Lords Sitting of 20 April 1971

Preamble
Reassembling after the Easter Recess the House met at half past two of the clock: The LORD CHANCELLOR on the Woolsack.
Prayers—Read by the Lord Bishop of Newcastle.
The Marquess of Dufferin and Ava—Took the Oath.

RECONNAISSANCE SATELLITE AND DEFENCE
LORD KENNET: 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 propose the establishment. under appropriate international auspices, of a reconnaissance satellite agency to make available to interested Governments information about the location of offensive and defensive forces in the world.]
EARL FERRERS: My Lords, I do not believe that this would be a practicable proposition at the present time.
LORD KENNET: My Lords, are the Government aware that this proposal was made by President Nixon during the course of his campaign for the Presidency late in 1969? Will the Government bear in mind that if it was a good idea then, it probably still is now?
EARL FERRERS: My Lords, the Government will certainly bear that in mind, but I can only repeat that at the moment they do not believe that this is a practicable proposition
LORD KENNET: My Lords, if I may press the noble Earl a little further, does he mean practicable from the mechanical point of view or from the political point of view?
EARL FERRERS: My Lords, from the political point of view: for the simple
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reason that the types of thing which would be likely to be (for want of a better word) photographed by such an agency would be particularly sensitive to the various countries concerned, and it would be unlikely that those countries would agree to such an arrangement as the noble Lord has suggested.
LORD KENNET: My Lords, is the noble Earl unaware that such things are at present photographed by American satellites without any agreement at all?
EARL FERRERS: My Lords, what the noble Lord has suggested is that there should be a satellite agency which should make such information available to interested Governments. It is the view of Her Majesty's Government that this is unlikely to be generally acceptable.

FIREARMS REGULATIONS REVIEW
2.38 p.m.
BARONESS WOOTTON OF ABINGER: 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 what progress has been made in the review of regulations relating to shotguns and other firearms mentioned in reply to a Question on January 12, 1971.]
THE MINISTER OF STATE, HOME OFFICE (LORD WINDLESHAM): My Lords, I can say that a good beginning has been made; but, as your Lordships will appreciate—and none better than the noble Baroness, who has made a distinguished contribution to so wide a range of such inquiries—these are not things to be done hastily, and it is too early to say when the review is likely to be completed.
BARONESS WOOTTON OF ABINGER: My Lords, while thanking the noble Lord for that reply, may I first ask him whether, because of the use of shot-guns in so many recent serious crimes, he thinks this inquiry ought to be expedited with a view to more stringent control of these and other firearms? Secondly, pending the result of the inquiry, will the noble Lord remind chief officers of

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police of their power to attach conditions of safe-keeping to firearms certificates and advise them that these conditions should be used in every single instance?
LORD WINDLESHAM: My Lords, the inquiry was set up only in December of last year. It is a thorough inquiry; this is a large subject and all firearms are included. A number of papers have already been prepared and presented, and more are in the course of preparation. On the second point, I can certainly draw the comment of the noble Baroness to the attention of Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Constabulary, as I did on the last occasion when she raised this subject in your Lordships' House.
LORD SHEPHERD: My Lords, can the noble Lord give us any idea as to when he would expect this review to be completed?
LORD WINDLESHAM: My Lords, Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Constabulary and his colleagues who form the Working Party have received a number of written representations. They have yet to decide what evidence should be invited, and when, but consultation with outside bodies is likely to take place later in the year. It would be unrealistic to expect a report before the end of the year.
BARONESS WOOTTON OF ABINGER: My Lords, while much appreciating the Minister's answer to my second supplementary question, may I ask him whether he is satisfied with the pace of these inquiries, in view of the fact that people are being shot while the decision on part of the investigation, as to what evidence ought to be obtained, is pending?
LORD WINDLESHAM: My Lords, the inquiry is being treated urgently. As I said, this is a complicated branch of the law. There are already controls; these are being enforced by chief officers of police. What now has to be considered is whether any further change should be made in the law. This is what is receiving study.
LORD HAWKE: My Lords, do Her Majesty's Government think that any regulations and control over firearms are
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likely to make any difference to the use of these firearms by the criminal classes?
LORD WINDLESHAM: My Lords, a study is being made of the kinds of firearms used in the commission of crime. A preliminary analysis suggests that the number of weapons used in indictable crime in 1969 which were held lawfully on a firearms or shot-gun certificate was significant, although a small proportion of the total.

MR. ILLTYD HARRINGTON
VISCOUNT ST. DAVIDS: 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 why Mr. Illtyd Harrington is not being reappointed to the British Waterways Board, and the chairmanship of the Inland Waterways Amenity Advisory Committee, in spite of his admitted achievements in both posts and the advice of his own committee, which is being reappointed.]
LORD MOWBRAY AND STOURTON: My Lords, it would not be to anyone's advantage for Ministers to make a practice of explaining matters of this sort.
VISCOUNT ST. DAVIDS: My Lords, while expressing some amazement at that Answer, may I ask whether the noble Lord appreciates that this particular action has filled the waterways world with dismay, as it appears that this gentleman has been sacked for being too successful? While the Government have appointed an excellent successor, will they please understand that if they do this sort of thing often they will get no co-operation from anybody on the waterways.
LORD MOWBRAY AND STOURTON: My right honourable friend has no intention of going against anyone's feelings; he is acting in the best interests of everyone.
LORD SHACKLETON: My Lords, may I ask the noble Lord whether he is aware that, even though he may not think it desirable to give a reason why this reappointment was not made, this did

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not inhibit his noble Leader in explaining why Professor Clegg was not reappointed. What is the Government's policy in this matter?
LORD MOWBRAY AND STOURTON: My Lords, in this particular matter we are only following the practice which the noble Lord's Government followed.
LORD SLATER: My Lords, in view of the nature of the noble Lord's reply to the supplementary questions that have been asked, may I ask how a third body, the Press, can pass on information to The general public as to the reason for the dismissal of these people—or the reason for their non-reappointment to these particular Boards? How does this come about? What means do the Government use in passing on this information? They must pass the information on to someone, otherwise the Press could not get it.
LORD MOWBRAY AND STOURTON: My Lords, I believe that in this case the information was passed to the Press by the gentleman himself.

REGENT'S CANAL WATER-BUS SERVICE
2.45 p.m.
VISCOUNT ST. DAVIDS: 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 whether it is agreeable to their or anybody else's political philosophy to allow the British Waterways Board to start a service of water-buses between Paddington and Camden Town on the Regent's Canal, which will be run, like their zoo water-buses, at a loss, in direct competition with profit-making private enterprise firms who are their own tenants and whom they can charge operating charges of any size they see fit.]
LORD MOWBRAY AND STOURTON: My Lords, the operation of this service is within the Board's statutory powers. They
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expect to run it, like their zoo water-bus service, at a profit.
VISCOUNT ST. DAVIDS: My Lords, again expressing some amazement at that Answer, may I ask whether the noble Lord is aware that the expectation of running zoo buses at a profit has never come to fruition? Does he really believe that anybody in this House—particularly his noble friends behind him—will be happy at what is being done? This is contrary to the provisions of the first nationalisation Act where such an action would have been impossible.
LORD MOWBRAY AND STOURTON: My Lords, I am sorry to keep amazing the noble Lord. The fact of the matter is that since 1967 the service has been running at a profit. In 1970 there was a profit of £2,500.
VISCOUNT ST. DAVIDS: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that the Government leave out of their accounts a large number of items which private enterprise normally enters into its accounts, such as depreciation, licences and so on?
LORD MOWBRAY AND STOURTON: My Lords, I really do not know how the noble Lord can know all this if he did not know whether the service was making a profit. I am advised that the profit was worked out after the deduction of central charges, interest, licensing and mooring charges.
VISCOUNT ST. DAVIDS: My Lords. will the noble Lord please try to produce somewhat better answers on waterways subjects in view of the fact that "wind on the heath" is now a nautical expression?
LORD CONESFORD: My Lords, are the Government aware that in the previous Question the noble Viscount complained that the British Waterways Board had been filled with dismay, and that his present Question is designed to fill them with dismay? What does he want?
LORD MOWBRAY AND STOURTON: My Lords, that is indeed a very wide question.

LAW REFORM (MISCELLANEOUS PROVISIONS) BILL
2.47 p.m.
LORD STOW HILL: My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be read a second time. It is a Private Member's Bill which comes from another place, where it was agreed to without a Division after very thorough discussion. It deals with the law relating to the recovery of damages for personal injuries; personal injuries in that context being very widely defined so as to include the contracting of an illness—particularly an industrial illness —or any impairment of physical or mental faculties as the result of somebody else's neglect or breach of duty.
It is divided into two main parts. The first part deals with the existing time limits within which actions for recovery of damages must be commenced. The existing law is somewhat complex, and I do not think I need trouble your Lordships to examine it in any detail for the purpose of the Second Reading of this Bill, but it would be broadly accurate to say that the law until 1963 was that a plaintiff who claims damages for personal injuries which he says he has sustained owing to the neglect, whether the negligent driving or the breach of duty, of some other person, such as a defendant motorist or his former employers, had to bring his action within the period of three years after the circumstances occurred which gave rise to what the law calls his "cause of action"—the grounds of his action. That was the law until 1963, and the Limitation Act of 1963, which this Bill would amend, introduced a change into the law in the following circumstances. The provisions with which this Bill deals relate to actions in general, for personal injuries, but they have special relevance in this particular context to actions brought by persons employed in various industries who had contracted diseases through exposure to certain processes in those industries—in particular, miners who may have contracted pneumoconiosis.
Medical science has recently traced the connection between cancer of the bladder and exposure in industrial processes to certain particular chemical products. Frequently it occurs that the unfortunate person who has contracted such a disease may net know for years that he has the
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condition from which he suffers; and even later may find out how serious it is and indeed that it may be fatal in its implications. He may have been for years wholly unaware of circumstances which gave him the right to claim damages because he has contracted that injury. He may have left the employment years before, and witnesses as to the circumstances in which he was called upon to work may long since have disappeared or become untraceable. It may be very difficult for him, when at long last he realises how serious his condition is, to mount an action, or for his trade union advisers and the solicitors they instruct to mount an action on his behalf, claiming damages for him.
It was very largely to deal with a situation of that kind that the 1963 Act, while it retained in general the three years' limit within which actions must be brought, provided nevertheless that in the case of the plaintiff who could show that he was unaware of the circumstances which gave rise to the cause of action which he wished to present, would have an extra year: even though the three years' limit might have run out, nevertheless he could bring his action within one year after discovering the relevant circumstances on which he could base his cause of action. That was the case with regard to a living plaintiff. Unhappily, not infrequently the unfortunate sufferer from the disease succumbed to the disease. The question then arose of an action by his personal representatives or the dependants in his family in respect of the breach of duty which might have brought about the death of the breadwinner of the family.
The 1963 Act left the dependants in a still more difficult position. Supposing his widow desired to sue; she was advised that there might be grounds to establish a cause of action on her behalf. The law took no account of the fact that she herself might be wholly ignorant of the circumstances which gave rise to that cause of action. If through her advisers she wished to submit to the court that her deceased husband knew nothing of the circumstances which led to his illness, nevertheless she would not be allowed to bring her action after the expiry of one year from the date of his death. Your Lordships can easily picture the situation of an unfortunate widow who in any

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event would know much less about the circumstances of his employment than her late husband did and who is confronted with the prospect of having to assemble the circumstances, with the assistance of her advisers, in order to put forward a claim in respect of her husband's death.
It is to cater for a situation of this kind that the changes in law which are proposed in the first Part of this Bill are designed. Those changes are these. In the first place, the one year extra which is given to the living plaintiff is extended to three years. In the second place, the deceased's dependants are also by this Bill, if your Lordships approve it, given the right to say that they themselves were unaware of the circumstances which gave rise to the cause of death. The Bill says that in their case equally, if they can show that they bring their action within three years after they became aware of those circumstances, their action will be competent. The one year which was the overall limit after the death of the deceased proposed by the 1963 Act, is also extended to three years. Those are the changes which the first Part of the Bill introduces.
The Bill is based upon and in accord with advice in that behalf which was given both by the English Law Commission and the Scottish Law Commission. The Bill has application both to England and Wales and to Scotland. The Law Commissions, before they gave their very valuable advice, took counsel with a large number of representative bodies in this context. They took counsel with the Trades Union Congress, the National Union of Mineworkers, the Transport and General Workers' Union, the National. Coal Board, Lloyd's Underwriters, the British Insurance Association and the Law Society. It is in consequence of the advice which they tendered that the Bill is now put forward for your Lordships' consideration. That is the first Part of the Bill. Very little question was raised with regard to those provisions in another place.
Now I come to the second Part of the Bill. It cleats with a matter which has attracted a good deal more attention. Again, it relates to the law regarding claims for damages for personal injuries. It deals with, and seeks to change, what
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in my submission to your Lordships is a really repulsive feature of the existing law. Learned judges have to enforce it; counsel have to apply it; solicitors have to apply it; the claims managers of insurance companies have to apply it. It is their duty to do so and they cannot help themselves, and nobody can possibly criticise any of them for discharging their duty conscientiously in the custody of the money which is in their charge.
The matter arises in this way. A widow has lost her husband. Under what is called the Fatal Accidents Act 1846 she is given, as a dependant, the right to claim on her own behalf and on behalf of other dependants of the deceased husband whom she has lost, damages proportionate to the loss occasioned to her and to them as the result of being no longer in receipt of the support which the deceased husband gave. In practical terms that means this. She may have lost her husband, say in a motor accident caused, or thought to have been caused, by somebody else's negligent driving. It may, again, be through breach of duty in employment. It may be through one of the hundred and one negligent, thoughtless acts which unfortunately bring about deaths. The unfortunate widow has in the first place to face this situation. She has to bring her claim for damages. It would be guile wrong to think of this widow as somebody asking for some pecuniary "windfall"—it is nothing of the sort. She may have children to support, elderly parents to help. If she has given many years of her life to her family, she probably will not be in such a good position to earn her living as she would have been had she remained single. Therefore, she has, in duty to herself and her family and those who are dependent upon her, to approach the court to ask for damages if she is advised that she has a claim.
That in the first place means that all the gruesome circumstances must be resurrected which describe how her late husband came by his death. She may have been a passenger with him in a motor car when an accident occurred owing to somebody else's negligent driving. She may have been driving the motor car with her husband in it. All that, whether she likes it or not, has to

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be paraded in court. Supposing liability is disputed, as of course it very often is, and the circumstances have to be given in evidence and analysed. That is done in her presence—or she may go out of court if she wants to; but, at any rate, all those circumstances which, in her state of distress, she would like to forget have again to be brought to her recollection and analysed to see whether she can prove affirmatively that the death of her husband was due to somebody else's fault. That is bad enough, but it cannot be helped; she has to go through with it, and this Bill does not seek to alter that.
However, worse is to come, and this position the Bill does try to alter. The learned judge, if he comes to the conclusion that negligence or breach of duty is established, then has to address himself to the task of assessing damages. As I said, the damages are the pecuniary loss she and the dependants suffer. In assessing damages, the learned judge, as the law stands at present, must say to himself: "I, if I think this lady is likely to marry again, must reduce the damages which I otherwise would give her because her loss is not so serious." That may be good logic, but it is not attractive logic. At any rate, that is what the learned judge has to say to himself. Learned judges on many occasions have said how they dislike the task; how impossibly difficult in any case they think it is to discharge it with any thoroughness.
The learned judge may have an unfortunate lady before him in the witness box perhaps for 20 minutes, or in court during the hearing of the case. He has never set eyes on this lady before. How on earth he is to assess her inclinations, her feelings towards her late husband, the likelihood that she may wish to become again married, except by a hit-and-miss method, I do not know. Many learned judges have expressed the view that it is not a task to which they address themselves with any pleasure. However, the learned judge has to do it.
In doing so, he has in the first place to ask himself not only, "Is she likely to want to remarry?" but also "Is she young and attractive and likely to find a suitable mate?" My Lords, I do not know whether I am exaggerating, but that seems to me to have something of a whiff of a healthy
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young heifer being paraded round the cattle ring in a cattle auction in order that her qualities may be assessed from the point of view of a prospective purchaser. Perhaps that is overpainting the picture, but not, I think, to any great extent. In my view, the whole process is perfectly repulsive.
BARONESS SUMMERSKILL: Hear, hear!
LORD STOW HILL: My Lords, with great respect, the matter does not stop there; it gets worse still, because those who are preparing the case on behalf of the defendant—again in discharge of their duty, and I do not complain of that —have to prepare for the administering of those questions in cross-examination which may seem to elicit the fact that the widow is likely to marry again. The judge sees her in the witness box and may think to himself "Well, she is an attractive young person. I do not know what her disposition is like, but I would assume she is of an agreeable and accommodating disposition. I do not know whether she really wants to marry or not, but I must hear questions put to her and see what she replies". Therefore the insurance companies (I do not say always, but on occasions) instruct inquiry agents to keep a watch on the unfortunate lady to see whether she, by her mode of life, gives any indication that she may wish to marry again. They solemnly instruct inquiry agents to shadow her and then, when the inquiry agent's report is to hand, it is put in the hands of counsel, whose duty it is to found questions upon that inquiry agent's report, designed to show that she is not, perhaps, of a flighty disposition but the sort of person who is not really very distressed, however much she may pretend it, at the death of her husband and will be only too glad to countenance the attentions of any suitable aspirer to her hand who may present himself to her in the near future.
My Lords, it is contrary to your Lordships' custom. I know, to quote from what was said in the other place, but Mr. Arthur Probert introduced this Bill on Second Reading in another place in what I hope I may say was an admirable speech, well couched and most discreetly phrased. He quoted—and I should like to quote, as I think it would be in accord with your Lordships' practice—from a

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letter which was written by a father-in-law of just such a young widow. The letter reads as follows:
My daughter-in-law, who was left with two children, one 13 months old when my son was killed and another born seven months after his death, has been greatly distressed by inquiry agents employed by the insurance company concerned in the claim for damages. They have watched the house for long periods and have questioned the neighbours when she has gone out about her mode of life. Has she a job? Has she lodgers? Has she men friends? Is she living with anyone? And questions of the same type. My daughter-in-law's reaction was, 'People will think I am involved in some filthy divorce case'."
I would respectfully present the view to your Lordships that if that is what the law says one should do, it is high time the law was changed. That particularly repulsive feature should be abolished.
In order that your Lordships may not think this is too fanciful, I would remind you that there was a case called Goodburn v.Cotton & Co., Ltd. decided in 1968, and in the report of the case some of the questions that were actually, and quite properly asked by counsel are set out. He was only doing his duty in putting these questions. They are set out in the report, and these are they. The lady in question was a widow of 25 and she was in the witness box 14 months after her husband had been killed in a road accident.
"(Q.) Are you contemplating getting married again? (A.) No. (Q.) Have you been out with any men since your husband died? (A.) With relatives. (Q.) Whom have you been with? (A.) My brother and his girl friend. (Q.) Have you been out with anyone who is not a relative? (A.) No, they were all relatives."—and then she added
"Just one. (Q.) Do you think of marrying him? (A.) No. (Q.) How many times have you been out with him? (A.) Three times, to the clog track."
My Lords, that was a young woman of 25 who lost her husband in a road accident 14 months before, and those are the questions put to her, in the witness box, in public, before a whole court full of people she does not know, complete strangers to her; and, despite her feelings, she has to stand up to answer questions of that sort. I do not want to be drawn into superlatives; therefore I will refrain from saying anything more on that subject. But I ask your Lordships to say that this practice must stop.
If your Lordships will now be so kind as to look at the Bill, you will see that
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Clause 4 provides—and these are the relevant words—
"there shall not be taken into account the remarriage of the widow or her prospects of remarriage."
Your Lordships will notice that not only are the prospects to be left out of account, if your Lordships approve these words, but also the actual remarriage (if it has taken place) of the widow. Some of your Lordships may say, "Yes, but what about the case of the young woman who waltzes into court on the arm of a millionaire whom she has married before the hearing takes place?''. I do not know how often that happens; I suppose sometimes it does happen that a widow may have remarried before the hearing takes place. In another place various alternatives to the solution proposed in the Bill were considered but they were all rejected and this provision was adopted. I ask your Lordships to say that the Bill is right and that we should leave out of account not merely the prospects of remarriage but remarriage itself.
My Lords, if you are going to say, "We will leave out the prospects of remarriage, but if we find that the lady has actually remarried then we must scale down the damages because she may have remarried somebody who can replace the support that she will have lost from her first husband", then one gets into a most impossible situation, which perhaps I may demonstrate in this way. Take two widows, each appearing in adjacent courts: one is engaged; one has just been married. The one who is engaged says, perfectly frankly, to the court, "I propose to get married the day after this hearing is finished". Her damages are not scaled down. In the case of the one who has been indiscreet enough to marry the day before the hearing takes place the damages are scaled down. My Lords, that is the best way to bring the law into disrepute. It may be that one is being illogical in saying so, but if so it would not be the first time that good logic has made bad law. I have heard it said that logic sits on the human intellect like an Alp, and this may be one of those cases.
My point goes further than that, because the law has already accepted such illogicality in a big way, if I may use that expression in this context. There may be a case in which a widow's husband was insured and on his death a

