Lords Sitting of 1 February 1973

Preamble
The House met at three of the clock (Prayers having been read earlier at the Judicial Sitting by the Lord Bishop of Portsmouth):
The LORD CHANCELLOR The LORD CHANCELLOR on the Woolsack.

GENERAL MEDICAL COUNCIL'S POWERS
LORD CHALFONT: 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 regulations govern the practice of medicine in the United Kingdom; what powers the General Medical Council has in this respect, and from what legislation these powers derive.
THE MINISTER OF STATE, DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND SOCIAL SECURITY (LORD ABERDARE): My Lords, the practice of medicine in the United Kingdom is governed by the Medical Acts 1956 to 1969 and certain other legislation. The General Medical Council is an independent body exercising powers conferred on it by the Medical Acts. Its general duty is to keep and publish the Register of duly qualified doctors, to regulate the standard of qualifications conferring the right to registration and to take disciplinary action against any registered doctors who may appear, by reason of their misconduct, to be unfit to remain on the Register.
LORD CHALFONT: My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for that Answer. I wonder whether I may ask him one further question. Is the payment of a registration fee a part of the conditions upon which a doctor may be placed on the Register and therefore allowed to practise his or her profession?
LORD ABERDARE: Yes, my Lords, the General Medical Council has the power to charge a fee for registration, and therefore it has the power to de-register if the fee is not paid.
LORD SHEPHERD: My Lords, could the noble Lord say whether the existing legislation will have to be amended as a consequence of our entry into the E.E.C. to make it possible for Continental doctors, whose standards may not be exactly equivalent to United Kingdom standards, to come into this country?
LORD ABERDARE: No, my Lords, not as the situation is at the moment. If there were to be any move towards facilitating the exchange of doctors it would have to be put into effect by directive, and although a directive has I believe been considered, it would of course require our assent before it became effective.
LORD BLYTON: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that there has been consultation in the Colleges on the difference between European qualifications and ours? Is it not a fact that many members of the professional classes, such as doctors and accountants, who are not up to what is referred to as the European standard may not be allowed to practise?
LORD ABERDARE: My Lords, I am aware of the feelings the noble Lord has mentioned, but I can only repeat that any qualifications that were recognised in one country or another within the Community would have to be the subject of regulations made by the Council of the Community.
LORD POPPLEWELL: My Lords, would not the Minister have another look at this question of the registration fee? Is he aware that concern is felt among ordinary trade unionists that the Medical Council have powers that might almost be referred to as those of a kangaroo court, whereas anything that is done in this particular direction within ordinary normal trade union life is subject to, and would probably be referred to, the N.I.R.C.? There appears to be a wide difference between the professional classes and ordinary trade unionists. Is it not possible to have another look at this matter?
LORD ABERDARE: My Lords, as I am sure the noble Lord is aware, a Committee of Inquiry is in process of being set up—I announced the terms of reference before Christmas—to consider what changes need to be made in the existing

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provisions for the regulation of the medical profession and so on, and the Chairman of this Inquiry will be the Vice Chancellor of Bristol University, Dr. Merrison.
LORD POPPLEWELL: My Lords, will this subject be covered by that Committee?
LORD ABERDARE: My Lords, the terms of reference are very wide; the Committee will be considering the whole question.
BARONESS SUMMERSKILL: My Lords, as the only appeal from the General Medical Council is to the Privy Council, would not appeal prove prohibitive to the average doctor?
LORD ABERDARE: My Lords, the General Medical Council is largely run by the profession itself. It is a professional body. I can only say that this Inquiry is now being set up, and all these matters can best be considered by the Inquiry.
BARONESS SUMMERSKILL: My Lords, I was asking about an appeal. The only appeal for a doctor against a decision of the General Medical Council, which, after all, determines his whole livelihood and his whole future, is to the Privy Council, and I am asking whether the cost of such an appeal would not prove prohibitive to the average doctor.
LORD ABERDARE: My Lords, I am only saying that this is the situation. I am not quite sure whether it is right that it would prove prohibitive. I can certainly tell the noble Baroness that there will be an Inquiry into all these matters.
LORD CHALFONT: My Lords, to clear my mind may I ask one final question? Is it a fact that the non-payment of registration fee by a medical practitioner will result in his being struck off the Medical Register?
LORD ABERDARE: Yes, my Lords; that is a fact.
BARONESS SUMMERSKILL: My Lords, is not this the only profession in the country—indeed, I should think the only field of work—in which a sum of money determines whether an individual is fit to follow his profession?
LORD ABERDARE: My Lords, the General Medical Council has been in existence for a great many years. It is responsible for doing much useful work in ensuring that doctors who treat the public are properly qualified. It has certain powers and it is acting under its legislative powers.
BARONESS SUMMERSKILL: My Lords, as this is so important, I am sure that the House will forgive me if I put a question to the noble Lord. