HL Deb 29 April 1968 vol 291 cc877-94

2.57 p.m.

THE LORD CHANCELLOR

My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time. As is, I think, by now well known, I am a strong supporter of the office of justice of the peace. This is a unique system which has now lasted some 600 years. Justices of the peace try about 98 per cent. of all criminal cases in the country, and the remaining 2 per cent. they see in their initial stages on the way to the higher courts. When one reflects that there are 16,500 justices of the peace, that they sit in about a thousand courts every day all over the country and that they try about 1½ million cases a year, the number of times that complaints are made in the newspapers about them is really infinitesimal. Obviously, with 16,500 justices of the peace, somebody will say something silly about three times a year, or do something of which complaint is made; but I believe it to be the case that, in relation to their numbers, complaints are rather greater about the professional judges than they are about the justices of the peace.

From time to time, with changes which take place, adaptations have to be made and this has been the case, very properly, with the justices of the peace. We had a Royal Commission in 1910 and 1911, and we had another in 1946 which reported in 1948; and it is possible—I say no more than that—that when the Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions has reported it might be desirable to look again at the duties, functions and operations of the justices of the peace.

Meanwhile this Bill sets out to do five things. First, it abolishes the ex-officio justices of the peace; secondly, it reduces the retiring age from 75 to 70; thirdly, it enables rules to be made for the better election of justices as chairmen and deputy-chairmen of their benches; fourthly, it introduces financial loss allowances for justices of the peace; and, fifthly, it provides for some rather minor changes in relation to the duties of the clerks to the justices.

My Lords, Clause 1(1) provides for the abolition of ex-officio justices. The reason for this is as follows. Until fairly recently no justices had to undergo any course of training, but the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Dilhorne, when Lord Chancellor, took the view that the difficulties of the justices were increasing and that they ought to have some form of training. He appointed an Advisory Committee on the Training of Justices of the Peace who reported in favour of making training compulsory. I accepted that Report, and now all the regular justices of the peace have to undergo a course of training. They are, as your Lordships know, appointed by the Lord Chancellor on the advice of about 190 local advisory committees. A number of the members of your Lordships' House are chairmen of advisory committees, and I am greatly in the debt of these committees. Most of them prefer to be anonymous, and therefore they get no kudos; and, of course, no pay. I know what great trouble they take to try to get the best possible justices according to the requirements.

The first and overriding requirement is that justices should be men and women of character, integrity and understanding, and accepted as such in the community among which they live. The second requirement, very much stressed by the Royal Commission, is that they should be drawn from as wide a cross-section of the public as possible. The third requirement, to which I personally attach a good deal less importance, is that the Lord Chancellor, as the Royal Commission put it, must see to it that no bench appears to be the perquisite of any one political Party.

I rather regret that anything to do with politics should have to be considered in relation to any form of judicial appointment. As your Lordships may know, whatever happened before the war since the war no Lord Chancellor has paid the slightest attention to Party politics in any other form of judicial appointment which he makes. But I recognise that in this respect the justices of the peace have had a rather unfortunate history and that the recommendations of the Royal Commission cannot be ignored. So the 16,500 proper justices of the peace are appointed after very careful recommendations from the advisory committees. And though the Lord Chancellor is not bound to accept these recommendations, he usually—but not always—does so. The newly appointed justices have to undertake to undergo a course of training, part to be done before they sit at all and the other part before the end of their first year. Then they have to undergo another course of instruction before they can sit on a juvenile panel, and they have to undertake to sit regularly. This is interpreted as not fewer than 26 days in the year—that is, one day a fortnight—or, in very exceptional cases, at least 18 days in a year.

In contrast to these appointed justices there are some 2,000 ex-officio justices. They are not men and women who anybody has thought would make good justices of the peace, but people who have been either appointed or elected to some quite different office. They are under no obligation at all to undergo any kind of training. They are under no obligation at all to sit regularly. The House may ask me, "Who are these peculiar 2,000 people?". Well, they are—I must not say "a rum lot", but they are a bit of a mixture.

There are 322 Privy Counsellors and some of these may be eminent people from the Commonwealth. Any of the ex-officio justices can be appointed a justice of the peace on his merits, but there is nothing to stop any Privy Counsellor from going to his local court as a justice of the peace. He has the right to insist to being sworn in as a justice of the peace, and he can immediately sit on the bench and decide cases.