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large sum was payable by an insurance company. It could surely be argued with equal force that if as a result of her husband's death she becomes possessed of a large sum payable by the insurance company, she may be richer than she ever was, or would have been, had her husband lived. But right back in 1908 Parliament changed the law and enacted specifically that insurance monies were to be left out of account. Equally, an Act of 1959 extended the principle concerning insurance monies to pension rights and other benefits of that sort. That surely is common sense; and if it is common sense to say that you must leave those things out of account it is not really stretching matters very far to say that we should also leave actual marriage out of account when the consequence of taking it into account is that the law would be made so ridiculously topsy-turvy as I am trying to describe.
My Lords, those are the purposes of this Bill. I hope your Lordships will feel that they commend themselves as being good sense; and therefore I ask your Lordships to give the Bill a Second Reading. It can be examined further in Committee (and some parts of it are complex), but at this stage your Lordships are considering the general principles, and I commend the Bill to the House for Second Reading. I beg to move.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 2a.—(Lord Stow Hill.)
3.10 p.m.
LORD GARDINER: My Lords, the House will be grateful to my noble friend Lord Stow Hill for the clarity with which he has explained this little Bill to us. Although it is a little Bill, it is not, I think, an unimportant one. It is, of course, completely non-Party political; it would be my hope that the whole House would support it. Indeed, as to the first Part, on the statutory limitations, which is a much needed reform put forward by both Law Commissions, I cannot imagine that there will be any opposition.
As to Part II, it seems to me that there are really four things to be said. First, there is no doubt at all that the existing law is deeply offensive to women. Nearly five years ago we in this House considered
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the first annual Report of the new Law Commission. In the course of the debate on November 16, 1966, the noble Baroness, Lady Emmet of Amberley said, at column 1323:
"I should like to say a word about the heading in the Report referring to archaic and obsolescent procedures. I hope that this Commission will have a look at the very archaic business of judging the marriagability of a widow. It is very derogatory to a woman who is having damages assessed for the judge to assess what he thinks is her marriage value. It dates back to the old slave market attitude, and I am sure that that is something which should be abolished."
No one, I think, can doubt the strength of feeling about this matter which has existed for a long time in all the women's organisations, in some of which, as I know, some of my noble friends, like Lady Phillips and Lady Summerskill, have done so much.
It must not be thought, however, that this is a view taken only by women. I appointed a Committee on personal injury litigation of which Lord Justice Winn was chairman. I do not think this point was within their terms of reference, and possibly they had that thought themselves; but the reason why they referred to it in their Report was because of the volume and vehemence of the complaints they had. They said:
"We are well aware, and we have had passed on to us from your Lordship's office correspondence demonstrating that representative bodies concerned with the welfare of women are gravely dissatisfied with the present practice (which is, as a matter of law, obligatory for judges charged with the task of assessing damages for widows suing under the Fatal Accidents Acts) of forming a judgment as to whether there is a probability that the individual widow will remarry and, if there appears to be such a probability, of forecasting when this may happen. This topic has been raised in Parliament and in many Press articles.
"We are unanimous in expressing the definite view that the law should be so changed as to obviate the continuance of the present practice."
This was an all-male Committee, all lawyers very familiar with these actions in the courts.
Then, as I know, in various constituencies a good deal was made in the General Election of the publication from the Conservative political centre called Fair Deal for the Fair Sex, which said that the present practice
"undeniably involves an affront to the dignity of womanhood at a peculiarly inappropriate

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time in a widow's lift. The defence of the present system rests upon the principle that if a widow is being compensated for the economic loss flowing from the death of her husband, that loss ought to be accurately calculated. Quite apart from the personal distress which this calculation may cause to a widow and her family, the flaw in this theory lies in the number of imponderables which need to be taken into account in estimating the chances of remarriage of a particular widow who is not immediately contempt: ting it. Which of us, with a lifetime knowledge of our friends and children, can predict with any confide-ice whether, when or whom any of them is likely to marry? Our deliberations have brought us to the conclusion that the present system is unjust and unacceptable and should be altered ".
Of course, it may, I suppose, be financially gratifying to a widow if she hears a judge say, "This woman is so ugly she is very unlikely to remarry, so I shall not deduct anything for that". I do not suggest he would put it in that way. One judge, I observe, said (as quoted in The Times):
"She would be fortunate indeed if she did marry, but being realistic one must assess the chances as low".
The situation is also difficult for lawyers. It may be that a solicitor would hardly be acting properly if he said to his client, "It is natural for a woman giving evidence in a crowded court to want to look her best; but you must realise that the better you look the less damages you get, and therefore I advise you to put on your oldest clothes and not use any make-up, and if you have false teeth really it would be better to leave them behind ". Bun I suggest that a solicitor may properly say, "You may put on your best clothes if you want to look your best, and we must not deceive the court in any way: but if you sometimes use make-up and sometimes do not, you may think it more sensible not to put it on on this occasion".
The judges themselves are in a difficulty. Two years ago in the case of Buckley v. Allan, which is reported in 1967 I All England Law Reports, at page 539, Mr. Justice Phillimore (as he then was) said this—I hope the House will forgive me; it is quite a long passage, but it shows the position from the judge's point of view:
"Secondly, it is said that I must take into account the prospects of the plaintiff's remarrying, and must make a suitable deduction on the basis that she would be supported by her new husband. Counsel for the defendants did not ask her any question on this subject, an
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example which was naturally followed by her counsel. Having, however, abstained from asking her anything about it—and I can well understand his not doing so—counsel for the defendants now says, and it is the conventional argument, that any woman with the sum she is likely to receive is likely to remarry. He suggested that she may not marry for perhaps seven years, but that she is likely to do so then because the children are older and largely off her hands. He says that she is an attractive woman.
In this state of affairs I am wondering what is the evidence on which I must act. Am I to ask her to put on a bathing dress, because the witness box is calculated to disguise the figure? Equally, I know nothing of her temperament I know nothing of her attitude to marriage. She may have some very good reason, perhaps a religious reason, for saying that she never will remarry. She has had no chance to express her views. Has her marriage been an entiely happy experience? I do not know. On the other hand, she may already be engaged to be married. On what do I assess the chances and fix the sum to be deducted from her compensation? After all, whatever men may like to think, women do not always want to remarry. There are quite a lot of rich widows who prefer to remain single, and I confess that I am not sorry to avoid this problem.
Is a judge fitted to assess the chance or chances, or wishes of a lady about whom he knows so little and whom he has only encountered for twenty minutes when she was in the witness box, especially when no-one has broached the topic with her? Judges should, I think, act on evidence rather than guesswork. It seems to me that this particular exercise is not only unattractive but also is not one for which judges are equipped. Am I to label the plaintiff to her face as attractive or unattractive? If I have the temerity to apply the label, am I likely to be right? Supposing I say she is unattractive, it may well be that she has a friend who disagrees and has looked below the surface and found a charming character.
The fact is that this exercise is a mistake, If there are statistics as to the likelihood of a widow remarrying based on her age and the amount of her compensation, just as there are statistics on the expectancy of life, they might provide a yardstick for deduction in the absence of evidence of some special factor in the individual case. In the absence of some such yardstick I question whether, having decided what she has lost by the death of the deceased, any judge is qualified to assess whether or when she is likely to remarry. Supposing she married a man who is only concerned to spend her money? to be treated as her new support in place of her former husband? I venture to suggest it is time judges were relieved of the need to enter into this particular guessing game. In this particular case I make no deduction for this lady's chances of remarrying."
The Court of Appeal subsequently said that a judge must take this into account

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so long as it is the law. That is obviously right; he must take it into account so long as it is the law. The difficulty seems to be that really judges do not know.
Have we not all said at one time or another, or heard somebody else say, "I cannot think what on earth he saw in her", or vice-versa, and none of us really knows whether somebody is going to remarry or not? People who never expected to marry again fall in love at the most extraordinary ages; one never can tell. The judge's guess is as likely to be wrong as to be right. I remember a very attractive young woman whom I would have expected would remarry, and the judge also took the view that within three or four years she was likely to remarry. This was some 20 or 25 years ago. She is still unmarried and has been working all the time, supporting the one child of the marriage. I do not know why she has not remarried. That is the third reason.
The question arises as to whether the way in which this Bill deals with this is right. As the learned Solicitor General said in the other place, "However you do it, it will produce an illogicality"—and he summarised the alternatives. I will explain in a moment why I venture to trouble the House on what may seem a Committee point. The first alternative is to take account of the fact of remarriage but not of the prospects of remarriage. As he pointed out, this would be absurd. It would mean that at the hearing the widow might say, "Could you sit a little longer in order to finish the case to-day because I am getting married to-morrow". The judge could not take that into account; if she had married the day before he would have had to take it into account. The second alternative is to provide that the court should take account of the fact of remarriage and of a definite and settled intention to remarry. That, as the learned Solicitor General pointed out, would, if anything, sharpen the actions of the hawks of the insurance companies rather than the opposite. He said. I think rightly, "That strikes me as getting the worst of several worlds".
The third alternative is to discard altogether subjective factors but have regard to the actuarial prospects of remarriage measured objectively by reference to the
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age and size of family of the widow. I was at one time myself attracted to this alternative until I made every inquiry I could and satisfied myself that there simply are not the statistics from which any actuary could calculate anything at all. Nobody has any idea what is in practice the prospects of a widow of 31 with one child remarrying or, if so, when. The statistics simply do not exist.
The next alternative was nut by the learned Solicitor General in this way. He said, "The possibility of how it can be defined would be to say to the judges in some way, 'You must continue as in the past to have regard to the fact of prospects of remarriage provided you do not undertake any assessment by reference to your response subjectively to the charm and beauty of the widow before you'." If we have to tell judges to continue to have regard to the facts of life but to disregard the beauty or otherwise of a particular plaintiff, it is difficult to see how a parliamentary draftsman, with all his skill, could formulate such a prohibition over judicial inquiry. It would still leave it open to the judges to say that they must take account of the fact that the widow who had received a substantial sum of damages had by that very fact increased her prospects of remarriage. That is another factor which is sometimes brought into account. I find it difficult to see how we could warn the judges against taking account of those factors and tell them to dehumanise themselves in the personal sense but to have regard to the broader facts of life.
The next alternative is to do what the committee which produced Fair Deal for the Fair Sex suggested, and was the form in which this Bill originally started. This was to provide that, in assessing the damages, no attention should be paid to anything which had not already happened at the time of the accident. But the other place, which took a lot of trouble over this clause, found that that would be most undesirable. It would mean, for example, that if the widow was so gravely injured in the accident herself as to make it very unlikely that she would remarry, that fact could not be taken into account. It was after a long discussion on all the possible alternatives that the other place, I think rightly, took the view that the form in which it is in the Bill, simply disregarding the prospects

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of marriage or remarriage altogether, was the only practical one.
My Lords, I apologise for having taken up your Lordships' time on this point. I have done so for this reason. Those who wish to see this Bill passed into law this Session would obviously be anxious that any unnecessary Amendment should not be put down, and I would with respect ask any noble Lord who is thinking of putting down an Amendment to appreciate that if the basis of the Bill, Part II, were to be changed so that there is a conflict between the two Houses at this point of the Session, it is most unlikely that the Bill would become law at all this Session. With those words, I commend the Bill to the House and hope that your Lordships will give it a Second Reading.
3.17 p.m.
LORD DIPLOCK: My Lords, I join with my noble and learned friend Lord Gardiner in welcoming at any rate Part I of this Bill, although I would venture to suggest that Part II requires a little further consideration. There are two arguments against the judge or jury—in those cases in Scotland where there is a jury—taking into consideration the prospects that a widow will remarry. One of them (and I appreciate the force of it) is the Iranian emotional one, that it is distressing that this kind of matter should be canvassed in public in the courts. May I say in passing that, while I appreciate the force of that argument, my experience when trying these cases over several years is that the kind of question which has been given as an example was never asked in a case tried before me. I did not know of any case, nor did it emerge in any case which I tried, that the kind of inquiries, the dogging, shadowing by insurance companies which was referred to in one specific case took place. If that invasion of privacy is to be stopped, I would venture to suggest that it covers a much wider range than this particular matter of a widow remarrying.
My Lords, the other argument is, I think, a powerful one—what I may call the rational argument—that is, that it is difficult to make an estimate. Judges in particular are not particularly qualified to make an estimate of what a widow's prospects of remarrying are, but in the course of assessing damages in personal injury cases—and that is far and away
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the most difficult task that a judge has to do—there are, as the noble and learned Lord pointed out, so many imponderables of which this is but one. I would venture to ask whether it is appropriate, in a Bill of this character, to make a piecemeal change in the law, and a change which runs contrary to the principles upon which damages are, and have for the last one hundred years and more, been assessed, in fatal accident cases.
As I say, it is difficult enough to assess damages in any personal injury case. The difficulty arises in applying the principle to the facts and the prospects for the future. Part II of the Bill adds to the difficulty by running counter to the principle upon which damages are assessed. Because the principle is not one of punishing the wrongdoer. Indeed, in this day and age, when the person sued is probably not the wrongdoer but his employer, and the persons who are punished are those who pay insurance premiums to the insurance company and not the individual assured, to punish the wrongdoer is outside the field of civil litigation, or it ought to be.
The principle here in fatal accident cases is that the widow and the dependants—I emphasise "the dependants"—should, so far as money can do it, be put in the same financial position as if the breadwinner, the deceased, had not been killed. Necessarily so far as the future is concerned, though not so far as the past is concerned—it is much less difficult so far as the past is concerned—that involves making an estimate of what the dependants would have received out of the earning.; of the deceased over his working life in the future and what they will receive in the changed circumstances as a result of his death; and the difference between the two is the dependency for which the principal, the widow, should be compensated.
Our system of law does not enable us to give damages in the form of an annuity of periodical payments which can take account of what has in fact happened. We have at present, even in fatal accident cases, to give damages in a lump sum, which one seeks to make a capital sum which will produce, over the years, the dependency calculated in the manner I have expressed. In making that estimate the prospects of remarriage in 90 per cent. of cases play little part.

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Expectation of life of the widow and of the deceased, apart from the accident; prospects of promotion if he had continued to live; the sort of wages which he might have had in the future, all play a much greater part in the assessment of damages. However, I venture to think that, particularly in fatal accident cases, there is a great deal to be said for altering the law and for allowing a periodical payment to be made which will take account of what has in fact happened.
I mentioned the dependants earlier because we have been concentrating on the widow here. The amount awarded covers all those who depended upon the deceased provided they are within the necessary degree of relationship, and I think particularly of infant children, children under the age of 16, or children of university age. In the ordinary way, one of the respects in which one considers the prospects of remarriage of a widow is in deciding how much of the compensation to apportion to the children. If the widow is unlikely to remarry while they are young, then the sensible way is to give the great bulk of the compensation to the widow, in that she can spend it best for their maintenance and for their advancement. But if she is about to be married—or, under this Bill, if she is in fact married—then one makes a considerably larger apportionment to the children in order to be sure that they will have money which can be spent upon them. Whether the Bill goes through or not, I venture to hope that judges will take that into consideration, at any rate in apportioning the compensation between the children and the parents. But if the law were altered more drastically to provide, in fatal accident cases, for an annual payment, then if the widow remarried it would be possible to alter the apportionment and to ensure that the infant children were protected in the way it was intended to protect them at the original hearing.
In the case of fatal accidents, where more than 99 per cent. of the cases arise either out of traffic accidents, where there is compulsory insurance—and I hope there will be compulsory insurance for passengers soon—or out of industrial accidents where, in practice, everyone is
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insured, the original difficulties about making awards in the form of periodical payments when the person paying the award is a private individual, disappear. Insurance companies have in the past, under workmen's compensation, made commercial arrangements and organised their business to make payments of this kind, and in my view it is worth while considering whether they could do that in fatal accident cases. But, the problem with which we are presented here is a much deeper and more fundamental problem than the mere question of whether the prospects of remarriage should be taken into consideration, or whether they alone—I will not deal with the 1959 Act to which my noble and learned friend referred—are to be left out of consideration. I venture to think that the law, as it has to be administered in the courts, is not improved by one single piecemeal alteration which runs counter to the general principles applicable. I venture to suggest that this is a matter which deserves consideration in much greater depth—and not merely this aspect of the widow's rights, but the much more general aspects of the widow's rights. Merely to deal with this piecemeal is to make the position worse than it was.
I must say that when I read the Bill in the form that it came from another place and saw that there should not be taken into account not merely the prospects of remarriage but the actual remarriage, and considered the case of a childless widow already married to a richer man, I asked myself: what is the exercise that I should have had to do as a judge in that case? I suppose I should have had to consider the prospect of her remaining single or marrying a different man with less wages coming in, and should have paid no account to the fact that, as events had turned out, she was much better off financially as a result of the death. Then I took the converse case where a widow had married a poorer man. According to this Bill, I must go through exactly the same exercise as I did in the first case and award to her the same amount of damages, although the former woman was much better off financially as a result of the death, and the latter was very much worse off.
Under the law as it stands at present, one would make allowance for the fact

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that a remarried widow was worse off, despite her marriage, as a result of the accident. But under the Bill, as I see it, one cannot do that. As I said at the beginning, assessing damages is a very difficult task—indeed, perhaps the only really difficult task that a judge has to do. I venture to think that in its present form this Bill will add to that difficulty, and will not effectively attack the problem which ought to be attacked.
LORD DAVIES OF LEEK: My Lords, before the noble and learned Lord sits down, may I, with deference, and perhaps a little misunderstanding, ask him to help somebody who is a layman in this esoteric region of assessing the damages that should be given to a widow? Why should any account whatsoever be taken of what the mysterious future may hold? If I were a widow with a face like a horse, I should resent it if I were given a high rate of damages because I was an ugly-looking wench. But if I were a forthcoming and attractive wench my chances of marrying a film star or a rich judge would be great, and my damages would be reduced. This is esoteric, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the human side. May I suggest, with all due respect—and I hope I never come before any noble and learned judge; up to now I have managed to escape it—that the job of a learned member of the Bench is to judge the assessment at the moment of transition.
SEVERAL NOBLE LORDS: Order!
THE MINISTER OF STATE, DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND SOCIAL SECURITY (LORD ABERDARE): My Lords, I hope that the noble Lord will excuse me for interrupting. I think he is making a speech, and he really ought only to ask a brief question of the noble and learned Lord, who has already sat down.
LORD DAVIES OF LEEK: My Lords, I certainly accept that rebuff and I beg your Lordships' pardon. But may I have a little guidance on this point?
LORD DIPLOCK: My Lords, the whole purpose of giving damages under the Fatal Accidents Acts is to make provision for the future of the dependants who are claiming the compensation. That is what it is all about.
LORD GARDINER: My Lords, would not the noble and learned Lord agree that
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the judges are directed by Parliament to over-compensate some widows, who have a lot of insurance money which they would never have had but for the death? Was that not a social decision taken by Parliament on social grounds just as the other House has passed this Bill as a social decision?
3.45 p.m.
BARONESS SUM MERSKILL: My Lords, I do not think the noble Lord, Lord Stow Hill, need anticipate any opposition to Part I of this Bill. On Part I, I would say that I have particularly in mind the cases of byssinosis and pneumoconiosis—dust diseases which are accompanied by the most distressing symptoms. Apart from that fact, there is the unhappy lot of the relatives who find it difficult to prove the origin of the disease and, in consequence of the Limitation Act 1963, are often subject to great hardship.
But I hope that Part II of this Bill will be equally acceptable. I listened to what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Diplock, said about considering the matter in depth. But may I say this to him? I have listened to the gallant contributions from the noble and learned Lords, who are exceptional men. We cannot regard the noble and learned Lords who have spoken as examples of the law; they are exceptional. But too many lawyers live in the past and find it difficult to apply themselves to new ideas. What is wrong is that the law has failed to assess properly the value of a woman. There is, for instance, the evaluation of the housewife. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Diplock, has to-day explained what was in his mind. I want to tell the House that the time has arrived—and the only time when we can discuss this matter is on the Second Reading of a Bill of this nature—when we must evaluate in an entirely different way the contribution which the housewife makes to the home.
May I remind the House of an incident during the last war when, in order to impress upon the population that enemy agents might be within earshot, posters were exhibited bearing the injunction, "Be like Dad; keep Mum." I recall rising in another place, and asking whether that represented the wife's economic position in war time or indeed, any other time. Was she simply kept, as we have heard from the noble and learned

