age, who has grown up happily in a family with elder brothers and sisters, a child who loved the husband of his mother, who always believed that that husband was his father and who always called him "father". Then that husband dies. On that man's death the child can then become the victim and the subject of these hideous legal proceedings, first to bastardise him, and then to legitimate him under a new name. To me, if words have their ordinary meaning, such treatment of the child is cruelty.
I know that noble Lords who take differing views on the merits of Clause 1 all wish to benefit the child and to do the best for the child. But if the innocence of the child is itself a ground for the legitimation of that child, then all children are innocent; and that is a ground, not for this Bill, but for the abolition of illegitimacy. Illegitimacy could be abolished by law, as I pointed out on the last occasion; but it is not done by Clause 1 of this Bill. The authors of this Bill seem to waver by making too little of marriage, on the one hand, and too much of it, on the other. They make, in my opinion, too little of marriage when they say that a husband during his marriage can beget a legitimate child by some mother other than his wife. On the other hand, having done that, as it seems to me, great wrong, they then say that the child can be legitimated only if the parties, who have already outraged one marriage, go through the form of entering another. Quite frankly, my own view is that less injury would be done to the institution of Christian marriage, and indeed to the institution of monogamy, if all illegitimacy were abolished by Act of Parliament and the law said frankly that legitimacy had nothing to do with marriage at all.
There is one other argument that might conceivably be put forward against me. It does not concern the merits of Clause 1, but concerns the propriety of our reaching our own decision on those

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merits. It may possibly be urged that Clause 1 of the present Bill is a most important clause, perhaps the most important in the whole Bill, and that the House of Commons has passed it. If such an argument against our voting on the merits is put forward, I shall be very happy to deal with it in reply; but I think I shall best serve the convenience of the Committee if I do not deal in advance with an argument which no noble Lord may put forward. I believe that Clause 1 of the present Bill is unprincipled and wrong, and I believe that, if it were passed into law, it would cause more misery than it cured. I ask the Committee to reject it. I beg to move.
Amendment moved—
Leave out Clause 1.—(Lord Conesford.)
5.44 p.m.
THE LORD BISHOP OF EXETER: I should like to support this Amendment and to oppose Clause 1, for the reason that it seems to me quite clear that this clause undermines the principle upon which English marriage law is based—that is to say, the principle of monogamy—and, indeed, is totally inconsistent with it. For by this clause the law will be made to say that it is possible for a man Legally to beget children of two women during the same time. That seems to me to be completely inconsistent with monogamy. The clause will make the law say that the law can pretend by means of a legal fiction that a man married at one time to a particular lady was nevertheless, for the purpose of the legitimation of a child, at the same time to be deemed to be married to another lady. That seems to me to be totally inconsistent with the principle of monogamy.
This whole question arises, of course, as an offshoot of the legal device of legitimation by subsequent marriage; and that device has a very ancient history. It was the brain child, I believe, of the first Christian Emperor, Constantine. He devised it as a temporary measure in order to persuade persons living in the quasi-legal state of concubini to advance from that into the state of full legal marriage. It was a temporary bribe, so to speak, to get rid of concubini, so far as possible, and to substitute for it proper marriage. The
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Emperor Justinian made this temporary provision a permanent part of the Roman Law; and so it remains.
The years passed by; the Empire was divided, and the jurisdiction of marriage questions in the West of Europe passed into the hands of the Church. But this law of Justinian was never entirely forgotten, although there was a doubt as to whether or how far it applied. I am glad to think that it was a predecessor of mine in the See of Exeter who, tired of the conflicting opinions of lawyers and irritated by the ambiguity of the law, wrote to the then Pope to ask for a clear answer; and he got one. The very clear answer was that subsequent marriage legitimates children born before the marriage of two people in all cases—not only of concubines, but in all cases—except the issue of an adulterous union or the issue of incest.
The extension of this device of legitimation by subsequent marriage had as its motive, for the most part, sympathy and understanding for children otherwise illegitimate. There is no question here of hard-heartedness on the part of the Church or of the Christian lawyers. Nor was the exception depriving of this benefit the children of an adulterous union the result of hard-heartedness or lack of sympathy; it was the result of a refusal to allow the heart to rule the head. Legitimation by subsequent marriage has a workable principle. It is that the father and mother may be deemed to have married one another at the time when the child was either conceived or born. And so considerate were lawyers of those days of the interests of the child that they made it a principle that the date should be either the conception or the birth, whichever was more favourable to the child: it had not to be always one or the other, as is the case now in England and in Scotland.
The principle was that the law might pretend that the father and the mother married one another at the time of the conception, or else of the birth, But, of course, in those days, when the legal formalities for marriage were not so precise and clear as they are now, and when a marriage could be established by repute—that is to say, by the private exchange of vows between the man and woman, followed by a period of cohabitation and the setting up of a general

