Lords Sitting of 27 March 1969

Preamble
The House met at three of the clock: The LORD CHANCELLOR on the Woolsack.
Prayers—Read by the Lord Bishop of Chester.
The Earl of Airlie—Sat first in Parliament after the death of his father.

LONDON (HEATHROW) AIRPORT RAIL LINK
THE EARL OF KINNOULL: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the first Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
[The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what programme has now been made for the building of the rail link between London and Heathrow Airport.]
THE JOINT PARLIAMENTARY UNDER-SECRETARY OF STATE, SCOTTISH OFFICE (LORD HUGHES): My Lords, no programme has yet been settled for the building of a rail link between London and Heathrow Airport. Following, a recommendation of the Transport Co-ordinating Council for London in 1967, detailed plans are being worked out by British Rail in conjunction with other interested bodies for the construction both of the line itself, most of which is along existing track, and of the terminals at either end, to establish accurately the economics of the project. Agreement has yet to be reached between the parties about the finances of the link and certain related matters, and these are being looked into by my right honourable friends the President of the Board of Trade and the Minister of Transport.
THE EARL OF KINNOULL: My Lords, while thanking the noble Lord for that reply may I ask whether he can advise us how soon a decision is expected, or how soon the discussions will come to fruition? Could the noble Lord advise us, also, whether in view of the increasing road congestion to London Airport, the
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Government are satisfied that the present coach service will continue to be able to give an adequate service.
LORD HUGHES: My Lords, I will take the second part first. This issue arises because of the doubts about the continued adequacy of the coach service. As to when a decision can be reached, there are, as I have said, a number of interests involved—British Railways, the British Airports Authority and the airlines—and it is not surprising that it is rather difficult to get them all to agree on the same solution. But I can assure noble Lords that the Government are well aware of the urgency of the matter, and we have brought pressure to bear on the parties to put forward an agreed scheme as quickly as they can.
LORD POPPLEWELL: My Lords, could my noble friend say whether any further progress has been made in connection with connecting the West London terminal at Gloucester Road with the Underground there? This proposal has been put forward over a long period of time, and it has always been turned down on the ground of expense. But in view of the fact that the Underground runs, as it were, beneath the terminal at Gloucester Road, it would seem that there is an outstanding case for a link-up between the terminal and the Underground system.
LORD HUGHES: My Lords, I indicated the difficulty in getting agreement. My noble friend puts his finger on one of those difficulties. What B.E.A. and B.O.A.C. would wish in relation to Gloucester Road is not necessarily the same as other people wish in connection with Victoria.
THE LORD BISHOP OF CHESTER: My Lords, could the noble Lord tell us whether consideration has been given to having an overhead railway, whereby passengers could embark in the middle of London and be delivered, I understand, to the door of the aircraft, without the necessity of having to go through various stations on the way?
LORD HUGHES: My Lords, I can appreciate that the right reverend Prelate is more interested in things above ground than below ground. My advisers have not carried me that distance, I am afraid.
LORD NUGENT OF GUILDFORD: My Lords, was one of the factors for this examination the arrival, as I believe, of the large new airliners at Heathrow next year? Could the noble Lord tell us whether Heathrow without a rail link will have the capacity to deal with the arrival of these large new planes, and what the prospect is of meeting the incidence of these large numbers of passengers all arriving at one time?
LORD HUGHES: My Lords, that question goes a little beyond the Question that was put down, but I understand that the answer to the first part, about the capacity of Heathrow, is, Yes. This, however, is merely another of the factors, added to the continual natural growth of air services, which are making the question of access from the airport to London a matter of ever-increasing urgency.
LORD BYERS: My Lords, would the Minister not agree that the longer the decision is delayed, the more expensive will any solution be?
LORD HUGHES: Undoubtedly, it will, my Lords. That is why the Government are pressing the urgency. But we have more than one indication that when Governments attempt to force solutions on unwilling people it does not add to speed.
LORD ALLERTON: My Lords, may I ask the noble Lord whether, if and when agreement is reached as to the massive new proposal for this rail link, any estimate has been made as to the length of time the work will actually take?
LORD HUGHES: Yes, my Lords. It is estimated that it will take five years to complete the link.
LORD MANCROFT: My Lords, if time does not seem to be the important factor would it not be better, in the long run, to go by sea?
LORD HUGHES: My Lords, I think that is a suitable note on which we may end this. I would only say that if the premise put forward was right, the conclusion would be equally right. However, I doubt if the premise is a correct one.

BETTERMENT LEVY AND HARDSHIP CASES
3.12 p.m.
THE EARL OF KINNOULL: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the second Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
[The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government how many cases of betterment levy have been submitted to the Minister of Housing on grounds of hardship and whether Her Majesty's Government will now issue a statement on the speculation that changes in the exemption of betterment levy in certain cases are to be shortly announced.]
THE PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY, MINISTRY OF HOUSING AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT (LORD KENNET): My Lords, the Minister has received about 120 letters giving details of individual cases where hardship is alleged since February 6, when he indicated during the debate on home ownership and the Land Commission in another place that he was prepared to consider such cases. The noble Lord will not expect me to comment on Press speculation.
THE EARL OF KINNOULL: My Lords, I did not gather whether the noble Lord answered the second part of the Question. While thanking the noble Lord for his reply, may I ask whether he can confirm the Press report (I think this is important) on the Sweeting case, that the Land Commission, having assessed these people originally at some £750, now advise them on how to avoid payment of the levy? If this is the case, will the Government now request the Land Commission to issue a leaflet with each assessment explaining on what grounds an assessment or levy could be avoided?
LORD KENNET: My Lords, the situation in the Sweeting case is as follows. Because Mr. Sweeting started work before the land was transferred to him, Mr. Clark, who is his wife's uncle, is the "developing owner" for the purposes of the Act and would therefore be liable to any levy chargeable. Section 61 of the Act provides for exemption where a person who owned land before the issue of the White Paper in September, 1965, uses it to build a single house for himself

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or a member of his immediate family. Mr. Sweeting does not qualify as a member of Mr. Clark's family under Section 61, but Mr. Clark has now intimated that he intends to live in the house himself. If he takes up residence and stays for the minimum period of six months specified in the Act he will be entitled to exemption from levy under the Act.
On the general question of advice to possible levy payers, this matter is being kept under continuous review. I am satisfied that for the moment the information promulgated is sufficient, but I repeat that there is continuous review of this aspect.
LORD WADE: My Lords, may I ask whether the noble Lord is satisfied that the general public understand these complexities? Also, pending the abolition of the betterment levy, which would be the best solution, could not something more be done to explain these matters clearly and simply to the general public?
LORD KENNET: My Lords, on the general question of information, anybody who buys or sells land or develops on land in his own possession without taking professional advice is acting extremely incautiously. If any professional adviser omits to mention the existence of the Land Commission and the levy he is falling short of his professional duties. On the more general question about the abolition of the betterment levy, I take note of the position expressed on behalf of the Liberal Party, I presume, in this House to-day.
LORD LINDGREN: My Lords, as the payment of compensation is dependent upon the payment of betterment levy, has my noble friend information of any case in which the payment of compensation has been refused?
LORD KENNET: My Lords, I am not quite clear—compensation for what? If my noble friend will give me further details of what he has in mind, I shall be glad to look into it.
LORD LINDGREN: My Lords, compensation for the refusal of planning permission. As I understood it, the payment of the levy on development helped to pay for the compensation where planning permission was refused.
LORD KENNET: My Lords, this case is no large part of the 120 letters that I mentioned. But I take my noble friend's point and will consider it.
LORD BROOKE OF CUMNOR: My Lords, while noting that the Liberal Party has now thrown over the betterment levy, which for many years it advocated, may I ask the Government whether they have noted that churches are now suffering unfairly under the levy? Will they consider whether they would not have been wise to accept the decision of this House, that charities should be in all circumstances exempt from levy?
LORD KENNET: My Lords, I am not sure whether the noble Lord is referring to churches as bodies, as entities, which are owners of property or to individual churches in the case of a sale of a church for development purposes. In the former case, Parliament has decided that charities should not be exempt on their investment land; as to the latter case, I do not know of any particular geographical cases which the noble Lord may have in mind. I should be glad to look into them if he would give me details.
LORD LEATHERLAND: My Lords, when my noble friend and the Government are considering the future of betterment levy, will they try to avoid the mistake made by the Liberal Government of 1911, which imposed the very famous and much publicised land tax, then cancelled it and paid back all the money they had received?
LORD KENNET: My Lords, the Government always seek to avoid all mistakes made by all former Governments.
LORD WADE: My Lords, will the noble Lord kindly note that my colleagues and I were always opposed to the betterment levy, although we have proposed a very much more satisfactory and fair way of dealing with this matter; but I think it might be slightly out of order to give a discourse on this subject now.
THE EARL OF KINNOULL: My Lords, could the noble Lord perhaps tell the House how long ago the Land Commission submitted recommendations to the Minister on exemptions from the levy?
LORD KENNET: Not without notice, my Lords; and this reply is not to be taken as agreeing that any such submission has been made.
VISCOUNT BRENTFORD: My Lords, cannot the Government do something to cause the Land Commission to expedite their decision about betterment levy, as in many cases there is a three-year or four-year time-lag before they ultimately get round to the task of deciding whether or not betterment levy should be levied?
LORD KENNET: My Lords, there cannot be a three-year or four-year time-lag: the Act has been in operation for only two years.
LORD CLIFFORD OF CHUDLEIGH: My Lords, has the noble Lord any information on the drying up of supplies of minerals as a result of the betterment levy?
LORD KENNET: My Lords, that is a rather different question.

ALHAMBRA THEATRE, GLASGOW
THE EARL OF CROMARTIE: My Lords, I beg leave 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 take steps to prevent the sale for office development of the Alhambra Theatre, Glasgow, one of the few well-equipped theatres in Scotland which would be extremely costly to replace.]
LORD HUGHES: My Lords, the Government have no power to prevent the sale of the theatre.
THE EARL OF CROMARTIE: My Lords, I thank the Minister for that very short and rather unsatisfactory Answer. May I ask whether the Minister would consider it worth while discussing this matter with the Arts Council? Would the Minister not agree that to destroy one of our few and best-equipped theatres in Scotland for so-called development—not, be it noted, for housing—is a retrograde step? Furthermore, would he not agree that such a decision could be economically short-sighted as to replace this theatre would be very expensive indeed?
LORD HUGHES: My Lords, I am quite certain that the noble Earl, Lord Cromartie, will not be surprised when I tell him that such discussions have taken place. The fact is that the Scottish Arts Council already make an annual grant to the Citizens' Theatre Company, which was £58,000 in the year 1967–68, and to the Scottish Opera, which was £78,000 in 1967–68. I am informed that both the Corporation and the Arts Council consider that the Alhambra Theatre is too large for regular use as a theatre under present conditions, and it was because of this that the Corporation decided not to acquire the theatre.
LORD TAYLOR OF GRYFE: My Lords, would the Minister agree that a problem of rather greater urgency is that of the replacement of the Glasgow Citizens' Theatre, which is now threatened by demolition in the area in which it operates?
LORD HUGHES: Yes, my Lords, but unfortunately the Alhambra Theatre does not offer a solution to that problem, because of its size. I do not know whether noble Lords are aware that the seating capacity of the Alhambra Theatre is 2,250, and while no doubt my noble friend Lord Taylor of Gryfe would be happy to think that the Citizens' Theatre could regularly fill a theatre of that size. I do not think he is quite such a complete optimist.
VISCOUNT ST. DAVIDS: My Lords, has my noble friend received any great volume of requests from members of the Conservative Party for the Government to take powers to interfere in the purchase or sale of land?
LORD HUGHES: My Lords, no, but it seems to me that it is a perfectly suitable opportunity for private enterprise to operate.

THE OPEN UNIVERSITY
3.22 p.m.
LORD BEAUMONT OF WHITLEY: My Lords, I beg leave 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 sufficient funds have been

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made available to the Open University to allow them to accept all applicants for courses in the first year.
BARONESS PHILLIPS: My Lords, students will be enrolled next year for courses starting in January, 1971 Grants to the Open University after that date will take account of the level of enrolments.
LORD BEAUMONT OF WHITLEY: My Lords, while thanking the Minister for that reply, may I ask her whether she is aware of the forecast reported by the Vice-Chancellor of the Open University, that there might need to be a quota system for allocating places on courses for the first year?
BARONESS PHILLIPS: My Lords, I should not like to comment on any statement by the Vice-Chancellor of the Open University, but as the noble Lord will appreciate, the number of potential students is vast. The financing of the Open University will be different from that of existing universities, and therefore the whole matter must rest on the enrolments when they come in.
LORD CONESFORD: My Lords, what facilities will be offered to the students of this new university to smash up university property, in order that they may feel no sense of grievance when they compare their lot with that of other university students?
BARONESS PHILLIPS: My Lords, since they will be utilising in some part their own television sets one assumes they will not exercise this right, or opportunity.
LORD WYNNE-JONES: My Lords, could my noble friend say whether the restriction on admissions is likely to be due to monetary causes or to the lack of sufficient tutors throughout the country?
BARONESS PHILLIPS: My Lords, we have no evidence that there is in fact restriction. We have not yet even received the enrolments, so one can hardly say that there will be restrictions.

ELY HOSPITAL, CARDIFF
LORD BESWICK: My Lords, at a convenient moment after half-past three my noble friend Lady Serota will be making a Statement on the Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Ely Hospital, Cardiff, which is being presented to the House this afternoon as a White Paper.
WITHAM NAVIGATION COMPANY BILL [H.L.]
Read 3a, and passed, and sent to the Commons.
SALISBURY RAILWAY AND MARKET HOUSE BILL [H.L.]
Read 3a, and passed, and sent to the Commons.
TEESSIDE CORPORATION BILL
Read 2a, and committed to the Committee on Unopposed Bills.

NURSES BILL [H.L.]
3.26 p.m.
THE MINISTER OF STATE, DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND SOCIAL SECURITY (BARONESS SEROTA): My Lords, I beg leave to introduce a Bill to amend the Nurses Act 1957 and the Nurses (Scotland) Act 1951. I beg to move that this Bill be now read a first time.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 1a—(Baroness Serota.)
On Question, Bill read 1a, and to be printed.

HORSERACE BETTING LEVY BILL
Returned from the Commons, with the Amendments agreed to.

BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE
THE LORD PRIVY SEAL (LORD SHACKLETON): My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper.
Moved, That Standing Order No. 41 (No Two Stages of a Bill to be taken on one day) be dispensed with for the purpose of taking the Consolidated Fund (No. 2) Bill through its remaining stages this day.—(Lord Shackleton.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.

HOUSE OF LORDS OFFICES
THE CHAIRMAN OF COMMITTEES (THE EARL OF LISTOWEL): My Lords, I beg to move that the Second Report from the Select Committee be now considered.
Moved accordingly and, on Question, Motion agreed to.
The Committee's Report was as follows:
1. LIBRARY
A Report from the Sub-Committee on the Library for the year 1968 was laid before the Committee.
2. PROPOSED WORKING PARTY ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE HOUSE OF LORDS, THE CIVIL SERVICE DEPARTMENTS AND THE TREASURY
The Committee were informed of the proposal of the Chancellor of the Exchequer that a Working Party should be set up to study the relationship between the House of Lords, the new Civil Service Department and the Treasury. The Committee agreed to set up a Working Party.
3. PARLIAMENT OFFICE AND LIBRARY
The Clerk of the Parliaments informed the Committee of a review of the following posts in the Parliament Office and Library:—

Librarian

Clerk of the Journals

Accountant's Office

Hansar+d Reporters

The Committee authorised the scales of salary consequent upon the revised grading of these posts.
The Committee authorised the temporary employment of a shorthand typist in the Parliament Office when required by the Clerk of the Parliaments.
4. HANSARD REPORTING STAFF

(a) The Committee reviewed the Agreement with Haynes Secretarial Services for the sup-
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ply of typists for the reporting of Debates and approved an increase in their charges.

(b) The Committee sanctioned the application to temporary Reporters of the revised attendance fee as set out in the Appendix to D.E.O. letter of the 11th March, 1969, and revised attendance fees to Permanent and Temporary Reporters when the House of Lords sits after 10.30 p.m., with effect from the 1st November, 1968.

5. OFFICIAL SHORTHAND WRITER
The Committee approved an increase in the scale of fees and the annual retaining fee for the official Shorthand Writer with effect from the 1st November, 1968.
6. DOORKEEPERS
The Committee authorised the appointment of an additional Doorkeeper for duties at Judicial sittings from the 1st October, 1969.
The Committee authorised improved revised scales of salary under D.E.O. (68) (Pay) No. 20 to the Doorkeepers with effect from the 1st January, 1969.
7. MEAL ALLOWANCES
The Committee approved an increase in the rate of meal allowance payable to certain officials working late in the evening after a normal day's duty.
8. SUPPLEMENTARY ESTIMATE 1968–69
The Committee approved the presentation of a Supplementary Estimate for the year 1968–69.
9. SUPERANNUATION AWARDS
The Committee sanctioned the payment of the following awards under the Superannuation Act 1965:—

(a) Revised Pension and Additional Allowance to Mr. William Day, M.B.E., Principal Doorkeeper, who retired on the 17th January, 1969;

(b) Death Gratuity under S. 4(1) to the legal personal representative of the late Wilfred Henry Martin, Senior Attendant, who died on the 10th February, 1969, and a pension under S. 53(2) to Miss Valerie Claire Martin;

(c) Death Gratuity to the legal personal representative of the late Mrs. Rose Emily Cranston, Housemaid, who died on the 24th December, 1968.

THE EARL OF LISTOWEL: My Lords, I beg to move that the Report be agreed to.
Moved, That the Report be agreed to.— (The Earl of Listowel.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.

FOREIGN COMPENSATION BILL
3.28 p.m.
THE MINISTER OF STATE, FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH OFFICE (LORD CHALFONT): My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a third time.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 3a. —(Lord Chalfont.)
On Question, Bill read 3a, with the Amendments.
Clause 1 [Extension of power to deal with property of Baltic States and ceded territories]:
LORD CHALFONT LORD CHALFONT moved Amendment No. 1:
Page 2, line 3, at end insert—
("(2) Any order made by the Board of Trade under that section may make the like provision in relation to former property of a Baltic State or ceded territory as might be made by such an order in relation to enemy property if a state of war existed:
Provided that an order made by virtue of this subsection shall not provide for the payment to. or the vesting in, a custodian of enemy properly of any money or other property unless an order had been made under or by virtue of that section before the passing of this Act purporting to require it to be paid to a custodian or to vest it or the right to transfer it in a custodian.")
The noble Lord said: My Lords, your Lordships will recall our discussions at the Report stage on what was then subsection (2) of Clause 1 of the Bill. As I understood it, the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Dilhorne, accepted the assurance I then gave that the small amount of unvested assets should remain outside the purview of the Bill. These unvested assets, with an estimated value of about £30,000 to £40,000, were for the most part reported to the Custodians and then became subject to control under Article 4 of the Trading with the Enemy (Custodian) Order 1939, shortly after the territory to which they relate became enemy territory. They have not, however, been the subject of vesting orders. The noble and learned Viscount, Lord Dilhorne, pressed his point to a Division and the subsection was left out of the Bill. But I think he and your Lordships would agree that there must be sonic provision in the Bill to enable the Custodian to perfect his title to property already vested in him. This Amendment has the purpose of restoring the sub-
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section but with the addition of a proviso to give statutory effect to the assurance which I earlier gave to the House.
We have taken the opportunity to consider whether to redraft the subsection so as simply validate the vesting orders already made. This looks at first sight attractive. But in view of the complex nature of these matters—with which the House will recall the noble and learned Lord, the Lord Chancellor, dealt some detail at the Committee stage—we have reached the conclusion that it would be better to stick to the original wording, together with the addition of a proviso to implement my assurance that these unvested assets should remain outside the scope of the Bill. Of course it would still be possible, if new vestings were hastily made before the Bill becomes law, to defeat the purpose of the proviso, but I assure the House that we have no intention of doing any such thing.
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: My Lords, I am sure the House is grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, for the explanation he has given with regard to this Amendment. When I first moved the Amendment in Committee to leave out subsection (2) of Clause 1, the noble and learned Lord, the Lord Chancellor, said that the object of the subsection was merely to perfect the title of the Custodian, and gave me an assurance that it would not be used for any wider purpose. That information, as we know—and I do not seek to criticise it as an error—was wrong, and I mention it now only because at that moment I took the stand that if that was all the subsection was intended to do I saw no objection to it. I see no objection now to inserting a provision, if required, whereby the title of the Custodian to what is in his possession will be perfected.
I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, for discussing with me the terms of this Amendment. I should have preferred a much simpler form, but I dare-say there are difficulties that I have not appreciated. I do not think he can really say that this form of Amendment all that simple, but I think the proviso is entirely effective for the purpose he and I want to see achieved at the present time, for it provides, if I understand it correctly, that no order for payment to the Custodian of any money or for the

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vesting in him of any property can now be made, under the power given by this Bill when it becomes an Act, unless prior to the passage of the Act such an order has already been made. It strikes me as odd, in a way, that if such an order has already been made there should be need to make another one when this Act has been passed. Be that as it may, think the proviso is effective to achieve that end, and I am grateful to the noble Lord for taking so much trouble to meet what were the clear wishes of the House on the Report stage.
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
3.33 p.m.
LORD CHALFONT: My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill do now pass.
Moved, That the Bill do now pass.—(Lord Chalfont.)
THE MARQUESS OF LANSDOWNE: My Lords, it would be churlish not to thank the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, for having dealt with this humiliating Bill in the sympathetic way he has done. He has gone out of his way to help us over certain grave difficulties that we felt, and I am grateful to him for this. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, was given a thankless task, and he stretched his powers to the very limit to meet us on this side of the House, and also, I suspect, if I may say so, some of the feelings of noble Lords and Ladies on the other side of the House.
Nevertheless, I feel that I cannot say goodbye to this Bill without reiterating what I said at the beginning; that is, that Her Majesty's Government have seen fit to dispose of property which by no conceivable stretch of the imagination could morally have belonged to them. These assets came within the control of Her Majesty's Government simply and solely because they were in the ownership—and I repeat "ownership", because eventually we did persuade the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, to say that he thought they were in the ownership; and I know that under British law that is so—of the Custodian of Enemy Property. But let us not forget that these assets came into the ownership of the Custodian of Enemy Property simply and solely because a country which had declared its neutrality before the war was overrun by the Ger-
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mans, and these assets, which had been placed for safe keeping in British banks, were then blocked. This is the first thing that happened to them, they were blocked. This is a perfectly normal procedure.
The next thing that happened to them—not to all of them—was that they were vested in the Custodian. I think I am right in saying that the gold about which we talked so much was not in fact vested in the Custodian until 1953, and, as my noble and learned friend Lord Dilhorne eventually discovered, there were other assets that had not been vested at all; and we have been able, thanks to the persuasive arguments of my noble and learned friend, to have these excluded. I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont for that. But I still believe —and nothing will persuade me otherwise—that we are in fact to-day being asked to legalise what is really an act of confiscation. Perhaps it may be helpful if I quote the words of certain legal gentlemen whose views reinforce my own. One of them is an American legal expert, and he says this:
"The enlightened policy of the nation is not to confiscate enemy private property but rather to preserve it.'
That is a quotation from Edward D. Roe, Foreign Confiscation in Anglo-American Law, New York 1951, page 10 and following. Then I must invoke the observations of the noble and learned Lord, Lord McNair:
"The vesting of enemy property in the Custodian is primarily a matter of ensuring its conservation rather than its confiscation."
This is my view. I think we are being asked to do a humiliating thing; we are being asked to give legality to a contemptible act by Her Majesty's Government.
3.36 p.m.
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: My Lords, perhaps I had better say straight away, in case the noble Lord, Lord Beswick, may show some anxiety, as he showed some concern recently at the length of Peers' speeches, that I do not intend to speak at any undue or great length on this Motion. I think that when this Bill came before the House one's first impression was that it was a pretty harmless run-of-the-mill Bill; and had it not been for the excellent work done by Sir Tufton Beamish and others in another

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place it may be that we in this House should not have appreciated the deep and serious implications of this measure. I believe that in fact we have greatly improved this Bill. My noble friend Lord Lansdowne has described it as an act of confiscation. I think that in this House we have done a great deal to mitigate that. As the Bill first appeared in this House I think that it entirely merited that description.
But here one has to distinguish between property which really became bona vacantia, and so the property of the Crown, and which the Crown has put in the hands of the Custodian for distribution among these various creditors, and property which had not become bona vacantia and had not got into the Crown's possession. So far as the distribution of bona vacantia property is concerned, it could not, I think, be regarded as confiscation to effect that distribution. But distribution of property which did not come within that class could amount to confiscation if the distribution took place straight away and automatically. But we have the concession, the statement made by the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, which I think goes a long way to mitigate that effect; and that is that if there are claims by former owners of that property within, I think he said, two years, that property will be returned to them. That would mean, as I understand it, that after two years are up the distribution will be of property which within that period has had no claim by a former owner, or successor of a former owner, established in regard to it. I think that that is a considerable improvement; it was made as a result of debate in this House, and I welcome it.
This is, of course, a Bill designed to implement an Agreement with the Soviet Union, and the Government are indeed fortunate that they did not have to submit that Agreement for approval to either House of Parliament. For I am sure, although they may think that they have had a rough passage over this Bill, they would have had a very rough passage indeed in securing approval for a measure which provided for giving half-a-million pounds to the Soviet Union as the price of an Agreement, when all that we are now doing under
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this Bill could, and I think should, have been done without the necessity of paying any such price to the Soviet Union for it. Furthermore, it is not the only benefit that the Soviet Union has got out of that Agreement.
We have spent a good deal of time in this House on this Bill. I do not for one moment think that that time has been wasted. Three Divisions have been carried against the Government. One of them dealt with a purely legal matter, the right of appeal in certain circumstances from a decision of the Foreign Compensation Commission, a matter in which, as the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor pointed out, the Government really were not involved, and certainly not a matter on which there was any Party issue. Nevertheless, the proposal that there should be such recourse to the courts, supported as it was by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Denning, the Law Society and the Bar Council, and many others, was strongly resisted and we had to go to a Division with regard to it, a Division which was carried.
That was followed on Report by the tabling by the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor of an Amendment to meet that particular point. I should like to express my gratitude to him for doing that, but I cannot forbear to draw from this the lesson: if we had not been able to carry that Amendment, would any Government, not necessarily this Government, having fought on that issue and won, have then put down an Amendment at a later stage? I do not think they would. But, thanks to the Lord Chancellor, and thanks to our carrying that Amendment against the Government, we have succeeded in making that improvement in the Bill.
The second Division we had was in regard to the matter we have just been discussing. There again, the carrying of that Division paved the way for an Amendment which satisfied the Government and those who have criticised this particular measure on that particular point. I do not believe that would ever have happened had we not been able to carry the Amendment. I just want to point to the fact that, quite apart from sending Amendments back to another place, it is sometimes useful in this House to carry Amendments against