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Lord, Lord Diplock, or did she provide a valuable service? That is the question which must be asked in this century. Fortunately, an enlightened Minister took my point, and that offensive poster was removed forthwith.
The Bill now before us once more focuses attention on the economic position of the housewife; and, unhappily, there are too many men in positions of authority whose minds are frozen in an outmoded concept of a woman's role. Successive Governments, whatever their Party, have failed to recognise the value of a woman's service to the family and to the community. She not only bears the children, but cooks, cleans, washes and nurses, and thereby enables her husband to work outside the home, and in time to acquire new skills, while she, whatever her talents, is doomed to the routine of the home for many years.
The noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon of Glaisdale, the former President of the Divorce Court, whom we are so fortunate to have in this House now, put it this way:
"The cock bird can feather his nest precisely because he is not required to spend most of his time sitting on it."
This is a matter for laughter among many men, but it is not a matter for laughter among women. Surely equity demands to-day that the woman who works in the home should be treated as an equal partner in marriage. The wage packet is not handed to her, but she is serving in such a way that the husband can do as he pleases and receive the wage packet himself. But the fact is—and this, of course, is where the law has been gravely at fault; as well, of course, as Parliament—that she is not legally entitled in her own right to any financial reward except half the savings from her housekeeping allowance, a right which stems from the Married Women's Property Act 1964, which I had the great honour of piloting through your Lordships' House.
I take the view that when a marriage comes to an end through the kind of accident that we have heard described this afternoon the wife should be treated as a partner in that marriage, irrespective of any future activity, marriage or otherwise. But, my Lords, the law decrees
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that the solution of her problems is to find a man who will keep her; and in order to assess her chances of this the bereaved woman, as we have heard, is expected to parade her physical attributes in the court, when the judge, a complete stranger, decides how soon some man, irrespective of his morals, his health or his employability, may turn up to offer her bed and board.
Of course, there have been enlightened judges, like Lord Phillimore, from whose speech the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, quoted this afternoon. He questioned his capacity to judge of a woman's attractions by examining what he could see in the witness box. However, my Lords, as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, it is not surprising that some judges differ in their tastes. In one case, Lord Justice Davies cut the damages of a young widow of 26, with two children, from £8,000 to £5,500, observing, after looking her over, that it would be a matter of surprise if the young lady had not remarried by the time she was 30. The noble Lord, Lord Davies of Leek, is Welsh, and he and I have a great respect for this particular judge, who of course was doing his duty in trying to interpret the law. But I suspect that that woman may have been a brunette, for most Welsh women are dark. Perhaps if she had worn a tatty blonde wig when she went to court she might have had her damages increased.
My Lords, this position is ridiculous. Not only is it tragic, but it tends to ridicule the whole process of our law. It is difficult to understand why this primitive approach to such a tragic situation has been tolerated in our courts and why damages awards should vary in reverse ratio to a woman's physical attraction. It could be argued that, having allowed the prospect of another husband to influence his judgment, a judge should make a proviso—and this seems logical—that in the event of the next husband not being able to provide the same standard of living as the first, the damages should be revised. That, surely, would be the logical outcome. Or, since a wife's financial position depends solely on the generosity, or lack of generosity, of her husband, the pertinent questions should be: did he reveal the amount of his wages? What proportion did he give her for housekeeping? Did it enable her to

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effect any savings on her own behalf? Was her name on the title deeds of the house? Some lawyers may think that these criteria might determine damages for her loss. However, my Lords, although this seems logical, this relationship cannot possibly represent a partnership. Moreover, this method of assessment would result in the wife of a mean man receiving less in damages than the wife of a just man, and therefore this approach is unrealistic.
My Lords, most men say that they cannot understand women. What can a judge learn about the quality of a woman's mind in such a short period of remote contact? If the wife had had a drinker, gambler or a brute for a husband, why should it be assumed that she is anxious to risk repeating the experience? Does that ever occur to the judge? Furthermore, a woman with some talent which has been frustrated owing to the demands of a family may look forward to enjoying freedom from the domestic chores; and in these days, when we are giving girls higher education, when we are teaching them what a wonderful world there is outside the kitchen and the chores, is it not likely that a girl, having had a husband, having had children, will now say to herself, "This accident was deplorable, but at least it will give me an opportunity to see a new world before I die."? Furthermore, why should the amount that she will receive be related to an unknown quantity; namely, the character of some man who may prove worthless? As to its being a lump sum, I question the wisdom of this. Should the lump sum be allowed to encourage, through loneliness, fear of the future, or of sexual deprivation a hurried marriage—a marriage which may subsequently prove disastrous?
Whatever a woman's luck in the first marriage lottery was, she has in the great majority of cases proved herself to be a working partner, and for these reasons I believe that damages should not be given in a lump sum but at regular intervals, and should bear no relationship to the next phase in her life. I think it is important for noble Lords to recognise that they and women have various phases in their lives. When one phase is over, let them go on to the next without
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being handicapped by the first. I believe that such a woman should be allowed to determine her own destiny, and if she chooses remarriage or any other activity her compensation for the loss of her first partner should continue. If that woman had lost a leg, she would have had compensation for the rest of her life although she might get a better job, a sedentary job, and be paid more. Here, a woman has lost her husband, who made a contribution to the home which of course enabled her to live and look after the children. But why should the compensation cease when he goes? Why should it not continue for life?
Finally, I want to say this. I regret that the Law Commission have failed to grasp this comparatively small nettle. Is it because the Commissioners are all men? Of course there are brilliant women in subordinate positions, as in the Church; but I am sorry that they have not faced up to this problem, and I suspect that they have simply viewed it subjectively and consequently, as the Solicitor General said in another place, decided to "leave it on the plate". This, my Lords, is only another of the legal injustices to which women are subjected. Successive Governments, fearful of jeopardising the male vote, lack the moral courage to tackle legal disabilities which stem from custom and prejudice. Consequently these are dealt with in a piecemeal fashion by Private Members' legislation, of which this Bill is an example. The noble and learned Lord who has just spoken complained at this being piecemeal legislation. I invite him to examine over the last few years the legislation which seeks to remedy injustices suffered by women, and he will find that it has been done in precisely the same way, by Private Members' legislation. I therefore earnestly hope that the Government will consider drafting a comprehensive code to deal with, among other things, the economic position of the woman who works in the home.
4.0 p.m.
BARONESS WHITE: My Lords, I wish briefly to support the Motion for the Second Reading of this Bill. I shall say a few words on the first Part of the Bill which alters the provisions about the limitation period imposed on the bringing of actions. This is of special interest to those of us who are

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connected with the mining areas. It was not by chance that this Bill was introduced in another place by the Member sitting for Aberdare: it was because those of us who have experience in the mining areas know of a number of cases where the possibility of proving the cause of death is very difficult within the short period at present allowed. Therefore it is not surprising that we who are interested in industrial accidents, particularly in the mining industry, greatly welcome the first Part of the Bill. There has been a general welcome for it; therefore I need say nothing further about that.
There was a third Part of the Bill. This has been dropped. The controversial part is Part II, concerning damages for widows. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Diplock, complained that here the matter was being tackled piecemeal. This has been a matter of concern for a number of years. It has certainly been an irritant to those of us connected with various women's organisations. A woman may possibly appear in court before not so kindly a judge; she is placed in a very difficult position, one which we think is humiliating and one in which we believe she should not be asked to appear. Even if one puts that aspect on one side and says that one has to face life as it comes and should not make too much of an argument about emotion or distress, it seems to me that it is also repugnant to reason that this particular aspect has to be taken into account by learned judges. This was pointed out, as my noble and learned friend Lord Gardiner said, by the Winn Committee, who, although they felt that it was not within their own terms of reference to produce a solution, made it clear that they thought that the present law was not satisfactory, and that it vas unsatisfactory to expect a learned judge to decide not merely whether a lady would marry again but also to calculate the period of time within which this event might be expected to occur.
The present Administration were not directly responsible for the Conservative Party document Fair Deal for the Fair Sex, but it was issued under the auspices of the Conservative Party. They made great play of this particular matter, and the solution suggested by Conservative lawyers (of whom I believe the present Solicitor-General was one) is the solution proposed in this Bill: namely, that in
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assessing damages account should not be taken of the prospects of remarriage, or even of actual remarriage. I appreciate that actual remarriage has caused considerable doubt and concern. It was very fully discussed in another place. I think that the Solicitor General put the matter in a nutshell when he said that either we leave the law as it is, based on the Statute of 1846, or, if we are going to change it, we should change it in the terms proposed in this Bill—that there is no halfway house. He went through the possible ways of dealing, with this seriatim. My noble and learned friend Lord Gardiner referred to some of his points and I think he, too, concluded that there was no other resting place. If one tries various alternative proposals one may land in greater difficulties.
The noble and learned Lord, Lord Diplock, said that the Bill was contrary to the principle on which damages are at present assessed. I am a lay person, and subject to correction in this matter, but, as I understand the position, one has to take into account various other imponderables, including, for example, the prospects of promotion of the deceased husband. One has to make various guesses which seem to be inescapable in the circumstances. But having made all these guesses, one must make a further guess which seems to be inescapable in remarriage. I cannot see why one should not stop before that particular hypothetical point. One makes one's calculations as best one can. I understand that one now makes these calculations and then has to ask oneself, "How much should I deduct from the amount that I would otherwise think appropriate, because having looked at the lady I think that she may well remarry within three or four years?" The noble and learned Lord, Lord Diplock, shakes his head; but it seems to me that this is the only logical way in which a learned judge can approach the matter. He makes other calculations and then brings in this factor: will she marry or will she not marry: and if so, how soon? It seems to me that he just cannot ask himself that particular question. At present he is instructed to do so.
It may well be that one should look in greater depth at the whole problem; that such payments would be more suitably made on an annuity basis rather than on

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the basis of a lump sum. I do not entirely agree with my noble friend Lady Summerskill in what I take to be her attitude on this matter. Nevertheless, this could be arguable and it was argued in fact, though I thought superficially, in another place. But if we pass the Bill which is before us to-day this much wider question could still be examined. I should be anxious if any such arrangements were made that it is not made more difficult for a woman to marry again because the payments may cease at that point. Particularly if she should have children, it seems to me completely reprehensible to suggest that a woman should enter into a second marriage and expect the step-father to take the entire responsibility for the children of the previous marriage. This puts her in a weak and dependent position in her choice of a second husband. I think that that would be entirely reprehensible.
I should not necessarily be against an examination into the whole question of how such matters are dealt with, whether by lump sum or annuity, but I feel that it is quite wrong that a woman should be placed in a position where someone who does not know her, who cannot possibly know her inward heart or mind, decides on her behalf, so to speak, that she shall have less or more according to whether he imagines (for it can be no more than imagination) that she will marry or will not marry. This is not only an incalculable hypothesis but is insulting to the person concerned. She has her own thoughts and feelings and attitude towards life. It is not for her to have to tell the judge what they may be; in any case, no one knows what the chances of life may be. But one fact which is before the court is the loss of the previous husband and that is the basis, surely, on which the calculations should be made.
The noble and learned Lord, Lord Diplock, said that he disliked piecemeal legislation. Here I agree with my noble friend Lady Summerskill: piecemeal legislation is the only way by which Parliament can legislate at all. If one waited for comprehensive and perfect reform of the law one would find that it simply does not happen.
BARONESS SUMMERSKILL: Hear, hear!
BARONESS WHITE: I speak, my Lords, with some little experience in another House, having been concerned in a number of reforms, particularly in matters of personal and family law. Therefore it seems to me that the sensible thing for us to do is to give the Bill a Second Reading to-day. By so doing we shall, I think, be meeting the well-known and clearly expressed wishes of the majority of women in this country.
4.11 p.m.
LORD SILKIN: My Lords, I want to say a few words about Part II of the Bill because I do not want it to be thought that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Diplock, is alone in his doubts about that Part. A case has been made for it on the ground that it is extremely difficult for any judge, on seeing a woman for the first time, to come to a decision as to her chances of getting married again and to decide how much he should deduct from the damages. But it is a material factor and the judge has to decide. It is always a difficult matter to decide on the amount of damages to award, and to decide what the woman has lost. Whatever my noble friend Lady Summerskill may say—and she made her usual speech about the rights of women and their subordinate position—the judge has to make this decision. He may take into account that the woman concerned will get on and pursue a profitable career for herself: or that she is not incapable of doing so.
These are factors which the judge should take into account. He should be deciding what will be the woman's future; whether or not she is the sort of person who is likely to get married within a reasonable time. I agree with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Diplock, that it is a pity that damages have to be paid once and for all. If they could be paid over a period, so that it would be possible to see whether the circumstances changed, I think justice would be done. But, my Lords, justice has to be done between two individuals. It is necessary to see that the plaintiff is properly compensated for the loss she has suffered; but also justice must be done to the defendant, and it is necessary to see that he is not called on to pay more than he ought to pay by way of compensation. In many cases,

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especially those such as that quoted regarding a good-looking girl of twenty-six, I think that the plaintiff would be over-compensated if the possibility, or likelihood, of her getting married again were disregarded entirely.
My Lords, I do not want to repeat myself. I think that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Diplock, has said all that it is necessary to say. All I rose to say was that I feel the same doubts that he feels and I hope that we might eliminate Part II from this Bill and look at the whole question again. It is much more than this isolated matter regarding widows. It is a much bigger question, and I hope that, as a matter of urgency, we shall ask the Law Commission to look at it again.
4.15 p.m.
THE, LORD CHANCELLOR (LORD HAILSHAM OF ST. MARYLEBONE): My Lords, I should like to say a word or two about both Parts of the Bill. Before I do so, may I say one thing about the Bill as a whole? When I was consulted about this Bill I made it very clear that there were two very different subjects under discussion: one which, at any rate in my judgment, would give rise to no controversy at all, and one which, inevitably, whatever one might think about it, would give rise to a good deal of controversy. And, except for the fact that both subjects had to do with whether damages were to be assessed, and if so in what amount, for personal injury or death, they had nothing in common with each other. I still adhere to the view that this should have been two operations and not one. In that event the House would have been spared the agonising dilemma, which, tactfully, as usual, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, put to it: that it may have the choice between making a botched job or losing the Bill altogether owing to the exigencies of the Parliamentary timetable. I should be extremely sorry to lose Part I on any terms, I will come to Part II in a moment.
Part I is a law reform measure pure and simple. It gives effect to the recommendations of both Law Commissions. It represents Government policy, and so far as I can, I will do my best to see that it gets on to the Statute Book. Part II
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is as purely a private enterprise operation as the first Part was the result of the efforts of the Law Commissions. It represents the older, more exciting and perhaps less professional approach to law reform; laudably seeking to end what is regarded as a particular abuse and less concerned with the effect of the proposed reform on the coherent rationality of the law as a whole, or the kind of task with which the judges will be confronted if the particular reform is put into effect.
I quite take the point which the noble Baroness, Lady White, has just put: nobody can complain of law reform simply because it is piecemeal After all, Parliament being what it is, one has to take advantage of the slots in the Parliamentary timetable that are available. There are a whole range of topics (and, incidentally, I would not put women's rights necessarily as the only one; or even as one of the principal ones) which lend themselves more easily to Private Members' legislation than to Government legislation with the Whips behind them. In respect of many Bills which have found their way to the Statute Book in recent years use has been made of this ladder, rather than the official ladder, in order to get them there.
What I think my noble and learned friend Lord Diplock, speaking from the Cross-Benches, was seeking to put to the House was not simply that the Bill was piecemeal, in the sense which the noble Baroness rightly defended piecemeal legislation. but that it was a piece of cloth put on to an old garment and inevitably likely to create the kind of trouble that—as the right reverend Prelate would be warning us—arises when new cloth is put on to an old garment. It is no good saying, with the noble Baroness, Lady Summerskill, that lawyers are apt to find it difficult to assimilate new ideas. This may or may not be true. What is true is that the law is not of the lawyers' creation. The law affected by Part II is the sole product of the labours of Parliament. It is not judge-made law; it is Parliamentary law. And it is very difficult, as my noble and learned friend was seeking to argue, to suture on to the old garment with which Parliament has provided us an idea that is incompatible with the nature of the fabric which Parliament has chosen to weave. This may be presenting a judge with a difficult problem.

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I should like, if I may, to go back for one moment to Part I of the Bill, which I wholeheartedly commend. The Act of 1963, as the noble Lord, Lord Stow Hill, reminded us, came under criticism recently on two grounds. The first related to the inability of the dependants of a deceased person to take advantage of the 1963 Act for the purposes of the Fatal Accidents Act. As matters now stand, the period within which they are compelled to take proceedings is twelve months from the date of death, irrespective of the date on which the dependants became aware of the essential facts which gave rise to the cause of action. This result was intended in the Act, but in practice it was found to give rise to anomalies. For instance, a single set of circumstances might lead to several men contracting the same insidious industrial disease as a result of negligence or breach of statutory duty by their employer, and the facts might come to light only after more than three years had elapsed. A survivor—a living plaintiff, who was ill but still alive—would, under the Act of 1963, have a further twelve months from his "date of knowledge" within which to take action. But in the case of another man, who had died, his widow would be unable to claim damages, either under Scottish law—that is, Common Law—or under the Fatal Accidents Act if the husband's death occurred more than twelve months before the issue of proceedings.
The second criticism was that a period of twelve months from the date of knowledge was too short. This was a complaint voiced very articulately by the Durham mineworkers concerned with cases of pneumoconiosis. In particular, there was a claim against the National Coal Board by a mineworker whose case was settled in January, 1970, and it was claimed, I think with some reason, that the same considerations might apply to others who require expert medical and legal advice before they institute proceedings.
It was a result of these instances that the last Administration asked the two Law Commissions for advice on these two points, and both Commissions have advised that dependants should be put in the same position as a living claimant, so that it would be the dependant's state
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of knowledge from which the time should run in order that he could take advantage of the additional period. The Scottish Law Commission—with the English Law Commission in principle concurring, but saying that they had hitherto discovered no injustice—recommended that the period of additional time should be extended from twelve months to three years. The result of this is accurately reflected in Part I of the Bill, and I can say honestly that I wholeheartedly commend it to the House.
I now come to Part II of the Bill. May I say, first, that although it seems very hard it is of the essence of the matter that the Fatal Accidents Act, and the comparable Scottish Law, I believe, does not take account of human sorrow to any extent at all. I myself think, though I know that there are many who differ from me, more non-lawyers than lawyers, that this is quite right, because I should not wish myself to place a money value on human sorrow as such. But the result is a somewhat cold-blooded calculation. A widow who becomes better off or no worse off on the death of her husband gets no damages; the widow who is worse off gets what she has lost in terms of money—in principle nothing more but also in principle nothing less. This is also true of others dependants, of the widow's children, as my noble and learned friend Lord Diplock said.
There are of course certain exceptions to this rule. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Stow Hill, referred to insurance benefits which under two statutory exceptions do not count. Whether that is right or wrong—and I am sure myself that it is right—is open to question and it has been questioned. Personally, I doubt whether the exception in that case is quite as illogical as the noble Lord argued. There are arguments both ways, but the point has a certain indirect reference to the point that is relevant for the purpose of Part II of the Bill. The relevant problem comes where a widow remarries. When she is actually remarried at the time of hearing, I have not heard in practice much legitimate complaint, but I agree with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, that if we are to tackle the problem in this way, to keep in an actual remarriage but leave out the prospect of remarriage, whether or not there was a firm engagement, would leave more anomalies than

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it would solve. I do not think that there is any doubt about this. After considering it and having to some extent hesitated on the point, I would now unhesitatingly advise your Lordships that this halfway house is not really a starter for the reasons which have been given by several speakers.
But how about the prospective remarriage when there is not a firm engagement? It is suggested to be the law, and I think it is established to be the law, that a judge should have a good look at the widow to consider whether she is marriageable and to reduce the damages in proportion to the effect she has on him. I venture to suggest that this is a task no judge who is a gentleman would willingly undertake; and if he did so, the subjective judgment he formed would be utterly valueless. I have always declared myself as a member of the Bar, so far as I can differ from the great, an unrepentant Phillimorian on this issue. I think that subjective judgments are best left out of account. And I was very disappointed when the Court of Appeal established the law in the contrary sense. I think that if they had taken the same view as the judge of first instance, which I believe and always have believed to be the sensible one, we should probably not be having this debate at all. But they did not.
So far I am wholly on the side of reform. But the difficulty arises from the way in which the reformers have framed their proposals. How is it possible to assess damage in cases depending solely on financial loss as the criterion of damage, when some of the facts of life are taken into account and others are not? The Bill says that neither actual remarriage nor the prospects of remarriage should be taken into account, but it does not say on what basis damages are to be assessed. I am not sure how the sponsors of the Bill want them to be assessed. The difficulties of actuarial guesswork are well known to practitioners, and I would accept without having made my own researches that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, accurately represented the state of actuarial knowledge when he said that actuarial statistics are not available in this case. But is it really justice—this is a question that
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the House must face—that a widow of 19 with no children should get more damages than a widow of 45 with six children? Yet this would appear to be the result of the Bill as drafted at the moment.
Assume, for the sake of argument, in each case a dependancy of £10 a week for the widow alone—because the children are assessed separately—and assume, for the sake of argument for the moment, that in each case the deceased husband is the same age as his wife: I do that particularly for the purposes of the calculation. A widow of 45 on that basis will get about £520 multiplied by 15—that is to say, £7,800—as her dependency to the age of her husband's retirement. There will not be very much reduction on that; there probably will not be very much increase on it. At the same rate, a widow of 19 may get £520 multiplied by 46, which is nearly £24,000, although everyone knows that she will either enter into some gainful occupation or remarry. She probably would not get as much as that, but one cannot dogmatise because one does not know how the judges are going to set about it under this Bill. But under this Bill she certainly would not get less than £10,000. So a widow of 19, with no children, would get £10,000, so far as I can see, and a widow of 45 with six children—leaving herself out of account—would get only £7,800.
I cannot see that that, as it stands, makes absolute sense. I may be wrong I may be stupid; I may be unable to appreciate new ideas, but that seems to me to be an odd result to achieve. Perhaps the courts, not being allowed to take into account her prospect of remarriage, will assume that she enters some gainful occupation and does not remarry. But the Bill, as drafted, says that no account is to be taken of her prospects of remarriage. Therefore I suppose they must be in doubt as to whether she will enter in to any gainful occupation, or for what length of time she will enter into it. I suppose that the Bill, as drafted, means that the court must not assume that she either does remarry or does not remarry.
If the Bill is passed in its present form I suppose the courts will have to try to make sense of it, but I do not wholly envy them their task. It seems to me that enthsusiastic law reform is apt to push the unfortunate judges from time to time