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reputation that they were man and wife—it was not altogether unreasonable to assume that the marriage had, in fact begun at the moment when the two parties first had intercourse and the child was conceived. In the Middle Ages it was often difficult to say with absolute certainty of any marriage, other than a marriage formally celebrated in facie Ecclesiae, precisely at what date the marriage did begin. Lawyers therefore implemented these types of legitimation by subsequent marriage, assuming always the father and mother did marry in facie Ecclesiae and put the marriage beyond all doubt.
The law is indeed very powerful, but I cannot for the life of me see how it lies even within the power of the law to be able to pretend that a man and a woman were married to one another at a time when that same law says it was legally impossible for them to be so married. I cannot see that this is to do anything but hold the law up to contempt—to presume that the law can just imagine, pretend and deem what it itself says is impossible. It is distasteful to oppose this clause, because it exposes anybody to the objection that he is unsympathetic, unimaginative and indifferent to the sufferings of those who are illegitimate. I wonder why it is that, if the main motive of the promoters of this Bill is simply that illegitimate children, some of whose misfortune can be remedied by the proposed terms of this Bill, they have not at the same time taken the opportunity to amend the Act of 1926 by extending the provisions of legitimation by subsequent marriage to the succession to titles of honour? After all, if that restriction is left, in some cases at least the purposes of this clause may be totally defeated.
I will not take an example from your Lordships' House. If it is, or was, the privilege of your Lordships in the common mind always to be titled, it is, or was, the common view that baronets were always bold and bad. The bold and bad baronet commits adultery and begets a son. He is divorced by his wife, he marries his mistress and in a year or two he has another son. Ten years later, having mellowed and become more cautious and less bad, he sends these two boys to a preparatory school. He
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sends them to the same school because he is less bad, and there is only one best school in the country and he wants both boys equally to go to it. There we have them in the fifth form, Smith Major and Smith Minor. The baronet has the misfortune to break his neck in the hunting field, or more probably on the Great North Road or the Preston Motorway; and then, all of a sudden, before the astonished gaze of all the other small and curious preparatory school boys, Smith Major becomes Smith Minor and Smith Minor becomes Smith Major; and the preparatory schoolboys, like so many Cornishmen, will know the reason why, and the whole purpose of this clause is destroyed. If this clause becomes law these two little boys are exposed to what seems to me an unnecessary ignominy.
It is from no lack of sympathy or understanding that I and other noble Lords oppose this clause. But one must face the truths of life. It does happen that the fathers eat sour grapes and it is the children's teeth which are set on edge. We are tempted to think that that is in all cases unjust. That may be because our human conception of justice is imperfect. I do not wish to impose upon the House a tedious theodicy, but it is possible that we underestimate the close nexus there is between children and their parents and the two-way traffic of credit and discredit, advantage and disadvantage, and benefit and evil which is continually passing between the two. Every child owes a great deal of gratitude for good to its parents. One must tell them, also, how they have received a certain amount of evil in, by or from their parents. That has to be taken and set against the many benefits which they have received. So it comes that the father has eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge. But it is not necessarily so very unjust as is sometimes maintained. However that may be, it is a fact that the sins of the fathers have evil consequences for the children, and we cannot always do anything about it. We hang a murderer, or we sentence him to life imprisonment, but the matter does not end there. A heavy cloud of shame hangs over the heads of the children for the rest of their lives. But no one would argue that, because the children are innocent, they ought not to suffer that shame and that

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therefore the murderer should be reprieved The interests of justice would not permit it.
I think that here is a similar position in a matter of less importance. The parents commit adultery, and the children are not born of a lawful marriage. I should have thought that the right way for society to discharge its duty of mitigating the evil consequences to the children as much as possible was not by setting up a legal pretence that their parents were married when in fact they clearly were not, but so to manage our own behaviour as to remove from illegitimate children the very last vestiges of social stigma. I cannot think that illegitimate children suffer very much because of their legal disabilities. I can imagine that they would suffer a good deal if they were made the object of scorn, or were treated differently in ordinary matters of day-to-day living from a legitimate person. If that is so, if they are so treated, that is a grave indictment on us, on society; for what it means is that, in effect, we are condoning the sins of the parents and passing moral judgment on the children. We could correct that if we could cease to pass any moral judgment on the children but passed a much more severe moral judgment on the parents. Then, I believe, there would be fewer illegitimate children born; the stigma which attaches to them would he more bearable, less onerous than it is now, and society would not be threatened at its very roots, the principle of monogamous marriage.
6.0 p.m.
BARONESS WOOTTON OF ABINGER: My Lords, I find the arguments that are being used a little puzzling. It has been argued by the noble Lord, Lord Conesford—and he quoted the Royal Commission in support of the argument—and also by the right reverend Prelate who has just spoken, that if this Bill passes, a man who begets a child by his mistress will be held to be begetting legal children by two women during the currency of his marriage, and that therefore the institution of monogamous marriage will he completely undermined. Surely that is not so. A man who makes an adulterous union with his mistress and begets a child will beget an illegitimate child. It will be born illegitimate;
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it will remain illegitimate all its life unless the previous marriage is subsequently dissolved in accordance with the law and the child is subsequently legitimated.
Surely the fallacy of this argument can be seen by the parallel case of the law of marriage. A man may live with his mistress and he may be divorced by his wife on that account. Subsequently he marries his mistress. According to the secular law of this country the second marriage is perfectly valid. No one argues that because the first marriage is dissolved and the second is legal, therefore at the time he entered into the adulterous union with his mistress he was in fact contracting two marriages at the same time. I think the parallel is exact. In each case, during the currency of the first marriage the union is adulterous, the offspring is illegitimate. The union may become regularised if the first marriage is dissolved, and by the same logic the offspring of that union may become legitimated in the same circumstances.
LORD KEITH OF AVONHOLM: My Lords, as one who supported this proposal on the Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce, may I say a few words? Of course, I recognise that this proposal is contrary to the Canon Law, to the law of Scotland and to the law of England as it at present exists. But we are faced here with a real problem. As the noble Lady who has just spoken has said, the question can never arise so long as the first marriage is maintained. But there are two situations: first, the married man may have intercourse with a mistress and beget by her a child. That child can never be legitimated so long as the marriage subsists. But it may happen that the wife of that man brings divorce proceedings against him on the ground of adultery and obtains a divorce. In that case, if the man then marries his mistress, this Bill, if passed, would legitimate that child.
The other case may seem, and I think it is, a more difficult case. A married woman as a result of adulterous intercourse has a child, and again so long as that marriage subsists the child can never be legitimated. If the husband brings an action of divorce against his wife, as he may very well do if he is aware of this adulterous intercourse, and