Then there are, as ex-officio justices, the Chairman of the Greater London Council; 318 mayors; the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University and the Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor and Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University. There are 532 chairmen of urban district councils; 64 High Court Judges; the Lord Chancellor (so I am abolishing myself); 469 chairmen of rural district councils; the Lord President of the Council; the Lord Privy Seal; the Chairman of the Council of the Isles of Scilly. As you see, they are a rather peculiar collection. The only people who really need to be justices of the peace ex-officio are recorders and chairmen and deputy-chairmen of quarter sessions and county court judges when they sit as chairmen of quarter sessions. They, obviously, need to be justices of the peace; none of these others does.

There are also, as ex-officio justices, 58 chairmen of county councils—I forgot them earlier; 25 Aldermen of the City of London; the Lord Chief Justice; the Solicitor General and the High Court Judges. The only reason why High Court Judges may need to be justices of the peace is simply because the right to bind people over to be of good behaviour, or to keep the peace, is conferred by the Justices of the Peace Act 1361 (which shows how old justices are) and it is open to some doubt whether High Court Judges, if not themselves justices of the peace, would be able to bind people over. Obviously, they ought to have that power, but I should have thought the sensible thing to do would be to give them the power, and then they would not need to be ex-officio justices any more. That, my Lords, is what subsection (1) does.

Clause 1(2) merely provides that if a justice, having once taken the oath of allegiance and the judicial oath, moves to somewhere else, he will not have to take them all over again. Subsection (3) is purely technical. There are some old Acts which are being repealed by this Bill; there is a little bit of one of them that we want to keep and we have put it into this Bill so that we can repeal all the Act. Subsection (4) provides that keepers of the rolls for the counties will not ex-officio be justices of the peace. In the Bill as originally drafted the keepers of the rolls of the counties, the custos rotulorum, were to be abolished. We did not think that really they had any duties left, though there were historic duties which they used to have. But some Members of your Lordships' House who are keepers of the rolls said that there were certain duties which the custos rotulorum had, and which the Lord Lieutenant did not have. At any rate, we are now keeping the keepers of the rolls, but they will not ex-officio be justices of the peace.

Subsection (5) of Clause 1 refers to signing documents and authenticating signatures. The point about that is simply this. Like previous Lord Chancellors, every now and then I get a letter from somebody, or a letter forwarded from a Member of the other place, saying, that I ought to appoint a justice of the peace—or, sometimes, that I ought to appoint so-and-so as a justice of the peace, because "we do not have any in our locality, and obviously, we must have a justice of the peace to sign various documents which have to be signed and attested". I reply, as my predecessors always did, that I never appoint a justice of the peace to sign documents: it is a judicial office.

The position is this. There is laid down by various Acts a requirement that certain things have to be signed or witnessed by certain people; and invariably this can be done by a justice of the peace, a barrister, a solicitor, a doctor, a clergyman and some of the Acts add a policeman or trade union official. There is no more sense in making somebody a justice of the peace to sign a document than it would be to make somebody a doctor to sign a document. As it is found in practice useful to be able to go along to the local authority with documents because the chairman is a justice of the peace, the sensible thing to do is to qualify those who are chairman of local authorities but who will no longer be justices to be one of the people by whom these documents can be attested or signed, so that the public will get the benefit of the same people signing them. It is not necessary for them to be justices.

Subsection (6) confers on the High Court of Justice and other courts of record the powers to bind over a person to be of good behaviour, for reasons I have already explained. The subsection also provides for the abolition of what your Lordships probably do not know—I certainly did not; that is, any right or power to commit to prison or to issue warrants of arrest or search warrants which may be exercisable at Common Law by the Sovereign in person, the Privy Council, a member of the Privy Council and the Secretary of State.