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out of the frying pan into the fire, and nobody seems to sympathise with them when they get there. I think it is my job to sympathise with them as long as I occupy my present position. I must say that I wish that bright ideas of this kind, which are obviously based on a genuine sense of injustice, could be more fully processed before being presented to Parliament. However that may be, we have this baby—or rather this pair of somewhat dissimilar twins—on our doorstep. I think that both should be given a Second Reading, but I hope that the younger infant will receive a little more careful examination in Committee.
There is a third matter that I should mention to the House, quite shortly, which, though the Bill does not deal with it at present, I am afraid that, contrary to some of the things I have been saying, I should wish to take the legislative opportunity afforded by the Bill to deal with piecemeal myself. Widows' damages are at present controlled by the court in a manner which I do not think can any longer be justified in the light of the status accorded to women by universal consent. They are shut up in court, and the widow has to obtain the leave of the court before she can get full control of the sum. I shall invite the House before the measure reaches the Statute Book to take the chance of this Bill to put an end to this power of the courts over damages, and I have some reason to hope that if I put such a provision into the Bill there will not be any controversy in another place—because if there were I should not use the Bill for this purpose. My Lords, on the first Part of the Bill, I am wholeheartedly in agreement. I remain a benevolent neutral on the second Part. There can be no question at all of Government Whipping, and we shall take the decision of the House.
4.35 p.m.
LORD STOW HILL: My Lords, think it is in accordance with the custom of your Lordships' House that the mover of the Bill replies to the debate, and I would begin by saying that I am most grateful to Members of your Lordships' House who have taken part for the obvious care that they have devoted to the subject under discussion. I have the advantage of starting from this situation: that one former Lord Chancellor
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and one present Lord Chancellor are both Phillimorians and advocate the view that if you are going to change the law at all you should disregard not only prospects of remarriage but actual remarriage. So I start from a very advantageous position.
I am also greatly invigorated and exhilarated to think that the two lady Members of your Lordships' House who have spoken have also supported me. And I am encouraged, if I may say so in reply to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Diplock, who regretted a piecemeal approach, to say: May I not, in the circumstances which I have just outlined, say with another distinguished Lady, Lady Macbeth:
"Out, out damned spot! "?—
because my case really about Part II is that the law as at present is (I hope that I speak with moderation and restraint) a "damned spot" on our legislation. It is degrading. It is repulsive that widows should be put in the situation which I have sought to describe.
My noble friend Lord Silkin said that the argument really was that the law was difficult to administer. That is only one half of the argument. The more compelling half which I would venture to put before your Lordships is that which centres upon the use of derogatory adjectives such as "repulsive". I submit that this is a repulsive aspect of the law, and it is, in Lady Macbeth's phrase, a "damned spot" that we should remove from it. I would say that particularly to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Diplock, because his most interesting argument was directed to the theme (I think I am fair to him when I say this) that once you approach the subject of damages you should recognise it as a single pattern, a very complicated pattern, and you should overhaul it completely.
The noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor used the simile of a new piece of cloth patched on an old piece of cloth, and I think that both noble and learned Lords were facing in the same direction. If I may say so to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Diplock, I should be very sorry indeed if Parliament adopted the attitude that it frowned upon piecemeal legislation. Enormous changes have been made by Private Members' Bills. If one combed the Statute Book, one would, I submit, find, over and over again, that

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Parliament has addressed itself to a particular awkward angle and has dealt with that. If we delayed reform until we could accomplish the immense task of completely overhauling—as an example—such a major aspect of our law as the law of damages, progress would be extremely slow and injustice would be much more rife than it is to-day. I submit respectfully to the noble and learned Lord that we should gladly and readily say that we can deal with this particular aspect of the matter now, and let us do so. I would add that I certainly do not differ from him when he implies in his argument that we should in due course, when it is possible in terms of Parliamentary time and when the necessary researches have been made, address ourselves to the law of damages as a whole. I should be the last person to question that. But, my Lords, not now. Nor should that consideration be used as a consideration by way of an obstruction to this isolated and necessary piece of limited change in our existing arrangements.
As to the difficulty of administering this legislation, the noble and learned Lord took for example the case of two widows, one who had remarried a new husband who earned more than her deceased husband, and the other who had remarried a new husband who earned less than the husband who had met with the accident that led to his death. He said: "Where do I go from there? How difficult it is to administer the law when one takes into account that sort of situation!" I cordially agreed with my noble and learned friend Lord Gardiner when he intervened to ask a question which I should like to put to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Diplock: What about insurance monies? I picture the noble and learned Lord (not so sitting now, because it would not be part of his duties) sitting as a judge of first instance and having before him a widow who had been married to a man who had met his death when earning a modest salary—a widow who had had the advantage (if I may so describe it) that his death put her in possession of a very substantial sum by way of insurance. She drives up to court in a Rolls Royce which she could never have afforded before.
The law says, in terms, and has said so since 1908, that learned judges are to
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put that situation out of their minds. That is producing an unreal result. The noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor felt difficulty in accepting the proposition that a widow of 39 years of age might have a multiple of 15 applied to the compensation that she received, and that it would be unreasonable that an attractive young widow of 21 years of age should have a multiple of whatever the figure would be—44—applied in the assessment of her compensation. There is nothing in this Bill, nor in the law so far as it exists, which would preclude a judge from taking into account the prospects of her obtaining gainful employment. This Bill does not touch that matter. It draws a ring round a limited situation which deals with actual or prospective marriage. Why? Because it is repulsive that the judges should have to concern themselves with it.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, I am sorry to interrupt the noble Lord, but how can they take into account the prospect of employment, which will not be possible if the widow remarries, if the Bill says in terms that on no account shall they take into account the prospect of remarriage?
LORD STOW HILL: My Lords. I suppose they will say to themselves: "What are we told by Statute to do? We are asked to hear argument by counsel that the particular widow is likely to remarry. We are told by Statute that we are not to take that into account. Equally, we are asked by counsel to take into account the fact that the widow is remarried. That we are told by Statute we are not to take into account. Anything else we may take into account, remarried, or not remarried with bright or poor prospects of remarriage. The lady may engage in gainful occupation, and, that being so, it should be taken into account." It may well be that learned judges, directing themselves in the future, will do that. That is nothing like so difficult as the problem of the case of a lady who has received £50,000 as a result of a policy of insurance. Is she likely to engage in gainful occupation? The learned judge is told he must not take into account that she has in that case £50,000. What, then, with regard to gainful employment?
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, I am sorry again to interrupt the noble Lord, but surely he is wrong about that. The 1908 Statute says that he must not take into account the £50,000 in order to assess the damage. He must not take into account against her the amount of money she receives under the insurance policy. That is not saying, as this proposition is, that he must not take into account something upon which her ability to engage in activities which may produce income must to some extent depend. They are not two comparable exceptions.
LORD STOW HILL: My Lords, I submit that they are exactly comparable. The noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor will get in great trouble with my noble friend, Lady Summerskill, if he is going to say that ladies who are married never work. They certainly may work, and there is nothing in the fact that the widow in question may have excellent prospects of remarriage or have remarried which will prevent her from working in future. If you assume that lady is in possession of £50,000, it is much less likely that she is going to get a job as a typist, a personal representative, or something of that sort, earning a very modest salary. When the noble and learned Lord, Lord Diplock, was sitting as a learned judge of first instance, if he had had the case of a lady with £50,000 in her pocket and had had to ask himself, "Was it likely that she would engage in gainful occupation?", I hesitate to speculate how even such a distinguished lawyer as he is would have addressed himself to answering that problem. One is in the realm of unreality, anyhow. We have been in the realm of unreality since 1908 in assessing damages.
LORD CONESFORD: My Lords, I am much obliged to the noble Lord for yielding. I want to clear my mind and ask the answer to this simple question. He says that if this Bill were passed in its present form, the judges might have to take into account the prospect of the lady's entering gainful employment. But suppose she gives evidence that in no circumstances will she enter gainful employment. If she is young, will she then increase her damages, with the result put by my noble and learned friend on the Woolsack that the lady of 23 will
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get much more damages than the widow of 50 with six children?
LORD STOW HILL: My Lords, that is the type of question one cannot answer without knowing more of the circumstances. When she says: "In no circumstances will I engage in gainful employment", is that because she does not know how to earn money—that she has no qualification?
LORD CONESFORD: No, my Lords, for the simple reason that the law will say that she can thereby increase her damages.
LORD STOW HILL: My Lords, whatever tile right answer is—and I should very much enjoy a controversy with the noble Lord and with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Diplock—one looks to the existing law to find the result of that: it is not within the purview of this Bill at all. This Bill does not alter the answers that would have to be given in that type of situation. This Bill has a much more modest objective: it simply says, as the 1908 legislation and the 1959 legislation said, that certain things have to be left out of account. The question arises: Does that produce an unreal result? In both cases the answer must be "Yes". You cannot pretend that a lady who has £50,000 in her pocket has nothing in her pocket.
If it is said that this Bill produces an unreal result, then so be it; let it be so. As I said earlier, logic is often bad law. We have spent centuries trying to accommodate our law to the vagaries of human conduct. Let us on this one occasion do what Lady Macbeth said: get rid of something which is thoroughly obscene and ugly in our law, and get nearer to civilisation and to that proposition to which my noble friend Lady Summerskill would so readily assent: that women are not chattels; that they have feelings and that those feelings should be taken into account in the case of a widow who is in that terrible position. If any of our wives were in that position we should feel strongly—if we could, in another world—the indignity which we are inflicting on them as the law stands at the present time. My Lords,

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I hope the House will give this Bill a Second Reading.
On Question, Bill read 2ª, and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.

UNSOLICITED GOODS AND SERVICES BILL
4.50 p.m.
BARONESS ELLIOT OF HARWOOD: My Lords, I beg to move that the House do now resolve itself into Committee on this Bill.
Moved, That the House do now resolve itself into Committee.—(Baroness Elliot of Harwood.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.
House in Committee accordingly.
[The LORD ST. HELENS in the Chair.]
Clause 1 [Rights of recipient of unsolicited goods]:
THE DEPUTY CHAIRMAN OF COMMITTEES: Before calling the first Amendment, I should remind your Lordships that if this is carried I am unable to call the second Amendment.
LORD REDESDALE LORD REDESDALE moved Amendment No.1:
Page 1, line 17, leave out paragraph (a).
The noble Lord said: I will not weary your Lordships with a lot of arguments regarding the deletion of this paragraph, but I should like to run over some of the points I covered in Second Reading. As in Second Reading, I should declare an interest in that I am connected with a mail order company. In Second Reading I tried to put over the problem of ascertaining whether goods that had been sent out to somebody had actually been unsolicited. The two aspects which I sought to cover were, first, the hoax order and, secondly, the fraudulent order.
Let us take the hoax order first. A mail order company can receive an order which appears to be perfectly genuine: it has a signature; it has an address, and it appears to be like any other order in which somebody is genuinely interested in receiving the goods concerned. However, as we know, it has happened, un-
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fortunately quite often, that because somebody thinks it is funny he fills in on an order form somebody else's name —usually that of somebody prominent or of somebody against whom he has a grudge. The mail order company fulfils this order in good faith and this person, without knowing of the order, receives the goods. Such a person is naturally somewhat annoyed and feels that the company has sent out unsolicited goods. With Clause 1(2) (a) as it stands, he naturally feels that, because the goods are unsolicited, all he has to do is to sit tight and forget about them. I can, of course, understand that the person who has received the goods is irritated and considers them unsolicited, which they are. But the company who sent them out did so in good faith. That is the first aspect.
The second aspect is really more serious. This is the question of the fraudulent order. It is so very easy for two people to get together, the first to fill in the second's name so that he receives the goods. Again with Clause 1(2) (a) as it stands, all they have to do is to sit tight and the goods are theirs. This provision makes it legal for them illegally to receive the goods. The noble Lord, Lord Donaldson of Kingsbridge, made an intervention in the Second Reading debate on a very reasonable point, regarding the fact that one could make, say, three demands and then go and collect the goods. If the article concerned is something like the magazine Which? one would not bother about collecting it. If it were something expensive, say a refrigerator ordered from a store, the procedure suggested is reasonable. But if the article is in the intermediary range it is uneconomic for the firm to collect it and therefore it goes by default. The major mail order companies send out many millions of items, and if a large number of them were in fact sent as a result of hoax or fraudulent orders the companies would not be in an economic position to collect them. The points I am trying to make cover items sent out in good faith by reputable companies.
When it comes to truly unsolicited goods, as referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Platt, then of course the company must take this risk. But it is a little unfair at this stage for a company to have to bear the cost if they sent out

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the goods in good faith. I am mindful of the remarks of the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor in putting forward a particularly controversial Amendment, and I accept the feelings of other noble Lords, especially those of the noble Baroness. I would not wish to put forward an Amendment which was so controversial that it would delay the passage of the Bill and jeopardise it. Therefore, I will not press this Amendment, but I should be grateful if the Committee would consider the points I have raised. I beg to move.
BARONESS ELLIOT OF HARWOOD: I am very interested in the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, and the fact that he does not propose to press this Amendment to a Division. But I must repeat some of the arguments about which the sponsors of this Bill feel very strongly in regard to the Amendment he has moved, which would in effect delete Clause 1(2) (a) from the Bill. The results would be as follows. A person who received unsolicited goods would then in any event be obliged to give notice to the firm which sent them in order to divest himself of the responsibility he has regarding the goods; namely, the duty of not destroying them or throwing them away. In other words, the Amendment would result in there being imposed on the person who received unsolicited goods, irrespective of how he came to get them, an obligation to write and tell the firm which sent them, in order that he may avail himself of the benefits of Clause 1(1).
I can see no reason why this obligation should be put upon him. I do not consider that this Amendment is justified. Clause 1(2) (a) is intended to cover those cases where the recipient does nothing about the unsolicited goods. No matter how much publicity attends this Bill and the matters it deals with, there will always be exceptions among the public who have never heard of it and have no idea what to do about unsolicited goods. There will be an even greater number of people, perhaps, who will have heard of this Bill but will not know precisely what it requires, or will not fully understand the detailed provisions. Even some noble Lords may have a little difficulty in understanding the detailed requirements of what is now Clause
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1 (2) (b) and Clause 1 (3). There will always be a large section of the public who, whether they understand their legal right or not, will in fact do nothing about unsolicited goods if they receive them. Many people simply do not write letters, and of those who do many have busy lives to lead and cannot always find the time and energy to sit down and write. And who can blame them? Why should anybody who has received a book, a record or something else, which he has not asked for and does not want, be expected to go the trouble of doing any-thing at all! After all, it takes a bit of effort to sit down and compose a letter, and to take a copy of it if you want to be on the safe side, not to mention the cost of postage et cetera. Thus, the purpose of Clause 1(2) (a) is to deal with the cases where the recipient of unsolicited goods does nothing. When this happens the firm is given six months to catch up with him. This is quite a reasonable period. In the Inertia Selling Bill, which passed in another place in the last Parliament, the period was four months, and we have increased it in order to make it easier for the people who have sent out the goods.
The Promoters of this Bill are not prepared to give way on the fundamental principle that a person who receives unsolicited goods should not be required to undertake either a responsibility as regards the care of the goods or a responsibility as regards taking some action such as writing a letter in order to get the goods out of the way. I am hacked up in this by the fact that the Crowther Report recently published has a whole paragraph about rights and obligations to protect the consumer against this kind of selling. The Crowther Report states very firmly that the Committee are of opinion that we should not expect people to have to write letters and draw attention to the fact that they have received unsolicited goods. We suggest it is reasonable to leave the Bill as it is. It provides a fair balance between the various situations that can arise—the cases of hoax orders and cases of mistaken delivery, either of the right goods to the wrong person or of wrong goods to the right person; and it also deals with cases of deliberately sending unsolicited goods. I am sorry, but I cannot accept the Amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale.
4.59 p.m.
LORD DONALDSON OF KINGS-BRIDGE: I should like to make a couple of brief points in support of the noble Baroness, Lady Elliot of Harwood. I think that we should look, as the mail order firms should look, at what the trouble is. Doubtless we should all agree that if a firm is sending "unsolicited goods" in the bare terms of that description, the goods should be treated as a free sample. One has not a right to send goods to people in the hope that they will buy them. I believe that is now the American rule; and we should get through this provision very easily were it not for the three exceptions we have been discussing. The first is mistake, the second is hoax, and the third is fraud.
As regards mistake, I do not think any noble Lord would wish to put any burden on somebody by whom a mistake is made. But we have agreed in this Bill to go a very long way. We have said that the person who suffers this error may be left with the goods for six months, and if during that time the person who makes the mistake wants to retrieve it he can send a bill at the end of the first month, a reminder at the end of the second month, a bill in red at the end of the third month, ditto fourth, ditto fifth and in the sixth month he can come and collect the goods. If they are not worth very much he will not bother, and most of these things are not worth very much.
One of the objects of this Bill is to prevent the wretched recipient from becoming liable at common law for something which the noble and learned Lord suggested is not correct. If it is not correct, that is good; but if it is correct, then if I am sent a gramophone record and I stop my child from breaking it for six months, then I think it is a necessary precaution that in the seventh month he can break it. This is a most important defence for the innocent man, sitting at home reading the newspaper, who suddenly finds himself liable for all sorts of things because a mail order firm is trying to make money out of him. I do not mind the mail order firm trying to make money out of him, or anybody else, but if it makes a mistake I do not think that the man at the receiving end should have any obligation at all.
Hoaxes seem to be covered in the same way. Of course the computer does not
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notice if 1,100 copies of Land of Hope and Glory are sent to No. 10, Downing Street. This cannot be helped. But I suppose at some stage or other there would be some indication or some documentation to the effect that a lot of things were going to the same address. In any case the period of six months is an absolutely adequate defence. I am not allowed to do anything until six months have elapsed; but at the end of six months, if you have not collected the article I can dispose of it. That covers the hoax.
A slightly more difficult problem is that of fraud. My noble friend Lady Elliot asks me to fill in a coupon for her because she wants a cookery book that she does not want to pay for. This is reasonable enough. I say, "Of course; anything you ask, I will do", and I send in the coupon. The cookery book goes to her. Presumably she has an attic containing little piles of books marked "Not to be opened before October 1" and "Not to be opened before November1 "; and all the way round this attic there are various goods that her friends have been sending her and which she cannot make use of for six months. Is that not a ridiculous situation? If people were to send refrigerators as unsolicited goods there would be some point in protecting the seller, but generally the goods are quite insignificant. The whole thing seems to be a ridiculous fuss about nothing, and I hope very much that the noble Baroness will not yield.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: I do not know whether I may say just a word. As I have said, my attitude on all these questions is one of benevolent neutrality, and I will try to be as neutral and as benevolent as I can. I think my noble friend who proposed this Amendment, which up to a point ought to be discussed with his two alternatives (because they are alternatives), ought to stick to this one because I do not think the other two are really "starters". The prospect of deciding what was an unreasonable refusal to do anything about the matter is one before which the courts would legitimately tremble, and I certainly should not encourage it. Nor do I see any advantage in extending six months to twelve months. This is just playing with the problem which is really raised by the first Amendment, to which both speeches have related.
LORD REDESDALE: Will the noble Lord allow me to say that the question of extending the period of six months is not my Amendment.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: I am so sorry; I apologise to my noble friend. I say the same thing about the Amendment, but not in relation to my noble friend. I am a little more sympathetic to my noble friend than perhaps the two other speakers have been. However, I think he must face the fact fairly and squarely that another place would almost certainly not accept the Amendment if we were to pass it, and that would virtually bid "goodbye" to the Bill. I think we must be realistic about that.
Secondly, I do not altogether go along with the noble Lord, Lord Donaldson, in saying that if a man makes a mistake and there is delivered to my house something that does not belong to me, I am really entitled to do nothing about it. It happens to most of us sometimes, I think. Certainly it has happened to me from time to time, and I am prepared to go to quite considerable trouble to see that the goods are re-delivered if there has been a genuine mistake, or that they are delivered to the right quarter if I can see what the mistake is. I think any honest man would do the same.
Equally, I am not unsympathetic to the hoax case or to the fraud case. The short answer to the fraud case is that the present law would deal with it. What my noble friend laughingly suggested as a possible arrangement between himself and Lady Elliot is certainly a conspiracy to defraud, and if it succeeded there would be damages. This would be so whether or not the Bill is passed and whether or not the Amendment is passed. That is the short answer to that problem. However, I remind my noble friend who proposed the Amendment that there is such a thing as recorded delivery and that there is such a thing as a reply paid postcard. On the whole, those who make their living by selling goods on credit in one form or another have to take the rough with the smooth. Part of the rough is that they are from time to time defrauded by their debtors. The county courts do their best to catch up with the debtors, not always very successfully; but I am afraid that mail order businesses must, up to a point, recognise that the nature of their business is such
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that there are occupational hazards from which they may suffer from time to time. I am not unsympathetic to my noble friend but I think he must make up his mind that if we try to press this Amendment it will be "goodbye" to the Bill.
LORD PLATT: I hope that this Amendment will not be carried, for the reasons perfectly well stated by other noble Lords and which I need not repeat. I hesitate to suggest in any way that the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor may be mistaken in one of his points, but may I ask him one thing? When he talks about a mistake he says, "I do not accept that there is no obligation on me in the case of a genuine mistake to see that the goods are rightly delivered". I agree with him, but surely that is a moral obligation and not a legal one?
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: If I may say so, I was speaking only about morality; I was not suggesting that there was a legal obligation. If I gave that impression I should like to correct it at once. I was talking about what an honest man will do, and not what an honest man could be compelled to do if he did not feel quite so honest at the time.
LORD PLATT: I accept that the noble and learned Lord was only discussing a moral obligation; but the whole point is that here we are discussing a legal obligation. If I had suggested an Amendment making it a legal obligation to go round next door and deliver the letters, then I think the Amendment would be resisted. I do not think that argument would commend itself to the Committee.
VISCOUNT HANWORTH: I have a certain amount of sympathy with this Amendment, but, as so often, I think one must realise that one can seldom legislate against an abuse without also bringing about a side effect. In my opinion, here it is far more important to protect the consumer than to cause some small embarrassment to those who are employing certain trading methods which in the future they may well find they have to modify to some extent in order to overcome these slight difficulties.
Unsolicited goods have been a tremendous bane to consumers when this sort of thing has occurred. So many consumers do not in fact know their legal rights. They do not write letters easily,