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obtains a divorce, then the adulterer and the adulterous wife may marry, and again, if this Bill passes, the child will be legitimated. That is a situation that, as things exist, however much we may regret it, is happening very frequently.
A great deal has been said about a child being at once a legitimated child and a bastard, or bastardising the child that is presumed to be legitimate; and, of course, a child that is born during wedlock is presumed to be legitimate. But it may well be that the husband of the marriage in which that child is born may repudiate the child merely because he is satisfied that the child is not his child, and on that ground he obtains a divorce. I am going to say nothing—because I am not entirely familiar with it—about the procedure of having that child declared an illegitimate child in England, but there would be no trouble about it in Scotland. It may well be that the husband may bring an action to have it declared that that was not his child and that it was a bastard. In Scotland I think that that could be done. It may be that the other interested parties—it may be the father of the child or the mother of the child—could bring similar proceedings. And, of course, in that situation I can see that no harm could be done by that child being legitimated by the marriage of its parents.
That is the sort of situation which is arising one might almost say daily. During the war it was a situation which obviously arose. A child would be born to a married woman. The husband had been away for two years or longer at the war; and it was perfectly obvious that that child was not a child of the marriage. It was born in wedlock in the sense that the marriage was still subsisting, and it would be presumed legitimate until in some way it was found or declared to be illegitimate. And, again, in that situation the child could be legitimated, if this were the law, by the marriage of the parents. That is, as I see it, a real situation that is happening to-day. So long as the marriage subsists of course there can be no question of legitimation at all. But if the marriage is dissolved, then the proposal is that in that case, if the father and mother marry, the child should be legitimated.
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Extreme cases have been suggested by my noble and learned friend Lord Conesford. I must confess that I myself have some difficulty in thinking that the cases that he suggests are cases that are very likely to arise. I can hardly imagine, in the case of a child who was born in wedlock, who has not been repudiated as the child of the husband, where the marriage has subsisted for ten or fifteen years and the child has gone to school and so on as the legitimate child of that marriage, that after that long period of time the child is going to be bastardised and going to be legitimated by the subsequent marriage of the parents. Theoretically it is the sort of case that can arise, but in real life and real fact I hardly see that it could arise. For those reasons I am prepared to support this clause.
6.10 p.m.
LORD SALTOUN: I should like to ask for some explanation about this Bill as it stands. I come from a country where it was so extremely necessary for poor people to have children that for many ages it was the custom for unmarried people to live together and only to marry when it was clear that a child was to result from the marriage. Among the wealthier classes it was the case that often before their marriage they had to get a dispensation from the Pope which, if it was given at all, took three years to come. That led to the system of hand-fasting, as it was called, and it was perfectly natural. But in the Bill as it stands we are asked to extend that to cases where children are born in adultery—I will put it that way.
It seems to me that two questions arise. First, is it wise to legislate in such a fashion that you say a thing is a fact when it is not a fact? I have read a great deal in the Press about the stigma of bastardy. As a matter of fact, in my experience I have known many people who are illegitimate and I do not think that they really suffer very much from the stigma—and, as we know, it was a title not of shame but of pride to William the Conqueror. But if there is a stigma, I would point out that it is not affixed by the parents, it is affixed by the people; and it seems to me that in this case we are merely adding another term of abuse to the English language in the word "legitimated." But the question

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that worries me is, does legitimation convey rights to property and rights of succession? It seems to me that that is a most important question. I do not know the law of England and I should be most happy if some noble Lord would enlighten me.
6.12 p.m.
THE MARQUESS OF SALISBURY: When I had the temerity at the end of the debate on the Second Reading of this Bill to ask for some indication of the Government's views on the issues raised by Clause 1, my noble and learned friend the Lord Chancellor gently rebuked me by saying that it was hardly for me to reproach the Government for their silence when I had not expressed any view of my own. Well, I do not complain about that; I think it was what I believe is called, in legal parlance, "fair comment." But actually, I still think it rather odd that the Government have no advice at all to give to the Committee on this particular clause. After all, I think it is generally agreed, whatever view we take about it that the clause raises most important issues, both of law and of morals. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Denning, to whom the House always listens with such respect—I am sorry not to see him here this afternoon—made this clear when he said at the outset of his speech on Second Reading [OFFICIAL REPORT, Vol. 216, col. 1190]:
"Your Lordships are asked this afternoon to set your seal on a great change in the law of England."
Those were Lord Denning's words. The most reverend Primate the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, speaking in the same debate, said that the Bill raised great moral issues on both sides.
This, as I see it, is not in fact, as the Lord Chancellor seemed to think, an ordinary Private Member's Bill dealing with some question of secondary importance which does not matter very much one way or another. I submit that it is a measure—this is particularly true of Clause 1—that raises very wide issues indeed. In those circumstances, I cannot help regretting that the Government have thought it right to adopt the attitude that they have no particular views of their own as a Government, but would be content, to quote the words of the Lord Chancellor:
"to be guided by the wishes of the House."
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However, having said that in my own defence, I feel, in view of what my noble and learned friend has said, that I ought at any rate to try, though with great deference, for I am not a lawyer, to give my views, for what they are worth, on Clause 1. Quite briefly, I am against Clause 1 for the simple reason that, as I understand it, it requires the law to lend itself to something that is patently not true. The broad principle of legitimacy as it has been long understood in English law is, after all, clear, simple and unequivocal. It is defined with crystal clear accuracy in the great new English Dictionary. There it is said that the definition of "legitimate" is
"Of a child having the status of one lawfully begotten; entitled to full filial rights."
There then follows a note which I would commend to the particular attention of the Committee. This note says:
"According to English law all children are legitimate who are born in lawful wedlock, and no others."
That is a perfectly clear, simple, definite statement, and that, I think, is a fair definition of what Lord Denning in his speech on Second Reading called "the old Common Law argument", which has been, I believe I am right in saying, the basis of British law on legitimacy for many centuries now.
But, as I understand them, the promoters of this Bill say that, while that may be good law, it is very hard on the child who, through no fault of his own, but entirely through the fault of his mother (in the case with which I am particularly concerned), has to bear throughout his life the stigma of illegitimacy. I think that that is a fair statement of their point of view. In their view, that is a wrong which must be expunged. They say that it is not very difficult to expunge it; all that is needed is to make use of a legal fiction. By this convenient fiction the court, should the matter come to court, will, in certain circumstances, be empowered legally to declare that a child that has hitherto been regarded as the offspring, born at a certain date in lawful wedlock, to a certain woman and one man, shall henceforth in certain circumstances be legally transformed into the offspring, born equally in lawful wedlock, on one and the same date, of the