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the Government, thus giving the Government an opportunity of thinking again and, as here, thinking again on two issues in which there is no Party issue involved and no Party point or principle.
I think the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, has had a difficult time in getting this Bill to where it has now got. I should like to thank him for the care and attention that he has given to it and for the consideration he has given to the views expressed. I do not propose to say any more with regard to it, except to repeat that I am grateful to the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor for the part he played.
3.45 p.m.
LORD ST. OSWALD: My Lords, as both my noble friends have said, the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, has had a rough ride on this Bill, but he has been given a number of unbroken broncos by his colleagues. He has ridden this one with grace, tenacity and, almost the whole time, with his eyes shut, which is a considerable feat of rodeo, as anyone must agree.
This Bill has now reached almost its last stage in your Lordships' House, and I hope that to-day Ministers will not either show or simulate surprise that some of us consider it a deplorable, even a dishonourable Bill. It is theft from the innocent and defenceless by those in high places. It is a five-star felony. The Government have protested that their purpose is beneficent, in partly compensating certain people, most of them having no connection with the Baltic States, who have suffered through expropriations of one kind or another by the Soviet Government. I suppose I could easily have been one of them, though I am not. I should like to say, with emphasis and conviction, that neither in this case nor in any circumstances that I can imagine, would I wish to be compensated out of money stolen from other, equally unfortunate and innocent people. The money which the Foreign Compensation Commission will handle and distribute will be "filthy lucre" in an unusually explicit sense.
Both the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, here, and the hapless Mr. Whitlock in another place have spoken poignantly about the claimants and the legitimate
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preoccupations of those claimants. None of this poignancy or heartfelt sympathy embraces the original owners—and I would say the true owners, the moral owners—of these assets, or the claims that they may have. The noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, was in fact somewhat impatient with them, because they had not come forward already to present their claims, and he implied that if they wanted to come forward in the next two weeks following the passage of this Bill there was nothing to stop them. That term for coming forward has now, as we know, been extended to two years.
When I pointed out that these people were not living in Bognor or Bishops Stortford but within the Soviet frontiers, and totally prevented from presenting their claims, lie brushed this aside as "colourful". Then when I pressed him he said that I was presenting "colourful facts". The noble Lord can only consider Bognor and Bishops Stortford as colourful if he leads as drab a life as the Labour Government have tried to impose upon the whole country, and this I know not to be the case. On the other hand, if he supposes that life within the Soviet Union and Soviet occupied territory is "colourful", then he has far less knowledge of the conditions there than is adequate for a Minister of State at the Foreign Office, and this I would also hope not to be the case.
I have recently read passages from a report from a Czechoslovak citizen after a visit to Latvia, in which he expresses his relief at the comparative freedom enjoyed in Czechoslovakia even since the Soviet invasion, and we all have to be conscious of the kind of conditions that have been imposed there. This Czechoslovak citizen described how freedom of the individual and national expression had been suppresed in Latvia by the Soviet masters; yet this is one of the three peoples receiving what I regard as punitive treatment from Her Majesty's Government. The Government may believe, indeed they have implied, that the fate of these people is so hopeless that they may be regarded as hardly to exist and any idea of future freedom can be utterly dismissed.
One of Lord Chalfont's favourite words, I have noticed, is "hypothetical". He has even spoken of "hypothetical flies" cast over the Government Front

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Bench. That is pretty colourful! It is far from clear, and I think he should clarify whether the Government believe it totally inconceivable that any of these countries can exist again. If so, then that seems to me pretty hypothetical in the noble Lord's pejorative interpretation. Simply to study the history of Poland, as one example, is to question that premise.
If the Government, while reluctant to express such a sweeping belief, still suppose that there is no practical chance of the true owners ever being in a position to claim, then I think they are also mistaken. Do they believe that the Central Banks of those countries can never be re-created? This sort of thing has happened. I do not know how many times it has happened, but one instance is the National Bank of Austria. The Oesteriechischer Nationalbank was founded in 1922, ceased to exist after the Anschluss in 1938, when it was absorbed by the Deutsche Reichsbank—an exact parallel to what has happened in the Baltic banks when absorbed by the Russian system—and re-created after the War by the Notenbank-Uberleitungsgesetz, a Bill passed through the Austrian Parliament. It now, of course, trades and is recognised by the world. What is to prevent any or all of the three Baltic countries, having recovered freedom, going through the same sort of parliamentary process with regard to the three Central Banks?
Thirdly, and lastly, do the Government assume that all the private depositors of those three countries who might have a claim through the banks must be dead, also their heirs? If so, let them say so. For my part, I say now, as I said at the Report stage, that they, the Government, are cruelly discriminating against innocent and helpless people. This Bill places a large number of people in the Baltic countries in an under-privileged category, in a state of statutory contempt. The greater part of these assets were vested in the Custodian of Enemy Property 28 years ago. At one moment they were recognised as the legitimate property of some customers of the Bank of England, the next moment they were vested in the Custodian of Enemy Property. There was nothing improper or unnecessary in this. It was done with the assets of many other countries over-run by Nazi Germany. But, as I pointed out on Report, of the £380 million transferred in this way from "technical" enemies to the Custodian,
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practically all has been returned to them except the £7 million which belonged to the Baltic countries. This cannot be described as anything but discrimination, and the reason for that discrimination is the ignoble one that the true owners are weak, unheard and at present unidentifiable. The Government may protest that only one of those qualifications is valid, the difficulty of identifying the original owners.
It is not accurate to say that, in matters of property ownership, an automatic assumption is made after 28 years that title cannot be re-established. When I was in the Ministry of Agriculture some years ago, I had to consider a somewhat perplexing problem originating from land ownership which, by coincidence, has now come back into the news. Before the First World War—that is, before 1914—small plots of land were sold, as part of a sizeable scheme, on Canvey Island in Essex. In the course of the First World War many or most of the deeds were scattered and lost. Basildon New Town bought up part of this area, and where the ownership was not known the purchase money from a compulsory purchase was paid into court, where it has awaited claimants ever since. Much of it still waits, protected, for the proper claimants should they come forward. Some of them have, and amounts of as much as £1,000 have been claimed and paid. There is new speculation it this area, as a result of a possible international airport at Foulness.
Some plots of land bought nearly 60 years ago may be of very considerable value, leading to successful claims being made 70, 80 or 90 years later for all I know. There was no question in my mind, when it was put to me, but that these claims had to be protected. It was not, as I recall, seriously challenged by anyone. If the Government choose to say that this is irrelevant, then they are admitting my charge that discrimination is being practised against the true owners of the Baltic assets. There is one law for them, and a far more favourable and civilised law for the original, also unidentified, owners of the plots on Canvey Island.
Why should these unhappy, presently enslaved, people not be protected, or enabled to bring their claims forward for compensation by a British Government,

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even after the assets have been distributed, as we now know they will be? On the 20th of this month I asked the Government what were the duties of the Custodian of Enemy Property. I was answered by the noble Lord, Lord Brown, who said:
"These Orders were made by the Board of Trade with a view to preventing the payment of moneys to enemies and of preserving enemy property in contemplation of arrangements to be made at the conclusion of peace." —[[OFFICIAL REPORT, 20/3/69, col. 1016.]
My Lords, what has become of those purposes to-day? I wonder if the noble Lord is listening to my question. I am making a point which I shall ask him to answer. I ask him what has become of those purposes to-day? Since we are no longer at war, it can hardly be claimed that the Custodian is now preventing the payment of moneys to enemies. As for preserving enemy property in contemplation of arrangements to be made at the conclusion of peace, whatever may have been contemplated in 1939, it certainly was not a deal of this nature. So that the purpose of these Orders, as described from that Despatch Box a week ago to-day, has been misused and abused.
The noble Lord, Lord Brown, also said that:
"In 1954 the House of Lords decided that the Custodians were Crown Servants whose duties involved the holding of property and the receipt of income until further instructions were given to them."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 20/3/69, col. 1017.]
I understand that such further instruction would come from the President of the Board of Trade. Arising from that part of the noble Lord's answer, I wish to ask the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, who will reply if, in this context, the President of the Board of Trade is governed, directed or limited by anything in law or Statute, as to the directions he gives. I hope that the noble Lord will be armed with the reply to this question, as it is a very obvious one, consequent on the explanation by his noble friend. Moreover, he was, I recall, in his place on that occasion when I told his noble friend that I should study the reply between then and the Third Reading of this Bill. More specifically still, I told the noble Lord's private offices this morning that I should be asking him this question.
I hope the noble Lord will recognise that this question is an extension of one
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which I put to him in the Report stage debate. I asked him whether Parliamentary action was necessary to enable the Custodian to dispose of assets under his control, other than by returning them to their original owners, because, in my submission, that would have made this a confiscatory Bill. The noble Lord appeared, a minute or two later, to deny that this was a confiscatory Bill, although on reading his words in Hansard I see that he did not actually deny it in words—but nor did he answer my question. I put it to him again: is Parliamentary action necessary to obtain the result sought in this Bill? If so, can he declare in definite terms that this is not a confiscatory Bill? If Parliamentary action is not required, then I have to ask him what the blazes is Clause I doing in the Bill?
My Lords, I do not think there is anything now to be done by us to draw the poison from this piece of legislation. I should like to think that a future Government would feel themselves in honour bound to make an ex gratia payment to a claimant who could prove his or her case—but, as I understand it, the Bill precludes the presentation of such a claim. If the Government can say that I am mistaken in this, it will do something to lessen the stigma which will blemish this country's name for fair dealing and fair treatment in particular to those without protection. There is something humiliating, to my mind, in the possibility that a future claimant may have a valid, attested claim recognised by international law, being forced to that recourse because his rights in British law have been deliberately barred by the terms of this Bill. Saving certain humanising improvements, mentioned by my noble and learned friend, that we have been able to make to this Bill in this House, I am sorry to say that I dislike it now as much as I did when I was watching its controversial passage through another place. The noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, may have observed that on this occasion I have been sparing to the point of solicitude, so far as quoting him to his own discomfort is concerned—no more than a light tease at the opening. But it would be wrong to spare the true author of this nasty piece of work.
I cannot close without reminding the House that immediately after the visit of Mr. Alexei Kosygin, in the course of

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which this Agreement was made, Mr. Harold Wilson declared that his guest had "in seven days almost become a part of the British way of life". I hope that the Prime Minister blushed at the recollection, privately at least, when the following year his quondam guest, as one of the rulers of Russia, ordered the invasion of Czechoslovakia and the crushing of the nascent urge to liberty in that country. I suggest that the Agreement reached and transcribed into this Bill is characteristic far more of the Russian way of life than of ours. When Mr. Wilson and Mr. Kosygin supped together in London, they were careful to use the same truncated spoon.
4.1 p.m.
LORD CHALFONT: My Lords, I am grateful for the thorough and courteous way in which this Bill has been treated in your Lordships' House. The noble Lord, Lord St. Oswald, need express no solicitude for me. I have found the piloting of this Bill through your Lordships' House a stimulating and interesting experience. The Government believe the agreement with the Soviet Union to have been a good and wise one, but noble Lords will have their own opinions, to which they are entitled, about the matter, and I have no doubt that the noble Lord, Lord St. Oswald, will continue to give voice to them.
In dealing with what I hope will be the last stages of the passage of this Bill in your Lordships' House, I shall deal briefly with some of the points which have been raised in this short debate. It is partly because the Government agree with the sentiments expressed by the noble Marquess, Lord Lansdowne, in his quotations from certain learned legal authorities that we did two things. First of all, in the Agreement with the Soviet Union we secured the insertion of Article 3, which provides that the Soviet Government are responsible for settling claims by Soviet nationals. Secondly, as I have said in your Lordships' House before and I repeat to-day, if an individual comes forward to claim his property to-day, he will get it. If he comes forward after the Bill becomes law, he will still get it or its value. I do not believe that any Government could be more unequivocal about their intentions than that.
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I shall not on this occasion allow myself the pleasure of a joust with the noble Lord, Lord St. Oswald, because time is short. I should like simply to reassure the House that I am acquainted in some detail with life in the Soviet Union and I need no instruction, although I will defer to the noble Lord in detailed knowledge of Brighton, Bognor Regis and Basildon. I can best answer his question by saying that the present statutory duties of the Custodian are to preserve enemy property in contemplation of arrangements to be made at the conclusion of peace. That is a broad definition of the Custodian's statutory duties. This Bill would add a new statutory power: to dispose of the Baltic and ceded territories' assets in order to enable the Custodian to pay money to the Foreign Compensation Commission.
The justification for this, in the eyes of Her Majesty's Government, is as follows. First, British property was nationalised by the Baltic States in Soviet legislation in 1940 or thereabouts, without compensation. Secondly, the British Government after years of effort have concluded this Agreement, to which I referred earlier, with the Soviet Government—the only Government now existing in the area in relation to British claims. Thirdly, the Soviet Government have undertaken not to pursue their claims to Baltic and ceded territories' assets now to be disposed of under the arrangements proposed in the Bill.
LORD ST. OSWALD: My Lords, has the noble Lord finished dealing with that point?
LORD CHALFONT: If the noble Lord will contain himself in patience for a moment longer, perhaps he will be satisfied. As my noble and learned friend the Lord Chancellor has explained, many of the assets in question—indeed the noble and learned Viscount referred to this in his welcome contribution to-day—which formerly belonged to Baltic or ceded territories companies are probably bona vacantia—that is, the property of the Crown—and no longer the property of former owners. As regards the property of individuals, if it was covered by the Anglo-Soviet Agreement then by Article 3 of that Agreement the Soviet Government is solely responsible for settling the claim of the Soviet nationals

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concerned. In other cases if the individual comes forward and establishes that some item of property is his, then he will get back the property itself or its value. Accordingly, there can be no doubt— and I hope that there is no doubt left in your Lordships' mind—that this Bill is not a confiscatory Bill. If the noble Lord wishes me to say that again in order that it is clearly on the record, I will do so: this Bill is not a confiscatory Bill. In the view of Her Majesty's Government, its proposals are fully justified.
LORD ST. OSWALD: My Lords, I think the noble Lord has already contradicted himself, in explaining that this Bill is required, in order to dispose of these assets, in the way they are being disposed of.
LORD CHALFONT: My Lords, I do not think it would be in the interests of your Lordships' House to go back over all these arguments. So far as I can see —and it seems that most of your Lordships are with me on this—the provisions of this Bill are fully justified and, as I have explained, in the cases which are bona vacantia and in the case of individuals' property there is no element of confiscation about the Bill at all. I am sure noble Lords will agree that the whole of the Bill and all the arguments which have been deployed have been given a most careful scrutiny. It is unlikely that the Amendment which was made during the Committee stage, the effect of which was to leave out subsection (5) of Clause I which concerned the payment of £500,000 to the Consolidated Fund from the assets, will commend itself to another place. I believe that the earlier part of the Bill, as it now stands, is an improvement on the Bill which was first received in your Lordships' House. That is the result of long, careful, courteous and comprehensive debate.
I should like to express gratitude to your Lordships, and especially to the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Dilhorne, for the courtesy and care with which he has studied the Bill and for the co-operation which he has extended to me in securing what I hope will soon be its passage through your Lordships' House. I hope noble Lords will agree
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that the Bill, which has been modified in several important respects in order to meet your Lordships' wishes, will now pass.
On Question, Bill passed, and returned to the Commons.

ELY HOSPITAL, CARDIFF: INQUIRY FINDINGS
4.10 p.m.
THE MINISTER OF STATE, DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND SOCIAL SECURITY (BARONESS SEROTA): My Lords, I will, with permission, now repeat a Statement which is being made by the Secretary of State for Social Services in the House of Commons about the Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Ely Hospital, Cardiff, which has been presented to the House this afternoon as a White Paper, Cmnd. 3975. In doing so I must apologise for its length. The Statement is a follows:
"The Committee of Inquiry was set up in 1967 by the Welsh Hospital Board at the request of my right honourable friend, the then Minister of Health, to investigate allegations of ill-treatment of patients and of pilfering by staff which had been made by a nursing assistant employed at the hospital. The Committee was also asked to make their own examination of the situation in the hospital at the time of their inquiry.
"The Committee, under the chairmanship of Mr. Geoffrey Howe, Q.C., has done its work with a thoroughness fairmindedness and humanity which must command universal respect. This makes it all the more disturbing that the Report is highly critical and will, I am sure, cause as deep concern to Members as it does to me. It is for this reason and because I consider that it should be used at once as a basis for remedial action that I have decided to take the unusual course of publishing it in full, omitting only the names of individual patients and staff.
"The Committee finds, first, that most of the specific incidents alleged by the nursing assistant as examples of ill-treatment did occur. Secondly, the Committee finds that many members of staff in the wards made use of food supplied for patients, and that excessive quantities of meat were provided to

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nursing staff. These aspects of the Report have been referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions. Thirdly, the Committee finds that an atmosphere existed in which well-intentioned members of the nursing staff felt it hazardous to complain; two who did so had to leave the hospital.
"Responsibility for serious deficiences in standards of medical and nursing services and of administration is attributed to the senior staff of the hospital, to the Hospital Management Committee and to the Welsh Hospital Board. The Committee also criticises the present procedures for dealing with complaints in the hospital service as a whole. And finally the Committee recommends that a system of inspection of such hospitals is needed—the form of which it leaves me to consider.
"The House will, I am sure, wish to study the Report before coming to conclusions. Nevertheless I think honourable Members will expect me to say today what the Government's attitude to it is. As the Minister responsible I accept the Committee's findings and recommendations about Ely. I add, however, that it would be quite wrong to draw conclusions about the standard of care in long stay hospitals from these findings. I would remind the House that these findings do not apply to the whole of the hospital service or even to the whole of Ely Hospital: they apply only to four wards and one villa for children. To draw general conclusions from this limited evidence would be quite wrong. Indeed in the course of an extensive series of visits up and down the county I have myself been deeply impressed by the skilled and devoted service given by staff in long stay hospitals, who have all too often been working for many years under heartbreaking difficulties; and I am very much aware that if this Report were published without a firm assurance of strong remedial action, it could shake their morale. In expressing my confidence in them, therefore, I at once add this assurance to them and to the House. The conditions which have existed for so many years to which many of them have been calling attention for a long time and in which such grave deficiencies as have been revealed at Ely can far too easily breed, are fully
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and frankly recognised by my Department and I am already taking steps to ensure that they will be dealt with effectively by the Regional Hospital Boards.
"One of these conditions is professional isolation. The main recommendation of the Report is that a new system of regular visiting and inspection is needed. I agree. And while the details are being worked out I am setting up a small working party in my Department to analyse the knowledge already available on these hospitals, and to supplement this survey where necessary with their own investigation.
"Secondly I have already asked each Regional Hospital Board Chairman to reassess the situation in his region and to present a report to me at our next meeting in April.
"I hope the House will permit me one further general observation. We are in the midst of a medical revolution in the treatment of the diseases of old age and mental illness. As the span of life is extended long term, often permanent, hospitalisation which only 20 years ago was the norm for these patients, is being replaced by intensive treatment given in short spells in hospital. In planning the Health Service of the future, therefore, we are able to assume a massive reduction in the proportion of hospital beds—and of long-stay hospitals—requirel for geriatric and mentally ill patients.
"Unfortunately, this does not apply to anything like the same extent to the mentally subnormal. For the foreseeable future many thousands of them will need resident hospital care for very long periods and this means that there is no prospect of doing without this class of hospital which I am afraid still remains a deprived area within the Health Service as, indeed, it was long ago when the Service came into being. The advice issued by my Department in 1965 to stimulate improvements, which this Report commends, was a good beginning. It shows what can be done. These hospitals must be given their fair share of manpower and money even if this means (as it will mean) a reallocation of resources within the Health Service. I shall be considering with the Boards ways and

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means of starting this difficult operation as soon as possible."
LORD BROOKE OF CUMNOR: My Lords, this is a terrible story about Ely Hospital. I am sure the noble Baroness has found it as painful to have to make this Statement as the House has found it painful to hear it. I venture to suggest that until we have had time to read the findings of the Committee, the less any of us comments on what has actually happened at Ely Hospital the better it may be. May I be allowed, however, to say how strongly most of us would agree with what the noble Baroness said about not generalising from this lamentable case, but, instead, extending our support and appreciation to the devoted staff who work in many other long-stay hospitals—sometimes, I am sorry to say, under almost soul-destroying conditions.
As to what is wrong, the responsibility of Ministers is involved, as well as of Regional Hospital Boards and hospital management committees. Do the Government recognise that the whole of the hospital service is critically short of money and that, while hospitals for the mentally subnormal are in the greatest need of all if they are to satisfy modern requirements, their needs cannot be rightly made good by simply twisting more tightly still the financial screw on other hospitals?
LORD AMULREE: My Lords, I, too, should like to thank the noble Baroness for making this long and rather tragic statement. Like the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Cumnor, I do not want to comment at this moment on the goings on at Ely Hospital and would rather wait until I have had time to study the Report. But I am very pleased that the Government have had the courage to publish this Report, even though it may be an unpleasant one to read. I should like to associate myself with what the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, said about the staff of these hospitals. Like him, I have had considerable experience of the conditions under which they work and of the marvellous work they manage to do under those deplorable conditions. One wants to pay the biggest tribute one can to the devotion to duty which they show.
There are three interesting matters to which I should like to refer. The first
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comment I would make (possibly it is unwise, but I should like to make it) is that it is the attitude of the senior staff that really lays down the attitude in the whole hospital, from the senior doctor down to the junior member of the ward staff. I am pleased to see that the Minister is to consider some way of changing the form of complaint, and possibly to introduce some form of inspection—I do not mean that in a pejorative way at all, but in a general, friendly and hopeful kind of way. I am a little worried about the assumption that there is going to be a large reduction in the number of beds taken for mental patients and geriatric patients. We were told that some time ago, and it proved to be sadly untrue. There may be some reduction but it will not be a very great one. I am very grateful indeed for the Statement.
4.20 p.m.
LORD SEGAL: My Lords, if I may venture one or two comments from these Benches—and I do so with the greatest restraint—may I ask the Minister whether she realises the sense of relief that many people will feel that this Report has at last been published? These conditions have been known to exist for quite a long time in the past, and have given rise to an enormous amount of uneasiness. Also, may I say how much the statement made by the Minister, that the Government intend to take drastic action in this matter, will be generally welcomed? May I stress also the urgency for some action to be taken to remedy the appalling conditions which she has described?
In this connection I would emphasise the need for a special training for nurses who are on the staff of these institutions. Special recognition should be given to the difficult conditions under which they work, and, particularly, some adjustment should be made in the matter of their pay in order to recruit the proper type of nurse for these institutions. Furthermore, may I say how important it is that some proper channel should exist for the laying of complaints, when such complaints are known to exist, to see that they are not brushed aside in the future as they have been, most unfortunately, in the past?
BARONESS SUMMER SKILL: My Lords, I am afraid I cannot agree with my noble friend when she suggests that

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we might receive this Report without comment. I believe that every time an inquiry of this kind is made it is much better for the helpless individuals in these institutions to have people in both Houses of Parliament who are prepared to ask questions again and again. Therefore, may I ask—
LORD BROOKE OF CUMNOR: My Lords, in fairness to the noble Baroness, Lady Serota, may I say that it was not she who suggested there should be no comment? I suggested that we should withhold comment only until after we have had time to read the Report.
BARONESS SUMMERSKILL: My Lords, I agree, but some of us who have been in Parliament for many years have lived through this kind of moment, time after time. It is always suggested that we should read the Report and see what is in it. By the time we have read the Report other things are happening and people forget to ask questions at what I consider to be the relevant moment—now. What I want to ask my noble friend is this: is she aware that what she said just now applies to similar institutions throughout the country, in so far as the staff are intimidated? My noble friend said that two members of the staff were dismissed, or left, because they questioned the system: their questioning was unpopular, and therefore they were dismissed.
What I should like to know, in view of this Inquiry and of the Statement which has just been made, is what general inquiry is now going to be set afoot by her Department in order to see how far the conditions in this institution apply in others. Unless somebody from outside goes in, questions the management committees and generally makes a fuss, the conditions which she describes now and which have obviously been existing in this institution for years can go on in other institutions of which we have no knowledge. Therefore, my question to her is this—and I have faith in her Department, now that she is in this job, because she is a woman and has compassion. My noble friend at the back groans. I am afraid it is true that women have a little more compassion in these matters than, perhaps, some of the men. May I ask my noble friend whether she will see to it that her Department makes
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a general inquiry with regard to the administration of homes and institutions which are organised for the old and the sick? Because it is in these places that the patients are completely helpless.
LORD SHACKLETON: My Lords, I am bound to say that the House is getting seriously out of order at the moment. I realise that this is a matter of deep I concern. The House makes its own rules of order. In fact, we practically always break them on Ministerial Statements, but I would draw the attention of the House to the fact that questions for clarification may be asked upon such Statements but they should not be made the occasion for immediate debate. Before we go any further, I feel that this is a point of which we need to be reminded.
BARONESS SUMMERSKILL: My Lords, my noble friend having said that, may I ask him whether he will give us an assurance now that this matter will be debated in this House?
LORD SHACKLETON: My Lords, the noble Baroness, who is, as she reminded us, a very experienced Parliamentarian, knows that it is not for the Leader of the House to determine what noble Lords themselves may choose to debate. It is open to her to put down a Motion or an Unstarred Question at any tine. I may add that I think this is a matter of very grave concern, and obviously the House is rightly concerned. I would not disagree with my noble friend that this matter, along with other subjects, is one that could well be debated.
LORD OGMORE: My Lords, as the sole Welshman to speak on this matter—and it primarily concerns Wales—may I ask the noble Baroness whether she is aware that this Report will be regarded with the utmost seriousness in Wales, and that Welsh people will want to know that there are no other institutions where the same conditions might already apply? May I also ask her whether, when her right honourable friend has discussed the whole question of Ely Hospital with the Chairman of the Hospital Board, a further report or statement will be made to Parliament, conveying to Members the results of that interview between the two gentlemen concerned?
LORD SILKIN: My Lords, may I say (perhaps it is hardly necessary for me

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to say it) that I cordially agree with the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Cumnor, and with the noble Lord the Leader of the House that, before we discuss this matter further, we ought to read the Report. I should like to put a question to the noble Baroness, and I put it because I was for many years both chairman and a member of a number of hospital management committees; and it seems to me inconceivable that a hospital management committee should not have known of what had been going on apparently for a long time. Certainly I should like to think that it could not have happened in the case of the hospitals with which I was concerned; and if a management committee is doing its job properly, it ought not to have happened in this case. May I ask the noble Baroness whether, in the Report, there is any reference to the activities of the Hospital Management Committee?
BARONESS HYLTON-FOSTER: My Lords, may I ask the noble Baroness whether Her Majesty's Government do not think that this is the moment to recommend that nurses should be moved around more? Because even with special training it needs superhuman patience to cope with some of the patients with whom they have to deal.
4.27 p.m.
BARONESS SEROTA: My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have spoken for their very balanced and restrained comments on a Statement which has clearly caused us all a great deal of distress. To my noble friend Lady Summerskill, whose comments were scarcely restrained, I can only say that I have very little doubt that if I were sitting in her place, and with her long Parliamentary experience, I should have reacted to a Statement of this kind in just the way that she has done to-day. It is a great support—and I know my right honourable friend the Secretary of State will share my feeling in this—to know that a Statement of this kind has been received in the way your Lordships have received it to-day. Of course, as the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Cumnor, pointed out, the prime responsibility is that of my right honourable friend, and he and I will together, I hope, work through the recommendations of
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this Report and see the implementation of the proposals that I have put before your Lordships in the Statement to-day.
Of course, as again the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, pointed out, there is no superfluity of money in the National Health Service—I only wish there were. Nevertheless, I think it is the duty of the Ministers responsible to take cognisance of the fact that there are large differences between the amounts spent in hospitals such as this and in other kinds of hospitals within the National Health Service, although of course there are sometimes good reasons for those differences. We must also take note of the fact that there are large differences between what different regions spend on these hospitals. These are aspects which my right honourable friend will clearly want to investigate.
All noble Lords expressed some relief at the publication, and one or two asked specific questions. Here I would join with my noble friend the Leader of the House in asking them to read the Report; and I assure my noble friend Lord Silkin that there is mention in this Report of the activities of the Hospital Management Committee. With regard to the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Hylton-Foster, about staff being moved around, as I indicated in the Statement that I read on behalf of my right honourable friend, the lesson of Ely is the need to avoid professional isolation in medical, nursing or in other grades of hospital staff. If noble Lords read the Report they will see that this aspect stands out clearly.
The noble Lord, Lord Ogmore, asked about the situation in Wales. I can assure him that my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Wales (who will become responsible for Welsh hospitals on April 1) is fully aware of the situation; and from my conversations with him I know that he is taking action himself on the Ely Report.
Finally, my noble friend Lady Summerskill asked me two questions. She asked: What is being done to inquire into other hospitals? She joined with the noble Lord, Lord Ogmore, in asking whether the results of these inquiries will be reported. When, at leisure, your Lordships read the Statement that I have just repeated you will find that there is a two-fold answer to this question. In

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the first place, my right honourable friend is considering the setting up of a professional advisory system at regional and central levels so that by regular visiting we can raise standards in these hospitals as a whole. That is the long-term plan. In the short term the working party that my right honourable friend is setting up will have as its first task an assessment of the situation in other hospitals with a view to discussing with the regions what reallocations we need to make to improve standards.

LICENSING (SCOTLAND) BILL
Read 3a, and passed.

CONSOLIDATED FUND (No. 2) BILL
LORD SHACKLETON: My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time.
Moved, that the Bill be now read 2a. —(Lord Shackleton.)
On Question, Bill read 2a: Committee negatived.
Then, Standing Order No. 41 having been dispensed with (pursuant to Resolution), Bill read 3a, and passed.

LAW OF PROPERTY BILL [H.L.]
4.32 p.m.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR (LORD GARDINER): My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time. This Bill is very much lawyers' law reform. It makes various amendments to our law of property; and our law of property is itself a somewhat technical subject. I mention this at the outset because the Bill has nothing to do with Party politics. I think it to be largely non-controversial: but at the same time I shall have to ask your Lordships to allow me to make an ordinary Second Reading speech. The reason for that is that it is so uncontroversial that it has been accepted by the Opposition as suitable for a Second Reading Committee in the other place. That means it will not have the Second Reading in the other place, and where that happens they naturally look to this House to see what explanation of the Bill has been given here. It is for that reason that I am
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afraid I shall have to make an ordinary Second Reading speech. At the same time, I recognise that one has to have tea at some time or another, and therefore if anybody should wish to leave now and to come back in half an hour, I am quite sure that neither the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross, nor I would take any offence.
My Lords, this is a Bill containing a considerable number of miscellaneous amendments to the law relating to property and land. Its three main parts concern first the law of business tenancies; secondly, the registration of title deeds under a special system operating only in Yorkshire, which is to be brought to an end; and, thirdly, a number of conveyancing matters concerning interests in land generally. With the exception of Part II, which deals with the Yorkshire title deeds, the Bill is based on the recommendations of the Law Commission contained in three Reports published by the Commission in the course of the last two years.
The three Reports are: the Law Commission's 9th Report, entitled Transfer of Land, Interim Report on Root of Title to Freehold Land, which was presented to me at the end of 1966 (the draft clause appended to that Report is reproduced in Clause 20 of the Bill); the Law Commission's 17th Report entitled Landlord and Tenant, Report on the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954 Part II, which deals with business tenancies and which I received in January of this year (this has appended to it a draft Landlord and Tenant Bill which forms the basis of the first 12 clauses of this Bill); and, lastly, the Law Commission's 18th Report Tr6nsler of Land. Report on Land Charges A fleeting Unregistered Land, which reached me only a few weeks ago and was published last week. The drift clauses 'appended to this Report are incorporated in Clauses 21 to 24.
Before I go into the details of the provisions in the Bill I should like to say a few words about the working methods of the Law Commission, because they enable me to put the Bill forward in the confidence that it will be widely welcomed. It is the practice of the Law Commission before arriving it any conclusions to publish working papers which are given a wide circulation and in the legal Press and among

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organisations and individuals which are likely to be interested in them. Just how wide this circulation goes your Lordships will be able to see from the long list of bodies who commented on drafts of the Law Commission's recommendations on business tenancies which is set out in Appendix 4 to the Law Commission's Report on this subject. They include The Law Society and the Bar Council, the Society of Public Teachers of the Law, the National Chamber of Trade, a number of local chambers of commerce, the Royal Institute of British Architects, the Building Societies Association, the Church Commissioners, numerous Government Departments and many more organisations of learning and distinction.
Among the individuals who made their contribution is the distinguished lawyer Member of this House, Lord Lloyd of Hampstead. The list of persons and associations whose memoranda assisted the Law Commission in the preparation of its Report on Root of Title is given in paragraph 33 of that Report and, though shorter than that to which I have just referred, again includes many distinguished and representative bodies and persons. The result of these manifold contributions to the reform of our law, for which I should like to express my appreciation to all concerned, is that the proposed changes of the law are supported by a very wide consensus of opinion. Her Majesty's Government have had no hesitation in adopting the recommendations. Apart from the necessary editorial changes when draft clauses are incorporated into a Bill, there are only a few alterations to which I will draw your Lordships attention when I come to discuss individual clauses.
In its two recent Reports the Law Commission has adopted a practice which I think this House will find particularly helpful when it comes to examine the Bill in Committee. The draft clauses recommended by the Law Commission appear in Appendices to the Report accompanied by explanatory notes, the clauses being on the left-hand page and the notes on the right-hand page. They are designed to aid the reader on the background to the proposed enactment, and where, as unhappily must sometimes be the case in view of the legal com-
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plexity of the world in which we live, the statutory language does not immediately convey its meaning to the uninitiated reader, the notes are designed to help him understand it.
This is not, of course, an invention of the Law Commission. I have just received a copy of a draft Criminal Code for Canada and I have observed that they have initiated, for the benefit no doubt of their Members of Parliament, the same practice of putting the draft clauses of the Bill itself on the left and then explanatory notes on the right. Moreover the Report on business tenancies contains yet another aid to the legislator and, I think, ultimately the profession. Here the recommendations are all amendments of existing statutory provisions and the second Appendix sets out the relevant sections as they will read when the amendments have been made. It has always been my view that we do not sufficiently help our legislators with explanatory material of Bills.
As the Bill consists of a large number of diverse amendments of the law, I cannot give your Lordships an indication of its contents without commenting on the clauses individually. I cannot group them and merely expound the general scheme. If this means, here and there, going into some degree of technicality, I must ask your Lordships' indulgence in advance. Before I explain the clauses in Part II think I should give you a broad description of the scheme of the 1954 legislation on business tenants which these clauses amend.
Part II of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954 applies to business tenancies defined in the broadest possible way. It covers any tenancy where the property comprised in it includes premises occupied for business purposes, and "business" is defined as including any trade, profession or employment and any activity carried on by a body of persons whether corporate or unincorporate. Of course, the most common example is the shop, whether it has dwelling accommodation above it or not. If part of it is business premises the whole of that Part of the Act applies to it. Broadly, where a business tenancy comes to an end, whether on the expiration of the term or as a result of notice served by the landlord, it is continued by the Act on the same terms

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as before until terminated by a notice given in accordance with the provisions of the Act. When that notice is given the tenant has the right to apply for a new lease.
My Lords, obviously it is something of a hardship on the tenant of a shop if when the lease runs out he has to move to some other premises, acquire other premises, and perhaps lose all the goodwill which his hard work has acquired. The landlord can resist the grant of a new lease only on specific grounds, the most important of which are either that a tenant has been a bad tenant or that the landlord requires the premises either for himself or for redevelopment. If the tenant is denied a new lease on grounds other than his own bad conduct, he is entitled to statutory compensation of an amount equal to once or twice the rateable value of the premises, depending on how long he has been there. If the tenant obtains a new lease, the terms are those which are agreed between the landlord and tenant or, in default of agreement, determined by the court. Where it falls to the court to determine the new rent, the amount is to be that obtainable in the open market, disregarding any good will attaching to the premises as a result of the tenant's business, any personal factors concerning the tenant's occupation and any improvements made by him.
My Lords, this Act has now been in operation for 15 years, and on the whole it has stood the test of time well. The number of tenancies renewed or terminated annually in accordance with its provisions must be very large indeed. In 1967, 4,258 applications for new tenancies were filed in the county courts alone (a few more are dealt with in the High Court) and this, of course, is only the tip of the iceberg, because in most cases there is agreement. It is not perhaps surprising that over the years, with the vast number of cases involved, a number of defects in the operation of the Act have come to light. The Law Commission has examined these and Clauses 1 to 12 are designed to deal with them.
Let me now deal briefly with the individual clauses. Clause 1 concerns the determination of rent payable under a new lease. As I mentioned earlier, improvements which may be made by the
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tenant or his predecessor in title should be disregarded so that the rent will not be inflated due to the tenant's own good work; but the courts have held that on the true construction of the relevant sections this covers only improvements made during the current tenancy. This clause will ensure that improvements to be disregarded in fixing the rent include those made during the tenant's earlier tenancies of the same premises so long as they were not made more than 21 years before, and the same applies to improvements made by predecessors of the tenant whose tenancies he acquired.
Clause 2 will enable the court to fix a variable rent. Variable rent clauses are now commonly found in long leases and as the court has power to grant a new lease for periods up to 14 years under the Act, it seems appropriate that in a proper case the court should be able to include a variable rent clause.
Clause 3 contains provisions designed to prevent abuse of the protection afforded by the 1954 Act. Until the tenant's application for a new lease is determined and the terms of the new lease are settled by the court the original lease automatically continues. It does not terminate until three months after the application is disposed of and the time for appeal has expired. Where, as is frequently the case at the end of a long lease at a fixed rent, the rent payable under the original tenancy has dropped much below the market value it therefore pays the tenant to play for time. In one case I noticed in the Report the current rent was £250 and the market rent was £3,000. In such a case the landlord may suffer grave injustices from delay. Clause 3 will in future enable the landlord at any time after the tenant has made a request for a new tenancy to apply to the court to determine a fair rent which will be payable from the date of the application until such time as the tenancy finally come to an end.
Clause 4 enables the landlord in certain circumstances to terminate the tenancies of sub-tenants at the same time as those of his immediate tenants. I do not think I need trouble your Lordships with that, for this reason: that a decision of the court which this clause was intended to rectify was itself disapproved in the Curt of Appeal in a case which was reported in The Times the day before yesterday.

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Therefore I think it may turn out that this clause is really codifying the existing law rather than altering it.
Clause 5 is less significant but perhaps useful. It is designed to prevent devices sometimes used to keep business premises out of the operation of the Act of 1954 altogether. On the other hand, there are some cases where it would be in the interests of both parties that the 1954 Act should not apply to a letting but it cannot be excluded. At present the only tenancies excluded from its operation are those initially granted for a fixed term not exceeding three months and then only if the tenant does not remain in occupation for more than six months. This provision inhibits the letting of premises in some cases where both landlord and tenant would welcome a strictly temporary letting; for example, where the landlord has premises standing vacant pending his own occupation or awaiting demolition and reconstruction at a future date.
Two clauses in the Bill will facilitate lettings in such circumstances. Clause 6 enables agreements excluding the operation of the 1954 Act to be validly made with the consent of the court on the joint application of both landlord and tenant. Clause 11 lengthens the short tenancies to which the Act does not apply from three months to six months, and the overall limit of occupation from six months to twelve months. Your Lordships may notice that Clause 6 in the Bill differs from that in the Appendix to the Report. We thought it right to make two small changes; first, to enable the parties, with the consent of the court, to make valid agreements to surrender an existing tenancy as well as valid agreements to enter into a tenancy; and secondly, to provide that in either case the agreement must be endorsed on the appropriate document creating or evidencing the lease.
Clause 7 slightly widens the grounds on which the tenant can resist a landlord's claim for possession at the end of the lease. Under Section 30(1)(f) of the 1954 Act, a landlord is entitled to possession if he intends to demolish or reconstruct the premises or a substantial part of them or to carry out substantial work on the premises and could not reasonably do so without obtaining posession. The courts have held that he is entitled to possession on this ground even where
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the tenant would be willing to accept a new tenancy on the condition that he gives the landlord all the necessary access and facilities to do his work and even where the tenant would be content to accept a new tenancy of only part of the premises and the landlord only requires the rest of the premises for his operations. The clause will enable the tenant to obtain a new tenancy in such cases. I do not think that I need trouble your Lordships with the remaining clauses under Part I of the Bill.
Part II of the Bill provides for closure of the Yorkshire Deeds Registries. They were established in the time of Queen Anne and George II apparently in order to avoid fraudulent transactions by moneylenders and others, for the preamble of the Act establishing the Registry in the East Riding recites that:
"… from the power possessed by ill-disposed persons to commit frauds by secret conveyances, several persons (who through many years' industry in their trades and employments and by great frugality, had been enabled to purchase lands, or to lend monies on land securities) had been undone in their purchases and mortgages by prior and secret conveyances, and fraudulent encumbrances, and not only themselves, but their whole families thereby utterly ruined".
This was, of course, before the establishment of a solicitors' profession with high standards of integrity, safeguarded by the Law Society. The registers provide the facilities for a record to be kept of title deeds in the Ridings which is open to inspection by the public. Registration of certain mortgages also has the effect of giving them priority over all subsequent mortgages.
When the system of registration of title to land, introduced under the 1925 Law of Property legislation is extended to Yorkshire, the facilities afforded by these registries will become otiose, since all future transactions in areas of compulsory registration will be governed by the new system. Indeed, the closure of the Yorkshire Registries was already contemplated in the Land Registration Act 1925, which set up the new system. So far as I am aware, this peculiar method, not of registering titles but of registering title deeds, has always been peculiar to Yorkshire and Middlesex, and the 1925 Act always contemplated that when registration of title was applied to those counties the Deeds Registries would be

1401
wound up. This happened about a quarter of a century ago in Middlesex, and now the time is approaching when compulsory registration will be extended to parts of the Ridings, so we must make preparations for this closure.
Huddersfield was made a compulsory registration area in 1961 and other areas are to follow. It is not intended to defer closure of a registry until the whole of the land in the Riding is covered. Indeed, I have learnt in my consultations with the county councils that it may be necessary for reasons of manpower shortages to order the closure of a registry before compulsory registration comes to the Riding. Power to do this is conferred by Clause 13, which provides that a registry shall close either on the day when compulsory registration is next extended to any part of its area or when an order to close it is made by the Lord Chancellor at the request of the county council. These registries, of course, do not belong to the Government, they belong to the local authorities. The effect of the closure will be that from the appropriate date new deeds will cease to be capable of registration. The registries will remain open for another two years for the purpose of registering deeds executed earlier and for searches. At the end of that period, they will close for all purposes. Clauses 14 to 19 deal with consequential matters. Arrangements have been made for the transfer of documents, for the preservation of documents of historic interest and for safeguarding the position of staffs and so forth. I do not think I need trouble your Lordships with them.
I now come to Part III, which concerns dispositions of interests in land and land charges. Clause 20, which reduces the statutory period of title and is based on the Law Commission's 9th Report, makes a change of the law expressly designed to simplify and cheapen conveyancing, although its contribution in this respect must not be over-rated. To make its effect intelligible, I must briefly explain the investigation of title undertaken when land changes hands. Title to land, as your Lordships will know, can be either registered or unregistered. If it is registered, the ownership of the land can be ascertained from Her Majesty's Land Registry, and mortgages and other burdens or charges on the land which are not otherwise apparent appear in the register.
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A purchaser therefore, who has obtained the vendor's authority to inspect the register has no difficulty in making sure of what he is buying. On the other hand, where the title to the land is not registered, the purchaser will want to investigate the deeds relating to past transactions in order to be quite certain that the vendor is in fact the owner of the land and that the land is not subject to any unexpected burdens or restrictions. Clause 20 concerns this investigation.
Section 44 of the Law of Properly Act 1925 provides that, subject to any other agreement between the vendor and the purchaser, the buyer is entitled to call for title deeds over a period covering the title to the land during the last 30 years. Clause 20 reduces this period to 15 years. Consultations by the Law Commission showed that the proposal to shorten the period had the general support of practitioners. The work undertaken in successive conveyances of a piece of land is largely repetitive. Moreover, under the law or limitation actions to recover land cannot, with a few rare exceptions, be brought after 12 years. Consequently, an investigation of the title over a period of 15 years, which indicates that the transactions throughout that period were satisfactory, will normally be adequate. The case for the reduction is discussed in detail in the Report and I need not go into it at greater length.
Before 1840, the general practice in regard to land was to ask for title to be proved over a period of 60 years. In practice, it was found that this period was far too long and few purchasers asked for it to be proved for more than 40 years, so that in 1874 by Statute it was amended to 40 years. It was gradually found that this was unnnecessary and that was why in 1925 the 40 years was reduced to 30. One of the consequences of the reduction will be an increase in the risk that some burden on the land or some restriction on its use may be overlooked because it was imposed in a transaction which preceded the period of investigation. But if any losses result from this, Clause 22, as I shall explain shortly, will provide a remedy.
This brings me to the remaining provisions of Part III, which deal with land charges. Land charges impose a burden on a piece of land or restrict the owner's right to use it. Examples are certain

1403
mortgages, options to purchase and restrictive covenants. It is of vital concern to a purchaser to know whether the land he is buying is subject to such burdens. Where the land itself is registered, this presents little difficulty. He can inspect the register of title to the land and find out. The situation is more difficult where the land is not registered, and in order to ensure that a purchaser will become aware of such charges, the law requires that they must be registered. A registered land charge is then deemed to come to the knowledge of all persons. Clauses 21 to 24 relate only to such land charges on unregistered land.
Now land charges affecting such land are registered against the name of the owner of the land at the time when the charge was created. In order to make a search of the land charges register it is therefore necessary to know the names of every person who has owned the relevant land since the register was created on January 1, 1926. All lawyers will continue to be grateful to my noble and learned predecessor Lord Birkenhead for his property legislation of 1925, which was a complete modernising of the whole of our property law. I know of no defect in it except this one. It was unfortunate. Once title has been registered at the Land Registry, anybody can go there and everything to do with the land, including charges, is on the register; and it is a geographical register. You start by wanting to know where the property is that you are interested in, and from the address or from the passage in the register you can trace it. This is all perfectly clear and simple. But for some reason, when it was provided that in the case of unregistered land there should be a land charges register, it was provided that this should be registered under the name of the man who owned the property at the time the charge was granted. Therefore, unless you know the names of the previous owners, going back a considerable distance, it may be impossible for you to find the entry in the register which records the charge. This has now gone on since January 1, 1926.
Forty-three years have now passed since that date, and accordingly even the deeds covering a 30 years' title may not disclose all the relevant names. It is
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therefore possible that a purchaser making a full search against the estate owners known to him will nevertheless miss some land charges and the risk will be slightly increased when the 30 year period is reduced to 15. In practice, the risk is not great because these charges are normally mentioned in the documents of title, and those which are not will often be revealed in answer to inquiries between the solicitors acting for the parties. Nevertheless, there is an inherent defect in the system which grows as time passes. The position was reviewed by the Committee on Land Charges under the chairmanship of Mr. Justice Roxburgh which reported in 1956. They came to the conclusion that no practicable cure could be devised, and the Law Commission, who have now re-examined the problem, have confirmed that conclusion. Solutions like the conversion of the land charges register into a register operating by reference to maps of the land concerned are ruled out by the sheer volume of the existing registrations. In the long term, the Commission concludes, the solution will have to be found in the nation-wide extension of the system of registration of land.
As I have said, burdens on land must be registered so that a purchaser will not buy land without notice of them. An unregistered land charge is generally void; on the other hand, every purchaser of land is deemed to have notice of a registered charge. This provision can lead to injustices where, for one reason or another, the purchaser is unable to discover the entry in the register relating to the charge. Clauses 21 and 22 are intended to go a long way to right these injustices. Clause 21 concerns the position as between the vendor and the purchaser of land. It is the normal practice for anyone buying land to make a binding contract at the earliest possible moment subject to a right to rescind if the vendor cannot show a sound title. The vendor's title is not investigated before the contract. However, it was held as long ago as 1927 that, as a purchaser is deemed to have notice of any registered land charge, he cannot rescind the contract if he discovers such a charge after the contract. As the purchaser would not normally know the names of the previous owners of the land against whom he would have to search until, following the contract, he is supplied with

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the vendor's abstract of title, this can operate unfairly. In practice, parties normally safeguard themselves by appropriate provisions in the contract. Clause 21 ensures that in future a purchaser will no longer be deemed to have knowledge at the date of his contract of any registered land charge of which he was in fact ignorant. If he discovers a land charge which the vendor had not disclosed to him, he will be able either to rescind the contract or to claim damages.
Clause 22 deals with the position after the purchase has been completed. As I explained in relation to Clause 20, land charges may be registered against the names of former estate owners of the land which are not known to a purchaser because the title deeds do not go back far enough. Theoretically, as time goes on, more and more names will disappear into the mists before the root of the title. Nevertheless, as purchasers are deemed to have notice of all registered land charges, the land will continue to be bound by the registered burden. If this defect in the system of land registration causes loss, that loss should be borne by public funds, as this is a mistake in our system. Clause 22 accordingly provides for the payment of compensation to anyone who completes a purchase after the enactment of the Bill and subsequently suffers loss as a result of the emergence of a land charge which was unknown to him at the time of the purchase and which he could not then discover. The clause sets out the machinery for recovering the compensation in some detail, and your Lordships may have noticed that there are small differences between the clause in the Bill and that appended to the Law Commission's Report.
The real remedy for all this is to extend compulsory registration of title to all the built-up areas of the country as soon as we possibly can, and ultimately, I hope before not many years have gone by, to the country as a whole. Meanwhile, if somebody does suffer damage because of a defect in the legal system, it is only right that (and I am happy to say that the Treasury agree) they should be compensated out of public funds. Subsection (9) excludes mortgagees of certain leases from the persons entitled to claim compensation, and subsection (11) contains a provision defining the date of certain
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contracts. I do not propose to trouble your Lordships with explanations of these. Lord Macnaghten, that eminent Lord of Appeal in Ordinary at the turn of the century, once said:
"No one, I am sure, by the light of nature ever understood an English mortgage of real estate".
And that great teacher of the law, Professor Maitland, in the Second Edition of his book on Equity, asserts that:
"It is the worst of our mortgage decd that owing to the action of equity it is ore long suppressio veri and suggestio falsi".
So it would take me a long time to explain the reason for the change in subsection (9).
There is little I need say about the remaining clauses of Part III. They require land charges created by a company for securing money to be in future registered in the register of land charges as well as the Companies' Register, and make minor, but none the less valuable, changes regarding the effect of registration of certain rent-charges for loans advanced for purposes of improving agricultural land.
My Lords, in the course of my speech I have had to cover some difficult branches of the law of property and conveyancing. In a sense, this is mainly a lawyer's Bill, but I hope that I have persuaded the House that the changes which it will make in the law sire of practical importance and real value. Some of them will simplify the law; others will right minor injustices or streamline the administration. I hope that the Bill will be accorded a favourable reception. I beg to move that the Bill may now be read a second time.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 2a. —(The Lord Chancellor.)
5.9 p.m.
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS: My Lords, the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor has told such of your Lordships as did not take advantage of his invitation for a temporary period of absence what is in this Bill; and for those who wish to pursue this sterling material yet further, there are the three Law Commission Reports to which reference can be made. There is no doubt that your Lordships will consider this subject to be highly technical, as indeed it is, and, I am afraid, perhaps not

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of the scintillating and stimulating nature of the debates which are going to follow. Therefore I will not take up a great deal of time. This is a Bill upon which it is quite impossible to make a Second Reading speech, and I will confine myself to asking a few questions, and perhaps the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor will be good enough to consider them and make one or two general comments at the end. I see in their place two noble and learned Lords who are extremely familiar with much of the subject matter of this Bill, and it may be that they also will have some comments to make.
On Part I of the Bill I have some detailed comments, and the first arises under Clause 6 which is, as the noble and learned Lord said, one of the clauses that allow a contracting out of the restrictions in Part II of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954. The point which I should like to have clarified, and which is not I think clarified by the Law Commission, is: what is the role of the court upon the joint application that is set out under two paragraphs in the clause as it is here printed? It seems to me that as the application will be joint, by both the landlord and the tenant, the court is liable to become simply a rubber stamp, and no criterion is set out in the clause whereby it may exercise its discretion one way or the other, perhaps on occasion to refuse consent to this contracting out. It seems to me that this position always brings the function of the court into contempt, unless courts are given some indication of what they are to do if for some reason they do not approve of the joint application. There will be no argument about it, so far as I can make out, because both sides at that stage will agree.
Then in Clause 7 a new Section 31A is inserted into the 1954 Act. The noble and learned Lord of course explained about the problem of the landlord who wished to redevelop or carry out structural alterations, and the tenant who was quite prepared to let him do so. even although it would mean some temporary inconvenience. The Law Commission's Report on this explains this matter in paragraphs 36 and 37. Of course, they make it clear that where the tenant is prepared to give facilities for the reconstruction or the redevelopment, then
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that may allow him to insist upon the grant of a new tenancy, whereas at the moment the law is that the landlord can get possession.
But in paragraph 37 the Law Commission have rejected a recommendation that where there is a complete redevelopment the tenant should nevertheless be allowed, if he wishes, to have a new tenancy of the new building. It seems to me to be possible under the wording of the clause as it now is that that is what could happen, because there is no limit on the extent of the reconstruction or redevelopment or on the, as it were, permissiveness of the tenant in allowing facilities to the landlord to carry out this work. It seems to me that one could construe this provision so that the tenant says to the landlord, "I am perfectly prepared for you to redevelop this property altogether. I can go away for a certain length of time, and at the end of it, when you have built a completely new office for me, I will come back and continue my protected tenancy". This seems to me exactly what the Law Commission were not recommending. Therefore, it is possible that this clause is drawn too widely.
Then, under Clause 9, I fail to understand the argument that the tenant must be in occupation at the time when the application for the new tenancy is made and at the time when the order for a new tenancy is given (or I suppose, as it may turn out, not given) by the court, but that the period in between is of no concern. This is said by the Law Commission to be a measure which is intended to ease the practical difficulties of tenants who may consider that they will not get their new tenancy and wish to find some alternative premises. But what good it will do the tenant if he is allowed to have some alternative premises for a period but then has to come back again to the premises in question at the moment when the matter is being tried by the court, is altogether beyond my comprehension. I do not understand what practical effect and usefulness to the tenant this particular clause is going to have. It may be that the noble and learned Lord could consider that and tell me, if not to-day then at some other time.
My main criticism about this Bill, so far as Part I is concerned, is that,

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although the noble and learned Lord drew attention to the admirable way in which the matter has been explained in the Appendices to the Law Commission's Report, for some reason the draftsman has not done the same. There is a very well established method of dealing with this incredibly complicated legislation by reference, and there can be no doubt that Part II of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954 is a very widely used provision and is applied all over the country to a large number of people, some of whom may not have legal advisers—they may not need them. What the Law Commission have done has been to set out in the Appendix what is called technically, I think, a "Keeling Schedule". They have reprinted the 1954 Act with the amendments in heavy type. I should have thought it would have been the greatest possible improvement that this Bill, too, should have a Keeling Schedule setting out the provisions of Part I as amending the 1954 Act: not only the sections of the 1954 Act that have been amended, but the whole of Part II, so that one can read the whole thing together in one place. This must be the right way to deal with legislation by reference of this sort. If the noble and learned Lord does not do so, I shall put down an Amendment (and it will take me a long time to write out) in order to have this effect.
Under Part II—Closing of Yorkshire Deeds Registries—I have very few questions to ask, although of course this is the one subject in the Bill which is not covered by the Law Commission Report. The noble and learned Lord said that he had consultation with the three county councils—and that of course is a matter which I should have expected to occur. I do not know whether he has had consultations with the legal profession in Yorkshire. The solicitors will be particularly involved, I imagine, in this; and the local societies of the solicitors' profession would, I imagine, have some very interesting views upon whether or not this measure is going to work properly. I think the House might be glad if the noble and learned Lord could tell us the result of those consultations.
It would also be of interest, in view of the fact that he said, or at any rate implied, that the whole system of the registries seems to be grinding to a halt
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in Yorkshire, largely from lack of staff. if he could give us some indication of the timetable that he foresees for the extension of compulsory registration in that county. It cannot be a real inference that can be drawn now from the Preambles to those old Acts that fraudulent-mindedness is any more prevalent in Yorkshire, even if it ever was. But I think we ought to know what is the timetable whereby this existing protection is to be withdrawn if there is going to be a substantial gap between that and the date when compulsory registration comes in. The noble and learned Lord may also be able to assure us that in the rural areas where compulsory registration under the 1925 legislation will not come until later there will be no practical disadvantages from the closure of the Deeds Registries when the compulsory registration first reaches one of the urban areas in that particular Riding of Yorkshire; because the date at which some of the county districts come under the national scheme may be very much later than that when the urban districts are brought under it.
Now I come to Part III, which I suppose is the most technical Part of all. It may be that the point I have in mind is something which is so obvious that, just because of its sheer obviousness, I have missed it. But, as under Part II (the Yorkshire Registries), there is here provided a statutory right to compensation if, as a result of either Part II, the rearrangement of the system, or Part III. the defects of the system, somebody becomes aware too late of a charge which then puts him in the disadvantage per laps of having a restrictive covenant on his land of which he did not know anything, or some other defect or disadvantage in title. I can fully understand, and I am very glad to hear, that the Treasury has agreed that there shall be compensation payable in such an event. But what strikes me as curious is that where this statutory right to compensation is granted, for instance in Clause 22, there does not seem to be any statutory requirement that the person who claims it should first of all have carried out a proper search of the title, not even to the extent of 15 years.
It seems to me that one could read Clause 22 as enabling a person to claim for an undiscovered restrictive covenant

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even though he had not carried out a proper search; and this could, I think, be of practical importance under subsection (4), because the compensation that is to be allowed is either the amount that it costs to get rid of the incumbent on the land or, alternatively, the compensation. In the case of a restrictive covenant, you can go to the Lands Tribunal and ask for the covenant to be modified or removed. You may or may not succeed, but if you do not succeed you do not get compensation. Therefore it seems to me that upon discovering the undisclosed restrictive convenant the person who has bought the land could go to the Lands Tribunal; he could fail to get the restrictive covenant removed, because it is still of some value and still enforceable, but he could then claim compensation. This is all very well if it is a very old covenant, and he really did not have the opportunity of finding it. But what if he simply has not looked? It seems to me quite wrong that in such a case he should have compensation. I suspect that there ought to be something rather more specific in the Bill about the duty of the purchaser before he can rely upon this right in the Bill. I have no other detailed comments on this matter, but this seems to be rather an important one, if I am right in having spotted a loophole here.
The other thing I want to say concerns a general matter. I am not sure what has happened to Her Majesty's Government, but we have had now a number of, I am sure, very worthy but very hotch-potch Bills containing a lot of detailed, boring things— probably very necessary—which come from the good work of the Law Commission. Then they get embellished by a title such as the "Law of Property Bill". Now the Law of Property Bill surely, as the noble and learned Lord said, is something which properly graced the legislation in 1925 but it does not grace this Bill. This is a Law Reform (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill, and I cannot think of any reason to call it a Law of Property Bill —except possibly that of brevity, and also, conceivably, the question of gaining credit for a rather more impressive piece of legislation than in fact it is. My Lords, I hope that it is not the latter, because I do not think it is a particularly impressive piece of legislation, and one
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only has to look at the Reports of the Law Commission to see that that is so.
For instance, paragraph 47 of the Interim Report on Root of Title, sets out some of the difficulties which are still unresolved. Sub-paragraph (4) refers to the possible need for changes in the limitation period applicable to actions for recovery of land by the Crown and by spiritual and eleemosynary corporations. This point has still to be explored, and it is bound up with matter in this Bill. It is an unresolved difficulty, and the noble and learned Lord drew attention to it. So we shall in due course have another of these Bills dealing with that. And the same applies to the Landlord and Tenant Act, because in paragraph 4 of the Introduction to the Report on that Act there are two things which, for reasons that wholly escape me, the Law Commission say they do not think they can tackle at this time. One is the definition of a "business". Should it be so wide as to include a famous tennis club? For some reason they do not want to take that one on. Similarly, there is another technical point about when a request is "given "or "made". These are two technical terms which the Commission do not wish to go into now. I suppose that one of these days they will tackle the points, and then we shall have another of these hotch-potch Bills put together from this Report and that. So, my Lords, although this Bill may be a good measure in itself, and one which should be welcomed, I hope that the noble and learned Lord is not trying to attract too much credit for a grandiose title on something which is not so significant as it might at first sight appear.
5.23 p.m.
LORD WILBERFORCE: My Lords, this Bill is a small step towards that great simplification of the law of landlord and tenant and of the law of property which we were promised when the Law Commission was first set up. It is true, as the noble Viscount has just pointed out, that this Bill is of a rather piecemeal character, and indeed could fairly be said to represent a step back rather than a step forward, because instead of simplifying the law it adds another fairly complicated Statute to the reading matter with which we are faced in this particular subject. But I think we must be grateful

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for it. These prosaic, boring, technical matters are of importance.
The various Parts of the Bill deal with matters which affect a great number of people—business tenancies, landlords, people who buy and sell land and people who have to search the register. I for my part think that on the whole it is worth proceeding with them even though, before long, they may be overtaken by something more general. Here, I should like to pay my own tribute to the care with which the Law Commission have prepared these drafts and to the care which they have taken to consult persons of various interests before framing their proposals.
My Lords, I have a few comments to make on the different Parts of the Bill. The first concerns Part I, the Landlord and Tenant Act section. On the whole that is well conceived, as I understand it. Of course the Law Commission had to start from a comparatively modern Statute—the Act of 1954—which was a well drafted and practical Act and therefore easier to deal with than some of the more medieval aspects of the law of landlord and tenant. But what has been put into Part 1 by way of amendment to that Act is, on the whole, well conceived, and I am glad to see in particular that it does not bear, as so much of this legislation tends to, an anti-landlord bias. It strikes a balance between landlord and tenant; and where it is fair to do so, it rights the present state of the law in the interests of the landlord, and on the whole it is admirably impartial as between the two.
I note—and this links up again with what the noble Viscount has said as to other matters which may require further consideration—that the Law Commission, in paragraphs 5 and 6 of their Report, drew attention to more than one matter which required attention; namely, cases where the business, the tenancy of which was for renewal, was carried on either by a company or a partnership; and they referred to certain cases before the courts which had given rise to difficulty. The reason they give in those paragraphs for not having made a proposal for legislation was that there was a pending appeal to this House in its judicial capacity in relation to one of the matters, and they thought it better to await the decision of this House. But then there is a note put in at the last moment,
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saying that that appeal has been withdrawn and further consideration will now be given to those questions. I wondered whether it would not be possible for this matter to be introduced into this Bill at one of its stages, rather than waiting for a fresh piece of legislation which may take some time to arrive. It does not seem to be a matter of great complication and it seems a pity to let this occasion pass. The only other point I wish to make on this Part of the Act is to endorse most heartily the proposal made by the noble Viscount that the Landlord and Tenant Act should be printed with the amendments in it. That seems to be absolutely essential, and I feel sure that the Government will fall in with that suggestion.
I come now to Clause 20 of the Bill, which deals with the particular matter of the root of title, which was the subject of a separate Report from the Law Commission. That is the Report which proposes that the root of title should be reduced from 30 years, as it now stands under the 1925 legislation, to 15 years. For my part I have felt, and still feel, rather doubtful about the merits of so drastic a reduction. The noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor pointed out that the period has come down from 60 to 40, to 30, and now we are to come down to 15. It is pointed out in the Report of the Law Commission that it is a fallacy to suppose that the reduction in the work of conveyancing solicitors is achieved proportionately to the reduction in the length of title which has to be deduced. You do not get half as much work in a 15-years root of title as for a 30-years, simply because you may well have to go back beyond 15 years, even if the minimum period is 15.
The argument which seems to have weighed most with the Law Commission in suggesting 15 years as against 20 is not, as I understand it, any longer valid. It is contained in paragraph 28, where they say that a reduction to 15 years would avoid the necessity of looking at a number of difficult transactions which occurred during the war period of 1940 to 1946. That was in 1965 and we are now in 1969, and the same objective would be secured if one were to reduce to 20 years rather than to 15. I appreciate that there has been substantial consultation on this point, though one notice

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from the Law Commission's Report that among the experts in Lincoln's Inn some doubt was felt as to the propriety of this reduction; and the adversaries of it were given an opportunity—an interesting technique in law reform—of publishing their views in one of the law publications, to which the Law Commission in their turn sent out their counter-proposals. I have no doubt that these suggestions have been very widely considered.
It does not perhaps matter a very great deal whether one fixes 20 or 15 years unless—and this is a real fear, I think—a reduction to 15 years is going to give rise to a demand, as it may, that the title of vendors of property should be guaranteed. It must be true that a reduction to 15 years will give rise to a small number, but at any rate a number, more of defective titles, cases where either a good title cannot be made or where some charge is discovered. There is already a certain amount of pressure in the profession and outside that a vendor of property should have to warrant and guarantee his title, and if a reduction to 15 years is going to give rise to more defective titles I have some fear that the pressure for guaranteeing titles might increase. That would be a bad thing, I should think, because it would bring us closer to the American system of bonds, insurance companies and so on, all of which would tend to add to the cost of transferring land rather than diminish it. If possible, I should like to hear from the noble and learned Lord that he has considered this point and that he has advised that the proposed reduction to 15 years is well designed from that point of view, that it will not give rise to a demand for guaranteeing title, or that, if it does, he will himself be in a position to resist it.
Lastly, I come to the section dealing with land charges, which have imposed rather a burden on those of us who try hard to follow these matters, since the Law Commission Report No. 18 was only available on March 19. It is a very technical and difficult Report, and though the noble Viscount seems to have found no difficulty in digesting it at short notice, I must say that I did. This deals, as everyone knows, with a most thorny and difficult subject, and there is really no proper solution to it. The Law Com-
1416
mission put this very well in paragraph 74. They say they know that their proposals will not lead to solving the defects in the existing system; that they are inheritors of a defective system from 1925. and it is not possible to put the clock back; that it is not possible, having regard to the huge number of transactions, to amalgamate the register with the land register or start a new register, and they say that all that can now be done is to patch the system and try to alleviate some of its worst consequences. Then they say this, which I think is of importance:
"We recognise, however, that if the present delay in extending compulsory registration of title… were to be prolonged, it might well be that substantial changes would be required in the system of registering Land Charges."
That brings me back to a point which I have raised before in this House and shall continue to raise, and that is the vital necessity of pressing on with the compulsory registration of land. I need not rub it in, because I know that the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor thinks exactly as I do about it. It is the only solution, and is the one matter in the realm of real property which is really going to do good and save some money and simplify the law. The present timetable looks to be this. so far as one can tell, putting it optimistically: that compulsory registration in England and Wales will be established by 1977, but of course after that date it will then take a considerable period of years before transactions, titles and so on are actually put on the register. So we may easily be faced with another period of twenty years under the existing system.
As regards acceleration of the compulsory land registration, I should like to revert to what was said the last time this matter was discussed, when the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor said, in answer to a question of mine, that he wanted very much to get on with it but that the Treasury had imposed a ban on civil servants; he could not get any more civil servants, and until he did it was not possible to accelerate land registration. I would ask the noble and learned Lord whether the Treasury does not realise that land registration is one of the few Departments which makes money; it does not cost money, it makes

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money, it brings it in. Therefore, an increase in the staff does not cost anything, it is deflationary rather than inflationary; and it is absolutely absurd for our financial masters to pretend that the general ban on increase in the Civil Service should be applied to this particular field. The contrary is the case, and the extra civil servants ought to be made available if they can be found.
Accepting, as one must, that there is going to be a substantial delay in extending compulsory registration, I want to make one final point which arises out of paragraph 74 which I have just read, that some further step will be necessary. I am convinced that it will. I do not think this patchwork will last very long, and I feel sure that before many years it will be necessary to do seomething else. The occasion for doing something else will surely arise out of the Report of the Maud Commission on Local Government, which, it may be—one can only guess—will suggest the establishment of wider regional areas of local government which will enable the whole system of local land charges, which at present are scattered about over a number of small local authorities, to be reduced and centralised.
It seems to me that if thinking starts on that soon enough it may be possible to make use of whatever reform comes out of the Maud Commission's recommendations to simplify and rationalise both the system of land charges and the system of local land charges, which would be an important step. That, of course, would not be necessary if compulsory land registration extends to the whole country, but assuming that there is to be an interim period it might give us a halfway house with which we can live better than we can under the existing abominable system of land charges. Subject to those remarks, I certainly support the Bill.
5.38 p.m.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wilberforce, for the interest they have taken in this Bill. I should very much like to deal with all the questions which have been raised, but perhaps in a sense we have had our fair share of to-day's time. We have the very important Second
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Reading of the Immigration Appeals Bill, then an Order and then two Unstarred Questions. As we are adjourning to-day and the Committee stage of this Bill will be taking place after Easter, I should like to consider carefully everything that has been said and I will personally answer all the questions which have been raised. It will give me great satisfaction to see the noble Viscount and discuss with him the interesting question of what titles to Bills ought to be. It may be that by the Committee stage we shall be able to implement a further recommendation of the Law Commission in relation to restrictive covenants. With regard to the other questions that have been raised by the noble Viscount and the noble and learned Lord, I will, if I may, answer them either orally, or in writing, or both.
On Question Bill read 2a, and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.

ROYAL ASSENT
5.40 p.m.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, I have to notify the House, in accordance with the Royal Assent Act 1967, that the Queen has signified her Royal Assent to the following Acts:

Consolidated Fund (No. 2) Act,

Mines and Quarries (Tips) Act,

National Theatre Act,

Genocide Act,

Licensing (Scotland) Act,

Horserace Betting Levy Act,

Derbyshire County Council Act,

Tees and Hartlepool Port Authority Act.

IMMIGRATION APPEALS BILL
5.41 p.m.
THE MINISTER OF STATE, HOME OFFICE (LORD STONHAM): My Lords, I beg to move that the Immigration Appeals Bill be read a second time. This Bill is concerned primarily with the fairness of the procedures we adopt within our system of immigration control to determine whether an individual immigrant is eligible for admission. In our view that system works both fairly and effectively at present. We keep the effectiveness of the control under continuous review, and your Lordships are fully aware that we take fresh action

1419
whenever it is found to be necessary and just. Indeed, we put a review of immigration policy in hand as soon as we took office. This resulted, in 1965, in a reduction in the issue of vouchers from 20,000 to 8,500 a year. Early in 1968 we introduced an amending Bill to enable the Government to regulate the rate of entry of people whose United Kingdom citizenship was not derived from any substantial connection with this country.
In the same Bill we made other changes in the law which had then become necessary to maintain the effectiveness of our control over Commonwealth immigration. For example, the 1968 Act restricted the admission of dependent children to cases where both parents or the only surviving parent was here, and contained provisions aimed at the suppression of clandestine immigration. From time to time we have taken administrative action to adjust the rules governing eligibility for admission. The most recent example is the withdrawal of the concession under which a man from a Commonwealth country was allowed to settle permanently in this country if he married a woman who was resident here. We have never lacked the courage to make changes that experience proved necessary, or to insist that such changes left inviolate our refusal to discriminate on grounds of race or colour. We are determined to maintain this policy and, while never allowing ourselves to be driven into adopting new measures for the sake of satisfying public clamour, will always watch the situation closely and take further action whenever it is found to be justified.
The Government are concerned, however, to ensure not only that our immigration control works, but is seen to work both effectively and fairly. It was in this spirit that in 1965 my right honourable friend the Prime Minister announced the Government's intention to submit our immigration procedures to an independent review. That review was undertaken by a Committee under the chairmanship of Sir Roy Wilson, Q.C., President of the Industrial Court. We are greatly indebted to Sir Roy and his colleagues for their valuable Report, on which Part I of the Bill is largely based. The general conclusion reached by the Wilson Committee was that, while immigration control was in general fairly administered
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and the great majority of cases which arise at present properly decided, it was not always apparent to immigrants, to their relatives and friends and to the public generally, that justice was being done. They recommended the establishment of a formal system of appeal to impartial administrative tribunals, and a year later the necessary legislation was introduced.
The cost of the appeal system will be quite substantial—about £500,000 a year. There will be some loss of the capacity for swift and decisive action in particular cases which we can achieve at present. There will be an increase in the number of Commonwealth citizens and aliens who have to wait for some time in this country, pending a final decision on their applications for admission or continued stay. But such disadvantages, though they should not be overlooked, do not, in the Government's view, outweigh the advantages of bringing immigration control more fully under the rule of law and so of making it manifest that those affected by it are treated fairly. I would add here that intending immigrants would greatly reduce the risk of delay on entry and still further reduce the risk of dispute if they obtained entry certificates before embarking. I cannot too much emphasise the importance of that.
I propose now to discuss the clauses of the Bill, drawing special attention to the few points at which our provisions depart from the Wilson Committee's recommendations. Where I make no such comment we have followed the recommendations. Clause 1 establishes the appellate authorities for the purpose of the Bill, comprising the Immigration Appeal Tribunal and its adjudicators. Clauses 2 to 5 confer rights of appeal against action taken under the Commonwealth Immigrants Acts, and Clause 14 enables provision to be made for appeals in connection with the admission and removal of aliens, by Order in Council, under the Aliens Restriction Acts. The Home Secretary has laid before the House a White Paper containing a draft Order in Council which shows the provision that we intend to make.
Eventually—I have said this many times before but I will say it again—we shall have permanent and comprehensive legislation for the control of Commonwealth citizens and aliens which

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will also cover rights of appeal. The Government have not lost sight of the need for this, but we have not been able to find room for such far-reaching legislation in this Session's programme. As I said last year, and I think your Lordships agreed, it will be helpful to see how the new appeal system works in practice, superimposed on the present system of control, before the two are combined in permanent legislation. Meanwhile there can be no question of aliens being arbitrarily deprived of their rights of appeal, because any Order in Council amending the Aliens (Appeals) Order will, like that Order itself, be subject to the Negative Resolution procedure.
The decisions against which Commonwealth citizens will have rights of appeal under Clauses 2 to 5 of the Bill are, with one important exception, those against which the Wilson Committee recommended that an appeal should lie. The exception relates to offenders who are recommended for deportation by the courts. The Government consider that the balance of advantage lies with the retention by the courts of their present power to recommend offenders for deportation; and we consider that appeals against such recommendations should continue to be heard within the ordinary judicial system.
In accordance with the Wilson Committee's recommendation a person who is alleged to have entered illegally is to have a right of appeal; but to discourage any abuse of this right we have thought it desirable to make it clear on the face of the Bill that once it is established to the satisfaction of the adjudicator that the appellant has entered, or is seeking to enter, illegally, his appeal must fail. Detailed provisions based on this general principle are to be found in Clauses 2, 4 and 5.
Clause 6 enables regulations to be made providing for notice to be given of decisions which are subject to appeal, with a statement of the reasons for such a decision and information about the right of appeal. Clause 7 deals with appeals from an adjudicator's decision to the Tribunal. Subsection (2) of the clause enables the rules of procedure to impose a requirement of leave to appeal. The Home Secretary proposes to provide in the rules that leave to appeal is to be
1422
granted in any case which turns on a point of law, or in which the appellant is making a bona fide claim to political asylum. In other cases the grant of leave to appeal will be a matter of discretion, on which the adjudicators will follow such guidance as may be given by the Tribunal. But the Bill itself specifies two classes of case in which leave to appeal to the Tribunal is not to be required. The first is that in which the appellant holds an entry certificate—again emphasising the importance of the "entry certificate"—and here we are following the Wilson Committee's recommendations. The second is that in which refusal of admission follows from a decision taken by the Home Secretary himself, in which he considers it to be n the public interest that the person concerned should not be allowed to enter thee country until the Tribunal itself has reached a final decision in the case.
Clause 8 is concerned with the functions of the appellate authorities in deciding appeals. The point I want to emphasise here is that the Home Secretary will remain responsible for determining the policy to be applied in the administration of immigration control. This policy will be expressed in the form of "immigration rules" which will be laid before Parliament and published. Under the appeal system these immigration rules will be binding on the appellate authorities, and within the limits allowed by law the Home Secretary will be free to alter the rules as the public interest may require.
Clause 9 prescribes a special procedure for use in cases involving national security. The Wilson Committee expressed the view that appeals in security cases could be dealt with in the same way as other appeals, except that they might need to be heard by specially selected adjudicators; but the Government consider it essential that in security cases the Home Secretary of the day should retain his responsibility for the final decision and that there should be provision in such cases for safeguarding evidence of which the disclosure would be harmful to the national interest. These objects are secured by Clause 9, which provides for the appeals to be heard by a panel acting in an advisory capacity—a panel of independent and judicially-minded people in whom the