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and, if they do get round to writing a letter, they do not know how to do it in proper legal phraseology. They certainly do not all keep copies normally, so it may be difficult to prove that they have in fact written; and, of course, as has already been pointed out, there is the difficulty of the damage to the goods. I will just quote an example of a letter we received in the Consumers' Association, which I think will remind your Lordships of the sort of thing that was going in April, 1970.
A gentleman from Scotland had some dealings with an organisation called the International Art Club, an outfit which is part of a leisure arts organisation and which advertises very widely in colour supplements and such like. This gentleman had been a subscriber to the club—for some reason it always seems to be referred to as a "club". Then in July, 1969, he wrote cancelling all further supplies, in accordance with the arrangement. They ignored his cancellation; they went on sending the goods—in this case pictures. Then in April, 1970, he received a communication entitled "Notice Before Proceedings", telling him that unless he paid what they claimed from him his account would be submitted to their solicitors for review and directions. The recipient wrote again, but still he could not get any sense out of them. All he had was a further threatening letter, this time in May, 1970, saying: "You owe us money. You do not pay. You do not answer. Appropriate action will be taken after seven days after this notice." And in the end he paid what they asked. He was intimidated, by the threats of action he had received, into paying, even though he did not owe anything. That is the sort of thing that has occurred, and there are several other examples I could quote. It seems to me that it would be the greatest mistake to weaken this Bill in any way at all.
5.23 p.m.
LORD BEAUMONT OF WHITLEY: Since the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor has widened the debate a little to consider Amendment No. 3 with No. 1, I hope your Lordships will forgive me if I do the same. May I say before I start that I have the opposite of an interest to declare? I normally find myself reacting violently on the side
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of any consumer protection Bill and against any attempt to weaken it; but in this particular case I think that Amendment No. 3 is really the minimum reasonable Amendment to put forward. We are talking about cases—and they are the overwhelming majority of cases, I believe, in unsolicited goods—where companies send out goods in good faith and, because of mistakes or fraud, or hoax (the three possibilities we have heard about) the goods get to the wrong people. Unless you say that mail order is in itself bad, it seems to me that you must bear in mind also the perfectly ordinary rights of businesses engaged in mail order.
It seems to me that we have in this Bill to find the right path, one that will do no wrong to the customer and also do no wrong to the trading companies, most of whom, I need hardly remind your Lordships, are highly reputable companies, and presumably economically beneficial. I believe that if we do not pass Amendment No. 3, or if Amendment No. 3 is not accepted, we shall be opening the gates to fraud on a large scale. That there is not very much fraud at the moment, I entirely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Donaldson of Kingsbridge. But the fact remains that if we say these goods can become, after six months, the property of the person to whom they are sent, and if all the person has to do is to stay absolutely mum and say nothing, we shall be opening a door whereby people could mount fairly large-scale frauds for intermediate value goods. And the large-scale efforts of some companies—and there is nothing wrong with their being large-scale—mean that such a fraud would be very difficult to detect. Of course it would be punishable under the criminal law, but it would be very difficult to detect, and I think we ought to have some safeguard.
As I understand Amendment No. 3, put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, it has been slightly misunderstood by the Committee. If that is so, I have no doubt that the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, will consider amending the wording before Report stage. What, as I understand it, he is trying to put forward is that if at some stage the company concerned write to the person whom they have been billing without getting any answer, and say to him. "Did you or did you not order this?",

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then the person will be obliged to reply. At any rate, even if not obliged to reply he should not have the right, if he does not reply, to keep the goods after that time. Here I think what the noble and learned Lord said about reply paid envelopes is absolutely right, and it seems to me that most of these firms will use exactly that form. That, surely, is what is meant by "…unreasonably refuses to inform the sender "—refuses to send back a reply-paid envelope which asks if he has ordered it. It may be that the Amendment as worded would not do this. If so, an Amendment in a slightly different form could be put forward on Report stage. But it does not seem to me very much to ask that companies who are legitimately, and I believe in a worthwhile effort, trading in the mail order area should be able to ask, before they have goods appropriated at the end of six months, that customers should reply to a straight question asking whether or not they have received these goods and whether or not they had ordered them.
LORD PLATT: May I ask the noble Lord the Deputy Chairman of Committees whether we are discussing Amendment No. 3?—because if so, there is something I should like to say about it.
THE DEPUTY CHAIRMAN OF COMMITTEES: Amendment No. 3 seems to have crept into the discussion on Amendment No. 1, but at the appropriate moment Amendment No. 3 will be put from the Chair.
LORD REDESDALE: I am most grateful for all the comments that have been made on this discussion on my first Amendment, and I am also particularly grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont of Whitley, for his remarks primarily concerned with Amendment No. 3. May I say that my remarks are primarily concerned at this moment with Amendment No. 1. I take the arguments that have been put forward, I think most reasonably, by all noble Lords and Baronesses who have spoken, but I felt that the argument had rather crept round to talking about unsolicited goods sent out deliberately. My points were entirely concerned with fraudulent and hoax orders, and the problem of trying to determine whether the goods had been ordered. In spite of their being
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repeatedly billed (this is the very important point Lord Donaldson made), the recipients were not under any obligation to say that they had never ordered the goods in the first place.
I appreciate the noble Baroness's comment that she does not want to impose unreasonable burdens on people who receive unsolicited goods; I accept the feeling in her remark. But I am sure that, reasonably, she will also feel that people who send out goods ought to have some protection, and if in terms they then contact the customer and ask whether the goods have been ordered, they ought reasonably to receive a reply. However, that comes under Amendment No. 3. Coming back to Amendment No. 1, I accept the point. I especially took the Lord Chancellor's remarks about interfering with this Bill in such a way that it would not go through another place, and I am mindful of his warning. However, his point that there are such things as prepaid cards was one that I covered in Second Reading, and I will raise that again in Amendment No. 3. I accept the arguments put forward and therefore I will not press this Amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
5.22 p.m.
LORD JACQUES LORD JACQUES moved Amendment No. 2:
Page 1, line 17, leave out ("six") and insert ("twelve").
The noble Lord said: While there is a good deal of evidence of pressure selling, and of giving gifts of one commodity if another one is ordered, there is very little evidence of goods that are unsolicited being sent to consumers. It is possible that the worst offenders are the charities, with their Christmas cards and similar merchandise. We have to be very careful that this Bill does not give greater opportunities for mischief than the mischief it prevents. I accept the general principle that if a consumer receives unsolicited goods he should, after a lapse of time, be in a position either to use or to dispose of those goods without giving notice to anybody. But in framing legislation to this end we must be very careful that we protect the innocent trader against fraud, hoax and mistake. I am concerned not merely with mail order but with all traders.
Take the question of fraud. As has already been said, it is quite easy for two people to agree that one shall represent himself to be the other and persuade a trader to deliver goods to the other on credit. The trader, if he takes the normal course, will first send his account and then, after a lapse of time, will normally send a reminder. After a further lapse of time he will then send a letter, and if there is still no response he will probably send a representative to visit the consumer—though in these days he will very likely find nobody at home. In due course, the trader will pass the account to his solicitor but the legal process does not commence then. It is almost universal practice for the solicitor first of all to write to the debtor and give him an opportunity to pay. So before the legal process is commenced, the six months have gone.
It is quite true that this is conspiracy, but it is very difficult to prove it because of the difficulty of identification. Thus an innocent trader, with every good reason to believe that he has a claim for payment, finds that he has no claim which can be enforced in law. Exactly the same could apply to a hoax order or to a mistake. In protecting the consumer the least we can do is to protect the innocent trader in a reasonable way. I consider that six months is completely unreasonable, particularly as there have been changes in the last ten or fifteen years in the length of credit trading. Outside of hire-purchase, the normal term of credit used to be six months, but in the last ten or fifteen years, because of the wording of statutory orders, the term is almost universally nine months, and I would plead that we should make it twelve months. This is a slight Amendment which is likely to be accepted by the other place, and it would give the innocent trader the kind of protection which previous speakers have said he requires in certain circumstances. I commend this Amendment to the House.
LORD DONALDSON OF KINGS-BRIDGE: My Lords, I hope the noble Baroness will not accede to this extension of a way out for the trader which has already been extended from four months to six months in the passage of the development of this Bill. If you make a mistake, six months is quite long enough
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to catch up with it, it seems to me. As the noble and learned Lord has said—and I think he is right—in nine cases out of ten if a mistake is made to an honest man (and let us assume that we are 90 per cent. honest), the trader will get it back anyway. People do behave in a perfectly ordinary way, so a mistake is not the most serious risk that a trader faces. The most serious risk is hoax or fraud. In the case of hoax, if you invite business in this way you must, as the noble and learned Lord has said, take the risk it carries. If you are a supermarket with self-service you have higher losses and lower expenses than if you are a service store.
It seems to me that if we were saying, as we wanted to say originally, that three weeks is enough, the noble Lord would have a case. But we have gone up to four months, and from four months to six months, and I cannot see any reason for going further. If the organisation is such that it cannot get in touch within six months I do not think it will be any more likely to do so in twelve months. I think the noble Baroness should resist this Amendment as a weakening of the Bill and one that might have an ill-effect in its return to another place.
BARONESS ELLIOT OF HARWOOD: I have listened to the discussion on the Amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Jacques, with great interest. If I were a trader and I had not managed to find out in six months whether the order was a hoax or was genuine I should be a very inefficient trader. I imagine that most traders receive payment long before that if the orders are genuine, but if they are hoax or unsolicited orders they do not want to give them any more than six months. It seems to me that six months is a generous allocation of time.
In some of the correspondence I received about this Bill people were urging that three weeks, a month or six weeks was sufficient time in order to catch these wrongdoers, and I know from the discussion in another place and in the Committee that a period of four months was originally suggested and finally it was agreed to be six months. I am perfectly certain that the sponsors of the Bill in the other place would never accept an extension to twelve months for these operations to take place. That seems to me much too long, and I cannot see

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why any good and efficient business should not be able to get their payment, if it is a genuine order, in six months. If it is a hoax order surely a firm must be able to find out in six months, which is quite a long time. I am afraid that the noble Lord must take it that I will not accept this Amendment. I know that the sponsors of the Bill in another place would not accept it either. I think it would be wrong to alter the period of six months to any longer, period at all.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: I am not quite so neutral about this Amendment as I was about the first one, because I think that ultimately the Committee has to make up its mind whether it accepts the principle of the Bill. I do not believe that twelve months is really compatible, in realistic terms, with the principle of the Bill. What you are really doing is to say that somewhere, in some small house in a line of cottages or houses in a working class district, an article of some value has to be kept for as long as a year undamaged before the occupier can treat it as his own. I can quite see that there are people who say that he ought to send it back at once, or ought never to treat as his own what does not belong to him. But if you are going to accept the principle of the Bill, it seems to me utterly unrealistic to imagine the situation in which people would keep these goods undamaged and unused in a working class house for twelve months without anything happening to them. It may be all right in theory or in law, but it does not seem to me to have any reality.
The only other thing I would say to the noble Lord who proposed the Amendment is that I think he underestimates the efficiency of the county courts. If the facts of a case are that a mail order firm receives an order relating to a real address, can prove delivery to it and a sequence of six bills unanswered and unpaid over the period of two or three months, difficulty in getting into contact with the occupier but ultimately serving him with process, and the occupier comes along and says, "I never ordered the goods", it may be that the county court judge would have wit enough to disbelieve him, especially if he were in fact in bad faith. I do not think that one should always assume that judges are fools.
LORD REDESDALE: I have listened to the argument of Lord Jacques with great sympathy. However, I feel that if notice is in fact obtainable that the goods were not ordered, then it does not really make much difference whether the period is one of six of 12 months. I think six months could be a reasonable time, provided you are able to determine that you have had some response from the recipient of the goods. I cannot support the noble Lord on this partcular point. I have sympathy with the noble Baroness, provided, of course, that you get some response from the recipient of the goods. I am afraid, therefore, I cannot support this Amendment.
LORD JACQUES: I am quite unrepentant, but I think more of my head than to put it up against a stone wall. I beg leave to withdraw the Amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
5.33 p.m.
LORD REDESDALE LORD REDESDALE moved Amendment No. 3:
Page 2, line 12, at end insert—
"(5) Nothing in this section shall apply to any recipient who unreasonably refuses to inform the sender that he has not solicited the goods."
The noble Lord said: I beg to move Amendment No. 3. Some of the points have already been covered by the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont of Whitley, and also by the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor. Despite the remarks of the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor, on this particular point I am rather more adamant in moving the Amendment. I have already covered the points regarding hoax and fraudulent orders, and I will certainly not weary your Lordships again after such a short period of time.
If Clause 1(2)(a) had been deleted, then the recipient would have had to reply. As I tried to say, I wished to be as reasonable as I possibly could; therefore I did not press that particular Amendment. However, I feel that it is not unreasonable after, say, the second or third request to recipients of goods they not having replied, to ask whether they have ordered the goods. If a recipient then replies by the prepaid reply card—which the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor has already covered, and which I covered on Second Reading—then I feel it would not be unreasonable

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to ask that this be filled in so that, for instance, prepaid reply labels could be sent to the recipient of the goods.
I wish on this point to appear all the way along as reasonable as possible, and I am putting forward this Amendment because I feel that it could be acceptable to another place without holding up or endangering the Bill. Therefore, I should like noble Lords to consider this Amendment very closely. I feel that it is a reasonable Amendment, and that we are not asking for an unreasonable effort on the part of recipients of goods should they not yet have replied. As it stands at the moment, they have no need to reply at all. All I am asking is that at this stage they should reply or, as I have put it, not unreasonably refuse to reply.
I appreciate that I have used the word "unreasonable" many times, and I have a slight worry that perhaps the use of the word "unreasonable" in this Amendment may not meet with the approval of some noble and learned Lords. However, I have seen the word "unreasonable" used a great many times lately in legislation, and therefore I feel that I am not pushing my luck too far in using it on this occasion but that I am acting reasonably. Therefore, I should like to ask your Lordships to consider this point, and to support my Amendment.
LORD DONALDSON OF KINGS-BRIDGE: My first reaction to this Amendment is that it really is, in a sense, creating a crime where the law, as it stands, covers the situation. It seems to me that if you are sent an expensive book and somebody rings you up and says, "Have you had the book, because we think it may have been sent by mistake?" and you refuse to reply, this is clearly fraudulent. I should have thought that the noble and learned Lord really covered this point in his suggestion about the county courts, and that if somebody is resisting the truth the law is usually able to deal with this.
If we are to have something of this kind, I think it would have to be very much more clearly defined. I do not think that one is obliged to reply to a bill for something one has not ordered
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or knows nothing about, nor do I think that one is obliged to send back a reply paid postcard. I do think one is obliged to answer a telephone, or to answer the door. I think that these are quite different things. I stand absolutely on the right of the private individual to be left alone; and if people want to sell—and I am all in favour of high-pressure selling—they take certain risks with it. There seems to me to be a very small risk involved. I know that the mail order people do not think so; but I believe it to be so, and I should be very sorry to see the Bill weakened in this way. I believe—and the noble and learned Lord will no doubt reassure us—that the law, as it stands now, will go most of the way to cover this point.
LORD BEAUMONT OF WHITLEY: May I ask how the noble Lord defends the theory that there is an obligation to answer the phone, and an obligation to answer the door, but that there is not an obligation to send back a reply paid postcard, particularly when he says that he stands for the right of the person to be left alone? He is left far more alone by a reply paid postcard than by a telephone call, or a personal call.
LORD DONALDSON OF KINGS-BRIDGE: Clearly this is a philosophical point. It seems to me that to answer a telephone means that you are already in communication with somebody, and by opening the door you are already in communication with somebody. But if you receive a paper through the post you are not obliged to read it; and very often I do not.
BARONESS ELLIOT OF HARWOOD: I have listened to the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, and I am afraid I am quite unconvinced by his remarks. I do not understand how it is that mail order firms—and the noble Lord is clearly speaking for them—do not know where they send their goods. If they are rash enough to send them anywhere, they must surely have some record of where they go.
LORD REDESDALE: If the noble Baroness will give way, may I say that it is not a question of where they have been sent, but of whether or not they have been ordered by a particular person.

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That is a totally different situation from the one the noble Baroness is describing.
BARONESS ELLIOT OF HARWOOD: Yes, I quite agree. But the firms must surely know. If somebody orders something from a shop or from any other establishment, there must be some record of the fact that it has been ordered. But I am talking about goods that have not been ordered and I can see no reason why, if they descend on an unsuspecting person, that person should pay any attention at all to them. That seems to be the whole point of the Bill.
LORD REDESDALE: I am sorry to interrupt again. The point is that if a company has an order with a signature on it, it has every reason to believe that those goods have been ordered. That is the argument that I am making. It is not the argument which the noble Baroness is putting forward; it is different.
BARONESS ELLIOT OF HARWOOD: As I understand the Amendment, it would mean that anybody who unreasonably refused to inform a sender would be prosecuted. But I do not see why a sender should expect to have any reply in respect of goods which have not been solicited or ordered. Therefore I cannot see that the Amendment would help in any way at all; it would simply weaken the Bill. I want to make the Bill as strong as possible, to help a person who is pestered by people who send goods which are not wanted. Admittedly it does not happen very often—it happens less since the Bill has been through another place; I hope very much that the Bill will pass through your Lordships' House—and people are getting much more tactful and nervous than they were before. But information was given in Committee in another place about certain firms—and I have the names of one or two firms with me.
The real point is that we want to be quite sure that this Bill will stop this disagreeable and bad practice, which the reputable mail order firms certainly want to stop. The reputable firms will not be at all indisposed by the Bill. The ones who will be caught will be those who are trying to "pull a fast one" on unsuspecting recipients of goods. It would be a great mistake to weaken the Bill in any
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way, and if the noble Lord chooses to press the Amendment I will oppose it.
LORD PLATT: I should like to support very strongly what has been said, and would remind the Committee of what the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor has recently said to us. The Committee have to make up their minds whether they accept the principle of this Bill. It seems to me that many of the arguments are much more concerned with protecting the mail order business, which I quite agree is a perfectly reputable business in the hands of most of the people who are running such firms, than with trying to stop this pernicious practice of dumping goods on a person and then trying to make him pay for them.
In answer to the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont of Whitley, I would say that there is a considerable difference between not replying to somebody who asks a question on the telephone and not getting out a pen—which some people do not even possess—reading a document which you do not understand, and trying to fill up a postcard which you also do not understand. I am sure that, like me, the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont, must know of quite a large number of old ladies who live alone and who absolutely dread all these forms and the things that they have to do. There is no difficulty at all for us in filling up a reply-paid postcard—though there is nothing in the Bill that says that it has to be a reply-paid postcard—and posting it, but to many people there is quite a lot of difficulty. I hope that we shall not weaken the Bill by passing this Amendment.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: May I again say a word or two, because I think I ought to utter a caution about some of the remarks that have been made. I am afraid that, in a rather disorderly fashion, I said that I did not think that this Amendment was a "starter". That is still my approach to it, because I do not know how the courts would set about deciding whether a mere omission to answer a letter amounted to a refusal, and, if it did amount to a refusal, on what principles the courts could be expected to decide whether the refusal was reasonable or unreasonable. If noble Lords in this Chamber cannot

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decide that unanimously, as from the discussion which has taken place they obviously cannot, it seems to me rather difficult to ask a county court judge to do it "by his own certain knowledge and mere motion", as they say at the beginning of a Parliament. Therefore, I do not think that this Amendment is a "starter".
But I should like to utter a word or two of caution about what has fallen from some noble Lords who are opposed to the Amendment. In the first place again I do not agree with the morals of the noble Lord, Lord Donaldson of Kingsbridge. I think they are most immoral. May I tell the Committee—I hope that I shall not embarrass the gentleman, because it affects someone other than myself—that, as your Lordships know, I have the unusual name "Ouintin Hogg", under which I have lived for a great part of my life. Curiously enough, there is somebody, either remotely related to me or not related at all—I am not quite sure which—with exactly the same name, except that he spells his name with an "e" instead of an "i". He patronises many of the same tradesmen, and his wife patronises many of the same tradesmen as my wife. So it is not at all uncommon for me to receive bills for goods which I have never ordered.
This was done without any kind of malpractice on the part of the tradesmen, who simply did not believe that there were two people of the same name. Indeed, I used to get the lady's mail and she used to get mine for many years until I ceased to use the name. It never occurred, I think, either to her or to me, not to put things right. It would have been highly immoral on our part not to tell the tradesmen that they had made a mistake, or not to send on the mail which they had sent to the wrong address. I simply do not understand the noble Lord, Lord Donaldson, who seems to say that there is no obligation of any kind to behave like a decent person.
LORD DONALDSON OF KINGS-BRIDGE: May I reassure the noble and learned Lord that I have a namesake in a very distinguished and learned position, Mr. Justice Donaldson, and he and I have actually exchanged share certificates. What I am against is putting an
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obligation on somebody. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Devlin, has written a book about it, which was replied to by Mr. Herbert Hart. I am against involving morals in the simplicity of the law. If there is a duty, it should be an absolutely simple one and not a moral one, as I think the noble and learned Lord will agree.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: I think that I disagree with the noble Lord's jurisprudence almost as much as I disagree with his morals, but it would take me a long time to explain why. So may I merely tell him why I thought it right to interpose that word of warning. The reason was closely related to what I said in answer to the previous Amendment. If, by any chance, a perfectly innocent recipient of bills for goods he has not ordered, and perhaps has not received, chooses' to ignore the correspondence from a firm which thinks he has ordered them and for which it has billed him often enough, especially if a reply-paid form accompanies the bill, asking, "Have you ordered the goods and did you get them?" the chances are that the court will infer that the recipient is telling lies when he goes into court later and says that he never ordered them.
The advice which the noble Lord, Lord Donaldson, gives, although it may be perfectly in accordance with the letter of a theoretical law, will not have very much sympathy in the county court. So I would advise your Lordships not to agree with the noble Lord's morals or jurisprudence, or to take his legal advice. You would be very ill-advised not to reply to letters of that kind. One of the reasons why I think that my noble friend Lord Redesdale is complaining too vigorously about the resistance to the Amendment is because to some extent it is unnecessary.
VISCOUNT HANWORTH: There are two points here. This Amendment undobutedly weakens the Bill. If one postulates some very unscrupulous firm which may grow up, it is perfectly possible to imagine that a recipient of goods will not keep a copy of his reply—it is very likely that he will not do so when, usually, people do not have typewriters—and the firm will simply deny that they have ever received a reply. The position of the person who received the goods would be very materially weakened. I

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would again emphasise that this is a case of caveat vendor. It is really up to the firm to assess the risks it is running, and to take reasonable ones, but not to complain if it does not know where its goods have gone.
LORD REDESDALE: I am most grateful for the comments which have been made, but, although I have been accused of overstating the case, I tried to put it as reasonably as possible. I fail to understand why it is too much of a burden for somebody, if he has received, say, three requests, to fill in a reply-paid card which could go out with the goods right at the beginning. Surely it is no great problem just to put a tick to say, "I did not order these goods; would you please collect them?" think that is a reasonable request, and I am afraid I wish to press this Amendment.
On Question, Amendment negatived.
Clause 1 agreed to.
Clause 2 agreed to.
Clause 3 [Directory entries]:
5.51 p.m.
LORD MOUNTEVANS LORD MOUNTEVANS moved Amendment No. 4:
Leave out Clause 3 and insert the following new clause—
Directory entries
"3.—(1) A person shall not be liable to make any payment, and shall be entitled to recover any payment made by him, by way of charge for including or arranging for the inclusion in a directory of an entry relating to that person or his trade or business, unless—

(a) there has been signed by him or with his authority a note complying with this section of his agreement to the charge, and, before the note was signed, a copy of it was supplied, for retention by him, to him or to a person acting with his authority; or

(b) there has been signed by him or by a person acting with his authority an order for the entry given on his or such person's own order form or letter heading.