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same woman and an entirely different man. That, in effect, is, as I understand it in plain words, what Clause 1 proposes.
I do not for one moment question the purity of the motives that have actuated those who support this Bill. I fully realise that their only motive is to try to save the child from the unhappy results of his mother's sin. But that does not, to my mind, alter the fact, however one may try to wrap it up, that, apart from any injury which the proposal does to the institution of Christian marriage—the right reverend Prelate, the Lord Bishop of Exeter, has already dealt with this—what the clause asks the law to do is solemnly to declare something which the judge, counsel and everybody else in court will know to be nothing else than a thumping lie—and that is what it is. All those people must be aware that at the date of the birth of the child—and I would say, if I may, to the noble Baroness, Lady Wootton of Abinger that that is the relevant date, and not some subsequent date—the natural father and mother of it were in fact not joined in lawful wedlock with each other. On the contrary, at any rate one, and maybe both, were joined in lawful wedlock with somebody else. How can any legal fiction, however ingenious and well-intentioned, alter that hard fact?
The noble and learned Lord, Lord Denning, if I understood his speech aright, thought that the institution of marriage was so tarnished already that to besmirch it a little more would not matter very much. He said [OFFICIAL REPORT, Vol. 216, col. 1192]:
"In the present day, we have divorce and people can re-marry. When the union is made lawful by marriage, the fruit of that union, either before or since, should be rendered legitimate too. The only argument one can find against it is the old Common Law argument.…"
With all deference to the noble Lord, I still prefer what he dismissed briefly as "the old Common Law argument." At any rate—and I will say this to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keith of Avonholm—it does not condone adultery. If I am told that the principle of the Common Law has already been breached by the Act of 1926, I would answer that, whether it was right or wrong to make that breach—and we are
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not concerned with that to-day—the deviation from this great principle in the 1926 Act, as the most reverend Primate himself recognised in the Second Reading debate, is very different from that proposed in the present Bill. For the provision in the 1926 Act applies only to persons who at the time of the birth of the child, though not married to each other, were, at any rate, not married to anyone else. Surely, in comparison with the present proposal that may be described as a "white" legal fiction.
It may be pointed out by those who support this clause that in all I have said I have not spoken one single word about the position of the children who are the fons et origo this particular measure. If I have not, it is not because I have not the deepest sympathy for those who suffer from the result of their parents' sin. But, as has already been pointed out, there is the question: will their situation really be much better as a result of this Bill? A child may be quite happy to be regarded as a child of Mr. A. Will it really help him to have the true story exposed in court? Will it help him to be declared a bastard of Mr. A. and then a legitimate son of Mr. B., when everybody there and everybody outside will know perfectly well that in fact Mrs. A. and Mr. B. were not married at the time of his birth? And what would happen if Mrs. A.—a lady of very free and easy morals—had two children by two lovers? That is something which happens, I am sorry to say, not infrequently. That is a possibility which your Lordships must not ignore.
In the event of the happy disappearance of Mr. A. by divorce or death, which father of the children does she marry? Under the Bill one child can be legitimised and one cannot. Who does Mrs. A. choose, and how does she choose? I feel that it is an impossible dilemma for her and very hard on the other child. I am putting that particular instance forward not in any frivolous spirit, but merely to indicate into what deep waters we may get if we depart from the fundamental principles which hitherto have governed the laws of legitimacy in this country. I believe that this Bill, however well-intentioned—and I am sure that it is extremely well-intentioned—is based on sentiment and not on morality; and we really must not confuse the two. For that reason,