Subsection (7) provides for the issue of a commission of the peace for the City of London, so that the justices of the City will have a commission of the peace and also an advisory committee. In this respect the City of London have carried on a fine campaign, which I much admire. A number of those to whom I have spoken about this Bill have taken the view that it is right to abolish ex-officio justices. They entirely agree with this proposal, except only so far as they themselves are concerned. I suppose this is only human nature. The mayors, for example, say: "We entirely agree with this general proposal. Of course, it is quite right to stop the chairmen of these 'potty' urban and rural district councils being justices of the peace—but mayors, that is different! This is historic. A mayor is the No. 1 citizen. He is the link between the local authorities and the justices, and while we agree with all other ex-officio justices being abolished, you ought to make an exception for mayors." Then the chairmen of the urban and rural district councils say: "We quite agree with this in general, particularly as to the mayors, because they have a whole-time job nowadays and the thing is a farce. They come and sit once and then we never see them again the whole of the year. But we have a part-time job and we like coming along and sitting during our year of office."

Without challenging the principle as a whole, the City of London say that the aldermen of the City ought to be one exception. I have seen more than one deputation from the City of London. The Governor of the Bank of England has been to see me. A lot of literature has been printed. And I see they have also won the support of The Times and organised a number of letters to the Press. I have been courteously told that at Committee stage an Amendment will be put down to make an exception of the aldermen of the City of London, and on that I should think we should have a very interesting discussion.

Subsection (8) deals with the position of the stipendary magistrates appointed under five Local Acts. This is mainly directed to magistrates at Merthyr Tydfil and in the Staffordshire Potteries. This subsection transfers their position into a Public Act, instead of leaving it to the rather involved provisions of those five Local Acts which were passed some time in the last century.

Clause 2 of the Bill reduces the compulsory retiring age of justices from 75 to 70, and in the case of those to be appointed in future reduces the age for stipendiary magistrates from 72 to 70. I apprehend that in your Lordships' House the question of a retiring age is a somewhat delicate matter. In any case, it is very much a matter of opinion. When I re-read the evidence given before the Royal Commission on Justices of the Peace in 1946 to 1948, I was amazed to find that I had given evidence before them. If anybody had told me I had, I should have strongly denied it, which shows what my memory is like. But I did, appearing on behalf of the Society of Labour Lawyers, a body of young barristers and solicitors with practices in magistrates' courts. I see that I said that none of us had ever had a complaint from a client about why he should have to he tried by Conservative magistrates or Labour magistrates, but that we frequently had had complaints about why people should be tried by these very old magistrates.

Originally, there were retiring ages for hardly anybody. Gradually it was found that, on the whole, it was better to have a retiring age, although it would be too low for some and too high for others. The difficulties of being able to say to Mr. A., "Yes, you can go on," but of saying to Mr. B, "I am afraid you're getting past it, old chap; you will have to go" were too great. So that nearly everywhere now, in Government and local government services, in industry and in every walk of life, there is a retiring age. As this is entirely a matter of opinion, I can only say that it seems to me that some retiring ages are too low. Of course, the retiring age for the police is very low; and one can understand the reason for that. But I am not at all sure whether Ambassadors and the best brains of the Civil Service ought to have to retire at 60.

Of course, the Lord Chancellor has great experience of appointments and personnel questions, and I am told that it is the accumulated experience of the Lord Chancellor's Office that, remembering that people vary very much, if it is necessary to place an age after which people are net usually quite so good as they have bees before, that age is 65. I am a bit passé myself, but for men who have to retain their hearing, who are after all laymen, who have to sit a whole day hearing a substantial number of cases, and to whom it is very important that they should not allow their attention to wander for a moment, I think the proposal that the age should be reduced from 75 to 70 has been generally welcomed. When I say "retire", I should add that the justices go on to a supplemental list, so that they can still have the initials "J.P." after their names, though they no longer sit. In older to make it as painless as possible, the Bill does it one year at a time. At first the retiring age will be 74, and the year after that it will be 73, the year after that 72, and the year after that 71, so that they will not really notice it—at least, I hope not.

Clause 3 enables rules to be made about voting for the chairman and deputy chairman of magistrates' benches. I have had many representations from different parts of the country that when chairmen and deputy chairmen are elected, if there is a crowd of new justices who have only just been appointed, they have had no opportunity of any kind of telling which of their fellow justices will make the best chairman or deputy chairman. This has been accentuated I think, since I have required—if not insisted on it—my advisory committees, if possible, to nominate justices only once a year. That is because it facilitates the course of training if they can all take a course of training together. All this clause does is to enable rules to be made so that in a case where a justice has only just been appointed to the bench he cannot vote.

