HIGHLANDS AND ISLANDS DEVELOPMENT (SCOTLAND) BILL (Hansard, 12 July 1968)

HL Deb 12 July 1968 vol 294 cc1247-54 1247

§ 12.52 p.m.

§ LORD MITCHISON
My Lords, I beg to move that the House do now resolve itself into Committee on this Bill.

§ Moved, That the House do now resolve itself into Committee.—(Lord Mitchison.)

§ On Question, Motion agreed to.

§ House in Committee accordingly.

§ [The LORD MERTHYR in the Chair.]

1248

§ Clause 1 [Power of Board to acquire shares in certain companies]:

§ LORD MITCHISON moved, in subsection (1), after "power", to insert: (a) to form or promote, or join with any other person in forming or promoting a company;".

§ The noble Lord said: I beg to move Amendment No. 1. I believe that a general word or two might save the time of the Committee. This Bill received its Second Reading on June 27, and I made it quite clear at the time that what I was then speaking to was the Bill as it would be if these Amendments were accepted. They have therefore, in that limited sense, been before the House already. During that debate the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, said some words with which I entirely agree. He did not think that there ought to be any difficulty in agreeing to the Bill. Indeed, I think it would have been agreed to three years ago if it had not been for those drafting errors which I have mentioned. This is an attempt to correct—I would hardly call them drafting errors, but drafting ambiguities, and to make a slight enlargement of the powers in Sections 6 and 8 of the 1965 Act, which constitutes the Development Board. Section 6 deals with carrying on a business or undertaking; and the other one, Section 8, deals with grants and loans.

§ There is one other fact I should refer to, and that is that the procedure in another place had a rather unfortunate result in connection with this Bill. A Long Title was spoken to under the Ten-Minute Rule, and once leave has been given under that Rule it becomes impossible to alter the Long Title there. Accordingly, what proved to be too narrow a Long Title resulted in some respects in too narrow a Bill, and that error, which I think everybody perfectly well understood and which could not be met in another place is proposed to be met by these Amendments.

§ The Amendment I am moving is of the first character; that is to say, it arises out of the powers under the 1965 Bill being not wholly fair and not wholly sufficient. The object of it is to enable the Board not only to form or promote a company, which power they may or may not have had under the existing language of the 1965 Bill, but also to 1249 join with any other person in forming or promoting a company. I happened to mention on Second Reading one particular case of a small enterprise—and this is rather a small enterprise Bill—and it may well be that there will be cases where the Board would wish to have this power. I want to add this, if I may. Everything proposed to be done under this Bill is going to be a matter of agreement between the personal company concerned and the Board, and everything to be done under this Bill has to have the consent not only of the Treasury but of the Scottish Office. Therefore I do not think we shall be oppressing anybody. I beg to move.

§ Amendment moved— Page 1, line 6, at end insert the said paragraph.—(Lord Mitchison.)

§ THE EARL OF KINNOULL
I should not wish to be destructive at all, but may I raise a doubt which is in my mind on a procedural point on the Amendment which the noble Lord has asked the Committee to consider. It is a question whether in fact this Amendment comes within the scope and relevance of the Bill. As I understand it, what the noble Lord is trying in this Amendment to do to the Bill is to extend the Highlands and Islands Development Board's powers, not only to acquiring an interest or equity share in an existing company trading in the Highlands and Islands but also to forming and promoting an entirely new company on their own. That may be very desirable, but as a procedural point I would ask the Committee whether it comes within the present Title of the Bill. In fact, I think the noble Lord, Lord Mitchison, will agree that it does not come within the present Title of the Bill.
Also, the noble Lord mentioned earlier that this matter arose because of the Ten-Minute Rule in another place. I am not sure that we should necessarily accept that. The noble Lord, I know, is a master of procedural points, and he knows as well as we do that the decision on a procedural point is entirely left to the Committee of this House. There are, of course, certain guide-lines, and these were spelt out during the Committee stage of the Administration of Justice Bill last February. At that time we were told that there were two guide- 1250 lines if we wanted to consider a point of procedure. In the first place, there was the Minute of January, 1931, by Counsel to the Chairman of Committees. There it is said: There is no Standing Order regulating the admissibility of Amendments in the House of Lords. The House is master of its own procedure and, unlike the House of Commons, is not subject to rulings on points of Order. The test usually applied in practice to the admissibility of an Amendment is whether or not it is relevant to the subject matter of the Bill. But the decision upon this House and the action taken upon that decision can only be made by the House itself"— in other words, can only be made by the Committee.
Then we look to Erskine May, page 500 of the 17th Edition. There it is stated: The Amendments must be relevant to the subject matter of the Bill and of the clause to which they are proposed, and they must not be inconsistent with a previous decision of the Committee on the same question. The admissibility of an Amendment, however, can only be decided by the House, there being no authority which can in advance rule an Amendment out of Order. The Officers of the House would draw attention to the Amendment which appears to contravene the accepted principles of admissibility and the matter will be discussed in the Committee". As I have mentioned, there was a precedent for this in the proceedings on the Administration of Justice Bill when, on February 6 this year, the noble Lord, Lord Goodman, withdrew an Amendment on these very grounds.
There is one other Amendment on which I think a procedural point may occur, and that is Amendment No. 12. Here (although this is perhaps not quite so strong as Amendment No. 1) I would suggest to the Committee that there is a suggestion that the Board could take an interest in a company based not in Scotland but in London, Burmuda or anywhere else, so long as that company's business contributed in some way to the Highlands and Islands. I would ask the noble Lord and the Committee to consider these points.

§ LORD MITCHISON
This Bill had its Second Reading, and nothing was said about this matter, although I explained quite clearly what the Amendments were going to be. I can only say to the noble Earl that I should have thought both sides of the House were interested in seeing that the Highlands and Islands Development Board, of which his own 1251 Front-Bench Member spoke so highly on Second Reading, as did everyone else, should be allowed to have these powers. I do not think I am doing anything out of order. We propose to amend the Bill later, but if the noble Earl thinks we ought to block the Highlands and Islands Development Board in getting this minor clarification of their powers because we are bound by some rule to do so, I simply invite him to divide the Committee.

§ THE EARL OF KINNOULL
I have no intention of dividing the Committee. I was simply drawing the attention of the Committee to the fact that there was a procedural point. We are not at all against this Bill; indeed, I entirely support what my noble friend Lord Dundee said about it on Second Reading.

§ LORD MITCHISON
I am glad to hear that. May we now take it that this is not pressed, and that accordingly we can proceed to this Amendment on its merits?