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reluctantly—because I sympathise so deeply with the motives of those who have promoted the Bill—but with deep conviction, I shall be obliged to vote against this clause if the matter is carried to a vote. That is the reason why I believe that, whatever personal feelings noble Lords may have, the Committee would be wise to reject this clause.
6.24 p.m.
VISCOUNT SIMONDS: I propose to be very brief. Indeed, after the powerful speech of the noble Lord who moved the rejection of this clause, and other speeches that I have heard, I should not have thought it necessary to say one word but for the fact that my noble friend Lord Conesford, in opening, said he had my support, and that I took the view which my predecessors in office as Lord Chancellor had taken of this clause in the years 1924 and 1926. I want to say at once that having given, I hope, the most earnest consideration I could to this matter, I do most heartily support the Amendment. I regard this as a bad clause, had in principle and in law, and likely to undermine, to some extent, the ideal of Christian marriage and to lead to grave confusion in the administration of the law.
I am going to ask something very pedestrian. The noble Lord, Lord Chorley, who moved the Second Reading of the Bill in language which, if I may say so, was temperate and fair, said something which caused me great astonishment. I am not for one moment disputing the importance of this Bill, because the status of 100 or even 10 children is a matter of great importance; but I am wondering whether, in its scope, it is not far less wide than the noble Lord said. He said [OFFICIAL REPORT, V01. 216, col. 1183]:
"I have obtained the figures for 1955, when the total stood as 32,000, and for 1957 when it had reached as many as 35,500—an increase of 3,500 in two years. I am, of course, giving round figures. Quite a substantial number of these illegitimate children must have been born in wedlock."
I wonder upon what foundation that statement was built. Let me say at once that, had I had anything to do with it, I should have supported the Bill of 1926, which did remove the slur or stigma which rested on illegitimate children; but I find very great difficulty in sup-
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posing that even a substantial number of this 35,500 were children born in wedlock.
Let me remind the House of the position. The noble Marquess, Lord Salisbury, has already done so. I should like to quote from the Third Edition of a book which I have reason to hope, and indeed believe, is an accurate statement of the law. I refer to Halsbury's Laws of England, where it is stated:
"Every child born of a married woman during the subsistence of the marriage is prima facie legitimate and the presumption of legitimacy arises also where the child is born not more than the possible period after the dissolution of the marriage by death or other wise."
That means the period of gestation which the law admits. I am dealing now, as your Lordships will see, with the case of an adulterous union with a married woman; for this purpose, it does not matter whether the man is married or not. Now the married woman has a child, and that child is regarded as legitimate and born in wedlock; and that presumption can be displaced only by the most cogent proof. Anybody who has any experience of these matters knows how difficult it is to displace that presumption of legitimacy; and when the noble Lord, Lord Chorley, speaks of 35,000 in respect of whom that presumption has been displaced I must say that I wonder how he got his figure.
Let me again cite from the book to which I have referred:
"Where, however, in any legal proceedings the enforcement of a legal right or the establishment of a claim to property or a dignity or the making of an order for custody or maintenance of a child of the marriage depends on the legitimacy of a particular person, the court in determining the existence of the right or claim will determine also the question of legitimacy. Where, however, no such right or claim is involved the court will not entertain the question of a person's legitimacy on the application of any person but himself."
How many cases have there been where the court, in such proceedings as that, has bastardised a child? If I may say so, it is not at all fair to take the case of the period during the war when, of course, there were very special circumstances. But how often does it happen in the experience of any of your Lordships that a person in such proceedings as I have mentioned is declared to be illegitimate? I am saying that only for

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the purpose of showing that the scope of the Bill, even if it becomes law, will be small. The number of grievances of illegitimate children removed will be comparatively small, but there will be a grave violation of the principle for which we have always stood and for which the Law of Scotland has stood until this moment. And let me add this: I am sure of one thing in the world: that my noble and learned friend Lord Keith of Avonholm would not dare to get up in Scotland and make, in regard to the law of Scotland, a proposal that he is prepared to sanction in regard to the law of England.
Now I said I would be brief, and I will be brief. I regard this as a grave intrusion upon our law. I would just add this, because I know some of your Lordships have referred to it. There is the case where there has been a divorce and where the suggestion may be that the woman is pregnant with the child of her lover. That may be; but there again may I venture to quote what I have found written somewhere:
"The presumption of legitimacy is not affected by the fact that the wife is shown to have committed adultery with any number of men. It must be affirmatively proved, before the child can be bastardised, that the husband did not have sexual intercourse with his wife at the time when it was conceived."
It is not a matter of the gossip in the market place or anything of that kind; it must be strictly proved in court, in proceedings in which such a matter is admissible, that the child is not legitimate. I would regret anything which made any intrusion upon that whatever, and, as I say, not only is this a violation of a principle which many people hold sacred and which therefore your Lordships should, I think, be very reluctant to impinge upon, but I believe it will cause quite as much difficulty and hardship as the law as it now stands.
LORD KEITH OF AVONHOLM: May I just say that I would not say for England what I was not prepared to say for Scotland, and as a matter of fact the minority in the Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce was composed of quite a number of Scotsmen and Scotswomen, including one of the present incumbents of the Scottish Bench.
VISCOUNT SIMONDS: My noble friend must allow me to say that he has not the opportunity of saying it in regard to the law of Scotland.
LORD KEITH OF AVONHOLM: I know.
6.33 p.m.
LORD COHEN: I venture with some hesitation to speak after the speeches of my two learned brethren. Let me say at once that I particularly agree with one observation made by the noble Marquess regretting the absence of my noble and learned friend Lord Denning; and I would only add that I regret even more the absence of the most reverend Primate. I had the good fortune to hear his speech on the Second Reading and I read the whole debate, and in the end I found myself completely convinced by what the most reverend Primate and my noble and learned friend Lord Denning said. I had hoped on this occasion to leave it to them to repeat what they said and to remain silent, but in their absence I feel I must just state briefly my reasons for differing from my noble friend Lord Conesford and my noble and learned friend Lord Simonds.
First of all, I would refer to the definition which the noble Marquess, Lord Salisbury, quoted from the dictionary—the definition of "legitimate" as born in lawful wedlock. It seems to me, while fully accepting that definition, that that pass was sold when the Legitimacy Act was passed. My main reason for supporting Clause 1 of the present Bill is that it seems to me a reasonable and logical extension of what was then done. I quite recognise that it may give rise to difficult cases. I confess that, despite the high authority from which it came, I was not impressed by the citation that my noble friend Lord Conesford gave as from Lord Phillimore, backed, as I understand it, by what Lord Finlay and Lord Cave said in a previous debate in this House, because I regard that as a case so unlikely to occur that it can be safely disregarded.
If I followed him aright, what he said was that we were to deal with the position of a child born of an adulterous union with a man but living for years in happy belief with the original husband and wife, when after an interval the husband died and then proceedings started. I

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cannot think it likely that, if nothing had been done before that, after that interval of time steps would be taken to bastardise that child. I would add that I should have thought that that was so exceptional a case that it was not a reason for leaving in this position a disputable number of children—I agree with my noble and learned friend Lord Simonds on that point; but at any rate a substantially larger number than there would be in the position of the case cited by the noble Lord. I think that that was not sufficient reason for abandoning what I believe to be a good change in the law.
Then there was the case given by the right reverend Prelate the Lord Bishop of Exeter of the bold, bad baronet. That is a possible case. But there, again, I think it is such an exceptional case that it is not a reason for deviating from what would otherwise, one would believe, be the right principle. My chief reason for supporting this proposal—if I may cite just one passage from the speech of the most reverend Primate made in the previous debate—is to be found in his words where he says [OFFICIAL REPORT, Vol. 216, col. 1186]:
"The purpose of the Bill is a very simple one and one that attracts our natural sympathy; it is to relieve some children, or perhaps I should say some more children, of the title and status of illegitimacy which they derived from the moral illegitimacy of their parents. They were born out of wedlock. Nothing can ever alter that fact. The fault of it is in no sense the fault of the children, but they are penalised by bearing the stigma of illegitimacy for what is not their fault. Is that to go on?"
My Lords, I believe it ought not to go on, and that we can do justice and treat kindly these children without adding any further serious risk to the moral principle which the right reverend Prelate the Lord Bishop of Exeter has stated and with which I respectfully agree. My noble and learned friend Lord Simonds has said that we should be altering the question of the onus of proof. I do not think that that is so. I think the proof would still be where it lies now, and it is a difficult onus to prove. We certainly might increase the number of cases in which the courts had to decide, but the difficulty of that decision does not seem to me to be a reason why we should continue to leave these children exposed for life to the slur of illegitimacy. I must
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apologise for detaining your Lordships, but I thought I ought to state my reasons for opposing this Amendment.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: As I understand it, my noble friend Lord Salisbury chides me for two reasons—believe me, when I say "chides" I do not mean that I am in the least offended, but I should like to answer them because I value his opinion. I think the first was that the Government of which I have the honour to be a member did not take up a governmental view on this point. Well, I would remind my noble friend that in 1926 when this actual point came up in an Amendment to the Bill in the House of Commons, Mr. Neville Chamberlain, my noble friend Lord Swinton and Sir Winston Churchill (then Chancellor of the Exchequer) were—I am sure my memory is right—members of the Government and voted for the principle of Clause 1; as did the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, and Mr. Ramsay Macdonald, who were not members of the Government. Those three members of the Government voted for the principle of this clause, which was defeated, and the two prospective Prime Ministers whom I have mentioned also voted for it. But I think that it is fair to say that this Government is not taking up an attitude which is unusual, and my noble friend was inclined——
THE EARL OF SWINTON: I think that what actually happened was that the Government put up the Under-Secretary at the Home Office to make a speech, and he spoke, presumably representing the Home Office view, in the contrary sense to which Sir Winston Churchill and I and others voted. Oddly enough, apparently, he voted against the Government.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: At any rate, it was not a Government view. If three so distinguished members of the Government as my noble friend Lord Swinton, Mr. Neville Chamberlain, and Sir Winston Churchill voted the other way, I think it is fair to say that there was no Government view de facto—though I am not prepared to argue whether there was one de jure. But I think I am right that, in regard to Sir Alan Herbert's Bill in 1937, the Government, of which the noble Marquess was a member, left it to the House, and after the House had approved the principle

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they then gave assistance to it. I hope, therefore, that the noble Marquess (I think his uncle was still a member of the Government in 1926; and he himself was a member of the Government in 1937) will not suggest a higher standard of perfection for a Government of which he is not a member than for one of which he was.
THE MARQUESS OF SALISBURY: I think it is fair to say that, if I was a member of the Government, I was an extremely junior member, and certainly not a member of the Cabinet. I do not know what view I would have taken then. I do not say that I would have taken a different view; but I was not consulted on the line the Government took on that important matter.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: If the Government took the view that they should get the opinion of the House, of course it was open to the noble Marquess to make an objection to their taking that view; but history does not relate that he did so: and after twenty-two years he must be taken to have acquiesced, whether he agreed impliedly or not. Therefore, on that point, I hope that, on reflection, he will not continue to chide the present advisers of Her Majesty's Government.
THE MARQUESS OF SALISBURY: Of course—but no, I will not interrupt again.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: The noble Marquess may not know it, but I have firmly resolved to encourage interruptions from everybody who wants to interrupt me. I am looking forward to someone beating the record of the most reverend Primate and to interrupt me more than nine times in one speech.
That was the first point. Therefore, so far as Her Majesty's Government are concerned, I think that it is in accordance with precedent that, on a matter of this kind, Her Majesty's Government leave it to the House to declare its view. The second point on which my noble and learned friend chid me was that he said that this involved very important legal matters and that I had not advised the House. That is an entirely personal imperfection. I spent some two to three columns of Hansard informing the House of the difficulties that arose on this point,
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and I did my best to put before noble Lords the legal difficulties and the full implications of the clause. My noble and learned friend Lord Conesford was good enough to deal with my arguments to-day, and to say that of course the clause is workable; and he went on to argue, as he was perfectly entitled to do, that it is undesirable.
I only wanted to make these points because I should like to assure my noble friend Lord Salisbury that I did my best to put the legal difficulties that arose, and I leave it to noble Lords who were present and who listened to my speech to decide whether I fulfilled my duty on that point. I have tried very hard, ever since this matter was mooted, to see if it was workable, because it naturally would be the duty of the Attorney-General in another place and myself to inform the House if we did not think it was workable. I still come to the conclusion that it is workable; but, as those of your Lordships who are good enough to listen to me (very often, I am afraid) in your Lordships' House know, there is nothing on which I am more reluctant not to express my own opinion. I call it my firmness of opinion; my friends call it my crass obstinacy, which is one of my characteristics. Whichever it is, I do make the habit of expressing my own opinion; and while I take the view—and so do Her Majesty's Government—that this is not a matter for a Cabinet decision or a Government decision, I should not like my noble friend Lord Salisbury to feel that I was afraid to express my view and to give my reasons for it.
I have tried to weigh up what it comes to at the end of the day—and that is, on the one side, as the majority of the Royal Commission put it, the harm that may be done to the institution of marriage; and, on the other side, the position of the child. My noble friend Lord Keith of Avonholm has told us his view to-day, and I hope he will agree with me that I put it fairly when I repeat my summary of his view—and I ask him to correct me if I am wrong. They called it illogical and unjust that in some cases the parents should be able to regularise their union while the innocent child was deprived of the benefit of legitimation and was left to suffer the stigma of illegitimacy; and they found no reason