Clause 4 provides for the first time for financial loss allowances for justices of the peace. These will not be at a flat rate. They will be only modest in character, and will apply only if there has been a loss. They will be rather on the lines of those enjoyed by members of local authorities. One of the difficulties in getting enough weekly wage earners on the bench is the financial difficulty that they find. This provision will, I hope, assist in that respect.

We are also abolishing the three-mile limit. There is at present a subsistence allowance for those who live more than three miles from the court, the idea being that if they live more than three miles from the court they cannot be expected to go home to lunch; therefore they receive something to help them pay for their lunch. But this is really quite unreal. The limit is, I believe, three miles as the crow flies. But when one thinks of any large town, one realises that a bus journey of three miles takes a considerable time. A person has to get on a bus, probably has to change somewhere to get on another bus, then has to walk to get back to his house and then has to have his lunch. He then repeats the operation the other way. There simply is not time for it. What happens in such cases is that when the justices rise for lunch, those who can afford to pay for lunch go to a hotel or café, and the weekly wage-earner has to go and have a glass of beer and a sandwich in the nearest pub, where he is not unlikely to run into those who may be appearing either as accused or witnesses in the afternoon. Even if he does not say anything wrong and nobody says anything wrong, I then get a letter from somebody who says: "I saw one of the justices talking to my enemy during lunch." So I hope the House will think this proposal is only reasonable.

This provision will not come into operation until the Treasury agree (the House knows of our present financial circumstances), but I hope it may not be too long delayed. I hope, also, that these provisions may help us to get more weekly wage-earner justices. While on that point, may I add this? As your Lordships may know, civil servants when justices of the peace have always had 12 days a year off without any loss of pay or holidays. I have persuaded my colleagues to agree that in future this should be 18 days; and that, I hope, will be a considerable help. I have approached, and had very sympathetic responses from, the chairmen of all the nationalised industries, all the local authority organisations, the Confederation of British Industry and the National Farmers' Union. Most of them are bodies which cannot direct their members what they are to do, but most of them are advising their members to treat their employees in the same way.

I should like to take this opportunity of appealing to all employers. They differ very much. Some are most cooperative and treat it as a compliment if the works foreman or some other employee is made a justice of the peace. A few of them, I am afraid, raise difficulties. The same difficulties do not seem to apply to company directors, who constitute a considerable proportion of the justices. They are important people in industry nowadays, and if they can get away, then I hope and expect that they will co-operate to allow the recommended employees to get away.

Clause 5 provides merely that rules may be made enabling certain adminis- trative acts, like adjourning cases, which at the moment can be done by one justice of the peace but can be done only by a justice of the peace, to be done in future by the clerk of the court. It deals with the actions and qualifications of those who are acting on behalf of the clerk to the justices, who may not themselves be qualified. In subsection (3) it declares that it is the function, as indeed it is, of the clerk to the magistrates to give advice to the magistrates on questions of law. Clause 6 applies some of the provisions of the Bill to Scotland. Clause 7 deals with the commencement of the Act, and gives power to provide for transitional matters. Clause 8 shows that the draftsman has taken advantage of the occasion to repeal about 16 old Acts in this field.

I hope the House will consider that these are useful provisions. They are not put forward in any way as critical of the justices of the peace, but, on the contrary, to enable them to do their work even better. I find that they do their work extremely well. They are extremely conscientious. Only ten days age, on a Saturday, I was in Birmingham, and there were the justices of Warwickshire in large numbers all attending a sentencing conference. That is just the sort of exercise which, though under no obligation to take part in it, they are always so ready to do. I hope, accordingly, that your Lordships will give this Bill a Second Reading. I beg to move.

Moved, That the Bill be now read 2a —(The Lord Chancellor.)

3.27 p.m.