(2) A person shall be guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction with a fine not exceeding £400 if, in a case where a note of agreement to a charge or an order is required by subsection (1) above, he demands payment, or asserts a present or prospective right to payment, of the charge or any part of it, without knowing or having reasonable cause to believe that a note of agreement or order in conformity with subsection (1) above has been duly signed."
The noble Lord said: This Bill deals with unsolicited goods and services, in
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this clause relating particularly to directory entries. While welcoming this provision to curtail the activities of the publishers of dubious trade directories, I am sure it was never the intention that it should apply to those cases where of their own volition persons place orders with an established and reputable directory. Clause 3(1) as drafted would, however, seem to place the bona fide publisher in the position of being unable to accept an order given to him by an advertiser unless he then sent to that advertiser a note of agreement for him to sign and return. Clearly, this would not only be nonsensical but would involve both publisher and advertiser in additional bother and unnecessary cost.
It is often the practice of advertisers, either themselves or through their advertising agency, to send publishers an order on their own order form or letter heading for an entry or display advertisement in their directories, specifying the particular requirements. Indeed, in many cases the larger advertisers and advertising agencies will recognise only orders given on their own official order forms. In such cases, no note of agreement, as is required under the Bill, would have been signed. The logical process would be for the publisher to acknowledge the order and to proceed to fulfil it. However, under subsections (1) and (2) of Clause 3 of the Bill as they now stand, and in the absence of a signed note of agreement, it would seem that the advertiser may be able to avoid payment in respect of the order he had placed with the publisher, and that the publisher himself would become liable to a fine if he rendered an account in respect of the order which he had received. It seems that the position could be met by a simple amendment to this clause, which would exclude orders placed by an advertiser or his agent given on their own order form or letter heading, without in any way weakening the provisions of the Bill or detracting from its intentions. I beg to move.
BARONESS ELLIOT OF HARWOOD: The Amendment printed on the Marshalled List says,
"Leave out Clause 3 and insert the following new clause …"
Then it sets out two subsections, (1) and (2), but omits subsections (3) and (4), which are essential to the Bill and which

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appear in Clause 3 of the Bill as at present drafted. I would therefore say to the noble Lord that I cannot accept the form in which the Amendment appears on the Marshalled List, because I cannot agree to omit subsections (3) and (4) as well as accepting an amendment to Clause 3, subsections (1) and (2).
On the question of subsections (1) and (2), I agree that there are difficulties in connection with trying to stop those people who produce or pretend to produce directories which are in fact entirely bogus. It is very important that the Bill should definitely deal with such people. As I think I said during the Second Reading debate, the amount of money involved is quite considerable. The hoax directory people are estimated to obtain something in the region of £1 million a year from unsuspecting people, the whole thing being completely bogus from start to finish. Therefore, we want very much to be able to deal with those people. On the other hand, it is perfectly true that there are a number of well-known directories. I can think, for instance, of Kelly's Directory, and there are others of which we all know. In fact I have only to-day received a letter from the publishers of a law list, obviously an extremely reputable firm, who ask that there should be some amendment which would enable these perfectly legitimate and honest-to-God directory publishers not to be burdened with having to do what is suggested in subsections (3) and (4).
I should therefore be quite prepared to look at this clause again to try to find words which would enable those directories which are entirely reputable, and to which many of us subscribe, to be exempted from the stringent methods by which we want to try to catch the hoax directories. But it has been pointed out to me that, in subsection (1)(b) of the Amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Mountevans, the words,
"an order for the entry given on his or such person's own order form or letter heading".
may be very difficult to interpret in law. What in fact is" his …own order form"? Could it be a form simply typed? Could it be a piece of paper with a letter heading simply typed on it? It may be entirely bogus under those circumstances. One knows, of course, the
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letter headings of well-known firms which are registered as companies. Should there be some wording of some kind in paragraph (b) which would define in some way, or make more clear, what the words "own order form or letter heading" really mean, so that if in fact people were using bogus or hoax letter headings one would be able to identify them?
I will look at this clause again and discuss with the noble Lord the possibility of re-drafting those sections of it which enable the perfectly reputable directories to be recognised, and of finding some form of words which would enable us to alter the Bill in order to bring in that for which the noble Lord's Amendment is asking; namely, that the real, honest-to-God directories should not be penalised in the work they do, which is very valuable work for the whole community.
LORD PLATT: I do not quite understand this Amendment. It may be that I am particularly stupid about it, or it may be that other noble Lords do not understand it, either. It seems to me that in paragraph (b) of the Amendment there is no reference at all to the person having to agree to payment; he has only to order the directory entry. Luckily, I am not confronted with this difficult situation of people wanting to put my name in a directory and wanting to charge me for it. But is it not the case that they write to you and that you answer saying, "Put my name in"; then suddenly they charge you ten guineas for it? How does subsection (b) cope with that situation?
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: Perhaps I could be helpful. I do not think that the noble Lord, Lord Platt, is entirely on to the particular evil which my noble friend is concerned to combat. The truth about the directories that my noble friend is attacking is that they do not exist at all—that is the essence of the matter. Somebody asks you to have your name put in the directory. Often they come round to see you because they do not very much like to have an address. The fact is that they get money for the entry in the directory but no directory ever appears. That is why I said on Second Reading that it is in any case illegal. This is really a safeguard, to catch them perhaps in advance.
The Amendment clearly will not do, for the reason that my noble friend has

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given. Paragraph (a) talks about, "a note complying with this section", and when you look to see what the note complies with you do not find anything. So that is that. I suggest that my noble friend who proposed the Amendment should get in touch with my noble friend who is sponsoring the Bill; and that both should get in touch with the Department of Trade and Industry so that something agreeable could be finalised before Report stage. I think that that is the best way of solving this conundrum.
LORD MOUNTEVANS: I am grateful to my noble and learned friend for his remarks and also for those of my noble friend Lady Elliot. I am quite sure that the appropriate course would be to improve the drafting. In view of this and of the undertaking given by my noble friend Lady Elliot to look into the matter again, I beg leave to withdraw the Amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Clause 3 agreed to.
Clause 4 [Unsolicited publications]:
BARONESS ELLIOT OF HARWOOD BARONESS ELLIOT OF HARWOOD moved Amendment No. 5:
Page 3, line 31, after ("illustrates") insert ("human").
The noble Baroness said: Your Lordships will remember that on the Second Reading we had a discussion on Clause 4 and I drew attention to the fact that its drafting was not satisfactory. Undoubtedly there are many difficulties about it. Since the Second Reading debate I have been in touch with various People and they have made suggestions which are incorporated in Amendments Nos. 5 and 6 which stand in my name. My attention was drawn to the fact that in the agricultural industry, and particularly in the dairy industry, it is very important that there should be no interference with artificial insemination and techniques of that kind dealing with animals. It has been suggested that if the word "human" were inserted, this would exclude the animal world.
The question then arises as to how we can limit such prosecutions as there might be in connection with advertising by associations such as marriage guidance councils, family planning associa-
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tions; with matters such as the supplement published by Which? on contraception; chemists who have bona fide information which they wish to circulate; medical information which is entirely bona fide and which people would want to know. These should be allowed under the Bill. What we want to stop is the undesirable dissemination of pornographic literature through a wide-ranging mailing list. This material is posted indiscriminately and is the real cause of the anxiety.
It has been suggested that the way to do this is to say:
"A prosecution for an offence under this section shall not, in England and Wales, be instituted except by, or with the consent of, the Director of Public Prosecutions".
In other words, it would be impossible for people in any of the organisations I have mentioned to be prosecuted for using a legitimate method of giving information which is really wanted on this subject; and that anybody who tries to make a prosecution—which would be a frivolous prosecution—would be unable to do so, because, clearly, the Director of Public Prosecutions would not allow this to take place.
I hope that the Amendment as redrafted safeguard the legitimate organisations and yet will stop the dissemination of very undesirable advertisements or literature that has been going on in the past. Therefore, I hope that the Committee will accept these two Amendments as being the best method of dealing with this particular difficulty. I beg to move.
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
BARONESS ELLIOT OF HARWOOD: I beg to move Amendment No. 6 formally.
Amendment moved—
Page 3, line 35, at end insert—
"(3) A prosecution for an offence under this section shall not, in England and Wales, be instituted except by, or with the consent of, the Director of Public Prosecutions."—(Baroness Elliot of Harwood.)
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
Clause 4, as amended, agreed to.
Remaining clauses agreed to.
House resumed: Bill reported with the Amendments.

ANIMALS BILL [H.L.]
6.9 p.m.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, I beg to move that the Commons Amendments be now considered.
Moved, That the Commons Amendments be now considered.—(The Lord Chancellor.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.

COMMONS AMENDMENT
[References are to Bill (72) as first printed for the Commons]
[No. 1]
Clause 7, page 4, line 25, leave out "twenty-one" and insert "fourteen".
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, I beg to move that this House doth agree with the Commons in their Amendment No. 1. This Amendment deals with the period of time that a person who arrests (if I may use that term) or detains an animal which is doing damage on his property, having strayed, must keep it before he can dispose of it. We said 21 days. I think the original proposal had been 14 days, and we thought that perhaps that was unfair in country districts to the true owner. Another place, in its wisdom, restored 14 days, because it was pointed out that for most people in urban areas it might be inconvenient to keep an animal for a longer length of time. It is a matter of judgment and opinion. Speaking for myself, I am perfectly happy to agree with the Commons in their said Amendment.
Moved, That this House doth agree with the Commons in the said Amendment.—(The Lord Chancellor.)
LORD GARDINER: My Lords, I hope that the House will so agree. To save my speaking again on the later Amendment, may I say that I think the fact that the Bill comes back from the other place with only two small Amendments is a tribute both to the Bill as originally drawn by the Law Commission and also to the work that your Lordships' House did on the Bill.
On Question, Motion agreed to.

COMMONS AMENDMENT
[No. 2.]
Clause 11, page 6, line 22, leave out "ditching" and insert "the construction of any obstacle designed to prevent animals from straying"
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, I beg to move that the House doth agree with the Commons in their Amendment No. 2. This, to use a piece of new and, to me, just legislative jargon, is what I am told is a missed consequential. Perhaps I may just explain that. Your Lordships will remember that during the passage of the Bill through our House we changed Clause 8, and the Amendment the Commons have inserted—in their case on Report stage—is to catch up with the Amendment, the consequences of which were not fully apprehended. I can explain the matter at greater length, but I think it quite unnecessary for me to do so. I beg to move.
Moved, That this House doth agree with the Commons in the said Amendment.—(The Lord Chancellor.)
LORD DAVIES OF LEEK: My Lords, as someone who knows a bit about ditching, may I put a question to the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor? How does one distinguish between fencing and ditching? Any countryman present will know that one of the great arts of the country areas is fencing and ditching. I could be intending to do a hedge, and the fence could be at the bottom of the hedge so that I cannot get at the hedge. Suppose, while trying to get at the hedge, I break my leg in the ditch that I have to build properly before I get there. I do not think that this is wisdom; whoever left out "ditching" does not understand what hedging and ditching means.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, there are two short answers to the noble Lord's question. The first is that, unless he has four legs, the Bill does not affect him at all. The second is that the reason we left out ditching was precisely the reason that he suggests.
On Question, Motion agreed to.

EGGS (GUARANTEED PRICES) ORDER 1971
6.14 p.m.
LORD DENHAM LORD DENHAM rose to move, That the Egggs (Guaranteed Prices) Order 1971, be approved. The noble Lord said: My Lords, I think it would be for the convenience of your Lordships if I spoke also to the Eggs (Protection of Guarantees) Order 1971 which immediately follows this present Order. These two Orders give statutory backing to the new arrangements for the egg subsidy which were announced in the recent Annual Review White Paper. These arrangements are intended to cover the interval between the demise of the British Egg Marketing Board and the ending of the subsidy in 1974.
Comparing the new Guaranteed Prices Order with the Order it replaces, one sees that the main changes are that the subsidy will now be payable to producers of eggs instead of to the Egg Board, and will be expressed as the difference between the guaranteed price and an "estimated producer price" instead of the difference between the guaranteed price and an "indicator price". This change is necessary because the indicator price was defined as the price the Board would receive in a market which was neither over-supplied nor under-supplied. Under the new arrangements, as under the old, eggs must be tested and found to be of first quality (or dirty, but otherwise first quality) if they are to be eligible for subsidy; but whereas under the old system the eggs had to be packed by the Board, now they may either be packed by the producer himself, if he is a registered packer, or be sold by the producer to a registered packer.
Apart from minor redrafting to remove references to the Egg Board the new Protection of Guarantees Order resembles the old one. The producer who sells eggs to a registered packer will receive his subsidy automatically at the same time as he receives payment from the packer for the eggs. The packer will be paying out the subsidy to producers under the terms of a contract with the appropriate agricultural Minister. The "mechanics" of the subsidy arrangements for 1971–72 have been agreed upon with the farmers' unions, and I am
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sure that the industry will find they have been kept as simple and convenient as possible. My Lords, I beg to move.
Moved, That the Eggs (Guaranteed Prices) Order 1971, be approved.—(Lord Denham.)
LORD BESWICK: My Lords, noble Lords on this side of the House are ready to agree to these two Orders. I suppose it is fair to say that they follow changes announced by the previous Administration. Our approach to the levy system was somewhat different from that displayed by the present Administration. We thought that we should be rather more cautious and should try out the possibilities of a levy system as against support prices; and I am sorry that the present Administration appear to be committed to a wholehearted, sweeping extension of this way of dealing with commodities. We were against dogma in agricultural policy, and I regret the readiness with which the present Administration are adopting, or appear to be adopting, their own dogma to commodities other than eggs.
I am not certain that the system which we are now bringing into operation, phasing out the egg subsidies, really justifies a wholehearted extension of the levy system. Prices that are now being paid are higher. The noble Lord spoke about quality; I doubt whether there are many housewives in the country who would accept that for the higher prices they are getting improved quality. I find in two or three cases out of ten that when I take an egg out of the refrigerator my fingers go through the shell, so thin-shelled is the product of the battery hen. I am not sure that I can blame that on the present Administration or the noble Lord, Lord Denham, but it is something which ought to be borne in mind by those whom one would expect to benefit under the new system which the noble Lord is proposing to introduce.
LORD HOY: My Lords, may I ask one question regarding the Interpretation Clause? I do not know whether it is a repeat of the old one, but I see that it states:
"'certified' in relation to cluck eggs means certified to be of first quality or dirty but otherwise of first quality by a person appointed by the Minister for the purpose."

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I should like to know whether the noble Lord can give us any information about who this person is to be. If one turns to page 2 of the Order one sees that "duck eggs" means,
"eggs in shell laid by domestic ducks"
and they have to be laid in the United Kingdom by these domestic ducks. That is made perfectly clear by the Order. It also states:
"'first quality' in relation to duck eggs, means fresh and free from taint, the shells being clean and unstained, sound and of good texture and shape, the contents being free from visible blemish and discolouration, the yolk being central and translucent and the white being translucent with the air space not exceeding one-quarter of an inch in depth."
I should like to know who is the person who is going to be appointed to look at these eggs to find whether the yolk is floating about in the middle, in a translucent state with an air space a quarter of an inch in depth. I am sure that your Lordships would be delighted if the noble Lord could give us that information.
LORD DENHAM: My Lords, I should like to thank the noble Lord, Lord Beswick, and the noble Lord, Lord Hoy, for their comments on these Orders. I may tell the noble Lord, Lord Beswick, that we do not expect the prices of eggs to rise unduly as a result of this Order. I take note of what he said about the quality: the maintenance of quality is very much in the mind of my right honourable friend. I am afraid that I cannot follow the noble Lord, Lord Hoy, in the lyrical quality of his remarks about duck eggs.
LORD HOY: My Lords, I do not want to interrupt the noble Lord but I would point out that the lyric quality was not in my remarks but in the Order. I would only ask the noble Lord to tell me what the lyrics mean.
LORD DENHAM: My Lords, perhaps it was the beatutiful voice in which the noble Lord read them. One thing the noble Lord mentioned was the air space in eggs. Of course, he will know that the amount of air space is one of the means of telling the freshness of an egg. I will not go through all of the noble Lord's points. I am afraid I cannot give him at the moment the names of the
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persons who would be appointed to certify duck eggs but my right honourable friend would see to this. But I feel sure that if my right honourable friend reads the comments of the noble Lord, it will be very much to his advantage.
On Question, Motion agreed to.

EGGS (PROTECTION OF GUARANTEES) ORDER 1971
LORD DENHAM: My Lords, I beg to move, That the Eggs (Protection of Guarantees) Order 1971, be approved.
Moved, That the Eggs (Protection of Guarantees) Order, 1971, be approved.—(Lord Denham.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.