1423
appellant can have confidence and whose advice will carry great weight.
Clause 10 gives the Home Secretary a power, which I think will be useful in some instances, to refer a case back to the appellate authorities for their opinion on some fresh matter which has come to notice since the hearing of the appeal. Clause 11 provides for rules of procedure to be made by the Home Secretary. As envisaged in paragraph 149 of the Wilson Committee's Report, the Government propose to bring the appellate authorities within the scope of the Tribunals and Inquiries Act 1958 by an order under Section 10 of that Act. When the rules of procedure have been drafted, they will be the subject of consultation with the Council on Tribunals. Clause 12 and Schedule 3 deal with the release of appellants on bail. Clause 13 authorises seamen who are appealing against a prohibition on their landing to be brought ashore, in custody, for the hearing of their appeals.
Clause 15 empowers the Home Secretary to make grants towards expenditure incurred by voluntary organisations in providing, for people who have rights of appeal under the Bill, both advisory and welfare services. A Working Group representing seven voluntary bodies concerned with the welfare of immigrants drew up, in July last year, a scheme under which those bodies would join in setting up a single advisory and welfare organisation such as the Wilson Committee envisaged. After some further discussion with the voluntary bodies, my right honourable friend the Home Secretary agreed in principle to the proposal for a single organisation providing a comprehensive advisory and welfare service. We have invited the voluntary bodies to continue discussions with the Home Office on the scale of the service to be provided and the arrangements for assistance from public funds.
I come now to Part II of the Bill. The principal provision here is Clause 16, which empowers the Home Secretary to make a deportation order, without a court recommendation, against a Commonwealth citizen who fails to comply with his conditions of admission. A power of this kind was first proposed in August, 1965, in the White Paper Immigration from the Commonwealth:
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but later that year the Government decided to set up the Wilson Committee, and we took the view that it would be better to defer legislation enabling Commonwealth citizens to be deported without the recommendation of a court until we could be sure of providing such right of appeal or other safeguard for the Commonwealth citizen as Parliament would consider satisfactory. It is not our intention that this power to deport for breach of conditions of admission should become effective until the appellate authorities are established and a right of appeal to them is available against a decision to deport. And I should perhaps emphasise that this power of deportation applies only to the Commonwealth citizen who has been admitted on conditions. It has no application whatever to those admitted with employment vouchers, or to wives and children admitted for settlement.
The purpose of Clause 16 is to enable the Home Office to enforce conditions of admission without recourse to criminal proceedings. In the present state of the law, the only sanction we can use against a Commonwealth citizen who fails to observe a time limit attached to his stay, or a restriction on his engaging in employment, is to prosecute him for an offence under Section 4(1) of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962. This is a harsh and clumsy procedure for dealing with people, very few of whom are criminals in any accepted sense. The police are obliged in these cases to bring the Commonwealth citizen before a court as a criminal because only a court has power to initiate the process of deportation. But what is needed, as we said in the 1965 White Paper, is a "speedy and effective power" to secure their repatriation without our having to invoke the sanctions of the criminal law. That is what the clause provides.
Clauses 17 to 21 contain various supplementary provisions. The only one to which I need draw special attention is, I think, Clause 17(5), which enables a warrant to be issued authorising entry to premises for the purpose of arresting a person who is liable to detention in connection with the making of a deportation order under Clause 16. There is a similar provision in paragraph 9(2) of Schedule 3, relating to the arrest of appellants who have been released on

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bail. Provisions of this kind are necessary if we are to be able to enforce the departure of people who have been at liberty in this country while their cases were being considered by the Home Office and by the appellate authorities.
Clause 22 provides, among other things, for dates of commencement for the various provisions of the Bill to be fixed by Statutory instrument. It is too early yet to say how soon Part I of the Bill can be brought into operation. I know that it will be your Lordships' wish to see a system of appeal in operation at the earliest practicable date; but the establishment of an appeal system depends not only on the passage of legislation, but also on the completion of a great many administrative problems and preparations. I do not want to exaggerate the practical problems involved in setting up the appeal system, but they are considerable. Provision has been made in the Estimates for the coming financial year to ensure that money is available for bringing the system into operation before the end of that year—that is, before the end of the financial year starting on April 1 next. But how soon the necessary resources of manpower and accommodation will be available is less easy to determine. If I may sum up, the principle underlying this Bill is that people from overseas should not be excluded or deported from this country without a full and fair hearing being given to their claims to enter or remain. Your Lordships will find me ready to consider any suggestions that you may put forward in Committee for further improvement of the Bill. This evening I invite the House to record its approval of the underlying principle I have mentioned, by giving the Bill its Second Reading. My Lords, I beg to move.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 2a. —(Lord Stonham.)
6.0 p.m.
LORD BROOKE OF CUMNOR: My Lords, in my opening words I wish to refer to the noble Lord, Lord Stonham, who has explained this Bill with his usual lucidity. This is the last day of term before the Easter Recess. During this period we have had 30 sitting days. My researches have disclosed that on no fewer than 18 of those 30 days Lord Stonham has been speaking for the Government on important business. It is a
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remarkable record, and I think that noble Lords in all parts of the House will wish to pay tribute to him.
SEVERAL NOBLE LORDS: Hear, hear.
LORD BROOKE OF CUMNOR: This Bill has its origin, as the noble Lord hinted, in the White Paper entitled Immigration from the Commonwealth which was presented to Parliament by the noble Lord, Lord Stow Hill, in August, 1965. It seemed to me at the time a very soundly based White Paper. I will remind your Lordships of a particular passage which is relevant to our debates to-day. It is paragraph 25:
"At present a Commonwealth citizen may be deported only if a court has made a recommendation to that effect on convicting him of a crime punishable by imprisonment. The Government regard it as important that there should be a speedy and effective power to repatriate immigrants who in one way or another, e.g., by obtaining entry by misrepresentation or by flouting the conditions on which Grey were admitted, evade the stricter control over immigration that is now envisaged. Without it the effectiveness of the control would be greatly weakened. It is therefore, the Government's intention to seek for the Home Secretary a general power—in addition to his power to act on the recommendation of a court—to repatriate such Commonwealth citizens if he considers the public interest to require it."
That was the position taken by the Government in August, 1965. But though the Government regarded it as important three and a half years ago, they have waited all this time before proposing to Parliament legislation to give them this power. It is the power embodied in Part II of this Bill. The reason for the delay, for which the noble Lord gave a euphemistic paraphrase, is that following publication of the 1965 White Paper there was a revolt within the Parliamentary Labour Party against that thoroughly reasonable proposal which I have just read out.
The Government, which up to then had no intention of setting up an expensive machinery for appeals—there is no mention of any such thing in the 1965 White Paper—decided to get themselves out of an embarrassing situation by appointing the Wilson Committee with terms of reference:
"To consider whether any, and if so what, rights of appeal or other remedies should be available to aliens and to Commonwealth citizens who are refused admission to or are required to leave the country."

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The Wilson Committee worked fast and well, as one would expect of any committee under that particular Chairman, and their Report was published in August, 1967. Among their other findings the Committee said in paragraph 63:
"We have been greatly impressed with the desirability of establishing a person's admissibility to this country before he starts on his journey, and we make recommendations to this end in Parts IV and V."
Later in our debate I hope that the Government will explain how much or how little they have yet done towards getting a person's admissibility established before he leaves his home overseas and starts on his journey. If only we could make that universal, it would do more than anything else to cut down the distress and frustration of making the long journey and then being turned back on arrival.
Meanwhile, the new power which the Government regarded as important and urgent to take as long ago as August, 1965, seemed somehow to become less and less urgent in their eyes as time went on. Another year and a half after the publication of the Report was let pass before this Bill was introduced. We now have a Bill which incorporates, in Part II, the new powers which, as I have explained, are three years overdue; and in Part I the new appeals machinery for both aliens and Commonwealth citizens which is estimated to cost £500,000 a year. For myself, I would not give nearly such high priority to establishing an appeals system at a cost of £500,000 a year as the Government do—though, admittedly, under pressure. If I were granted £500,000 of public money to use, I believe that it would do much more good if it were spent on increasing the grants to voluntary bodies and local authorities for improving social services and community services in those places where special problems arise through big concentrations of immigrants. That is where the money is needed. We have an unquestioned responsibility to all these people who are already here, much more direct than we have to others who are not in this country at all.
If the Government seek to rebut what I am saying by quoting the statement of the Wilson Committee that opinion among their witnesses was virtually
1428
unanimous in favour of establishing some kind of system of appeals, I reply that of course it was. If they had asked witnesses from the parts of the country about which I have just spoken they would have found opinion virtually unanimous in favour of better community services—just as if, had they asked people what they thought about the tax system, they would have found witnesses virtually unanimous in favour of lower taxes. Government and Parliament have to do what none of those witnesses was called upon to do, and that is to establish priorities in the laying out of public money, which is one of the most important and responsible duties of a Government. I, personally, think that there are many priorities higher than the setting up of an appeals system at the ports. In the event I believe that it will make no perceptible difference to the numbers of people admitted. I have a high admiration for the way the immigration officers do their work. It is difficult and thankless work, and I feel most strongly that those who wish to criticise anything that happens in this field should direct their criticisms against Ministers, whatever Government are in power, rather than against the immigration officers who to the best of their ability are carrying out Ministers' intentions.
When the new system in Part I of the Bill gets going, of course there will be some successful appeals. But that in itself will not prove that the appeals system has brought about a difference, because, human nature being what it is, immigration officers who now in an evenly balanced case give the would-be immigrant the benefit of the doubt are likelier in future to decide doubtful cases the other way, knowing that the adjudicator can be relied on to make further investigations and put things right if the decision of the immigration officer has been too stern. The £500,000 a year will justify itself in so far as it gives confidence and satisfaction to those who succeed on appeal. I do not think that it will give much extra confidence and satisfaction, compared with the present system, to those whose appeals fail. It will certainly lift a painful load of responsibility and unpopularity off the Home Secretary and other Home Office Ministers. I am not suggesting that this is why the Bill is being introduced; I

1429
know that it is not. I can recollect cases where my life as Home Secretary would have been easier if the ultimate responsibility for decision had been on some tribunal and not on me. Yet Ministers exist to carry responsibility and to defend their decisions and policies to Parliament. Weighing up all this, I do not believe that this new appeal system will add as much to human satisfaction and happiness as if the £500,000 a year were spent in the alternative way I have suggested.
Part I of the Bill marks, of course, a fundamental change which the noble Lord did not mention. Entry into this country is at present a privilege, except for certain categories of people from the Commonwealth who have a statutory right under the 1962 Act to come in. If this Bill becomes law, entry will no longer have the status of a privilege; it will have the status of a right for all except those aliens or Commonwealth citizens whom it is decided not to admit, and even they will have a right of their own—the right of appeal against the adverse decision. The Home Secretary will continue to be able to exercise a general control by making immigration rules, as the noble Lord explained. But in so far as he exercises discretion to refuse to admit an alien or a Commonwealth citizen who he thinks ought not be allowed to come, his decision is liable under Clause 8 to be set aside by an adjudicator or by the Tribunal, simply on the vague and unchallengeable ground that his discretion should have been exercised differently. There are grave questions for Parliament here.
I suggest that your Lordships should consider most carefully Clause 8(1)(a). Sub-paragraph (a)(i) presents to the appellate authority a normal justiciable issue:
"that the decision or action against which the appeal is brought was not in accordance with the law or with any immigration rules applicable to the case."
That is a clear issue for appeal. But in sub-paragraph (a)(ii) the appellate authority is given no external guidance whatever, The task for it is to decide whether,
"where the decision or action involves the exercise of a discretion by the Secretary of State or an officer… the discretion should have been exercised differently".
Surely, where the Secretary of State has to exercise discretion either he must be
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directly responsible to Parliament for his decision, or that decision can be overridden only by an appellate authority which is given some criteria on which it is to base its overriding judgment. It seems to me intolerable that, in a matter which is not one of fact or of law, but one of discretion, a Minister of the Crown can be overridden by an adjudicator who only needs to say, "I think my ideas on the exercise of discretion are better than the Minister's." I hope that the Government will consider this passage in the Bill very seriously, particularly bearing it mind Appendix III of the Wilson Committee's Report and the behaviour of the so-called Aliens Deportation Advisory Committee in the 1930s, which is not irrelevant to it.
I remember a case where I signed a deportation order against an alien who had slipped into this country via Ireland, and whose presence here I regarded as not "conducive to the public good"—that is the technical term—because he was a known drug addict. He had no right of appeal. I was answerable direct to Parliament for the decision. Under this Bill he could appeal, and I think I am right in saying that his appeal world go to the Tribunal. And the Tribunal, having unfettered freedom and being answerable to nobody, might take a different view and say that it was an insupportable interference with the liberty of this foreign subject if he was not allowed to come and spend a time here, and enjoy his heroin among the sort of people he would gather around him in London. The Government, who have certain responsibilities for law and order and public health, would then be powerless to get rid of such a man.
Noble Lords may also remember a man called Rockwell (now dead, I think) who also slipped into this country via Ireland six or seven years ago. I had to consider his case and I decided that the presence of this man, an alien and an avowed Nazi, was not conducive to the public good, though he had committed no crime on British soil. I believe that the vast majority of British people were grateful to me for using my discretionary power to make him go quickly. But under this Bill he would have had a right of appeal to the Tribunal, and it would then have been perfectly open to the Tribunal to say that this was an arbitrary and oppressive act by the Home Secretary, out of accord with Britain's liberal reputation

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for cherishing freedom of expression, however odious the views expressed may be. Had either of those two individuals been Commonwealth citizens and not aliens, it would not have been possible to deport them at all. They had not broken any landing conditions. They had entered Britain lawfully through the Irish Republic. They had not committed any crime.
Now that we are to extend the powers of deportation to Commonwealth citizens who have broken a condition of landing, and now that everyone threatened with deportation is to have a statutory right of appeal, I want to ask the Government seriously, in the light of such cases as I have mentioned, whether the long-standing power to deport an alien on the ground that his presence here is not conducive to the public good should not be extended to a Commonwealth citizen also. I would not have urged this when there was no right of appeal, but now that there is to be a right of appeal the objections to this course fall to the ground. Had a man like Rockwell been not an American, as he was, but a Canadian, say, or an Indian, or a Maltese, I am certain that his presence here advocating Nazi doctrines would have been no less unacceptable to public opinion, but there would have been no means of getting rid of him because he would be immune from deportation.
There is one other point of principle which I must raise with the Government, for the Second Reading debate is the time for points of principle rather than for minor points of criticism of clauses in the Bill. Why do the Government propose in this Bill to discriminate in favour of those wishing to come to this country from abroad, and against British citizens resident here already? If an alien wishes to come, and is refused admission, the Bill will grant him a right of appeal. But if a British citizen wishes to travel abroad and the Government withhold a passport from him, he has no right of appeal whatever; and I can find no proposal in this Bill that he should be given that right. Most of your Lordships may imagine that a British citizen has a right to a passport if he wishes to travel abroad and complies with the necessary formalities and pays the fee. But that is not so. To issue a passport to a
1432
British citizen is not a statutory duty on the Government; it is a prerogative act. Will the Government, therefore, in Committee bring forward Amendments to the Bill and to the Title of the Bill to grant to a British citizen refused a passport to travel abroad the same rights of appeal against the decision as an alien who has been refused permission to land?
My Lords, we should give this Bill a Second Reading and then help the Government to amend it in Committee on the lines that I have mentioned. Part II is necessary for the reasons that the noble Lord has given, and on the Government's own showing. by that White Paper, it is three years overdue. Part I implements broadly the Wilson Report, and my criticism of it is not on the detail. My personal criticism of it is that it is very expensive in relation to the small difference it will make, and the £500,000 a year could be spent to better purpose on community services to help immigrants who are already here. In Committee the Government should show the courage of their convictions about appeals, should accept the logic of my speech, and should extend the scope of the legislation to the no less important matters that I have indicated.
6.20 p.m.
LORD FOOT: My Lords, it gives me some pleasure in opening what I want to say to the House this evening to join with the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Cumnor, in his congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Stonham, upon the extent of his achievement during these last thirty days. The way in which the noble Lord manages to deal with all the work which falls on his plate is a perpetual wonder to me, and I know we are all pleased with the way in which he always deals with the House, in spite of the many duties that are thrown upon his shoulders, with courtesy and with kindness.
My Lords, my intervention in this debate will be very brief, because I am a wholehearted supporter of this Bill. I recognise that the Government, in introducing it, are not only substantially implementing the Report of the Wilson Committee but are also carrying out undertakings which they gave, particularly at the time of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act last year, that as soon

1433
as they could manage they would set up an appeal procedure for people who were wanting to come into this country.
If I may, I should like to deal briefly with only two of the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Cumnor. He said that if he had at his disposal half a million pounds to spend upon the problems of immigration it would be better to spend it upon the people who are already here, upon mitigating their condition. May I briefly say why I wonder whether the noble Lord's judgment upon that matter is right? I believe that one of the very important matters to assist the solution of our problems of immigration is the way in which we deal with the intending immigrant at the moment he arrives on these shores. If the procedures which we have to receive him, possibly even to send him away, do not appear to be fair; if the decision appears to be made by some faceless bureaucrat, and if the possibility of the decision being reversed may depend upon whether he can get the assistance of a Member of Parliament or somebody like that to put his case to the Home Office, I think it undermines the confidence of the immigrant population, not only the people coming in but the people who are already here, in a way which is really very harmful to the establishment of satisfactory race relations in this country. I of course defer to the far greater experience of the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Cumnor, in this matter, but I seek to ask him and the House to consider whether in fact his judgment upon this matter is right. I think it is vitally important that we should now implement this Report and put it into effect.
The only other matter to which I want to refer was raised by the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, when he referred to the terms of Clause 8(1)(a)(ii), which of course provides that the discretion of the Secretary of State, exercised through an immigration officer, can be reviewed and, indeed, if necessary, reversed by an adjudicator or the Tribunal. My Lords, there is a dilemma here. This point was of course developed and deployed in the other place by Mr. Quintin Hogg, and I, at any rate, always read and listen to anything that Mr. Hogg has to say about these matters with great attention. He developed this theme in a rather different
1434
way from that put forward by the noble Lord. The way Mr. Hogg put it was this: that he doubted the wisdom of passing down to an adjudicator or to the Tribunal the discretion which had previously been vested in the Home Secretary, because a tribunal of that kind—a judicial or quasi-judicial tribunal—is an appropriate body to deal with questions of law and questions of fact, but it is not an appropriate body to deal with the administrative and discretionary questions which very often arise in cases of this kind.
I see the force of that argument. I can well see that when you depart from questions of law and fact and move into the field of discretion there are sound reasons for saying that that is a matter of policy which ought to remain in the hands of the Executive, which is accountable to Parliament. I can also see the force of the argument that a judicial or quasi-judicial body of this kind is not really appropriate for dealing with what is basically a discretionary and administrative question, when you get outside questions of law and questions of fact.
I think we are caught in a serious dilemma here, and I would put the matter to myself in this way. I ask myself: Do I regard the need for some appellate system, so that it may be seen to all the world and by the immigrant himself that he is getting a fair deal, that his case is being heard and that due consideration is being given to his particular circumstances, as overriding the difficulties which there are in occasionally transferring to a body of this kind questions which are the subject matter of discretion? My answer to that question is "Yes"; and I think that the situation is greatly mitigated by reason of the fact—and I commend the Government for having taken this course—that they have laid down for the benefit of the adjudicators and the Tribunal, and indeed for the benefit of the immigration officers, the rules which they are to apply in the case of both the Commonwealth immigrant and the alien. By giving those guide rules as to how the discretion which has now been devolved to the adjudicators and the Tribunal is generally to be exercised, the Government have gone a very long way to mitigate the problem; and I think it is only in peripheral and marginal cases, very peculiar cases, cases with sectional circumstances, that you will find that the

1435
Tribunal or the adjudicator will be concerned with matters of discretion. If I may say so, I think this is a compromise, but I think it is probably the best sort of compromise which could be devised.
I should therefore like to commend this Bill to the House. Perhaps I might conclude by saying this. My Party, and I myself, have in the past been at some odds with the Government sometimes on this question of immigration. Sometimes we have felt almost violently in disagreement with the Government. It is all the more pleasant, therefore, on an occasion of this kind, to be able to congratulate the Government upon implementing this policy; and, if I may say so very humbly. I think they have done a very workmanlike job.
6.29 p.m.
THE LORD BISHOP OF CHESTER: My Lords, I, too, was very glad that the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Cumnor, drew the attention of the House to the remarkable service which the noble Lord, Lord Stonham, has offered to us during this Session. Perhaps I may presume, from these Benches, to add a pastoral word, and to plead with him not to overdo it, because his services are far too valuable to this, House for us to contemplate our being deprived of them because he submits himself too fully and too readily to the demands of public service.
If I had any doubts at all about the desirability of this Bill they have been dispelled by two of the paragraphs of, the Wilson Committee Report. The first is paragraph 61, which draws attention to the indignity to which people may be subjected if they have to undergo intense examination on arriving in this country at a time when they are least able to deal with it: people coming to this country after a long journey, people who are tired, people who do not speak the language, people who are apprehensive of what the future may hold for them. They are not in the right state to undergo the kind of scrutiny which is also disliked by those of us who, in different circumstances, go into a foreign country. Therefore it is desirable that this should be dealt with in a much more judicial way.
My Lords, Clause 84, which lends weight and authority to this Bill, reminds us of the undesirability in principle of permitting the Executive to take decisions
1436
which affect a man's whole future, decisions against which there is no appeal. This creates a sense of injustice in the individual; and, as the noble Lord, Lord Foot, pointed out, the sense of injustice extends far beyond the individual who is concerned. If the Bill is justified upon only these two grounds, it ought to receive the ready support of this House. Nevertheless, the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Cumnor, has pointed out certain grave matters of principle which the House will have to consider very carefully. There are four points within the Bill which, although they are matters of detail, will need to be very carefully considered, because they will affect the whole character and working of the system that is laid out in the Bill.
The first one concerns the procedure under which the Bill will operate. Clause 11 empowers the Secretary of State to make rules of procedure. We do not yet know what those rules will be; but there are many who hope, with the Wilson Committee, that the procedure will be subject to the scope of the Tribunals and Inquiries Act, which will give the opportunity for examination of the way in which the tribunals are working. I hope, therefore, that consideration will be given by the Government to placing the work of the tribunals under the scope of that Act.
Secondly, I would draw your Lordships' attention to the remarks made in the Wilson Committee Report on the question of deportation. As we know, there is a dual system here: the powers of the Minister to deport and the powers of deportation under the measure. The Wilson Report considers (it is in paragraph 132) that the Secretary of State should have power to repatriate a Commonwealth citizen who has obtained entry by misrepresentation or by flouting the conditions on which he was admitted. It recommends that the courts should cease to have power to make recommendations to deport. The House must ask itself whether it is desirable to continue this dual system and whether it would not be wiser to give power to deport solely to the Minister.
Thirdly, I would draw your Lordships' attention to the question of legal aid. The Wilson Committee (in paragraph 177) state that they do not consider that there are sufficient grounds for making legal

1437
aid available. I think this House must examine that opinion because grave issues concerning the whole future of an individual are involved here. Undoubtedly very heavy expenditure will be incurred by and laid upon those who, in many cases, will have small ability to meet it. I know there is the suggestion that grants should be made to advisory and welfare organisations in order to be able to help individuals. It is also very desirable that help should be given as speedily as possible. I suppose it is possible that a legal aid system might be so slow-working that the aid would not come at the time it is needed to the people who most need it. Therefore, it might be possible to have a dual system whereby both legal aid and aid through advisory welfare organisations were made available. This is an important matter concerning the working of the measure, and I hope that it, too, will be examined.
Finally, my Lords, I would say something about the appointment of the adjudicators. This is vital to the whole system of working. The Wilson Committee recommend (in paragraph 153) that the appointment of adjudicators should be vested in the Secretary of State. There are many very experienced in these matters who believe that that is not good advice, and who think that the appointment of these officers should be entirely separate from the Immigration Service, which is responsible to the Home Secretary. Those who take this view believe that there is a very strong case for examining whether it would not be better that the Lord Chancellor should appoint the adjudicators so that there is no question whatsoever about their independence of thought and mind.
These are matters which are in a sense details, but they are very important because the compassionate working of this measure will largely depend upon them. I hope that they will be studied, for I am sure that many like myself would wish to support this Bill.
6.37 p.m.
BARONESS GAITSKELL: My Lords, I cannot let tributes in this House to my noble friend the Minister pass without adding my own to them. To my admiration I must add real amazement at the amount of hard work that he can put in during a Session in this House.
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Not only do I welcome this Bill but I congratulate the Government on their sense of justice and fairness in introducing it. That is my reading of it from a completely general standpoint. I have no knowledge of the complex legal; matters in this Bill, and if some of my judgments are wrong I hope that my noble friend will correct me. Few people—and I am one of them—were aware of the really unsafe foundations upon which our immigration laws are based, Mr. Quintin Hogg in the House of Commons called them "nonsensical". In fact, I discover that the laws have been extended from two temporary emergency measures, the Aliens Act 1914 and 1918. The Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962 was modelled on these and gave complete powers to immigration officers, whose decisions could not be challenged in the courts. Little wonder, my Lords, that Mr. Quintin Hogg during the Second Reading in the Commons—and he is a man who commands respect and affection in all Parties—speaking of the immigration laws since 1905 said that we have established one of the most illiberal, arbitrary systems of immigration law in the civilised world.
To-day thousands of aliens and Commonwealth citizens are interrogated by overworked immigration officers, doing their best to be fair under the most difficult conditions. However, when the would-be immigrant fails to satisfy the conditions of entry he or she is detained pending legal representations. Recently I heard of the case of a 17½-year old Pakistani girl, who spoke no English and was detained in Holloway Prison for one month waiting for her case to be considered. The Immigration Appeals Bill, having individual justice as its aim, could be really workable and fair in such cases. Facts such as age and relationship have to be elucidated; and when hundreds of individual disputes have to be determined, that is not the job of a Minister or Ministers. The Ministers are there to decide policy. It is the job of an administrative Tribunal such as is recommended by the Wilson Committee and which is to be put into practice by the Bill when it becomes law. It is for such a Tribunal to deal with the day-to-day problems of immigration. It is not suggested that the Tribunal should be staffed only by lawyers, and some lawyers are opposed to the Bill. I am afraid that