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to suppose that the restriction was in any way a deterrent to illicit unions, particularly as the parents could, for all practical purposes, legitimate the child by the circuitous and somewhat absurd method of adopting it. I think that summarises the view.
Now I come to the issue which has been put before your Lordships with such strength this afternoon. I have listened with great care and attention to the most eloquent speech of my noble and learned friend Lord Conesford, and to the most moving and strongly expressed view of the right reverend Prelate the Lord Bishop of Exeter. I find that they cannot expel from my mind the view put forward by the most reverend Primate the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury. This is, I think, essentially a matter for our consciences and moral views. At the foot of column 1188 [OFFICIAL REPORT, Vol. 216], after dealing with the position of the Church and with the arguments that we have heard to-day, he said:
"Personally, I think it is more straightforward, and therefore morally preferable, to drop the legal fictions of any kind"—
such as adoption—
"and to argue as follows. This child was born out of wedlock and in adultery. The adulterous parents have, by divorce, set themselves legally free to marry one another. They, the natural parents, are now legally married. Therefore, let the child have the status which by nature belongs to him, and of which he has been deprived by the ill-doing of his parents; and let it be called, naturally and legally, the child of its parents—that is, legitimate it."
That language has neither the emphasis nor the force, in a fundamental sense, of the language used by my noble and learned friend and the most reverend Prelate in their speeches, but it seems to me to set out in simple, natural and, above all, kindly terms one great argument for the principle of this clause.
The other passage from the most reverend Primate's speech which I venture to quote (it appears in the middle of column 1189) is this:
"Indeed, my Lords, I think that, on the whole, if the clause be passed, it may help Churchmen and others in our by no means unsuccessful attempts to restore the waste places of married fidelity and integrity; for we shall not be using a legal argument to prevent the bringing of relief to an illegitimate child."
I find those words sufficient, for my own moral views and conscience, to support
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this clause. I am not going to detain your Lordships longer; but in view of what had been said, I felt that I should not have slept easily to-night if I had not expressed my own view.
LORD SALTOUN: My Lords, may I ask the noble and learned Viscount one question? In the case of an intestacy, under the law of England, does a child so legitimated derive a title to property to defeat other claims which might otherwise be put forward?
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, the position was fully explained on Second Reading. The noble Lords, Lord Chorley and Lord Conesford, will correct me if I am wrong. For this purpose this Bill becomes part of the Act of 1926. Speaking without the book, Section 10 (I think it is) of the 1926 Act states that legitimation under the Act does not affect succession to honours or property. Therefore, this clause makes no difference to the succession to honours or property from the position under the 1926 Act; and the 1926 Act, in turn, made no difference from the position before it. I think that there is no disagreement on that point. I should welcome being told if anyone takes a contrary view.
6.53 p.m.
THE EARL OF SWINTON: My Lords, I will not say that my name has been taken in vain, but a vote which I gave in another place a good many years ago, in very good company, has been cited in this debate, and therefore I should like to say shortly why I shall give a vote to-day if this matter goes to a Division. As I remember it, the debate in another place, apart from the speech of the Under-Secretary, was wholly in favour of the argument for which I voted and which is now to be found in the first clause of this Bill. To-day we have heard, as forcibly and sincerely as we could possibly have them, the arguments against this clause. With much more hesitation than in 1926 I shall still adhere, if this comes to a Division, to the vote which I then gave, and I shall support the clause in the Bill—and entirely for one reason.
I have tried to look at this matter from the point of view of what is in the best interests of the children themselves, and I cannot resist the conclusion that