AMENDMENTS OF THE POTATO MARKETING SCHEME 1955, AS AMENDED
6.22 p.m.
LORD DENHAM LORD DENHAM rose to move, That the Draft Amendments of the Potato Marketing Scheme, 1955, as amended, laid before the House on April 6 be approved. The noble Lord said: My Lords, the draft amendments to the Potato Marketing Scheme which are now before the House would increase the powers of the Potato Marketing Board. A very important function of the Board is to co-operate with the Government in its policy for maincrop potatoes. This co-operation takes two main forms—influence over acreage planted and support buying of potatoes in years of surplus.
The Government, after consulting the Board and the Farmers' Unions, decides what acreage of potatoes is needed each year to meet demand. The Board then fixes a quota acreage for each registered producer. If yields were stable, there would be no further problem, but because they vary so widely this acreage arrangement is not enough to prevent surpluses. When there is a surplus (this year the surplus is nearly 1 million tons) the Board buys potatoes from growers and either re-sells them for stock feed or, if it does not do this, pays the grower compensation. The Government contributes towards the cost of this market support. At present it is paying two-thirds of the cost, but there is to be a change

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which would increase the Government's normal share to two-thirds on the first 200,000 tons for which the Board contract and three-quarters of the remaining cost. The details of this have still to be agreed with the Board. The Board collects contributions from growers. The ordinary contribution is paid on a grower's quota acreage, and is currently £3 per acre. If he plants more, he pays this £3 and an extra £25 excess acreage contribution in addition.
In May, 1970, the Board submitted to my right honourable friends amendments to the Potato Marketing Scheme. My right honourable friends provided an opportunity for objections to be made, and a public inquiry was held. The commissioner who conducted the public inquiry reported to my right honourable friends in February this year. In the light of the objections and the report, my right honourable friends modified the Board's amendments. The draft now before your Lordships incorporates the amendments as so modified. The most important concerns the ordinary contribution. The wording is complicated, but the purpose is to set limits on the rate the Board may fix. Each grower would be told what contribution he had to pay in any year. The limits are as follows.
First, for 1971 the contribution could not be higher than £4.03 per acre. For later years, the maximum would be limited in two ways. First, the figure of £4.03 would be increased in proportion to changes in the guaranteed price and the average yield of potatoes. This means, for example, that the Board would not be allowed to fix for any year a contribution which was more than 6 per cent. higher than the contribution actually payable for the previous year, unless the guaranteed price and the average yield had changed in such a way as to bring the maximum up to this level. But also, even if this formula allowed an increase of more than 6 per cent., the Board could still impose such an increase only if the producers were consulted and they accepted the higher contribution. They would do this if they did not request a vote on it, or alternatively, if a vote were taken and a two-thirds majority of those voting were in favour.
The second purpose of the draft amendments before the House is to give
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the Board power to relieve a grower of liability to pay the ordinary contribution in exceptional circumstances—for example, if flooding prevented him from harvesting his potatoes. At present, the Board can give this relief only for the excess acreage contribution, which is payable on acreage planted by a grower over and above his quota for any year. Finally, the draft amendments would fix lower and more convenient maximum charges for supply by the Board of certain documents—for example, extracts from the register of producers or copies of the Board's balance sheets.
So far, my Lords, I have spoken about the draft amendments as they are now before the House. The Board made one more proposal which my right honourable friends were not prepared to recommend this House to approve. Under this proposal, the whole basis of fixing the ordinary contribution could have been changed if a poll of registered producers had been taken and two-thirds of those voting were in favour of the change. My right honourable friends rejected this proposal because they considered that such an important change in the Board's powers ought not to be made unless the full procedure laid down in the Agricultural Marketing Act were completed. My right honourable friends are satisfied that the Board should have the additional powers which these draft amendments would give to it, and would make responsible use of them. I therefore recommend your Lordships to approve the draft Amendments. I beg to move.
Moved, That the Draft Amendments of the Potato Marketing Scheme 1955, as amended, laid before the House on April 6 be approved.—(Lord Denham.)
LORD CHAMPION: My Lords, I am of course a supporter of marketing schemes for agricultural produce, and I regard the Marketing Acts 1931 and 1949 as very great steps forward in the selling of the products of our farms. But I can well understand the feelings of frustration and annoyance with such schemes when producers are met with the sort of jargon to be found in the draft Amendments now before the House. Even as one used to reacting Bills and Acts of Parliament I found the amendment to sub-paragraph (3) of paragraph 84 of this

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Scheme complicated and difficult, in comparison with which the existing subparagraph is a marvel of clarity.
I invite the House to look at all this stuff about "the actual rate", "the average yield", "the formula rate", and the multiplication of the formula rate by the guaranteed price and by
"the total of the average yields for the three previous calendar years divided by the total of the average yields for the first three of the four previous calendar years"
with
"the actual rate of ordinary contribution for any calendar year"
not to exceed
"by more than six per cent. such rate for the preceding calendar year unless any such actual rate, not exceeding the formula rate for that calendar year, has been approved on a poll of registered producers, …"
and so on, and so on.
I am grateful to the noble Lord for having explained this, and I hope that his explanation will be available to every egg producer—I beg your Lordships' pardon; I mean potato producer: I am getting my fish and chips and eggs mixed up a bit. I wish the potato producers who happen to like to work things out for themselves, and do not take for granted the words and calculations of the Marketing Board, joy of that paragraph, but confidently predict a massive increase in the sale of ice-bags for overheated brows. This really is jargon of the worst possible sort. Surely it should be possible to produce words which would be understandable to the men who will produce the potatoes and will have to pay the levy to the Marketing Board.
Apart from all that, as I understand it, these draft Amendments have been through the mill of publication, receipt of representations and a public inquiry, and in the circumstances I agree with the noble Lord that this House should approve the Motion that is now before it, deplorable though I find the jargon in which the Order is couched.
LORD DENHAM: My Lords, I should like to thank the Champion, for his Order. I can assure sure that his other to the appropriate quarter.
On Question, Motion agreed to

FAMILY INCOME SUPPLEMENTS (COMPUTATION) REGULATIONS 1971
6.30 p.m.
LORD ABERDARE LORD ABERDARE rose to move, That the Draft Family Income Supplements (Computation) Regulations 1971, laid before the House on March 25, be approved. The noble Lord said: My Lords, your Lordships will remember the debate we had last December on the Family Income Supplements Bill, which has meanwhile received the Royal Assent. The scheme embodied in it is really very simple. Weekly supplements are to be paid to families with children if the head of the family is in full-time work and the family income is below certain levels, which are provided for in Section 2 of the Act. The supplement will amount to half the difference between the family income and the prescribed income levels, subject to a maximum.
During our earlier debate I drew attention to the provision for raising the income levels, or "prescribed amounts" as they are called. By these draft Regulations we propose to raise them from £15 to £18 in the case of a family with one child. The amount will rise as before by £2 for each additional child, to £20 when there are two children, £22 when there are three and so on. The Regulations also raise the maximum payment prescribed in Section 3 of the Act from £3 to £4. There is no change in the other provisions of Section 3, which means that as before no benefit will be payable if the income is 20p or less below the prescribed level.
My Lords, it was clear from our debate last year that support for the policy now embodied in the Act was something less than unanimous. It is in some respects a novel policy and there is plenty of room for different views about it. Noble Lords opposite made no bones about their dislike of it, though they were ready to debate it constructively and did not seek to obstruct the Bill.
There would. I think, be little point in going over again to-day the ground that was covered by our previous debate. With the Act on the Statute Book and the first supplements due to be paid on August 3 preparations for the introduction of the scheme are now of course far advanced.

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We shall be inviting claims from next month. As your Lordships will have been made aware during last week, a take-up campaign is in progress, concerntrating at this stage on inviting claims to other benefits, such as welfare foods and remission of National Health Service charges. We shall be sending individual invitations to all families with children who claim these benefits to consider claiming family income supplements, and a second stage of the campaign will be specifically directed to finding other families who are entitled to family income supplement. We are making extensive use of the advertising media, but in addition we are approaching local authorities, social workers, voluntary organisations and everyone we can think of who can help.
Over the campaign as a whole we are spending £340,000 on advertising in the national Press, television and posters and we are also sending about 170,000 letters appealing for help in finding beneficiaries to everybody we think can help, including local authorities, individual social workers, the clergy and many voluntary organisations. With these letters we have sent copies of a new family benefits guide which has been specially prepared to help anyone connected with social work to give advice on the various benefits that are available to families with children.
I cannot help thinking that noble Lords, and the noble Baroness in particular, who asked at the Second Reading stage what the provisions were for raising these amounts, will welcome these proposed increases. The Chancellor's Budget decision to increase the child tax allowance has greatly improved the relationship between these prescribed amounts and the tax threshold. Family income supplements are not subject to income tax, but we are nevertheless anxious to keep to a minimum the number of people who both receive the supplement and pay tax. The higher lax ratio will greatly reduce the number of cases where this will happen.
I am confident that if these draft Regulations are approved the scheme will bring really valuable help to families who are in need and to whom we cannot give sufficient help through other social security benefits. As I said in our earlier debate, we are studying a number of methods of tackling family poverty. We do not claim that this scheme is in any
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way a panacea, nor are we wedded to it as our own distinctive contribution to the solution of the problem. But it is in the belief that it will be a contribution, and that your Lordships will wish it to be an effective contribution, that I beg to move.
Moved, That the Draft Family Income Supplements (Computation) Regulations 1971, laid before the House on March 25, be approved.—(Lord Aberdare.)
BARONESS PHILLIPS: My Lords, I should like to thank the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, for introducing these Regulations. The only point of jargon here which caught my eye was the word "computation", which seems to be a new word for sorting out these matters. Like the noble Lord, I will not reiterate the points which we discussed on the Second Reading of the Bill. I do not think that we on this side of the House will ever like the underlying philosophy of the Bill, though naturally we are glad that it will be a means of helping particularly what I might call the one-parent family. I was ready to congratulate the Minister on the fact that the Regulations appeared to be coming into operation in May rather than in August, as was originally mentioned, but he now says that it will be August and I have to withhold my congratulations.
I am particularly glad to see that the rates have been raised. I assume that the Minister will now be able to tell me the difference in the total cost, which was to be £8·6 million. I assume that it will now be more. I am delighted to know that there is a publicity campaign to make this scheme better known. As the noble Lord will be well aware, the voluntary agencies, with which I have some connection in this country, will be only too anxious to make certain that everyone who can benefit will do so.
I will not go into the other difficulties with which the Government may be faced. Apart from dealing with those who are in employment, I think they may quite soon have to be looking at the other large problem, the number of people who are unemployed. But I will not in any way impede the Regulations now before the House.
LORD DAVIES OF LEEK: My Lords, I only want to add, from experience, that every encouragement should be given to

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people to take up their rights. There are quite a number of people entitled to benefits who do not know that they are so entitled. We must break down the old-fashioned idea that it is like the old Board of Guardians in 1910. This is something that is given to them with dignity by any Government in power, and they are entitled to it. I am sure that the Minister will encourage this knowledge being passed on to the people in local authorities and elsewhere who have the duty of dealing with people who have trouble and who have need of help.
LORD ABERDARE: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness and to the noble Lord for what they have said. I noted the jargon "computation". I hope that this has nothing to do with computers, because if it has we might be even longer getting the Regulations into force. Certainly the claims will be coming in during the course of next month, and the first payments will be made, as I have said, on August 3.
I very much take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Leek. We are doing our utmost to make it quite clear to everybody who might be entitled that they should claim. We hope that not only will the advertising campaign have some considerable effect, but by circulating the letters to the social workers we hope to get a more personal contact with the families who might be able to claim. So far as the cost of the scheme is concerned, we do not expect it to be much more than was originally budgeted for, because a great many wages have increased since then and a great many people have gone out of the scope of the scheme. If I can help the noble Baroness further on that point I will write to her.
On Question, Motion agreed to.

PARISH RECORDS
6.40 p.m.
LORD TEVIOT LORD TEVIOT rose to ask Her Majesty's Government whether they would consider introducing legislation for the better preservation of parish records and for the purpose of establishing a central indexed copy of all parish records at the General Registry Office or somewhere similar. The noble Lord said:
My Lords, I beg to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper. Before I proceed, I should declare an interest, because I sometimes receive fees for searching parish records. I am most grateful to the noble Lords who have been kind enough to wait to speak and to listen, and in particular to my noble friend who is going to answer. I thought that to-day would be one of the last opportunities that we might have this Session of having a debate on the subject of parish records, one which has been too often brushed aside in the past, and I believe has not been discussed in your Lordships' House for a great many years. I stand to be corrected, but I think the last occasion was in either 1904 or, at the latest, 1929.
There are more than 12,000 ancient parishes in England and Wales. In some cases the registers for christenings, marriages and burials start as early as 1538. I should have liked to give a rather fuller historical background, but, alas!there is too little time. I must ask your Lordships to remember that monumental inscriptions inside and outside, and collections of records found in parish churches (especially redundant churches) should also be regarded as of great importance. One cannot emphasise too strongly that these records form a very large part in our country's heritage. They surely are the history of our people. Records from every village and town, from every corner of our land, for five and a half centuries (or 443 years, to be precise) many of which are being allowed to rot, to be stolen, burned or blown up, may be lost for ever.
This evening I should like this to be an exploratory discussion, and while I am very eager to hear what my noble friend proposes, I am not getting over excited or thinking that much progress will be made. A call for better preservation is by no means a new cry. A valuable opportunity for central preservation at the Public Record Office was missed in 1836 when the Civil Registration Bill was passed, and all the registers of nonconformist denominations, including the Roman Catholic churches and the Quakers, were sent in to the Public Record Office, where they can be seen to this day.
After many years of fighting for legislation there seemed to be a good chance

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in 1882 that Parliament would take action. A Parish Register Preservation Bill provided that
"Every existing register of an earlier date than July 1 1837 and every transcript there of those remaining in any diocesan registry, shall after the passing of this Act be under the charge and control of the Master of the Rolls and be removed by his warrant to the Record Office".
That Bill was never passed, and others seemed to have shared the same fate. In 1887 and 1894 the Parish Councils Bill transferred to the custody of parish councils all documents hitherto deposited with the parish clerk, but parish registers were specifically excluded. An Amendment to remove the 1837 registers to the Public Records Office after parish councils had made authenticated copies was ruled to be beyond the scope of this Bill. Finally, in 1904 even Lord Salisbury failed in your Lordships' House to secure the passage of the Local Records Bill which included parish registers.
Between 1905 and 1916 the Joint Committee of Convocation of Canterbury produced no fewer than four Reports on The Collection and Custody of Local Ecclesiastical Records which achieved little, and in 1927 the Registers Commission of the Church Assembly produced a Report. They felt that parishes would prefer to remain custodians of their registers and would be against any centralisation. They expressed their belief that:
"existing conditions, though susceptible of much improvement, indicate almost universal alertness on the question of the value of old registers."
Nevertheless, in order to prevent loss, neglect, or misuse, they made recommendations for signatures on changes in incumbencies and for regular inspections, and wherever there was any evidence of neglect, to order their removal to the diocesan register or other central repository.
Few of the Registers Commission's recommendations were implemented. However, the Bishops were empowered to establish one or more record offices at which incumbents could deposit registers. This has prevented many losses. In many dioceses county record offices have been approved as diocesan record offices, and the 1962 Local Government (Records') Act made it clear that record offices could accept non-public records, and in some counties, for example, in Warwickshire,
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there has recently been a very vigorous policy of centralisation, and further losses of registers are unlikely. Centralisation has its dangers, to which the destruction of the Four Courts of Dublin in 1922 and the bombing of Exeter Record Office bear witness. The importance of the safe custody of registers cannot be emphasised too strongly. Every year fresh losses are reported, and large numbers have come to light as a result of the excellent work done by Mr. Donald Steel in compiling the National Index of Parish Registers.
The situation in England contrasts very unfavourably with that in Scotland, where by an Act in 1854 all registers of the Church of Scotland prior to 1855 were collected and deposited with the Registrar General in Scotland. There is no doubt that extremely valuable work in preserving and copying registers has been done by private organisations such as the Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies at Canterbury, the Society of Genealogists, the National Institute of Archivists and the National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth. These registers are used for a variety of purposes by historians, demographers, sociologists, geneticists and lawyers as well as genealogists.
There is no doubt that genealogy plays an important part in our invisible exports, especially with respect to English speaking countries. Not only are there inquiries, but more and more people come from the United States of America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere to trace their family history. A central indexed register, as suggested in the second half of my Question, would rule out any possibility of total destruction, by fire or otherwise, and would make it much easier for people to search. I am not suggesting that this would not cost money, and of course a fee should be charged, although I hope a more realistic one than that contained in the 1962 fees measure currently in force. The cost of this work would come to something like a quarter of producing the decennial census, and it would be of immense value to posterity, both intrinsic and contributive to the national income. I am not suggesting that parishes should not retain some of their records. I am pleased to see the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Newcastle here with us to-day; I am sure he can make a useful contribution.
I feel sure that if the Government were disposed to take steps on the lines that I have suggested, a valuable contribution towards the future study of the history of this country would be achieved, for the records of individual families of the past are part of the history of this country.
7.48 p.m.
THE EARL OF CRANBROOK: My Lords, I am sure that we are very grateful to the noble Lord for having asked this Question this afternoon and allowed us to consider a subject that has not been discussed in your Lordships' House, or indeed in another place, for a great number of years. The noble Lord has referred largely to parish registers, and in particular parish registers before the 1837 Act, subsequent to which there is a complete record of every birth, marriage and death at the Public Record Office. I want to bring up the question of the other records which are found in parishes throughout the country, because they are probably a little less well known than registers.
I might weary your Lordships with a little personal experience when I was a younger man and was doing what almost every backwoodsman Peer or country squire tries to do—that is, to find out something about the history of his parish. My investigations led me into the tower of our parish church and I found a wooden chest filled, higgledy-piggledy, with a mass of parchment, papers, silver fish, mildew and only escaping mice nests by the glory of God and not through the care of the parson or successors to the overseers of the poor in whose charge they really were. In point of fact, these had been neglected by a whole series of disinterested parsons for a very long period.
When I looked in I found there was nothing of any great importance—nothing earlier than the beginning of the 17th century. The parish registers, of course, were downstairs in the church chest, the safe in which modern law demands they should be placed. It was probably just as well there was nothing earlier than the beginning of the 17th century because had there been I could not have read it easily. There were such things as overseers' accounts, churchwardens' accounts, the parish surveyor's accounts, apprentices' indentures of paupers who had been
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apprenticed to neighbouring farmers and tradesmen, justices' orders returning paupers to the other end of the country in case they should become chargeable to the parish in which they then were, and returning them to the parish of their birth. In fact, it was really the poet Gray's "short and simple annals of the poor"; and in a very neighbouring parish there was in fact a "mute inglorious Milton" in the shape of a 17th century parson who wrote, in a couple of spare pages of the parish register in 1620, a rather touching little elegy to his dead wife who had died in childbirth. That is the kind of material which exists in every parish throughout the whole of Great Britain.
In my parish there was no "mute inglorious Milton", but there were some quite nice little sidelights on history. There was an account paid to a local doctor for inoculating the paupers in the village workhouse against smallpox some twenty years before Jenner introduced vaccination. There was a prosecution of an unfortunate woman who had tried to poison her faithless lover's new mistress with arsenic which she stole from the foreman of a neighbouring farm who was using it to treat seed wheat against seed-borne diseases. It may be interesting to your Lordships to realise that pollution of the countryside by poisonous seed dressings was taking place, certainly in my own part of the world, a hundred and twenty years before the introduction of dieldrin and aldrin.
Technically some of these were civil and technically some of them were ecclesiastical records, and the county council is responsible under the 1933 Act, as indeed it was under the 1894 Act, for surveying the parishes in its county and has the power to make orders for the proper preservation of such records as it finds if it is thought necessary. Bishops, of course, have similar powers, under the Parochial Measures Act, over ecclesiastical records. They can indeed meet the noble Lord. Lord Teviot, already if he is prepared to pay the cost, because a Bishop has the power to authorise the copying and printing of all registers in his diocese if the person who wishes it done is prepared to pay the cost.
Since the time when I found that mess in our own church my own county

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council, with the co-operation of the Bishop, has made a survey of every parish in our county. We have looked into every parish. A great many of the records which we have there found have been deposited at the county record office. But that is the kind of survey which can be made and financed only by an authority large enough to pay the technical staff needed, to provide the repository necessary, and to meet the continuing expenditure of cleaning, cataloguing and curating those records when they are finally brought into the local record office—which in our case, as in a great many others, is recognised by the Bishop of the diocese as being the record office of the diocese.
The trouble is that present legislation is largely permissive. A county council is under no obligation to make provision for parish records; and I think I am correct in saying that not more than 50 per cent. of them have done so. If manorial records are being neglected, the Master of the Rolls can give instructions that they are to be kept properly, on where they are to be kept and how they are to be kept—a power which is given to him, I presume, because that was formerly necessary in order to protect the rights of copyholders and commoners whose rights were to be ascertained only by reference to the manor rolls. Recent legislation has made that no longer necessary, but still the Master of the Rolls has that power, even over documents which are privately owned, to ensure that they are properly preserved for the sake of historians and for posterity.
It seems to me that when we are dealing, as we are, with parish registers, whether civil or ecclesiastical, we are fundamentally dealing with something which does not belong to private individuals, although there is such a thing as the parson's freehold in registers; and of course in days gone by, and indeed to a certain extent to-day, the parson can get fairly considerable fees from searches in his records. That, I should have thought, is something which is hopelessly out of date. It ought not to be necessary for a parson to have to draw fees from searching through his records; his stipend ought to be such that that is not necessary. These registers, although in
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theory they belong to the parish, whether an ecclesiastical parish or a civil parish, fundamentally belong to the whole nation, and the Master of the Rolls or some other such person ought to have the right to insist that both the ecclesiastical authorities and the civil authorities do their duty and look after the registers properly.
Fundamentally the civil authority, I suspect in co-operation with the ecclesiastical authority, is probably the best repository—that is to say, the county is the best repository, and better than the Public Record Office—for most of these things. But it must be a large authority; it must be an authority which can employ the technical staff concerned. Technical staff in the way of archivists are in relatively short supply to-day, and the experienced staff need to cover a fairly large area. The continual cost is fairly substantial and can be borne only by the larger authorities; but a good many of them are continuing to neglect what I look upon as their duty. I am pretty certain that the same sort of higgledy-piggledy mess of parchment paper, silver fish and mice nests is to be found all over the country if only we looked for it, and it really is time that legislation insisted that this material be properly looked after.
6.59 p.m.
LORD SUDELEY: My Lords, the subject of this debate is parish records generally, but I shall confine myself to the most important of these: the registers.
I do not wish to overpaint the case for parish registers. From the time of their inception in the reign of Henry VIII, the record which they provide is seldom a continuous one. Some of our parishes no longer possess registers of any time before the end of the 18th century. No more than half the registers of the ancient parishes in this country extend further back than about 1600. In those registers which go back to 1600 or even further there is likely to be a break during the Commonwealth. Often the civil registers of the Commonwealth were filled in by an illiterate; sometimes they were ignored altogether.
In another respect our parish registers are deficient. By Continental standards, the amount of information which they