LORD BROOKE OF CUMNOR

My Lords, I am sure we have all enjoyed the felicity with which the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor has introduced and explained the provisions of this Bill, whether or not we have agreed with every single word he has said.] hope he will not think it presumptuous of me if I remark what a pleasure it is to hear a member of the Government moving the Second Reading of a Bill with virtually no reference at all to notes. Thu only thing in the Bill to which I thought the noble and learned Lord might have drawn fuller attention, and for which he might have claimed further credit, was that we have in it no fewer than six pages of repeals of old enactments. In that respect it seems to me a considerable contribution to the clearance and simplification of the Statute Book. I wondered whether the noble and learned Lord would single out the, at first sight, surprising fact that under the heading of "Repeal of Unnecessary Enactments" in Part I of Schedule 4 we find that the whole of the Habeas Corpus Act 1640 is being repealed. I take it that we can feel assured that this is not a tacit removal of one of the principal liberties of the subject which has been enjoyed for so many years.

I think your Lordships' House will always give support to any Bill calculated to improve the administration of justice. As the noble and learned Lord said, this Bill is concerned with the lay magistracy, and at the very outset of my speech I want to pay tribute to the 16,000 unpaid magistrates who bear throughout the country this very substantial burden. It is a unique system, and as a country we can be proud of it. But in being proud of it, we should remember to be proud of them: because it is through their readiness to give up valuable time to public service that we have this world-famous system. It is deeply rooted in history. I do not know whether anybody has ever calculated how much money it saves the public in rates and taxes, but my simple calculations to try to see what we should have to pay for stipendary magistrates if there were no unpaid lay magistracy have always led me into enormous figures. Not primarily on financial grounds but on that and every other ground I think your Lordships would wish to be associated with a high tribute to the non-professional magistrates.

The Bill in Clause 1 abolishes ex-officio justices. I suppose I must declare a kind of negative personal interest, because it abolishes my right to sit as a justice of the peace. I confess as a Privy Counsellor that I did not wake up to the fact that I was entitled to claim to be sworn in as a justice of the peace, still less that I ever had the right to commit people to prison. But this is what one learns through membership of your Lordships' House. It is very exciting, but I cannot really regret that it is soon to be a thing of the past.

There have been complaints that the mayor as chief citizen or the chairman of a local council can sit on the bench during his year of office with no experience and no training. The Royal Commission twenty years ago made what has always seemed to me a somewhat curious recommendation here: that the right to sit on the bench should be withdrawn from chairmen of county councils and district councils but should be retained by the mayors of boroughs and the lord mayors of cities. I think it is a good thing that that recommendation was not implemented in that form, and I am not surprised that up to now no part of the recommendation has been implemented.

I am not sure how many complaints there have actually been against a mayor, for example, sitting as an inexperienced magistrate. I happen to remember, because it was mentioned while I was piloting through another place what became the Administration of Justice Act 1964, it being said that the Lord Chancellor at the time of the 1949 Act, who was a Lord Chancellor in political sympathies with the present Government, had been averse to getting rid of the ex-officio magistrates because he and his predecessors had found that so frequently one of these persons who attained the right to sit on the bench solely through his local government office proved in practice to be a very valuable member of the bench, and this therefore was a useful source of recruitment to the magistracy.

However, I for my part would not press that argument now, because something new has occurred. Training is now compulsory for magistrates. The first step was taken by my noble and learned friend Lord Dilhorne when he was Lord Chancellor, and it was completed by the noble and learned Lord on the Woolsack. Now no justice can take his seat on the bench until he has undergone a course of training. It seems to me that this must weigh heavily in the scales as regards whether we should continue to permits mayors and chairmen to sit on the bench during their year of office, because unless they are justices already it is quite clear that within that year of office, which will be an extremely busy year in other ways, they will scarcely have time to qualify themselves by a compulsory course of training. For that reason, if for no other, I am prepared to accept the general proposition here. I hope indeed that this Bill will be seen as a declaration by Parliament that no one in future may take his seat on the bench without undergoing training.