1439
lawyers are somewhat allergic to tribunals. I suppose that they are jealous of their powers. But perhaps lawyers alone are not ideal adjudicators of social problems—not always.
I welcome this Bill, but there are some minor flaws in the draft rules presented to Parliament. There is discrimination against Commonwealth citizens in certain respects. In the White Paper Commonwealth Citizens Control after Entry, paragraph 24 on page 5 deals with entry and residence of husbands and male fiancés. I know that great play has been made of the increase in the number of male fianceés from Commonwealth countries who have come here in the last few years, but, under the provisions of this Bill, if they have used the excuse of marriage for illicit entry they can be deported. As the right reverend Prelate, the Bishop of Chester, has said, no provision has been made for legal aid for immigrants in these cases. The financial support promised for voluntary organisations is not an adequate substitute and will not achieve this objective.
But, despite these criticisms, this Bill is a good one. The fears expressed in the Commons by those who opposed it are groundless, I believe, because there is no automatic right of appeal, as I understand it. There is no handing over of Government immigration policy. The Secretary of State makes the rules for the appeal proceedings, and I hope that my noble friend the Minister will bear me out when I say that these rules are binding on the appellate authority. He can still keep any alien or Commonwealth citizen out of this country. The Wilson Committee have done a splendid job and deserve much credit. The Government have shown wisdom, courage and humanity in following up the Committee's recommendations in this Bill—or very largely doing so—and I hope that the phobia about illicit entry will be assuaged by the provisions in the Bill.
I have only one more point to make, and it refers to what was said by the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Cumnor, about the half-a-million pounds a year which it will cost for these appeals. My Lords, what is half-a-million pounds a year when spent on social services and spread over the country? That is the point. Half-a-million pounds a year to
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obtain proper appeals or to settle disputes could have a marvellously good effect, but I do not think that half-a-million pounds a year spent throughout the country in the communities where immigrants live would go very far. In any case, that sort of money should be spent by the separate Ministries responsible for education, health and other services.
6.45 p.m.
LORD GRIDLEY: My Lords, I too should like to pay my tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Stonham, for the magnificent work that he does in your Lordships' House. If I may say so, we have a great affection for him and I hope that when we go away at the end of this term the fact that we shall not be sitting will mean that he will find that his labours are to some extent lightened. In general, my Lords, I find myself more in sympathy with what was said by the noble Lord regarding the proposals in this Bill than with what was said by my noble friend, Lord Brooke of Cumnor, but I recognise at the same time that my noble friend has far greater and wider experience in these matters than I shall ever have.
I support this Bill and the idea of an Immigration Appeal Tribunal because of the experiences I have had when living in the Commonwealth, where I have spent the greater part of my life, and I propose to confine my remarks to the position of the Commonwealth immigrant rather than that of the alien. I believe that an appeal tribunal would be able to sort out the position of a Commonwealth immigrant citizen who had, in good faith, gone to an agent in his country of origin and paid an extortionate fee for travel documents which he believed to be genuine; and who, on arrival in this country, found to his consternation that the documents were false. That can happen. I know from my own experience that many of the people who come from the poorer parts of the Commonwealth and who are semi-literate can be duped in this way. I think, therefore, that an appeal tribunal could remedy what might be a possible injustice. That would do nothing but good at a time when race relations generally are somewhat sensitive.
With regard to the issue of false documents, it is an unfortunate fact that as soon as statutory controls are imposed

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they are exploited by some people for their own monetary gain and advantage. Immigration officers are aware of this, probably more so than anybody else. The published records show that in 1968, 168 Commonwealth citizens were found to be travelling on falsified documents. Parliament has imposed duties on immigration officers which are difficult and onerous. I am quite certain that these officers deserve our gratitude—as other noble Lords have said—for the manner in which they perform their duties. I believe that the burdens of these officers might be lightened if there were an appeal tribunal, and any unjustified criticisms which might be made against them for acting in an arbitrary fashion would be more likely to be removed. My noble friend Lord Brooke of Cumnor said that the creation of an appeal tribunal would tend to make an immigration officer submit difficult cases to the tribunal instead of making decisions himself. I think that if the Appeal Tribunal found an immigration officer adopting tactics of that kind it ought to be their duty to call attention to the submission of unnecessary appeals, and the officer should be disciplined accordingly.
I now come to the operation of immigration control, and even with this Bill I do not see how control can be as successful in its operation as we should all like it to be if we in this country act in isolation. This is really a Commonwealth problem. By that I mean, without disparagement to our friends in the Commonwealth, that the issue of forged travel documents takes place in many of the newly independent countries and in the immigrants' countries of origin. It would be in the interests of everybody if the activities of those who are responsible for the issue of forged documents were severely curtailed. I know what the noble Lord, Lord Stonham, for whom I have the greatest respect, is likely to say in reply to this—that is, that we cannot interfere in the internal affairs of other members of the Commonwealth. But if the Commonwealth is ever to mean anything, is it not possible for one country within the Commonwealth to co-operate with another country within the Commonwealth to alleviate the difficulties of the nationals of one of them who are suffering frustration at the ports of entry, and to alleviate the difficulties of our im-
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migration officers? In the opening stages of his speech, the noble Lord, Lord Stonham, stressed the importance of the institution of certificates of entry in the country of origin. Is it not possible to co-operate in this matter? And may I ask the noble Lord, Lord Stonham, have we ever sought the co-operation of other members of the Commonwealth in the difficulties that face all of us over immigration control?
An event occurred last Christmas which, in my view, meant that life in future can never be quite the same for any of us. Noble Lords may have seen the picture of the "Good Earth", as they called it, from the cabin of the space capsule of Lovell, Anders and Borman, as they sped on their journey towards the moon. This convinced me in dramatic fashion—and it must have convinced most of those who saw that picture—that the world in its solitude is really one entity in space, a world on which all the peoples of all races have to learn to live together. It is a sinister fact that at the present time nations everywhere, even some of the newly independent nations, are tending to increase their immigration controls. This does not help, particularly as I believe that it tends to exacerbate racial tensions.
I commend the action of the Government in bringing this Bill before your Lordships and I support the Second Reading. I am sure that it will help to reduce racial tension. Nevertheless, would it not succeed even better if there was a meeting of Commonwealth Ministers and ourselves to iron out the respective difficulties of us all, to some of which I have referred? I commend this suggestion to the consideration of the Government, in the belief that it would greatly facilitate the operation of the Bill.
6.55 p.m.
LORD WALSTON: My Lords, I join with all noble Lords who have spoken already in their compliments to the noble Lord, Lord Stonham, and in their general commendation of this Bill. It is a good and useful Bill and will serve a valuable purpose.
On two occasions recently I have spent a few hours with the immigration officers at London Airport and have been able to watch at first hand how they do their job. I certainly go along with the noble

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Lord, Lord Brooke of Cumnor, in his respect for what they do and how they do it. They have a very difficult job. I noticed them on one occasion when there was a large number of aeroplanes arriving mainly from India and Pakistan. The aeroplanes had been circling for some time over the Airport in a fog and streams of people came through the Immigration, arriving after a long and hard journey in a strange country, not knowing the language and what they were going to find here. I was much impressed by the humanity of the men who dealt with them. In almost every case there was no problem at all. Where there was a problem, it was often one of language, and there was somebody available who could speak the language and could help. When it was a question of detaining someone for further investigation, it was done, so far as I could see, decently and politely. That in no way detracts from the need for an appeal against what, after all, can only be the subjective assessment of one human being concerning the truthfulness or otherwise of another. The necessity for that has been borne out by the White Paper and is confirmed in this Bill. That is a good thing.
There are one or two points—minor points perhaps but not without importance—which I hope the Government will consider in this context. When an immigrant is detained, I agree that it is the responsibility of the airline which has brought him in to see that he is looked after, and that it is no responsibility of Her Majesty's Government or anybody else. For all that, I think that we should pay attention to the conditions under which these people are detained. I have seen some of the accommodation, and while the best that is possible is being done under restricted circumstances, it is not a very happy sight. A large number of people are detained in a small room, with beds close to each other and scarcely any room for movement or exercise. They are guarded by kindly people of the Securicor in uniform. I hope that the Government will do something to improve the conditions of these people while they are being detained.
It would be interesting to know whether the Government envisage that more people would be detained if they exercised their right of appeal and did not
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go home straight away. I know that the Bill gives facilities for bail to be granted, but I imagine that there will be some cases where, on perfectly reasonable and sound grounds, it will not be granted, and the chances are that there will be a larger number of immigrants detained.
Another point I would ask the Government to consider is the number of immigration officers who are available for this job. At the present time they are heavily overworked with the growing number of immigrants who come in, and when there are appeals it is obvious that evidence will have to be given by the officers concerning the people whose entry they have claimed is not according to the law as it is at present. That will take up a considerable amount of their time. It will still further increase the strain on them, and will increase the delay not only for immigrants but for other people who come into this country who have to pass through the immigration net. Therefore, while I know it is difficult to recruit any more of these people, I would suggest that so far as possible tribunals should hear the cases they are investigating actually on the site where the detention has taken place, where the immigration officer is working. For instance, a room or rooms should be set aside at London Airport for this to be done, so that the immigration officer can go there when he is needed without any difficulty and then resume his duties, instead of having to find his way to London and having to hang about for one or possibly two days, while the case is being heard.
Finally, there is the point which was raised by the right reverend Prelate about the appointment of the members of the appeal body. I share his view that it is better that such people should not be appointed by the Home Secretary. I in no way suggest that the Home Secretary would not be entirely objective and appoint admirable people; but it will be considered—wrongly, but nevertheless considered—by many that he is acting as judge in his own cause. It would be preferable, in my view, if these people were appointed by some other Minister. The Lord Chancellor is the obvious choice, but the danger is that the appointments will then tend to be, and possibly inevitably would have to be, lawyers. I do not think that a legal qualification

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is in any way the sole qualification, or indeed the best one, for this type of assessment. Very little hard evidence will he presented: it will be much more a question of the actual age of somebody, the actual relationship—whether somebody is a fiancée or not—which cannot be proved in a legal sense, but is a matter of judgment. The kind of people who do that are often not lawyers, but people who have had experience in social welfare of one kind or another, possibly in the countries of the immigrants concerned, and have some understanding of the individual human problems that arise. The points I have raised are not large, but I think they are points which will affect the actual working of the Bill. It is a good Bill, and I am happy that the Government have introduced it.
7.3 p.m.
LORD BROCKWAY: My Lords, I apologise for not having indicated that I wished to speak in this debate: I slipped up. I will be quite brief. If I know my noble friend Lord Stonham, he will be somewhat embarrassed by the whole series of tributes which have been paid to him. I would only add this comment: the extraordinary thing is that he has served the House so fully when only a short time ago he was quite seriously ill. I should like to join with others in hoping that he will not be so conscientious in doing work for this House as to cause any detriment to his health and to his continued service. And I appreciate, when I say this, that I have myself caused my noble friend a good deal of trouble by my criticism of what he has had to administer. The main reason why I am speaking to-night is that, even though I criticise nearly every item of legislation which my noble friend mentioned in the introductory passages of his speech, I wholeheartedly welcome this Bill, and I rejoice in the opportunity of expressing that appreciation.
I should very much like to reply in detail to the speech made by the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Cumnor. He and I are old political antagonists. I would make only two comments on his speech. The first is appreciative. I should very much like to see legislation which gave British residents who were refused passports the right to make a similar appeal.
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My only doubt is whether this would come within the terms of the present Bill. My second comment is critical. The noble Lord said that this £500,000 could be better spent upon social activities, education and helping local authorities with large immigrant populations. One reply to this suggestion has come from my noble friend Lady Gaitskell. I make another reply. The noble Lord urged this as a matter of priority. He urged that the £500,000 would be better spent on the social services than on the machinery for these appeals. It is a matter of priorities. But the priorities are not between spending £500,000 on an appeal system or £500,000 on social services. The priorities must be against our national expenditure altogether, and many of us feel that to be spending £100,000 to £1 upon armaments and war preparations, and to be critical of spending £500,000 upon giving greater rights to immigrants when they claim to come into this country, is taking the rule of priorities to the lowest stage where we can possibly make a comparison.
I welcome this Bill for three reasons. The first is this. From the very beginning of these immigration laws many of us have felt that to allow officials, however conscientious and unprejudiced, to make decisions affecting the future lives of individuals without their having an opportunity to appeal is inconsistent with the rule of law. I would emphasise what my noble friend Lord Walston said. Many of these decisions by the immigration officers are subjective: they have to be made on the basis of whether they believe what is said by the immigrants. A judgment of this sort is extraordinarily difficult to make, and it is one that is largely outside the training and experience of the immigration official.
The second thing I want to say is this. I join with others in paying tribute to immigration officials. Rather strangely, a considerable number of them were constituents of mine, because my constituency was on the edge of the airport. I know them, and they have spoken to me of their difficulties. I know that the great majority of them are conscientious, but, as my noble friend knows, they occasionally make mistakes. He will be aware that over the years I have taken to the Home Office a number of cases

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of appeal against decisions by immigration officials. I have often had to apologise, because they have been at the weekend—and I pay tribute to the officials at the Home Office who were able to find the Minister in time to enable a decision on deportation not to take effect. But these cases are sufficient to justify the proposal for this appeal tribunal. My noble friend will appreciate, if he refers to the files at the Home Office, that in only one case out of a considerable number that I have raised have the Home Office decided against the right of the immigrant to remain in this country.
My Lords, my third reason for welcoming the Bill is this. Many immigrants and their families, when they arrive at Heathrow, or some other place of entry, have no knowledge of the procedures involved or of the organisations or individuals who can give them help. It has been almost by accident that my telephone has rung, often at late hours of night, for calls from those who have been treated in this way at Heathrow. This has been due to the accident of knowing me and to ignorance in not knowing appropriate organisations. The proposals which are made in this Bill will help to meet that difficulty. My Lords, that is all I want to say. I want to express the very greatest appreciation both of the Minister and of the terms of this legislation. I may have to make some suggestions in Committee, but in principle I support the Bill wholeheartedly.
7.11 p.m.
LORD RITCHIE-CALDER: My Lords, I am not going to detain the House or my noble friend Lord Stonham from the rest which we all agree he ought to have. I want to intervene for only this reason—and my intervention was promoted by the noble Lord, Lord Brooke. I have to declare an interest because I am a member of the Community Relations Commission; and therefore I ought to be grabbing with both hands the opportunity Lord Brooke suggests should be given us of having another half million pounds. But I reject it, because I think that the £500,000 to be spent on these appeals will in fact be much more valuable in our community relations than any
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amount of money spread in thin disposal over the country.
That is why I think this Bill is going to help enormously any work we are trying to do in integrating the communities; in helping to remove the misgivings, the doubts and the miseries of the present situation. Above all, as Lord Brooke said, it will enable us to ensure that everyone sees that justice is in fact being done. I think that that is very important from our point of view. I have only one thing to say to my noble friend, and that is that we on the Community Relations Commission are not trying to exceed our remit or ask to be consulted by the Home Secretary on these matters. What we welcome very warmly and sincerely in the interests of our job is that we may give him whatever advice and participation we possibly can; and it would be very useful if we knew in advance the kind of matters on which we can help.
7.13 p.m.
LORD STONHAM: My Lords, I am extremely grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Cumnor, and indeed to every noble Lord who has spoken in this debate, for their great kindness to me personally. I did not know that the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, had been doing some research. It is interesting to learn that I have spoken 18 times in the last 30 Sitting days. I did not know how many—I knew it was too many, but I did not know it was as many as all that. I can only say that I am most grateful and, although this is our last Sitting day before Easter, to me it feels like Christmas.
I would also thank every one of your Lordships for the welcome that you have given to this Bill. I am going to answer as many points as I can, but I should like your indulgence in this regard if I am as brief as I can be without undue brevity, because there is important business yet to come and the hour is getting rather late. I should like to say, however, that while I have been listening to this debate I have become convinced that we ought to have a very interesting and helpful Committee stage. I will therefore try to limit my remarks to those vital points which I think may be helpful in relation to a Committee stage.
The noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Cumnor, asked me about the delay since

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1965 in taking power to deport for breach of conditions under Part II of the Bill. This delay was occasioned because the Government took the view that it would be wrong to take power to deport by Executive action, without any right of appeal, a person who had entered the country lawfully and had not been convicted by a court, still less recommended for deportation. So the Government decided to establish the Wilson Committee to look at the rights of appeal generally, and the time since 1965 has been passed in the work of that Committee and in the preparation of the Bill. I am somewhat surprised that the noble Lord, with his great knowledge of these matters departmentally, should have thought that that time was unduly long.
The noble Lord referred to review by adjudicators of the Minister's discretion. I think he put it that an adjudicator should not be in a position to say, "I think my judgment is better than the Home Secretary's". The Aliens' Deportation Advisory Committee, to which the noble Lord also referred, had no guidance at all from the Government on general principles and policy, but the appellate authorities under this Bill will receive guidance in the form of immigration rules. But I think the other parts of the noble Lord's argument on this point were effectively answered, if I may say so with respect, by the noble Lord, Lord Foot. May I say to the noble Lord, while I think of it and while thanking him for his remarks, that I would ask him his forgiveness because I owe him a letter from the last debate. I would ask him to understand that this matter is not forgotten. We are still working hard on this very complex matter, and I hope he will hear from me soon about the subject referred to last time which I thought he might have mentioned again.
The noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Cumnor, also raised very interesting points. He mentioned Rockwell, for example, who was an American Nazi—I remember the occasion quite well—and a drug addict, whom he did not mention by name and whom he had to decide to deport. He said that under these arrangements the Home Secretary would not be free to act in the way that he himself was free to act. Indeed, neither of the two classes of person he mentioned
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could be deported if the appellate authorities upheld an appeal against deportation, as the noble Lord supposed. With regard to a Commonwealth citizen, there would be no power to deport if no criminal offence was committed or if the Commonwealth citizen was not in breach of the conditions of his entry. If, as the noble Lord suggested, the question is "Should there be power to deport a Commonwealth citizen because his presence here is not conducive to the public good?", I would ask the noble Lord to consider whether this would not indeed be a new facet of the Conservative Party's policy of assimilating the treatment of aliens and Commonwealth citizens. The information in the possession of the Home Office at present does not suggest that this change is warranted or that it would serve a substantial purpose. As the noble Lord is aware, Commonwealth citizens hive a right to acquire our citizenship after five years' residence, so that if the noble Lord wanted to make the change he suggests it would of course be of limited effect so far as time is concerned.
LORD SOMERS: My Lords, may I interrupt the noble Lord for one moment? He said that if a man had committed no criminal offence he could not be deported. But I wonder whether he would agree that a man who was an undesirable character could have a very bad influence and cause others to commit criminal offences without actually doing so himself.
LORD STONHAM: My Lords, this is a possibility, and indeed this was exactly the kind of case that the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Cumnor, posed with his drug addict. It was the kind of situation he envisaged. Indeed, the; same could have been said of Rockwell. But I should have thought it rather doubtful in both cases whether it would be very long before they committed a criminal offence. But I agree that that is a possibility.
The noble Lord then raised a most interesting point about the refusal of passports to British citizens to go abroad, and asked why should they not have the same right of appeal as Commonwealth citizens. As one would suppose, the noble Lord stated the position correctly, but in practice a passport is refused only

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where the applicant is still in debt to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for expenses previously incurred in repatriating him from overseas; and I think that is a proper provision because he is a defaulter. That is something which is rarely disputed. Otherwise there are the extremely rare cases where the Foreign Secretary has decided as a matter of Executive discretion that for special reasons the grant of a passport to the applicant would not be in the national interest.
In the second class of case there is normally no justiciable issue. The issues are those that may well touch on national security, in regard to which the Home Secretary, under Clause 9 of the Bill, has reserved to himself the right to make a decision. But in cases where a passport is refused for reasons connected with the situation in Rhodesia—which forms a special category—the Government have set up an advisory committee under the chairmanship of Mr. Justice Cairns, and any change in the law relating to United Kingdom passports would go beyond the objects of this Immigration Appeals Bill, as the noble Lord will appreciate, and of course it is outside the subject considered by the Wilson Committee. But I will certainly bring this point to the notice of my right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary and it may well be that in a later stage of the Bill we shall deal with it again.
I turn now to the questions put to me by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester, which were four in number. The right reverend Prelate asked me first for an assurance that the whole system of appeals would come under the Tribunals and Inquiries Act. I can give that assurance. They will come under the Council on Tribunals which was set up under the Act. He then asked about the appointment of adjudicators and urged, as indeed did my noble friend Lord Walston, that the appointments should be made by my noble and learned friend the Lord Chancellor instead of by my right honourable friend the Home Secretary. On that I have to say that the Home Secretary has decided, with the full agreement of my noble and learned friend, that he will adhere to the Wilson Committee's Recommendation to make the appointments of adjudicators himself, and I think for reasons that the right reverend Prelate
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will accept. The Government think that the functions of my noble and learned friend should be limited to the appointment of the comparatively small number of Tribunal members, because the Tribunal is the higher appellate authority and obviously the appointments of Tribunal members will be the key appointments. They will be made by the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor, and surely his responsibility for them is sufficient guarantee of impartiality.
We also think that if the noble and learned Lord had to deal personally with the appointment of adjudicators, bearing in mind that there will be perhaps more than twenty serving full-time and thirty part-time, it would be beyond the resources of the small staff of my noble and learned friend to give proper consideration to each individual appointment. I understand that it is the view of my noble and learned friend that his own intervention will be far more effective in the establishment of the appeals system if it is limited to the appointment of the members of the Tribunal.
The right reverend Prelate also asked for an assurance that legal aid would be forthcoming for those making appeals. As I said in my speech in relation to Clause 15, there is, we hope, one single voluntary body being set up to assist appellants and others, and as the Wilson Committee suggested, it would be very much better for them to assist in appeals rather than that it should be done individually under the legal aid system. They thought it would cost less. I would assure the right reverend Prelate that this is one of the things which will be taken into consideration in respect of the degree of financial support that is accorded to the voluntary bodies.
The question of deportation was described by the right reverend Prelate as a "dual system". I feel that what we are doing is surely right; namely, retaining in certain classes of case the present system with the intervention of the courts (and I think it is always desirable, when we can, to do so), but also to bring in under Clause 4(1)(a) the right of the Home Secretary himself to deport in certain cases. This is entirely in accordance with the Wilson recommendation although, as I said in my speech, we do not intend to implement it until the whole machinery for these appeals

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is available and ready. I hope that that adequately covers the points raised by the right reverend Prelate.
My noble friend Lady Gaitskell, as always charming and kind, referred to the case of a 17-year-old Pakistani girl who was detained in prison for one month. My noble friend was correctly advised. Miss Patel was so detained while her case was taken to the courts, and when it failed there representations were subsequently made to the Home Office. That was the reason for the long period referred to by my noble friend. Miss Patel was then sent away. My honourable friend Mr. Merlyn Rees who deals with these matters in the Department—and deals with them with the utmost thoroughness and fact-searching and heart-searching—was not satisfied that Miss Patel was, as she claimed, the daughter of a Commonwealth citizen resident here. I am afraid that she had to go back.
My noble friend Lady Gaitskell also asked me for an assurance that she was right in thinking that rules are binding on the appellate authority. She was correct in so thinking. While I am dealing with this point about the one Pakistani girl who was kept here so long, perhaps I may deal with the associated point raised by my noble friend Lord Walston with regard to detention accommodation and the time that people are likely to be kept here, and also the number of people likely to be detained. I would say to your Lordships that we are well aware that accommodation is inadequate, and we are doing our utmost to get accommodation at London Airport for mothers and children who may have to be detained overnight. This is certainly our intention.
With regard to greater numbers, I think that they are likely to be less and that people are likely to have less trouble. I mentioned the number of adjudicators we intend to have, and we expect that two or three, for example, will be on duty at any one time at London Airport, although no adjudicator will be on duty for more than six hours. The service will be from nine o'clock in the morning until nine o'clock at night. We expect to be able to deal with most cases, so far as adjudicators are concerned, within 24 hours. Of course, bail will be granted to most of those who are now detained, if it is
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necessary to detain them. But we are going to provide more accommodation.
My noble friend Lord Walston raised a point about the advisability of having all appeals heard in adjoining buildings at London Airport, or on a site near to it. This is what we hope to achieve so far as London Airport is concerned, but at other ports it is not generally thought to be practicable to hold the hearings in the port area. But this will not give rise to any serious problems because we always have places available within a reasonable distance from the port.
The noble Lord, Lord Gridley, for whose speech I was also grateful, raised the question of forgeries. On this I would say that the Commonwealth Governments who are chiefly concerned have done a great deal to tighten up their procedures for the issuing of passports, and so on; but they cannot, of course, stamp out entirely the traffic in forged documents, and they cannot place an embargo on their own citizens' leaving for this country. Our immigration officers, however, are not inexpert at spotting forged documents, and not very many, I think, get through the fine mesh.
The kind of problems which the noble Lord mentioned cannot easily be dealt with by inter-Governmental consultation, but we certainly bear the point in mind, and at some levels consultation is continuous. The High Commissions in London are most helpful, and there is the greatest degree of co-operation and help and understanding from them. The noble Lord opposite said that I would say that we cannot interfere with newly independent nations. I have not said it. Of course, we cannot interfere with newly independent nations—or, I hope, with any nation. But we can consult with them and co-operate with them for the greater benefit of the citizens of all the countries.
He spoke about entry certificates, and I entirely agree; in fact I think I have said three times this evening how important it is to have the certificates. Consider some of the countries from which these people come. Perhaps their village is a long way from any office, so that they have to travel, and that is expensive to do. If it is to get a document to take them out, that is one thing; but if it is to get a document that does not necessarily allow

1455
their departure, that is another, In principle, we are very much in agreement with what the noble Lord has said. We have been continuing our efforts to publicise the entry certificate procedure and are continuing to do so by all means in our power.
My Lords, I have tried to answer most—indeed, I hope all—of the questions that were put to me. I thank your Lordships for all the contributions you have made, and hope that what I have said will be of some use in considering the points that your Lordships would wish to raise in Committee, all of which I look forward to considering with the utmost care. I hope that your Lordships will now give the Bill a Second Reading.
On Question, Bill read 2a, and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.

FUTURE BUSINESS
7.37 p.m.
LORD BESWICK: My Lords, with permission I will make a short Statement about future business. I had hoped that the Decimal Currency Bill would reach us from another place before your Lordships' House rose for the Easter Recess. It now seems that the House will rise this evening before the Bill is received. Alternative arrangements are therefore being made to enable the Second Reading to be taken as planned when we return. Your Lordships will see on the Order Paper which will be distributed to-morrow a Business of the House Motion in the name of my noble friend the Leader of the House, which is being tabled to-night to be moved on April 15. The purpose of this will be to enable the Bill to have its formal First Reading on that day, to be followed immediately by Second Reading. I should emphasise, however, that the Bill will be printed and available for distribution and consideration tomorrow.
EARL ST. ALDWYN: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for making this Statement to the House. I think it desirable that the House should be fully aware of what is happening. I think that some, seeing on the Order Paper the very day we return a Motion to suspend Standing Orders to take two stages in one day, might have thought
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that the noble Lord's Party were trying to rush things. But I am sure that, with his explanation, the House will be satisfied.