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were meant to contain is rather paltry. In Spain, details of ancestors are entered. In the baptismal registers of Switzerland the place where the parents were married and the maiden name of the mother are both given. More facts were given in the registers of Austria and Prussia and of France after the Revolution. Our own registers lack even a good deal of the information which should have been put into them. During outbreaks of the Plague, burials were often too numerous to be recorded. A great many marriages were never inscribed in the parish registers. Some of our ancestors did not marry in the church; they merely cohabited with one another and so acquired the reputation of being married. That was especially so among the poorer classes who were drawn into cities by the Industrial Revolution and who could not afford the fees. Other ancestors underwent clandestine marriages, without banns or licence. Those marriages were performed by such clergy as had nothing to lose, especially those who had been imprisoned in the Fleet for debt. Hardwicke's Marriage Act, which put an end to that in 1753, was treated with derision in Parliament because it prevented the younger sons of Peers from abducting wealthy heiresses.
After so much is said against parish registers, however, their great value and importance cannot be denied. In putting together the history of a family a genealogist may prefer to draw on wills. These contain much ancillary information, especially of the kind that is now appreciated. Most people indulge now in a taste for genre, which I suspect would have been despised by our forebears of the 17th and 18th centuries. From the list of chattels in their wills we may form a picture of the interiors our ancestors knew which is too exact. But in the work of constructing pedigrees, wills are often of no use, since the people who concern the genealogist did not have enough property to make them. That may apply just as much to the forebears of families which are established as to those which are not. Compared with some of their neighbours on the Continent, the English have always kept an open society, and it would be hard to construct the pedigree of any established family in this country without coming, in
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the space of a few generations, to some ancestor the sole record of whose existence is in a parish register. The extent to which our pedigrees cut right across the social scale surprises anybody who does not know anything of genealogy. The most striking instance which our Garter King of Arms quotes in his English Genealogy is the ancestry of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. Among Her Majesty's 64 most immediate forebears may be numbered an innkeeper, a toyman and a plumber.
The desire of everybody to draw on parish registers so that they can construct their pedigrees is one which I am sure will increase. The layman may object that hardly anything has been done in this country on descent in the female line. Nearly all pedigrees, he will tell us, are traced through the male line, because that is how property has descended, and for anybody who likes to think that he will inherit property the writing is on the wall. I know that we are moving over all the time to the Left, despite the holding of power by Conservative Governments. But no matter what changes the politicians may like to make to the surface of our society in the names of progress and social justice, they cannot annihilate the desire which most of us have for our roots; and that desire, in the form of an interest in genealogy, increases the more the reality may be denied to them.
A predecessor of the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor, Sir Francis Bacon, said that the Swiss community is governed by utility and not respect. Yet in Switzerland one can litigate for a coat of arms. In the United States of America social standing is governed to an exceptional degree by performance instead of birth. Yet the College of Arms draws most of its business from the United States. The last Prime Minister must acknowledge, reluctantly, that this ancient institution is a good dollar earner. The coming to power of a Labour Government in 1945 coincided, at the College of Arms, with an unprecedented boom in the English side of its business. That Labour Government received much of its support from Wales. Every Welshman knows his ancestors.
The use I have just advocated for parish registers may be regarded as an old one,

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fashionable in Victorian times when our local archæological societies were founded, with their periodicals which recite the history of individual families. Parish registers are just as important to the practitioners of the present fashion in history. The writers of our Victorian history books were never ashamed of some straightforward narrative; for them history consisted in the bold acts of a few men, who were often the founders or later representatives of our leading families. Now, in our more democratic age, a narrative which describes great men and their deeds is scorned as the child's vision of history. Historians prefer to exercise a dry power of intellectual analysis in sorting out the facts on masses of people which they have collected.
Dr. Wrigley, Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, is just one such historian. He wrote a chapter in D. J. Steel'sNational Index of Parish Registers, from which many facts in this speech are taken. In that chapter Dr. Wrigley recommended various forms in which parish registers might be used for his population statistics. I shall mention some other ways in which the construction of a mass of old pedigrees may help our understanding of the past and, as well as this, be necessary to us in the present time. We could look again at the problems which Professor Sorokin put to us in the 1920s in his pioneer treatise on social space. The kind of conclusions which Professor Sorokin came to have been suppressed in the past few decades because they make us squeamish. Professor Sorokin asked, for instance, to what extent ability is inherited. On the answer to that may depend whether we should inherit privilege, so that we can assume the more responsible tasks in our society before we are past our prime.
Again, to what extent do the men who rise to the head of our society breed less than those in the lower reaches? It has been the reputation of aristocracies in Rome, Sparta and elsewhere that they should diminish in size. From this it may follow that in order to prevent the exhaustion of talent in society as a whole we should not for ever practise our equality of opportunity: birth should sometimes be a disadvantage, so that talented men of humble extraction do not rise. Such a feudal system of government might explain the spectacular regenera-
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tion of Japanese society in the middle of the last century.
For both kinds of people, the individual citizen who wishes to establish his roots and the contemporary historian in his welter of statistics, the present state of parish registers leaves too much to be desired. The first consideration is that the information in the registers should never be lost. That end has not been achieved by any insistence that all our parish registers should be put into the best custody. The registers which matter most are those which provide a record before civil registration was introduced once more in the 19th century. No more than one in five or six of these registers have been deposited in our county record offices. Most of the old registers are still in the hands of the clergy, who are not addicted to antiquities like their Victorian predecessors and so have no reason to take any special interest in them.
The second consideration is that the information in the parish registers should be made as accessible to the public as is possible. For several reasons at the moment that is not the case. The researcher may be prohibited by the fees. When the original charges were laid down in 1836, what I have described as the old-fashioned attitude to the registers prevailed. Those who laid down the charges were thinking of the genealogist who wished to construct just one pedigree, usually his own. For this he might need to look up no more than one baptism in tthe parish register. But the modern historian who is interested in population statistics may wish to look through the register over a period of several centuries to collect a great many names. The cost may be astronomical. In his book on Family History, Mr. C. R. Humphrey-Smith has said that the fees due for the search of 100 names between 1540 and 1840 can be between £50 and £60.
If the information in them can be copied, many more people will benefit from the parish registers. But the extent to which, until now, it has been possible to make copies is very limited. At the beginning of this century some transcription work was done by county parish register societies and local archeological societies, but owing to the rise in the cost of printing most parish register societies no longer exist, and not many of the local

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archæological societies do any more transcription work. Those who wish to make photographic copies have often been forbidden to do so by the Church. According to the notes prepared by the Legal Board of the Church Assembly on the Ecclesiastical Fees Measure of 1962, no incumbent is bound to permit the photographing of his registers. The right to refuse is excused sometimes on the score that any incumbent who allows his registers to be photographed cheats his successor of potential fees. On other occasions permission to photograph the registers is refused owing to differences of opinion about theology, which have nothing at all to do with pedigrees or population statistics. In the security of their granite mountain outside Salt Lake City the Mormons possess the largest collection of genealogical material in the world. Yet owing to disagreements on religious opinion they are unable to add micro-filmed copies of some of our parish registers to their magnificent collection.
Most of our parish registers are without any form of index. Those registers which have never been copied are seldom indexed and many of the printed registers are also without an index. When it is completed, with the help of a loan from the Pilgrim Trust, D. J. Steel's Index of Parish Registers will merely contain a list of parish registers; it will not be an index to the registers themselves. Marriages form a great part of the information in the parish registers and the marriages recorded in Boyd's great Index' which draws also on Bishops' transcripts and marriage licences provides but a fraction of the total. I should therefore like to give the noble Lord, Lord Teviot, my very warm support. I think he is wise not to recommend that we should centralise the registers themselves. The security of the originals lies in their being distributed according to their counties.
The noble Lord reminded us of all the Irish parish registers which had been sent to Dublin and were destroyed in 1922. Only those which had not been sent to Dublin survived. I think, too, that because the noble Lord, Lord Teviot, has recommended the copy, the Church might be tempted to back him out of self-interest. The existence of a centralised
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copy should greatly increase the demand for certified copies of individual entries specifying date and page. For such certified copies a fee could be charged. The compiling of an index should not be difficult. With the help of a computor the Mormons have already made an index of the surnames in those of our parish registers which they have been allowed to microfilm.
7.13 p.m.
LORD DAVIES OF LEEK: My Lords, I apologise but I will speak for only a minute or two. I think that from this side of the House we ought to say "Thank you" to the noble Lord for raising this point, and to the noble Lords who have spoken. Originally I was going out of the House—and some of your Lordships will be saying, "I wish he had", because I am detaining you. But, my Lords, I think that a lot of scholarship and a lot of care has been taken in this excellent little debate this evening, and I wish, in the three minutes that I wish to take, to support this appeal that something be done, because in this transitional cacophony of the age in which we live, when M.1s and M.6s are cut through lovely little parishes, we are going to lose much of the tradition of these Islands if it is not kept alive in some of these stories. I am surprised that the television authorities, both the independent and the national, have not at some time cottoned on to the possibility of giving lessons in schools on this subject. They may have done so, but not to my knowledge. Too little attention is paid in our schools to this.
I should like to say, as a Welshman, that we always take great interest in this subject. I had the most amazing experience, when I was lecturing in America and wanted a pint of beer. I said to some people, "I wish you had a decent beer like we have in Britain and Wales". They replied, "We will take you to a place in Seattle". I was "knocking back" a pint of ale there, and singing on the piano, when a fellow came to me and said, "You have a Welsh intonation ". He said, "My ancestors were Welsh. You don't know a little village called Llanover, outside Abergavenny do you? "I replied," Do I know it? I lived there for some years ". He told me, "My grandfather came from

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there". I did not tell the old rascal who his grandfather was, but in fact his grandfather was the husband of my great-aunt who had run away to Baltimore with four "kids" in the 1850s. He wanted me to trace his ancestry through the local parish church. I got my brother on to it. It is just the human touch. There is nothing from the point of view of material gain, but there is more in the world than material gain.
Finally, I wish parish records also would keep alive some of the wonderful epitaphs. There was a wonderful one at Bushey—I hope it is still there. I will finish with a quotation. This lovely epitaph is inscribed for a poor old widow who died:
"Here lies a woman who was always tired, Who lived in a house where help wasn't hired.
The last words she said were, Dear friends I am going
Where washing ain't wanted nor sweeping nor sewing.'
In Heaven they tell me loud anthems are ringing
But having no voice"—
she was English—
"I'll steer clear of the singing.
And where folks don't eat there's no washing of dishes,
So everything there is exact to me wishes.
Don't mourn for me now; don't mourn for me ever.
I'm going to do nothing for ever and ever."
On the strength of that little poem alone I think the Minister ought to encourage his Government to take action on the noble Lord's appeal.
7.15 p.m.
THE LORD BISHOP OF NEWCASTLE: My Lords, I would make a short intervention, as this Question concerns me. First, a little correction of fact. Under the present arrangement it is in fact within my power to order the removal of ancient records, provided they are under the category of what you might call ecclesiastical records in other words, births, marriages and deaths, in that parish or area. Now why is that not done? It is interesting that there would have been a little hit more edge to this debate—which I welcome, because it is very good to have interest taken in these things—had a single hard case of present abuse of ancient registers been producable. I think a little sympathy on the
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part of researchers and historians—and I am a historian and therefore can speak with some authority of what I am going to say now—is due, because in fact those who are called to considering the conditions of the Kingdom of God to-day and to-morrow are naturally a little bit absorbed and liable to be drawn off their interest in that which belongs to 300 years ago, although it is still of significance now. I would agree with the noble Lords who have made that point, but I would ask for sympathy.
May I make a practical suggestion. The whole machinery for preservation is in existence—not indeed for a central register with all the costliness of indexing and so on, but the preservation is provided for. If it is not used it is within the power of a bishop in extreme cases to have it used. May I say how much the layman interested in his local conditions can do to have the machinery put into action. The noble Earl, Lord Cranbrook, made a very good point. Probably half the parsons occupying that church did not even know that the stuff was in the belfry. Draw their attention to it and action will be taken, provided that somebody can do the work—and if it costs money somebody can find the money. It is all as simple as that.
Very often the clergy to-day, although they may not be very active as researchers, still have a very great interest in the history of their own parishes, and they welcome researchers and historians and very much appreciate the guardianship of these things. I think on the whole it will be found that the machinery is there. If it is not used, it is up to those who are interested quietly to bring it into operation. I think it can be done quietly. But the official answer will, of course, be given elsewhere.
May I make one observation which may not be made by anybody else. This is in fact a very useful little debate as a preface to work which is already going on. I am informed, which I did not realise until last week, that the Council for the Care of Churches is at present considering the whole question of church valuables and their use, safe keeping and disposal. Records are within the scope of this inquiry, and the Council is aware that they present a serious problem, no less than the care of other kinds of church

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invention, in about the year 1850, by the property which is of historic or artistic then director of the ordnance survey, and value.
7.19 p.m.
LORD SANDYS: My Lords, perhaps your Lordships will allow me to speak for a few minutes as a churchwarden My Lords, I will not detain you further, and follow the right reverend Prelate the except to make two observations on Lord Bishop of Newcastle in this matter, as Teviot's suggestion. First, I believe that I have a statutory responsibility in ecclesiastical law. My noble friend Lord Cranbrook said that he found a situation which he believed obtained in a number of parish churches. I am quite sure that he is right. In a large number of counties—I do not know how many, because I have been unable to discover—a joint county and diocesan record office exists. Worcestershire is one of the fortunate counties in which such an office exists. Perhaps it may be of value to your Lordships if I recount my dealings with it, both as a churchwarden and also through my responsibilities as a Lord of the manor and previously holding the manorial rolls for approximately 400 years.
I experienced a much more pleasant set of circumstances than my noble friend Lord Cranbrook. Our parish was visited in about the year 1911 by a Crown Commission which went through and marked all the documents; they were parcelled and a special safe was obtained in which to house them. It was extremely easy therefore for me, on inheriting this wealth of documentation, to make contact with our local archivist, and to place in his hands, as the official receiver of local historical documents, a large number of documents dating back to the Elizabethan era and some even beyond.
In Worcestershire, fortunately, not only are these documents preserved, they are also cleaned and restored by a team of assistants, both professional and lay. I would heartily support what the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Leek, said about the value of these documents in education. Moreover, due to the fact that the photocopying system can be applied to this sort of document it is of very much wider application than noble Lords may believe at the present time. For over 100 years, since the inception of the zencograph, it has been possible to achieve a form of copying of documents. We have in this country justifiable pride in that
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Invention, in about the year 1850, by the then director of the ordnance survey, and a number of documents, including Magna Carta, were reproduced most effectively in that process to the great benefit of archæologists all over the world.
My Lords, I will not detain you futher, except to make two observations on Lord Teviot's suggestion. First, I belive that it would be of great value if the central registry were made available free of charge—although I think my noble friend Lord Sudeley suggested that copyright exists in the case of parish records. I agree with him on that, but there is a need for these records to be available for educational purposes and it would be a disincentive if these were hedged about with legalistic practices or it financial burdens were placed upon those doing research. Secondly, I heartily welcome the idea of a central registry, as opposed to purely local registries, and I emphasise the point made by my noble friend Lord Sudeley, about how important it is that the records should not be moved from where they are.
7.24 p.m.
LORD ABERDARE: My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Teviot, and other noble Lords for their contributions on this fascinating subject. I have learned a great deal from listening this evening. I thought at first that most of your Lordships were going to be critical, and it was a great relief towards the end when the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Newcastle spoke on behalf of the Church; and I was grateful for what the noble Lord, Lord Sandys, has just said as churchwarden and lord of the manor.
My Lords, in the Government's opinion the present law is adequate and makes sufficient provision for the care and preservation of parish records. The Parochial Registers and Records Measure 1929 empowered Bishops to give directions for the safe keeping and care of parish registers as the right reverend Prelate mentioned. The Measure provided for the setting up of diocesan record offices for the deposit of registers not in current use. It empowered incumbents, with the consent of the bishop and the parochial church council to deposit their registers and further empowered the bishop to order registers to be deposited in any

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case where he thought registers in a parish were exposed to risk of loss and damage. The right of the public to search the registers and to have certified copies of entries in them was preserved in the case of registers deposited in diocesan records offices.
The Local Government (Records) Act 1962 enables local authorities to accept the deposit of records which appear to the authority to be of general or local interest. Consequently, arrangements have been made in many areas for the county or city records office to act as diocesan records office for this purpose. Not all parish records, even in these areas, have been deposited with the local authority records office. Many incumbents take pride in their old registers and have the facilities and are willing to continue to bear the burden of looking after them. Noble Lords will see from what I have said that if in any parish the records appear to be in any danger, either because of inadequate storage facilities or because a busy incumbent has not the time to devote to looking after them, the remedy appears to lie in an approach to the bishop and the local authority archivist.
The second part of my noble friend's Question suggests that an indexed copy of all parish records should be deposited at the General Register Office or at some other central location. It may assist consideration of this suggestion if I deal first with those parish records created after the introduction of the civil registration of births, marriages and deaths in 1837. The Births and Deaths Registration Act 1836 provided that marriage registers kept by the clergy under the Act should be kept in duplicate and that, when filled, one of the duplicate registers should be deposited with the local superintendent registrar. The Act also required certified copies of entries in marriage registers to be sent quarterly through the superintendent registrar to the Registrar General. The Registrar General and the superintendent registrar respectively were required to index the certified copies and the deposited registers and to make the indexes available for searches. It will be seen that, so far as marriages from 1837 onwards are concerned, there is provision for both a central copy, and a local duplicate original record in the custody of officials.
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No similar provision was made for copying parish registers of baptisms and burials, because the new registers of births and deaths contained fuller information than the parish registers and, of course, included all people born or dying, not merely those who were baptised in the Established Church or buried in the parish graveyard. Quarterly copies of entries in birth and death registers are also sent to the Registrar General. The central deposit and indexing of conies in parish registers of births and deaths would generally provide no more than a partial duplication of information already available. It is true (and this is the point which I think mainly concerned my noble friend, Lord Teviot) that there is no central copy of any parish records created before 1837. The total number of entries in these registers is not known, but it is beyond doubt measured in tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions. The cost of providing copies, and indexing them individually, would be very high indeed, and I wonder whether such an enormous undertaking is really worth while. A small number of people would use them to try to construct their family trees, and a handful of professional genealogists would no doubt find useful employment in assisting them.
LORD TEVIOT: My Lords, I apologise for interrupting. I am afraid I do not agree with the noble Lord's last remark. It is not just a handful of genealogists, as I explained in putting my Question. It is the historians, demographers and other people who search these records, and they are of immense importance.
LORD ABERDARE: My Lords, I quite take the noble Lord's point. I was going on to mention historians and social scientists who would find value in these studies. The only point I am questioning is whether the effort of copying this vast number of records is really worth what would come out of them when the records themselves are there. Those who wish to consult them can do so, and what we are discussing is merely the potential benefit of a central copy, which I respectfully suggest would not justify the likely cost, nor would it justify the vast number of staff that would be required for the operation.

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My noble friend mentioned the case of Scotland, where these registers have been centralised. I understand that it is true that they are centralised, but they are not indexed, and I wonder whether there is a great advantage if they are not in fact indexed. My noble friend Lord Cranbrook drew attention to records—and I was most interested in what he said—other than the registers, and I agree that everything we can do to preserve these other records should be done. However, like the right reverend Prelate, I feel that the present legislation, which I agree is permissive, is as far as we ought to go at present, and that pressure on Bishops and on the local archivists is the best way of ensuring the preserving of these records. I hope that when the local government reorganisation is enacted the authorities will be that much bigger and better able to cope with the problem.
I listened with great interest to my noble friend Lord Sudeley, who made one point that particularity appealed to me. It was the fact that we pay such tremendous attention to our descent through the male line and little to our mothers, whereas in fact I should have thought that we owed just as much of our heredity to them. The noble Lord, Lord Davies of Leek, joined in as a Welshman. We are always glad when he joins in, when he is in order, and I apologise for having found him slightly out of order earlier on. He spoke of Welsh records, and I personally have had very happy experiences with the Glamorgan Records Office. He did us another service by putting on record an epitaph from one of the churches which he knew. Perhaps that
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is one way in which these epitaphs could be preserved—by the noble Lord writing them into Hansard.
I do not suppose that I have satisfied my noble friend, because I think he is anxious to have some central register of the records from before the 1836 Act. I can only say that we feel that the permissive legislation which exists is adequate at the moment, and that, between the Church authorities and the State authorities we ought to be able to preserve the records that we need by using the available powers.

SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE
The LORD CHANCELLOR The LORD CHANCELLOR acquainted the House that Her Majesty had (by Commission) revoked certain Letters Patent and had appointed the Chairman of Committees for the time being, the Lord Merthyr, the Earl of Listowel, the Lord Rea, the Lord Ailwyn, the Lord Amulree, the Earl St. Aldwyn, the Lord Crook, the Lord Airedale, the Lord Jessel, the Lord Douglas of Barloch, the Lord Strang, the Viscount Goschen, the Lord Grenfell, the Baroness Wootton of Abinger, the Viscount Dilhorne, the Lord Champion, the Lord St. Helens, the Lord Royle, the Lord Beswick, the Baroness Emmet of Amberley, the Lord Stonham, the Earl of Shannon, the Lord Derwent, the Lord Henley, the Lord Ferrier, the Lord Gardiner, the Viscount Hood, the Lord Alport, and the Lord Maybray-King. Speakers of the House in the absence of the Lord Chancellor. The said Commission was read.