LORDS AMENDMENT (Hansard, 28 May 1970)

§ LORD BROWN

My Lords, I beg to move that this House doth not insist on Amendment No. 8 to which the Commons have disagreed. Your Lordships will have read the debate in another place, and will have noted that there is now considerable agreement that a statutory provision on these lines is unnecessary. When this Amendment was before your Lordships' Committee I stressed that the Government were not arguing against the substance of the Amendment. I agree that in general a seaman should not expect to receive wages if he unlawfully refuses or neglects to work, or is 1208 absent without leave, and so on. Whether or not a seaman who acted in the manner envisaged here would be entitled to his wages for the period concerned would depend upon the terms of his contract of employment. He would certainly be in breach of contract, and even if the contract were silent on the point a court might well hold that he was not entitled to his wages for the period in which he unlawfully refused to work, or for which he was unlawfully absent. There is no need to have any provision to this effect in the Bill: it is unnecessary. However, if there were really felt to be a need to have written terms to this effect inserted in the contract, or to circumscribe or spell out matters of detail, then these, I submit, are contractual matters for negotiation and agreement, and there is no overriding reason of public policy why we should seek to spell them out here.

I appreciate that the Pearson Report recommended the inclusion of these contractual terms—which was the main reason why the noble Lord, Lord Sand-ford, moved the Amendment in Committee—but the Report did make the point that they could become a standard clause in articles of agreement". In this Bill we look forward to the future, to the day when more and more matters will be dealt with by agreement, and to company agreements superseding statutory crew agreements. It would in the Government's view be a retrograde step to write back into the Bill contractual provisions such as these modified re-enactments of the substance of Sections 159 and 160 of the 1894 Act, especially when it is unnecessary to do so.

It was pointed out in another place by the Opposition that there is no certainty that the Board of Trade will approve crew agreements containing such provisions, and I should like here to repeat the assurance given in another place by my right honourable friend, the Minister of State for the Board of Trade, that the Board of Trade would approve a reasonable provision of this character. For these reasons, I ask your Lordships to accept my Motion. I beg to move that this House doth not insist on Amendment No. 8 to which the Commons have disagreed.

§ LORD SANDFORD

My Lords, the House will be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Brown, for that explanation, and particularly for his assurance, which goes quite some way to meet our point. I think the House will be left judging for itself the real reason why another place considers this Amendment unnecessary. Perhaps I might just remind the House that in fact, weighing all the considerations which the noble Lord has just put forward—and a good deal more than that in the six, seven or eight years during which this Bill has been under preparation—the Government came firmly to the conclusion that the Amendment which is now being disagreed to should in fact form part of the Bill. They put it in their own Bill; they supported it at Second Reading; they supported it at Committee stage, and I do not think many people will forget what happened at the Report stage. But, having said that by way of recollection, I would not seek to go any further on this particular Amendment.