Schedule 1 to the Bill lists exceptions to the ex-officio rule, but all the people named in Schedule 1 are people who are likely to be already well qualified before they could obtain their position. If a man is worthy to be appointed recorder of a borough it can hardly be alleged that he is not sufficiently qualified to sit in the magistrates' court in that borough. Noble Lords may note with some interest at the end of the Schedule that the Commissioner and Assistant Commissioners of Police of the Metropolis are to continue as ex-officio justices. I understand from what I have heard that there is a proposition that this should be altered by later legislation. So far as I can recollect from my experience as Home Secretary, there is a technical reason why it is desirable that the Commissioner and Assistant Commissioners of Police of the Metropolis should be ex-officio justices: because there might be some doubt otherwise whether they were statutorily qualified to exercise the duties of a constable. Mysteriously enough, it does not arise in the case of any of the chief constables of provincial police forces, but it is a point that requires attention in regard to the Metropolitan Police. I, for one, think it is an anomaly that we should find the Commissioner and Assistant Commissioners of Police of the Metropolis in this list, but I certainly would advocate that we rectify the matter by a change in the law relating to the Metropolitan Police elsewhere, to make sure that these people retain their powers as constables, rather than that we should risk robbing them of essential duties by providing that they shall no longer be ex-officio justices.

As the noble and learned Lord indicated, Clause 1 also abolishes the system which has been established for hundreds of years in London whereby the Lord Mayor and aldermen sit as single justices in the City. I think I am right in saying that the position of the Lord Mayor of London is different in this context from that of the lord mayor of any other city, and different from the position of the mayor of any other borough. The difference is that a person cannot be elected Lord Mayor of London until he has served for several years as an alder- man of the City of London. He will therefore be as well qualified already as any alderman by the time he becomes Lord Mayor. The Bill therefore appears in this subsection to be directed not against the Lord Mayor of London as such but against the capacity of the aldermen of the City to administer justice fairly and equitably.

I have no personal connection with the City of London; but I understand that the City does not allow the aldermen to sit as justices until they have undergone a system of training which is in fact more extensive than that which is now required of new magistrates elsewhere. It seems to me at lint sight that the sharp difference between the case of the City of London and that of the rest of the country in the context of this Bill is one that the noble and learned Lord did not mention, or at any rate I did not detect him mentioning it. It is that, whereas hitherto the ex officio magistrates throughout the rest of the country have gained the right to sit on thy; bench from the start of their year of office, although many have had no previous experience or training, that does not apply in the City, where no one, whether alderman or Lord Mayor, can sit as a justice unless he has undergone a course of training.

But training alone does not guarantee capacity. We all know that is so, in every walk of life, and I dunk your Lordships will be sympathetic to the desire of the Government to make a change in respect of the City of London if there is evidence of complaint against the quality of the justice that is administered in the City. For my part, I can hardly think that any Government would venture to propose to Parliament any radical change in the system of administering justice anywhere, except an the basis of well authenticated complaints against the system which it is proposed to disturb. It will greatly help the House if the noble and learned Lord, the Lord Chancellor, in winding up the debate, will tell your Lordships what complaints the Government have received against the City of London system —complaints from the Law Society, perhaps, or complaints from the Bar Council, or complaints, indeed, from responsible members of either branch of the legal profession with experience of handling cases before the aldermen in the City courts. Obviously, Parliament must take cognisance of the matter if it is commonly felt by barristers or by solicitors that their clients are less likely to receive proper justice if they are up before one of the City aldermen than if the case is to be heard by an ordinary country bench of magistrates.

If complaints like this are made—and I think your Lordships will be interested to know whether they are or not—one test that can be applied is the extent to which decisions in the City of London courts are reversed on appeal. I suggest it will be most helpful if the noble and learned Lord, when he is winding up the debate, will give the figures for recent years as regards the City of London. It would be helpful to have the percentages of cases decided by the City aldermen which are subsequently reversed on appeal, and to establish a comparison between that and the percentage of decisions reached by magistrates' courts elsewhere in the country which get reversed on appeal. That is the kind of objective test which Parliament surely must apply. In the administration of justice the proof of the pudding is in the eating, rather than in the recipe. When justice is not being done, changes must be made, and made fearlessly. When justice is being done, Parliament would be ill advised to change the system except on the most cogent proof that the quality of justice dispensed will be improved by the change.

As to the remaining provisions of the Bill, all of them are important. There is the reduction, over a tapering period, of the age of retirement from 75 to 70. I am still on the right side of 70, but I am not and never have been a magistrate, so I have no personal interest to declare here. However, your Lordships will probably appreciate the force of the noble and learned Lord's argument when he says it is difficult to differentiate between one individual and another over 70 and to say to one man, "You can stay on", and to another, "You must go". Certainly in principle it would be desirable if the average age of benches of magistrates could be reduced, and for my part I would not cavil at this proposal to reduce the age over a period from 75 to 70, although I can well imagine that others of your Lordships below or above the age of 70 may have more to say about it.