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the clause in the Bill is in the better interests of these children. I am impressed by the argument that, in a sense, this is a legal fiction. I would rather it were put more simply, but I think that what we have to look at is the result. I do not feel that this is going to be a great incentive to more people to commit adultery. If I thought that this was likely still further to undermine the greatest of all human institutions, perhaps, the institution of marriage, I should vote against it. But I cannot believe that. After all, the adultery has taken place in these cases, and it has taken place in spite of the law being what it is to-day. I do not believe—it is entirely a matter of opinion—that there will be more or less adultery because of this Bill, or that this clause will act as an incitement.
I was impressed by the example given of the child who has been born legitimate and has lived for years as a member of the family. I have myself known an instance of that kind. It would be very hard on that child if it were bastardised years and years afterwards, but I think that it is extremely unlikely that that would happen. If, as I originally thought, a sort of automatic bastardy followed in this case, then I should be against this clause, but that is not so. In the case of parents who on the face of it have lived happily together, although somebody may have committed adultery a long time ago, and who have brought up a family together and the family is happy together, I do not think that the survivor, on the death of one of them, is going to take steps to bastardise the child. Therefore, for the reason that I believe it is in the interest of the child that this ought to happen, if this matter goes to a Division, I shall support the clause in the Bill.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, would your Lordships allow me to make an explanation? My noble friend Lord Saltoun asked me a question rather suddenly. The position is that the 1926 Act did not affect a disposition which came into operation before the Act, but a disposition which came into operation after the Act would treat the child as legitimate except in the case where property was connected with an honour, in which it would not affect it. It
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made special provisions for the order of seniority of the original and legitimated children. I must apologise to my noble friend. When I gave my answer, I was thinking of Section 10 which deals only with dispositions which were made before the Act came into force and before the children were legitimated.
LORD MESTON: My Lords, I should like to say in a few words that I am opposed to this Amendment and 100 per cent. in favour of the clause. Clause 1 is designed with one object, and one only—that is, entirely out of kindness to the children. If we are to look for legal principles, we can find legal principles, if we want to, to prove that the earth is flat and not round. We shall get nowhere if we are going to be bound by ancient legal principles. Amongst other matters, Parliament exists for the purpose of displacing old legal principles and creating new ones. In this case, everyone, I know, is actuated by kindness and good feeling towards the children. If your Lordships do not vote in favour of Clause 1, I shall be greatly disappointed.
7.0 p.m.
LORD CHORLEY: I think it would be a mistake to detain your Lordships for more than a minute or two but, on the other hand, I feel that I ought to say a few words about this matter. The arguments which have been deployed, particularly by the noble and learned Viscount the Lord Chancellor, are so powerful that I do not wish to go over that ground again. But I do feel that I should remind your Lordships of a point made by my noble friend Lord Conesford: that this Bill was passed by the other House by a large majority, only four people voting against it on the Second Reading, and that in the subsequent proceedings there was no Division against it at all. The defeated minority accepted the position and the Bill went through.
I do not think one could do better than adopt the position taken up by the most reverend Primate himself in regard to this matter, as was emphasized by the noble and learned Viscount the Lord Chancellor, when he said that this clause was attacked on the ground that it would weaken the institution of matrimony, and that that was guesswork. I ask your

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Lordships to accept that view and to say that what this Bill does to legitimate children, and to remove the stigma on many thousands of children—because I maintain that that will be so—is concrete and not a question of guesswork at all.
The problem here is whether we are going to help these children. The right reverend Prelate the Lord Bishop of Exeter said—and I paraphrase: "The sins of the fathers have evil consequences for the children, and we too often cannot do anything about it." This is one of the occasions when we can do something about it: we can do it by passing this clause into law. I ask your Lordships to take that view and to reject this Amendment.
LORD CONESFORD: I only wish to say a word in response to the last point raised—namely, how the House of Commons voted. On the Second Reading there voted 45 in the "Aye" Lobby and 4 in the "No" Lobby. If you add the four Tellers, that makes a total of just over one-twelfth of the House of Commons. I submit to the Committee that the other House has certainly no legal, and certainly no moral right to insist that this Bill should go through unamended, against the convictions of your Lordships, in the present Session. But fortunately it is unnecessary to decide
Resolved in the affirmative and Amendment agreed to accordingly.
EARL ST. ALDWYN: It has been agreed that we should postpone further consideration of this Committee stage, and therefore I beg to move that the House do now resume.
that question to-day. There are later Amendments on the Marshalled List by the promoter of the Bill himself, the noble Lord, Lord Chorley. Therefore, in any event, if those Amendments are adopted, the Bill will go back amended to the other place. If the Committee adopts my advice, then it will be for the other place to decide whether or not they agree with the Amendment to leave out Clause 1. The matter will then come back to this House. I do not disguise my intention to ask the House again, if necessary, to reject it; but the House may not follow that advice. Your Lordships do not bind yourselves to-day as to what you will do in those circumstances. I shall not repeat the arguments. I believe that this is the most important Amendment on which I have ever had the honour to address this House.
LORD CHORLEY: The noble Lord knows perfectly well that it is not practical politics to oppose this Bill at this stage, and for the Bill to go backwards and forwards between the two Houses in that way.
On Question, Whether the said Amendment shall be agreed to?
Their Lordships divided: Contents 27; Not-Contents 19.

CONTENTS

Ammon, L.

Craven, E.

Iddesleigh, E.[Teller.]

Atholl, D.

Denham, L.

Jessel, L.

Auckland, L.

Dormer, L.

Morley, E.

Baden-Powell, L.

Exeter, L. Bp.

Mowbray and Stourton, L.

Birdwood, L

FitzAlan of Derwent, V.

Pakenham, L.

Braye, L.

Gainsborough, E.

Salisbury, M.

Colville of Culross, V.

Goschen, V.

Saltoun, L.

Conesford, L. [Teller.]

Grantchester, L.

Simonds, V.

Craigmyle, L.

Howard of Glossop, L.

Swanborough, Baroness

NOT-CONTENTS

Amulree, L.[Teller.]

Keith of Avonholm, L.

Stonham, L.

Cholmondeley, M.

Lucan, E.

Swinton, E.

Chorley, L.[Teller.]

Merrivale, L.

Taylor, L.

Cohen, L.

Merthyr, L.

Uvedale of North End, L.

Crook. L.

Meston, L.

Williams, L.

Elliot of Harwood, Baroness

Stansgate, V.

Wootton of Abinger, Baroness

Faringdon, L.

Moved, That the House do now resume.—(Earl St. Aldwyn.)
On Question, Motion agreed to, and House resumed accordingly.

EDUCATION BILL
The LORD CHANCELLOR acquainted the House, That the Bill had been endorsed with the Certificate from the Speaker that the Bill was a Money Bill, within the meaning of the Parliament Act, 1911.

NATIONAL ASSISTANCE BILL
The LORD CHANCELLOR acquainted the House, That the Bill had been endorsed with the Certificate from the Speaker that the Bill was a Money Bill, within the meaning of the Parliament Act, 1911.
House adjourned at fourteen minutes past seven o'clock.