BACON CURING INDUSTRY STABILISATION SCHEME 1969
7.38 p.m.
LORD BESWICK LORD BESWICK rose to move, That the Draft Bacon Curing Industry Stabilisation Scheme 1969, laid before the House on February 27 last, be approved. The noble Lord said: My Lords, I beg to move that this Order be now approved. Bacon stabilisation arrangements began in December, 1966. The present system of payments was introduced in April, 1967. The scheme embodied in the Order, which I hope the House will approve, is authorised by Part V of the Agriculture (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1968.
The only significant change of procedure in this Scheme, as against the others, will be the establishment of a register of bacon curers which will be kept by the Minister. Unless a curer's name is inserted in the register he will not be eligible for the stabilisation arrangements. Although the prospect of any levy payments may seem remote under the currency of the present Scheme, nevertheless we think it important to make clear that the arrangements as a whole rest firmly on the idea of payments being balanced in the long term by levies, and that the same considerations should apply to the payment of grants as to the application of levies. All this is provided for in paragraphs 8 and 9 of the Scheme.
It is the policy of Her Majesty's Government to encourage the expansion of British bacon production. This can be effected only by making efficient use of resources, by increased productivity and by improved marketing. The Bacon Market Sharing Understanding, the particulars of which I recently gave in the House, open the way for the curing industry to win a larger share of the United Kingdom market. The measures taken at the Annual Review should ensure a steadily increasing supply of the necessary pigs, and it is now important for the whole curing industry so to organise their resources that they can take full advantage of their opportunities.
When the Worth Committee recommended the continuance of the stabilisation arrangements they expressed the hope that these arrangements would be
"so adjusted as to encourage re-organisation and to discourage the inefficient use of resources".
To help in achieving this, and in securing the expansion objective's, the Industrial Reorganisation Corporation has agreed to make an independent examination of the structure of the industry and to consider with individual companies whether any improvement might be effected.
In the meantime, this draft Scheme relates to bacon produced up to September 30 only. Obviously, a longer-term decision is required and the Government are prepared to consider immediately any recommendations, interim or final, made to them by the Industrial Reorganisation Corporation. I believe that the industry will give the I.R.C. that measure of co-operation which is necessary for the investigation to be speedily completed. Should it be necessary the Government propose to lay before Parliament a Scheme extending the present arrangements for a further short period, pending the Corporation's final recommendations.
My Lords, I do not believe there will be any disposition to deny that stabilisation arrangements are necessary, and that they have played a vital part in putting the British bacon industry in the more encouraging position from which further advance should be possible. I have no hesitation, therefore, in commending this Scheme to your Lordships' approval. I beg to move.
Moved, That the Draft Bacon Curing Industry Stabilisation Scheme 1969, laid before the House on 27th February last, be approved.—(Lord Beswick.)
7.42 p.m.
LORD NUGENT OF GUILDFORD: My Lords, may I thank the noble Lord, Lord Beswick, for describing the Scheme and its purposes to your Lordships, and may I say that I welcome the Scheme and would advise my noble friends to welcome it, too. This is no more than an interim measure to continue the existing Scheme. It is a complicated little Scheme, and I am grateful to the noble Lord for sparing us a complete explanation of how it all works. The fact is that it keeps the
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bacon-curing industry alive at present, and therefore is of great importance.
The curing industry is the essential link between the pig farmer and the housewife. The shaky condition of this industry has been a matter of great anxiety. It is due to a number of factors, some within the industry and some without. Here I should like to express my thanks to the Worth Committee for the Report which they made, which has been such a helpful review of this most complicated affair. The industry reached a crisis in 1966 when this Scheme was brought in to keep it going, and it has been most useful in this period.
As the noble Lord has rightly said, in the context of a programme to increase home food production bacon is a most important commodity. At present, we produce not much more than one-third of the total bacon consumed in this country. Only about one-third comes from our own farms, so there is a great scope for increased production, depending on two things: first, that our farmers produce the right sort of pig to make good bacon; and secondly, and equally important, that the bacon-curing industry is of both the right quality and the right capacity. As the noble Lord has said, this is no more than an ad hoc interim Scheme; and will come to an end in six months' time. I should like to make a comment on the shortness of this period, because it means that in these six months the Government hope to work out a permanent Scheme for this industry which will really set it on the right road.
The noble Lord, Lord Beswick, has told us that the Government have called in the Industrial Reorganisation Corporation to help. They have already the Report of the Worth Committee; but the Industrial Reorganisation Corporation has a big and difficult task ahead of it, first of all to win the complete confidence and co-operation of the industry, which is a most complex affair. It consists at the present time of something over 200 factories. It is true that the Worth Committee said that there were not more than ten or twelve groups that make a significant contribution to production. Nevertheless, the structure is most complex, and the future reconstruction of the industry will clearly depend on a number of mergers taking place in

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order to achieve a really efficient structure for the future.
I should have thought that the Government are being optimistic in supposing that even the I.R.C., with all its dynamic qualities, would be able first to work out schemes of reconstruction, and then to make recommendations to the Government in that short time. I was relieved to hear the noble Lord, Lord Beswick, say that if necessary an extension of this Scheme could be made, and that he would if necessary come before this House again with an extending Order. The only point I want to make to the Government is: for heaven's sake! take enough time to do it. It is impossible to get agreement in a short time, and "shot-gun marriages" for mergers are no basis for a happy future. We must try to get this industry reconstructed on a really sound basis, and I am sure that this will not be easy. The I.R.C. and the industry have my best wishes, but I press upon the Government not to say that it must be done in six months. It is most unlikely that that would be possible. So I ask the noble Lord, Lord Beswick, not to hesitate, if it is necessary, to come here and ask for a further Statutory Order extending the Scheme for a further six months.
There are three questions that I should like to put to the noble Lord. Would he say (I do not think he told us) whether the bacon curers are satisfied with the Scheme as it now exists in the present Order. Secondly, what is the annual cost of the present Scheme? I think we should know this before we agree to the Order. The noble Lord told us that the industry is co-operating with the I.R.C. I was happy to hear that. I hope it will. I think perhaps I need not do more than say that I hope that out of this co-operation will come a sound reconstruction which will put this industry on a thoroughly efficient modern basis. It consists of some good modern parts and some less good, old-fashioned parts, of adapted buildings and so on. Out of it we want to see coming something really good and permanent. With those comments, I am pleased to support the Order. I would just ask the noble Lord to answer the one or two questions I have put to him.
7.48 p.m.
LORD AIREDALE: My Lords, there are two points of detail that I should like to raise on this Order. The lesser one in importance is, I think, on Article 10, which lays down that the Minister shall determine the rates of payments or levies week by week. I assume that this is for the benefit of the industry and not of the Minister, so that the industry may keep a running account and may know, week by week, how it stands as between the receipt of payments and being liable for levies. I should have thought that it would have been better if Article 10 had laid upon the Minister the duty not only to determine the matters week by week, but to publish and to communicate to the industry weekly these decisions. I hope that when this Scheme is shortly superseded, as I understand it is to be, by another one, opportunity will be taken on that occasion to impose upon the Minister the duty not only to make weekly determinations, but to communicate these determinations weekly to the industry.
The other point (I think a much more serious one) arises on Article 9. This empowers the Minister to impose levies whenever he considers that the return from the sale of the bacon is more than sufficient to cover the cost of production of the bacon, without taking into account any profit for the producer or any question of the producer's being enabled to make a living without being liable for levy should the Minister so determine. I do not suppose that such power would ever be exercised by any Minister, because I do not suppose that any Minister wants to bring the bacon curing industry to an end; and this would be what would happen if these powers were exercised and levies were ordered without the producer being enabled to make a living. But I do not think that Ministers ought to come before Parliament and ask for powers which they would never contemplate using; nor do I think Parliament ought to grant Ministers powers which they clearly would never, in their senses, put into operation.
I do not suppose that in the next six months during which this Order is going to operate any Minister, however malevolent, will be able to do a great deal of damage to the bacon industry, and I am sure that no Minister wishes to do so.

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Nevertheless, I very much hope that when this Order is superseded by another one the power which is sought in the new Order to make levies will not require the Minister to consider simply the cost of production and the proceeds of sale and take no account of the entitlement of the producer to make a living. I hope that in granting power to impose the levy it will require the Minister to have regard to the fact that the producer is there to make a living out of the work that he does. I very much hope that that point will be borne in mind when the new Scheme is brought into operation.
LORD BESWICK: My Lords, I am grateful for the welcome which has been expressed for the scheme, and I particularly welcome the words of the noble Lord, Lord Nugent of Guildford. Also, I hope that I can construe what was said by the noble Lord, Lord Airedale, as a welcome for this scheme, although he had some reservations to make. Let us face the fact that it is an interim scheme, and a necessary interim scheme. I was asked by the noble Lord, Lord Nugent of Guildford, whether it was agreed by the industry. They welcome the framework of the scheme. I understand that they would like rather more money to come as a result of it, but nevertheless the amount, which is some £8½ million for this year, is a very considerable sum. I am glad to see the noble Lord indicating his support. I suppose it is very seldom that we shall get an industry—especially an industry concerned at all with agriculture—saying that they are quite satisfied with the amount of money. But that is the position in this case.
The noble Lord said that it was better to wait a little longer and to come up with the right final scheme rather than to make a quick decision with an unsatisfactory scheme. Of course this is a sensible thing to say. My understanding is that the I.R.C. say that they might make interim recommendations about the reorganisation of the industry within about two months. They are not entirely unfamiliar with the industry. A good deal of inquiry, of course, has been made and they know something about its structure, although not until quite recently, I understand, did they get the agreement of the companies concerned to go in and make
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detailed investigation. The fact seems to be that they will go in now with some understanding of the overall Picture, and that within a few months they will be able to complete their inquiries. I trust that they will be able to come up with proposals that will be satisfactory. Nevertheless, I take the point that rather than hurrying without reaching a satisfactory conclusion, it would be better to have another extension of this interim scheme.
The noble Lord, Lord Airedale, raised two or three points. He wanted to know why these determinations about prices were made weekly. The answer is that they are decided weekly because bacon prices change weekly, and it is of assistance to make these determinations each week. He asked whether it would be possible to publish the prices. I understand that the industry is informed of the prices, but whether any formal publication would be more helpful is a matter we shall consider. The noble Lord went on to say that the powers to apply a levy, as they were not likely to be brought into operation within the next six months, ought not to be in the Order. I do not agree with him at all on this. The whole essence of this sort of stabilisation scheme is that it should be a give and take arrangement. The principle is important, and on reflection I hope he will agree that even though within the short term that part of the principle covering the levy is not applied, nevertheless it is essential that we have firmly before us the fact that in the lean times the Government help, in the good times the industry make a contribution, and that the objective is that overall the scheme will be self-balancing. Therefore I hope the House will agree that it is as well to maintain this principle in this Order.
The noble Lord, Lord Airedale, went on to say that he thought there should be specific reference to a profit before a levy is applied. Again, I am afraid that I cannot agree with him. It is quite impossible to say that no levy shall be raised unless each firm makes a profit. One cannot say that at all. One given rate of price may enable one firm to make a profit, and another one could well make a loss. What I think is important is that there should be the possibility of profit. We want a reasonable

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rate of prices to prevail, and the considerations which are set out will enable the Minister to determine whether there are prices under which eventually some firms will make a profit. Some, if they are not so efficient, may well not reach the profit-making stage. Nevertheless, they have the opportunities of profitability, and I think this approach—perhaps the noble Lord will agree—is the right one. I hope that I have answered all the points which the noble Lord, Lord Nugent of Guildford, put to me, and I trust that the House will now be able to approve this Order.
On Question, Motion, agreed to.

RAILWAYS: DERAILMENTS AND GOODS WAGONS
7.58 p.m.
THE EARL OF CROMARTIE THE EARL OF CROMARTIE rose to ask Her Majesty's Government, in view of the potential danger to the travelling public due to the frequency of derailments, whether they will direct British Railways to withdraw from service the type of goods wagon which is liable to be derailed at speed or to reduce the speed of trains made up with such wagons. The noble Earl said: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper. I have put down this Question as I know there are a number of noble Lords, as well as many railway travellers outside your Lordships' House, who are perturbed by the ever-increasing number of derailments on British Railways. Apart from the loss of time—not to mention the expense to the taxpayer which these derailments cause in the re-routing of the trains and clearance of the track, which often must be re-laid—there is a very real danger involved. I do not have to remind noble Lords that only two or three weeks ago a young cadet travelling on the Western Region was killed, due to the passenger express in which he was travelling colliding with one of these derailments. What, my Lords, would have been the scale of the disaster if the cement train derailed last year on the King's Cross/Edinburgh line had fallen inwards, instead of outwards, right in the track of the following Flying Scotsman?
Leaving aside the sub-standard maintenance of rolling-stock, a situation which in my opinion is not helped by the progressive closing of the Scottish repair depôts, there is little doubt that the design of certain goods wagons, more especially the 16-ton mineral wagons, should be subject to some very close scrutiny indeed. Whether they should be taken out of service, or modified in some way, I do not know, but this is a matter which should not be swept under the carpet. I think and hope that the Minister will agree with me that the public should be told what remedial measures are contemplated, before there is a major disaster.
8.1 p.m.
THE EARL OF KINNOULL: My Lords, I should like to support my noble friend on this very important subject. It is high time that the Government were probed about their intentions in regard to the standards which they propose to operate in their freight wagon fleet. The problem, as I understand it, is that the Railways Board have some 800,000 wagons in operation, 75 per cent. of which are the short-wheel-base variety, built for limited speeds of 45 miles an hour and now totally unsuitable for modern requirements. I believe that a great majority of the 75 per cent. I have mentioned are over 30 years old. Nevertheless, they are used, and have to be used; and, in consequence, too often they are running too fast for their capabilities for too long a period, so that they then overheat and consequently seize up.
Besides the handicap of out-of-date rolling stock, the railway depôts also suffer from a serious shortage of available wagon fleets at certain times of the year. I believe I am right in saying that in peak periods the shortage is something like 30,000 wagons. As was evident the other day, coal traffic had to be turned away from the railways—the very traffic which we were told the railways would cope with under the new Transport Act. The problem is acute, and the result of using this old and ancient rolling stock is that there is now continuing evidence of delays and breakdowns, loss of punctuality in services and now possible accidents. The loss of punctuality in services was particularly stressed in the recent Annual Report of the Central Transport Users' Consultative Committee.

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I should like to put four specific questions on the wagon fleet. First, I would ask the noble Lord what research has been done into the overheating of wagon axles and what results have been achieved. Secondly, is it likely that these old-type wagons can be modified, or will they have to be scrapped? Thirdly, how many wagons now in operation are restricted to the 45 m.p.h. limit? Finally, what research has been carried out on the new disc-brake system?
I suggest that the remedy, or partial remedy, is to keep open some of the alternative routes and, where possible, to separate freight from passenger traffic. I could cite the example of two routes between Gloucester and Birmingham, the Bromsgrove route and the Stratford-on-Avon route. The Railways Board intend to keep open the Bromsgrove route and, ultimately, to close the Stratford-on-Avon route. But the Bromsgrove route is extremely hilly for the carriage of freight and includes the famous Licky incline. It has already been proved that this incline is so steep that a number of trains have overrun or overshot the points. I believe that regulations have now been adopted which slow down the services. The freight service generally is not a happy one. The freight services, despite the provisions of the Transport Act, are decreasing every year, revenue has gone down, the services are being withdrawn, and the equipment is old. It is time that we were given the Government's view of the long-term future planning of the Railways Board.
8.6 p.m.
LORD FERRIER: My Lords, I have a good deal of sympathy with the noble Earl's anxiety as disclosed by his Question, for to-night I set off on my eighth overnight journey undertaken this month. On occasions when my sleeper has been "over the wheels", I have been particularly conscious of the manner in which the bogeys of even the passenger coaches "hunt" at high speeds on some parts of the track, especially on the electrified Euston/Crewe section where they reach speeds of 90 to 100 m.p.h. and come down the banks of the Shap and Beatock.
One cannot help hearing or reading about derailments. Indeed, when one sees a goods train, the wagons of which are necessarily loose-coupled, coming down one of these banks, one appreciates the strain on the wagons and tracks which
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arises in the present conditions. Last Friday there was a wagon standing in the loop beside the arrival platform at Carstairs with one bearing so burnt out that the wagon had to be chocked up. I understand that it had been there for two or three days and was not the first wagon to have gone wrong in that area recently. Admittedly, all the main line goods wagons have now got oil bearings, but they are modified wagons of the short wheel-base type to which the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, has referred. That does not convert them into modern vehicles which are safe to attach to modern trains. The speed of the schedules and the long hauls as compared with the days of steam must put considerable strain on couplings and bearings, especially where sections of the track are in need of replacement.
Without wishing to be alarmist in any way (I confess that I would rather travel by train than by air, all else being equal) I look forward to hearing the noble Lord's reply to my noble friend's Question. Needless to say, I hope that it will be reassuring. Nothing, short of a head-on collision, could be worse than an express train at speed running into a wagon derailed from the opposite line. I was interested when the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, referred to alternative routes. If the density of traffic over the Beatock section calls for high speed schedules, with the necessary drop coming down the bank from the other side, is this not a further reason for the Waverley line to have been kept open in order to relieve the pressure of the goods traffic on the main Carlisle/Carstairs route in order to enable the managers to reduce the schedules of goods trains over the bank?
8.10 p.m.
LORD HUGHES: My Lords, in asking his Question the noble Earl, Lord Cromartie, made a commendably brief speech, an example which has been followed both by the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, and by the noble Lord, Lord Ferrier. I am afraid that I must take a little more time because, as each of those noble Lords indicated, the brevity of their speeches did not mask the seriousness of the subject that we are discussing.
The Question as framed by the noble Earl implies that the Government have

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power to direct British Railways to withdraw from service any type of goods wagon that is liable to be derailed at speed, or to reduce the speed of trains made up with such wagons. I must emphasise right away that the Government have no such power. Under the 1962 Transport Act, responsibility for the safety and efficiency of operation of the railways is the statutory responsibility of the British Railways Board, and the Government cannot, nor would they wish to, if they could, directly interfere with that responsibility. I think I should also, right at the start, put this matter in its proper perspective by pointing out that during 1968 the number of goods train derailments on plain track per million goods train miles on all lines, based on figures supplied by the British Railways Board, was only 2·97. So, while it is necessary and right that the noble Earl should draw attention to the number of accidents, one ought not to allow, either by admission or by inadvertence, the impression to get around that goods wagons are being involved in derailments all over the place.
Railway safety is, however, a matter about which my right honourable friend the Minister of Transport maintains close contact with the British Railways Board, through the Chief Inspecting Officer of Railways. Over this problem of goods train derailments the Ministry, through the Railway Inspectorate, have been working in close co-operation with the Railways Board since the incidence of goods train derailments, and, in particular, those caused by short wheelbase wagons with old type suspensions, first began to assume significant proportions. The short wheelbase wagon first showed itself to be prone to derailment on plain track in 1960 when a series of derailments occurred in which such a wagon was the first to leave the rails at a speed of less than 60 m.p.h.—which at that time was the maximum permitted speed for any train that included short wheelbase 4-wheeled wagons.
This speed limit had obtained for many years, but with steam traction comparatively few goods trains in fact exceeded 45–50 m.p.h. for any considerable distance, and although derailments involving short wheelbase wagons had occurred from time to time, they were generally
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ascribed to the defective condition of the wagon itself or to the state of the track at the point of derailment. With the introduction of powerful diesel locomotives on express goods trains, the actual mileage covered at speeds over 45 m.p.h. increased considerably, and it became evident that certain types of 4-wheeled wagons of short wheelbase were (and I use this expression with some diffidence, seeing the noble Lord, Lord Conesford, sitting opposite) derailment-prone even when apparently in good order, and that when running at speed on plain track only a very slight track irregularity could be enough to derail a wagon.
The incidence of short wheelbase derailments first began to be significant in 1962, and in succeeding years the Chief Inspecting Officer has called attention, through the medium of his Annual Report on railway accidents, to the increase in goods train derailments of this particular kind. Throughout this period, also, there have been a series of discussions between the inspecting officers and officers of British Railways who were fully alive to its seriousness right from the first. During 1961 and 1962 the Board instituted a drive to improve the standard of maintenance of goods rolling stock, and withdrew from traffic one particular type of short wheelbase wagon, the pallet van, which had an especially bad derailment record. Quite early in these discussions the possible need for a reduction in the maximum speed permitted for short wheelbase wagons was being urgently considered, and early in 1963 a limit of 50 m.p.h. was placed on all trains that included them.
In 1963, also, the Board referred the problem to their Research Department at Derby, where a series of experiments was put in hand to test the running of short wheelbase wagons over track that included known irregularities. As a result of these tests, of the wealth of evidence that had been accumulating over the years, and of the continuing discussions with the inspecting officers, the British Railways Board early in 1966 took the highly restrictive step of reducing the speed limit for all trains that included wagons with a wheelbase of 10 feet or under to 45 m.p.h. It is at this figure that the speed limit for these wagons still stands. I can assure noble Lords that, in addition to making these reductions in

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the speed limit, the Board have, over a period, taken action in various ways to ensure that this speed limit is not broken.
As regards the present limit, I feel that I should point out that recent analyses of goods wagon derailments show that the reduction of the speed limit to 45 m.p.h. has already largely eliminated speed as a major factor in short wheelbase derailments. Of the 156 such derailments in 1968, there were only 3 in which a speed of between 35 and 45 m.p.h. was considered to be a contributing factor. This, I am informed, shows that the way ahead does not lie in any further reduction of a limit which is already highly restrictive from the operational point of view. Nevertheless, 156 out of a total of 215 derailments on plain track in 1968 were caused by short wheelbase wagons. And the incidence, at any rate up to the end of 1968, was still rising, the comparable figures for 1966 and 1967 being 83 out of a total of 144, and 107 out of a total of 169 respectively.
The core of the problem is, of course, that out of a British Railways' fleet of 4-wheeled wagons that totals just over 400,000, nearly 330,000 have short wheelbases. It is indeed the sheer numbers of short wheelbase wagons that makes them such a problem, the two types that caused most derailments in 1968 being the 16-ton mineral wagon, of which there are over 186,000, and the vanfit, of which are are nearly 50,000. Noble Lords have asked: what are the measures, short of the withdrawal of wagons from service (which would seriously reduce British Railways' capacity to handle their goods traffic) that have been, and are being, taken to reduce the proportion of short wheelbase wagons in the British Railways' goods wagon fleet? Let me give some answers.
Since 1962 no further short wheelbase wagons have been built, either by British Railways or by private owners. With very few exceptions, all new wagons built since then have been of 15 ft. wheelbase or above, and all the main classes of wagons built have been provided with suspensions of improved design. Most of these wagons are capable of running safely at speeds of at least 60 m.p.h. Since 1962, also, private
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owners have acquired some 10,000 new wagons, mainly tank wagons, all of which are of long wheelbase and are fitted with modern types of suspension. This has enabled British Railways to take positive action to eliminate most of the private-owner, short wheelbase wagons.
During the last four years over 1,300 bogie wagons have been introduced to meet freightliner requirements, which has enabled the fleet of short wheelbase covered goods vans and open wagons to be substantially reduced. Thus there has been a progressive reduction in the number of goods vans, but by the nature of the work on which they are used they incur the longest mileages at sustained speed. Similarly, the introduction of nearly 5,000 new, high-capacity, long wheelbase coal wagons for what I am told is described as "Merry-go-round" working between the collieries and the power stations has enabled British Railways to dispense with an appreciable number of short wheelbase mineral wagons.
As regards the immediate future, noble Lords should know that the size and type of some of the wagons needed for the carriage of the future types of goods traffic have only recently been decided. Studies to determine the likely amount of freight the Board can expect to carry over the -next two decades will take sonic time to reach fruition. The results will eventually govern the final pattern of the future British Railways' goods fleet. It is not just a question of a like-for-like substitution of wagons with modern suspension for those at present existing. In anticipation, however, of what the requirement would be for the future wagon fleet, British Railways initiated in 1965 the design and building of six prototype wagons of long wheelbase and with double link suspension for technical assessment. These have proved satisfactory when running at speeds up to 75 m.p.h. Following this, in mid-1968 my right honourable friend the Minister of Transport gave authority for the construction of 250 covered goods vans of this design to enable a commercial assessment to be carried out.
Finally, as regards replacement the the British Railways Board have told my right honourable friend that they will shortly be submitting to him a request for authority to build a number of new long wheelbase wagons in connection

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with the development of general freight traffic. Thus, within the financial limitations imposed on the Board action will be taken to replace the old short wheelbase wagon fleet as quickly as possible.
As to the immediate future, analyses of the plain track short wheelbase derailments in 1968 suggest that the main single factors are traction and braking shocks (some 31 per cent.) and mechanical failures (some 20 per cent.), with minor defects in the track some way behind (some 10 per cent.). These track defects, where they occurred on passenger lines, were insufficient to affect passenger trains but were enough to upset the balance of a short wheelbase wagon. Some 12 per cent. of short wheelbase derailments were attributed to multiple causes; that is, when minor deficiencies in wagon and track tolerances come together. The Board have been and are taking steps to overcome these three factors. Traction and braking shocks, particularly at slow speeds, when they have most often caused derailments, are the results of minor faults in driving techniques associated with the type of equipment, and measures for improvement in these fields are actively in hand.
Mechanical failures are in many cases the result of insufficient or faulty maintenance. Great emphasis is being placed on the need for better maintenance, and active steps for its improvement are also being taken. Derailments of short wheelbase wagons because of defective track have mainly been the result of slight twists in the track, which have been insufficient to affect wagons with suspensions of satisfactory design, much less passenger coaches. Standards of track maintenance on goods lines that run alongside passenger lines and where a derailment might affect a passenger train are being given special attention.
At this point I might mention the Ashchurch accident, to which the noble Earl, Lord Cromartie, referred. He will forgive me if I do not follow him in this matter, but the inquiry into that starts to-morrow and it would be quite improper for me to make any comment about it. The noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, asked a number of questions. I think I have covered them, but I should like to say, on the question of withdrawal of wagons, that it is a matter for the
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Board in the first instance, in their investment projects, to decide whether to scrap or to replace; but when I mention that the cost of providing a new wagon is something of the order of £5,000 it will be seen that the task of replacing some 300,000 wagons is not the sort of thing which can be thrown at the British Railways Board all at once when they are faced with the requirement to operate in a system where deficit-financing is at an end. But I hope I have said enough to make it clear that the Board regard this as a strong claimant upon their investment projects. Does the noble Earl wish to say something?
THE EARL OF KINNOULL: My Lords, I do not think the noble Lord has quite told us what the long-term plans of the Railways Board are as regards replacement and the withdrawal of these wagons. I think we are entitled to know that.
LORD HUGHES: I think I have covered that in general terms. I have indicated the sort of steps they have already taken; I have indicated the fact that there are 250 of the new type being constructed so that there is a proper commercial assessment; and I have also indicated the steps which the Board have taken to try to work out the kind of wagon which they are likely to need for the other traffic which they may expect to get. So the Board are doing as much as they can within their resources immediately. But they have to recognise the fact that the right solution is to fit this in, as the noble Earl has said, with proposals to meet the long-term situation.
Finally, I should like to assure noble Lords that my right honourable friend the Minister of Transport, through the Chief Inspecting Officer of Railways, is keeping closely in touch with developments in this field. He is satisfied that, within the limits set by the availability of financial resources and the need to avoid building wagons before the future requirements can be determined, as satisfactory a programme as possible is being followed for the replacement of the worst short wheelbase wagons and for the maintenance of those that have got to remain in use and of the track on which they are to run.
I know that neither my right honourable friend nor the British Railways Board view the problem with complacency. I

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think it is proper and useful that the noble Earl should have asked this Question, because undoubtedly there is from time to time a large measure of public concern about an accident of this kind. I have spoken at some length because I think it is right, in the interests both of the general public and of the Railways Board, that as much as possible of this information should be put on public record.