I would mention only this one point: it is possible to grow deaf before the age of 70, and there are a great many people who are charged with offences in magistrates' courts who would rather see on the bench a magistrate aged 71 in full command of his hearing than a magistrate in his sixties who, it was strongly suspected, was not able to catch every word of the evidence.

If I may, I should like to second and to endorse what the noble and learned Lord said about the part which employers can play in enabling young people to take time off to sit as magistrates—and, I would say, younger people at all levels and ranks in the business. The noble and learned Lord said that one finds quite a large number of company directors who appear to be able to take time off, but there are perhaps disappointingly few employees. I think the practical difference is that the company director is his own master; he is self-employed in a respect which the employee is not. The employee, whether he is a high executive or no more than a labourer, is under a contract of service and is expected to give his full time to his employer's business. Most fortunately there are some firms which do, in fact, take pride in permitting the members of their staff to take time off to sit on the bench, or indeed to perform public services of other kinds. That ought to be far more widespread than it is, and anything which any of your Lordships can do to exercise influence in businesses with which you are personally concerned, to ensure that people who are well qualified to be magistrates, at whatever level they are serving the business, are allowed the necessary time, will of itself be a public service.

The thought has crossed my mind, although I may be wrong about this, that now we are bringing down the maximum age to 70 we need not be so much on guard against appointing to the bench people who have just reached the age of 60. To my mind, although I am all for securing younger men and women to be magistrates, if we possibly can, we ought not to sacrifice any possible field of candidates, and there are a number of men and women who really become available to perform public services for the first time about the age of 60. This Bill would enable them to give nine or ten years of good service on the Bench while at the same time closing the door to their continuing on the bench when they are really too old to do so. I put forward this suggestion on my own responsibility, not from a desire to see benches cluttered up with people of my own age, but rather because it seems to me so important that we should not artificially shut the door on any category of people who could give valuable service on the bench.

I have no comment to make on Clause 3, which concerns the election of the chairmen of benches, but I should like to say a few words about the financial loss allowance and the changes in subsistence allowances. It was in fact I myself who in the 1964 Act introduced subsistence allowances for justices for the first time, and I do not resent at all that in this new measure the three mile limit is being removed. At one time 1 was opposed to extending financial loss allowances to justices, and if I remember rightly I argued against an Amendment to that effect which was moved in Standing Committee in another place on the 1964 Bill. I said that there seemed to me at that time to be a lack of evidence that financial loss allowances were really necessary, but that I would retain an open mind if further evidence became available. I think it would be helpful if at some stage in the Bill—this may be rather a Committee point—we could be informed about this evidence. In proceedings on the Second Reading in another place the Attorney General said: There is also abundant evidence from the Lord Chancellor's advisory committees, who nominate candidates for the bench, that many suitable people from the wage-earning section of the population cannot at present afford to serve as justices."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, Commons, 23/1 /68. col. 234.] That may well be true, but it did not appear to be true four years ago, because after this point had been raised at an earlier stage of what became the 1964 Act, I instituted an inquiry throughout the country. Out of the 190 advisory committees which the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor mentioned, 173, if I remember rightly, replied, and 166 of those 173 said that they had no evidence at all of their being debarred from recommending people who would otherwise be suitable to serve on the bench because of financial difficulties. In some ways that surprised me at that time. But there is was: that was the evidence and from that and from other facts that were available up to that time four years ago there seemed little reason to offer financial loss allowances as well as subsistence allowances and travelling allowances to justices. But I say at once that if there is nowadays material evidence that without financial loss allowances we might not be able to obtain the services of some men and women who in all respects would make excellent magistrates, I would support this change.

Personally, I also support the changes proposed in Clause 5 relating to justices' clerks, and if I am right in thinking that those changes are welcomed by the justices' clerks themselves then I support them all the more warmly. There are a number of questions to be asked in Committee about particular parts of this Bill, but I am sure that we should give the Bill as a whole a Second Reading, and then examine it in Committee with all the care that anything concerned with the administration of justice always demands.