HOUSE OF LORDS REFORM: VOTING PEERS
8.30 p.m.
VISCOUNT DILHORNE VISCOUNT DILHORNE rose to ask Her Majesty's Government: Whether they will publish the reasons and calculations which led to the conclusion that 230 would be the right number of voting Peers in a reformed House; and whether they will publish the number of Cross-Bench Peers who fulfilled the proposed attendance qualification in the last five Sessions of Parliament. The noble Viscount said: My Lords, even at this late hour I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name. I know that this is the last Question to which the noble Lord, Lord Shackleton will have to reply before the House rises. I am sorry, but it is not my fault that it should come on at such a late hour. But I do not think that the noble Lord will dispute that the proposals in the White Paper proposed the biggest constitutional change which we have had for 50 years. I am not seeking to debate to-night whether those proposals are good or bad. We have discussed them. What I am seeking is information—not as yet provided—so that we can see on what grounds some of the conclusions in that White Paper are based.
The procedure which has been followed in relation to this big constitutional change is very different from that which is normally followed. Industrial relations are very important. We had a White Paper which we discussed quite recently called, In Place of Strife. We discussed that White Paper with the advantage of having before us a Report of the Royal Commission presided over by my noble and learned friend Lord Donovan, which provided very valuable and informative back-
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ground. We also have Bills, and sometimes White Papers, which are produced as a result of Reports of other Commissions. We had this afternoon a Bill based largely on Reports of the Law Commission. Because the Reports of those Commissions are very factual, one can see when one reads them the precise reasoning which leads to a particular conclusion, whether that conclusion be accepted in the White Paper or not.
But in considering these White Paper proposals we have nothing of that kind—although, of course, a Constitutional Commission is being set up, ant one would have thought that the first thing to do would be to submit the question of the reform of this House to an impartial and highly qualified body, as no doubt that Constitutional Commission will be. It was, I think, because of the absence of such information as is normally available that there was such a commotion in another place about a document in the Library with respect to your Lordships' attendances. Rightly or wrongly, it seems to have been thought that that document would contain the key to some of the conclusions in the White Paper.
Now we have before us, published in answer to an Order of this House, the Return of your Lordships' attendances in the last five Sessions. I should have thought that for anyone familiar with this House that was a useful document, though for others, unfamiliar with this House, it was likely to be a most misleading one, and possibly one that would lead to false conclusions. It gives a record of attendances, but, of course, it does not in any way disclose how long in a day any one of those Peers has in fact attended. When one looks through the list of some of the highest attenders—I would except the noble Lord, Lord Airedale, who I am glad to see has the record number of attendances, and who in some Sessions scored the maximum and has always just beaten me—one notices (or at least I noticed) one curious thing. It is that so many of these regular attenders, within the terms of the White Paper, were regular attenders whom we do not see here fairly late in the day and who (I say this with the greatest of respect to them), for one reason or another do not and have not played a very active part in our proceedings.
But that qualification of regular attendance seems to have had a very significant part to play in the determination of what I consider to be one of the most important questions in relation to the reform of this House—that is: "What size should it be?" I would hope—and I have no doubt that the noble Lord, Lord Shackleton, will tell us—that when the Government reached the conclusion they did about the size of the House, questions of composition were disregarded and that what was considered was: What was the right size for this House if it was to go on to conduct its proper functions? Surely that is the first question that should be considered.
Am I not right in thinking that some of these other bodies which have considered the reform of this House have recommended a House of the order of 300 Members? For myself, I say straight away that I doubt very much whether a membership of 230 is large enough for this House properly to discharge all its functions including its functions on Private Bills, bearing in mind that to be a regular attender one has to attend only for some part of two days out of three. Taking into account the considerations of illness or Leave of Absence, I must say that I am very inclined to doubt whether 230 is the right number. But if it is the right number, if investigation has been made and consideration given, and if the process of reasoning and the calculations lead to that conclusion, surely we of this House, and the Members of another House, ought to be informed of that process of reasoning and of those calculations. So far they have not been so informed. And it was in an endeavour to obtain those reasons and calculations which have led the Government to that conclusion, that I put down this Question.
I should find it difficult to believe that the Government had not approached the matter in that way; but the White Paper itself seems to indicate a slightly different approach—though I may have drawn the wrong inferences from it. If one turns to paragraph 46, one sees first of all that it says:
"…the Government considers that in the first instance a reasonable size would be between 200 and 250 (excluding law lords and bishops)".
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We are given no ground for that conclusion; we are given no indication of the reasoning that has led to it. As I say, we have had nothing like a Royal Commission Report which we can examine to see whether that really is likely to be the right figure.
Then the White Paper goes on to say:
"At the outset the voting House would consist principally of those present created peers who were able to attend regularly—there were about 150 during the session for 1967–68…"
So you start off with a basic figure of regular attenders without regard (because there is no record of it) to the duration of each attendance. And then it is recommended—although the Paper says "the Government contemplates"—
"that about 80 new life peers would be needed for this purpose in the first instance".
That is how the figure of 230 is arrived at as the proper size for this House.
If I have drawn the right conclusion from the White Paper, you start off with the number of regular attenders and add 80. I cannot, however, believe that that was all that was done in determining the right figure. There must I feel have been some consideration of what really was the number which was required for this House to function permanently. Was it not considered before that the right number was of the order of 300? Of course, if it is the number of 300 that is required, the extent of the Prime Minister's patronage will go up from 80 to 150. That would alter the whole picture. So I submit to the noble Lord, Lord Shackleton, that it really is vital, if consideration was given to what was the proper size of this House in the future, disregarding its composition, that we should know the facts and the figures which led to that conclusion. If it be the case—reluctant as I am to believe it—that all that was done was to find the number of regular attenders of first creation, and then add the number of 80, that seems to me an entirely arbitrary figure. If that was all that was done, I ask that the Government should "come clean" and tell us so.
My Lords, it is not without interest to notice that if you leave out Peers of first creation the number of regular attenders, if you include all Peers, in the Session 1967–68 was 291; and I think this House

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functioned very efficiently with that number. I do not want to prolong this debate by one word more than is necessary, but I think it is right that I should say that I personally attach very great importance to this question. I do not know what took place at the talks between the leaders of the Parties, or what stage the negotiations had reached before they were broken off in a moment of petulance. I do not know what materials were put before that body; that is all covered with a cloak of secrecy. I think it would be a very good thing if all the documents which were before that body, and those who attended those meetings, were made public; and I hope that that can be done. I see no reason why they should not be. What is the need for secrecy about those discussions? Then, my Lords, we shall be able to see, if not the whole of the picture, at least a considerable part of the picture. I think we ought to know the facts precisely, long before a Bill comes before this House, so that we may have ample opportunity to consider exactly why it is that the Government have concluded that about 230 should be the right number.
My Lords, I would agree that it is not a very firm conclusion, because the White Paper goes on to say:
"The voting House would therefore consist at first of about 230 peers: provided that non-voting peers were also prepared to attend in reasonable numbers and where appropriate to serve on committees, this number should be sufficient for the business of the House, at least for the remainder of this parliament."
What grounds are there for reaching that conclusion? I must say that it seems to me very odd that you should say that this House could function properly for the remainder of this Parliament if nonvoting Peers were prepared to serve on Committees on which, it follows, they would have no vote. So much for the first part of my Question. The second part—
LORD SHACKLETON: Oh, my God!
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: The noble Lord says, "Oh, my God!" I am sorry to inflict this on him now. I would rather have inflicted it on him at an earlier stage of our proceedings to-day. This is really a much more important matter than bacon curing and matters of that sort. The noble Lord's interjection,
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I am afraid, rather encourages me to press the second part of my Question more firmly than I had intended.
LORD SHACKLETON: My Lords, the noble and learned Viscount needs no encouragement.
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: My Lords, indeed I do, and, what is more, I can tell the noble Lord that I usually respond to it. But, my Lords, despite the temptation, I will deal with the second part of my Question—perhaps the noble Lord had not observed that it has two parts—quite shortly. It is this. It is said that if you have 230 Peers, then 30 Cross-Benchers will suffice. So far as I can see, the number of Cross-Benchers of first creation, or Life Peers, who attended in the 1967–68 Session was, in fact, fewer than 30. I do not want to go into what will be the test to be applied before anyone is made a Cross-Bencher in future, what examination papers they will be required to answer; but it seems to me that as we have been given the figures for five Sessions of attendances at your Lordships' House, the figures for one Session for Cross-Benchers—which is what appears in the White Paper—are really insufficient. Therefore, all I am asking for is that those figures should be extended to cover the same period as the Return which has now been published pursuant to the Order of this House.
8.42 p.m.
LORD FERRIER: My Lords, I shall not be a moment, particularly at this late hour, but the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Dilhorne, talked about two days in three as an attendance measure. I would remind the House that so far as Scottish Peers are concerned it is one day in three in which Scottish business is being considered, as of to-day.
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: My Lords, the noble Lord says "two days in three". Surely, to be a regular attendant—I think I said it—you have to attend one day in three.
LORD FERRIER: My Lords, the noble and learned Viscount said two.
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: My Lords, if I did, I said it wrongly.
LORD FERRIER: My Lords, that was what tempted me to rise—I think it was

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a slip of the tongue. I rose only to point that out and to draw attention to some of the matters which the noble and learned Viscount has mentioned in his speech in regard to the attendances of Peers. Because I think I am right in saying, from the point of view of those of us who come from great distances (I do not say only Scottish Peers; there are English Peers from the North and West of England, and so on), that the problem of attending here is a matter of very much greater importance, in terms of service to your Lordships' House and the sacrifices that they make, than for people who live just round the corner. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Shackleton, will bear that in mind. As a matter of interest I worked out my own attendances. I support what the noble and learned Viscount has said, that the bare figures have to be taken very much in perspective; not only in respect of the amount of time which the attenders spend in this House and the contribution which they make to the business of this House, but also the distance from which they have to come; and the fact that, because of engagements in distant places, they cannot fulfil all the attendances that they would like.
8.48 p.m.
LORD SHACKLETON: My Lords, I clearly did an injustice to the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Dilhorne. I might have known that the short nature of the second part of the Question would lead to only a very short speech, and I apologise. I recognise the solemnity of his approach, which did not entirely succeed in concealing the naughtiness of his intention. I regard the noble and learned Viscount with growing affection, all the more since he has sat on those Benches opposite, and I regard him as a formidable and careful debater. But on the last occasion we covered quite a lot of the subjects which he has mentioned.
I have always understood that the debate on an Unstarred Question should be rather narrow, but—and I know that there is much more that the noble and learned Viscount could have produced—we heard about the Prime Minister's patronage and the great constitutional change; and I agree with him on that point. He talked about the process of reasoning. On the last occasion I said
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that I thought he needed a further tutorial; that he failed to pass his examinations; and I am sorry to say that he does not seem to have done very much in the meanwhile. If only he had read the White Paper properly it would have helped—
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: My Lords, if I may intervene for a moment, may I say that I am asking for information? I have read the White Paper more than once—it may be because of the way in which it is written—but this Question is directed to obtaining that tuition for which I am asking the noble Lord.
LORD SHACKLETON: My Lords, I am very willing to provide it. It will not be a tutorial; I am afraid it will be a lecture, but I see a number of noble Lords here ready to listen. I must ask the noble Viscount, when he has had my lecture, to again read the White Paper, because there he will find some of the reasoning, and I think he might even understand some of the limitations that apply to amateur "statisticating". I acclaim the noble Viscount's skill in playing round in an area that could give rise to difficulties, but he may be aware that in another place in the consideration of the Parliament (No. 2) Bill there has been a debate which is somewhat germane to the noble Viscount's Question. Indeed, I am almost inclined to think that there is some connection between the two.
I am sure that the House, and especially the noble Lord, Lord Conesford, would agree with me that in these circumstances it would not be in accordance with our usual practice to enter deeply into a matter which is at present under consideration in another place, and that we should await the time when the Bill comes to this House, when we shall be required, and indeed shall wish, to give it our full attention. Some while ago we devoted three days of debate to the White Paper and we shall have a further opportunity.
The noble Viscount referred to the concern in another place that a certain document should be made available to them. It would appear that some people may have thought that this would be the explanation of everything. That is an illusion which many of us are apt to fall into until we become more experienced. I

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would remind the House of the practice, which is set out in Erskine May, on page 451 of the 17th Edition:
"The rule that allusions to debate in the other House of the current session are out of order prevents fruitless arguments between members of two distinct bodies who are unable to reply to each other, and guards against recrimination and offensive language in the absence of the party assailed: but it is mainly founded upon the understanding that the debates of the Upper House are not known, and that the House can take no notice of them."
Erskine May goes on to say:
"The daily publication of debates in Parliament offers a strong temptation to disregard this rule."
Even the noble and learned and strong-minded Viscount has succumbed to this temptation.
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: My Lords, the noble Lord may think that, but I do not think that he is right in thinking it at all. I did not refer to any discussion in the debate; I referred to a document. The noble Lord referred to that document in moving for the return that was ordered. I did not go beyond that. The noble Lord is trying to deal with a serious matter in a most facetious fashion.
LORD SHACKLETON: My Lords, it is clear that the noble Viscount did not need much tempting. He entered into sin willingly and quickly. The whole question has arisen out of demands in another place, but it raises difficulties in this House, and the question really is how far I should go at this stage into matters which are constantly before another place. I am in a difficulty in this regard and I only hope that the noble Viscount will appreciate that in attempting to give an answer I shall give as much as it is possible for me to give at this stage.
I will deal precisely with the noble Viscount's arguments. There is one misconception which I think must be corrected. I am not sure whether the noble Viscount entirely suffers from this misconception, because I am sure he has studied the Paper fairly closely. The terms of the White Paper do not imply, as the Question does, that in the Government's view 230 would always be the right number of voting Peers in a reformed House, for all the reasons which the noble Viscount himself gave—because of the inevitable uncertainties of projecting past practice into the future.
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That is not what the White Paper says. What we said was that, in the first instance, a reasonable size would be between 200 and 250, excluding Law Lords and Bishops. The White Paper recognises that it is not possible to fix for all time a figure which would be, as the noble Viscount puts it, "the right number". What the Government propose is that the voting House should consist initially of some 230 Peers, not counting Bishops and Law Lords, and that thereafter a larger number might be found necessary as the work of the House developed and expanded in the future. This subject was discussed exhaustively in the Inter-Party Conference, and the conclusion was that 230 was (I use my words carefully) a viable initial figure.
The Government's aim has been to create a House of sufficient size to fulfil the duties which are to be placed upon it or which it chooses to undertake both as a debating Chamber of distinction and authority, which I believe your Lordships' House to be, one which will play a developing part in the Parliamentary task of scrutinising the activities of the Executive—this has always been an important part of the work of a reformed House and is clearly crucial in regard to the numbers—and also as a legislative Chamber which, while not rivalling the Commons, will complement it and relieve it of as much work as is practicable, both in initiating legislation and in scrutinising that which has been passed by the Commons. I think we can fairly say that we do a pretty good job in this House, and I would say to the noble Viscount that I am conscious of how much he contributes to this. An example has been the Foreign Compensation Bill. I did not follow the ins and outs of the Bill and I am not in a position to judge, but I am sure that he must feel that he achieved quite a lot.
In relation to the qualification period, the proposed initial number takes into account the frequency with which noble Lords attend this House and also the figures for average daily attendance in the last five Sessions. The noble Viscount has drawn our attention to the fact that the return of attendance over the last five Sessions is available, and from if your Lordships will see that there has been an increase from 151 in 1963–64 to

1483
194 in 1964–65, to 191 in the following year, to 199 in the next and finally to 225 in the Session of 1967–68. A further factor, of which the House will be aware and which is referred to in paragraph 46 of the White Paper, is that at the outset the voting House will consist principally of those existing created Peers who will find themselves able to attend regularly. As shown in the table on page 5 of the White Paper, there were 153 of these in the last Session up to the 1st August. I need to point this out because the White Paper was written when figures did not give the complete Session—in fact, as I say, they went up to August; but there is no significant difference.
It will be necessary—and this has been made quite clear—for additional Life Peers to be created to give the working or voting House the appropriate size and balance between the political Parties, and the vast majority of these new Life Peers would be drawn from existing Peers by succession, who of course include many of the most active and experienced Members of your Lordships' House. The Government, however, have been anxious that the number of initial creations should be no larger than the work to be performed and the Party balance requires. I rather think that our desire in this matter to restrict the number initially is consistent with what I believe to be the views of the Party opposite. It is always possible to create new Peers, but there is no easy way of un-creating Peers. And one of the major parts of our programme and our proposals is that once a Peer is created, subject to a retiring age, his rights are there for life.
On the other hand, the Party breakdown of created Peers, given in the table on page 5 of the White Paper, makes it clear that a considerable number of conversions is inevitable if we are to have a voting House with the proposed balance between the Parties, referred to in paragraph 48 of the White Paper. To take the most obvious example, the Party of the noble Viscount has only 38 created Peers who attended over one-third of the sittings of the last Session. The White Paper also states, in column 46, that much would depend on the number of non-voting Peers who attended debates in the House or served on Com-
1484
mittees, and on the frequency with which they did so; and this we cannot possibly estimate in advance. But the Government consider that, provided that speaking Peers, non-voting Peers, are prepared to attend in reasonable numbers, and to serve on Committees when appropriate, the initial figure—and I stress this again—of 230 would be enough for the business of the House, at least for the remainder of this Parliament.
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: The noble Lord will forgive me for interrupting, but he said that he stresses this again. All I am asking him—and I did quote that 230 was the initial figure—is to disclose the reasons which led to the conclusion that this was a viable figure.
LORD SHACKLETON: Perhaps the noble Viscount will allow me to go on. I do not think that I shall possibly be able to satisfy him, but we shall have further opportunities. The Government consider—and we cannot tell this—that 230 will be about the right number for the remainder of this Parliament. It is quite possible that this initial number of voting Peers may need to be increased. It may prove to be the wrong number, especially in a subsequent Parliament, if the work develops in the way contemplated, for example, in Appendix 2 of the White Paper, which is called, "Possible changes in functions and procedure".
I doubt very much whether I can hope to bring precision of the kind which the noble Viscount is seeking, and which the White Paper makes clear it is unable to provide. But we are looking into the future. We should all like to have a crystal ball, and perhaps the noble and learned Viscount would have a better one than I have. But this was a considered set of proposals from a number of very experienced people, and I have given some of the calculations that influenced our decision.
As regards the second part of the noble Viscount's Question, 52 Peers not in receipt of a Party Whip attended more than one-third of the Sittings during the 1967–68 Session, up to August 1; and this number is equally divided between Peers of first creation and Peers by succession. I admit that in saying this I am merely re-stating what is published on page 5 of the White Paper. Figures for the

1485
previous four Sessions can be provided only with the co-operation of the other political Parties, because if we define Cross-Benchers as those not in receipt of a Party Whip—which is the definition that we use in the White Paper—it is necessary, if we are to make the necessary breakdown, to have the complete list of those in receipt of a Party Whip for the last five years. The Government do not possess this information in the detail which publication would require. Nor, in my view, would it have any statistical certainty for what we are seeking to demonstrate.
One of the most striking features which emerged from our work on the proposed reform was the change in the work and attendance in the House during the last four Sessions. This again introduced another element of change. It is reflected in the Attendance Return to which I have already referred. The introduction of Life Peers, the Peerage Act 1963, the introduction of women into the House, the payment of expenses, the Leave of Absence scheme and the creations of Peers in the present Parliament have resulted in great changes, of which all of us are aware and which are reflected in the life and work of the House as we see it to-day.
The White Paper gives the most recent statistics, and it is on these that we should concentrate, since they provide the most accurate basis for any study of the work of the present House. In considering the size of the reformed House, I would warn noble Lords against simple extrapolation from patterns of attendance which exist at present, since these have been established in very different circumstances from those which will exist in the future. For the future, we shall have the Committee proposed in paragraph 71 of the White Paper to review the composition of the reformed House, and they will have, in their terms of reference, the particular duty of considering the size of the voting House against the actual performance of the House.
LORD GRIMSTON OF WESTBURY: My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, may I ask him to reply to one point put by my noble friend to which he has not referred; and that is whether the deliberations which took place in
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the inter-Party Committee, which were broken off, can be published, as they would be helpful? My noble friend raised that point and it has not been answered. There is another point, and if I am wrong in putting it here no doubt the noble Lord will tell me, but when we were having some exchanges about the publication of attendances in your Lordships' House my noble friend Lord Carrington raised the question of similar information being supplied about another place. I supported him in that. On that occasion the noble Lord, Lord Shackleton, said that he would have this matter looked into. I do not know whether this is the right moment to ask him whether he has done that. If not, perhaps he will tell me. But otherwise perhaps he can tell me how the matter stands.
THE EARL, OF KINNOULL: My Lords, I wonder whether, before the noble Lord finishes, he will also tell us, in view of what he has already said, his opinion on the question of discussing in this House the future of this House before the Bill comes here, if it comes here. Could he give an undertaking now to the House that the House will be given ample time to discuss the Bill during Committee stage; that we shall not be asked to sit right the way through August or be asked to sit all through nights a ad so on, but will be given ample time to discuss the matter; and that if necessary the Bill will be carried over to next Session?
9.10 p.m.
LORD CONESFORD: My Lords, I suppose that my affection for the noble Lord the Leader of the House would prompt me to be extremely brief in any event, but he did not really appeal to me as he might have done when he created the word "statisticating". If anything was calculated to lose the sympathy which I normally feel for him that invention would have done so. I intervene not for the purpose of saying that but to say that I entirely agree with him in what he said about Erskine May and what he based upon it. My only quarrel with him about that is that he used it as a method of rebuke to my noble and learned friend who had not offended in that way at all. He had not made any use whatsoever of the

1487
proceedings in another place to discuss this.
But what I would ask the noble Lord to bear in mind is this. He says that we could not be given further information at this stage. If that is so, I think we shall clearly have to have the information at some other stage. But whether he will like that any better, I very much doubt. The information already given in this White Paper was given to meet a request from another place. I entirely agreed with the reasoning that, as the other place was apparently asking for information that was available, as a matter of courtesy and good manners we should certainly give it. But, my Lords, it was given in order to oblige another place. Is there any real reason why information should not be given to oblige this House? There is nothing absurd in that demand.
If it is said that anything we want to know cannot be given until the House of Commons has finished with its deliberations on the present Bill, I must warn the noble Lord that that may very much delay proceedings in this House. If we have to wait until the introduction of the Bill in this House before we can get information which some of us may think essential it may not have quite the effect that the Leader of the House either desires or expects.
LORD SHACKLETON: My Lords, I really am put in a very considerable difficulty. If one of my noble friends had been speaking or was answering this Question, I really should have had to suggest that this was turning into a most irregular debate.
SEVERAL NOBLE LORDS: Hear, hear!
LORD SHACKLETON: I am saying this quite seriously, my Lords. I will still do my best since we have become so irregular, but it is in my experience very unusual for a debate to continue on an Unstarred Question after the Government spokesman has spoken. It can be done, but it is very unusual.
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: It depends on the answer.
LORD GRIMSTON OF WESTBURY: My Lords, I was careful to say "before the noble Lord sits down".
LORD SHACKLETON: My Lords, I fully accept that the noble Lord employed an acceptable and correct device. The debate is already going enormously wide in that we are having threats from noble Lords. It is not unknown for answers to be given—
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: My Lords, would the noble Lord give way? If we are being very pedantic at this late hour, is the noble Lord speaking with the leave of the House?
LORD SHACKLETON: My Lords, I entirely agree—the noble and learned Viscount is perfectly correct. Indeed I wrote down the words, "leave of the House" before I rose. If the House will give me leave I will reply.
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: Please.
LORD SHACKLETON: My Lords, this is the sort of muddle we get into on these occasions. I have rarely known a Government spokesman to speak twice in reply to an Unstarred Question, and I doubt very much whether anything I can say will satisfy the evident intentions of certain noble Lords in this matter. The noble Lord, Lord Conesford, was correct—and the noble and learned Viscount, as I expected, was extremely circumspect—but the fact is that at this moment we are discussing something which is becoming rather like the mirror image of a debate in another place at a time when legislation is before the other House, and I say quite seriously that if we go along this path we shall find ourselves in difficulties. This is not in any way to question the rights of noble Lords to question the Government on any matter coming before the House, and I look forward to the sort of questions we shall have at the time when the Bill arrives here. But I really do not think that I can go any further, beyond saying that as I used the word "statisticating" I thought happily we should have a response from the noble Lord, Lord Conesford.

BOURNEMOUTH CORPORATION BILL
Reported, without amendment.
BARCLAYS BANK BILL
Brought from the Commons; read 1a, and referred to the Examiners.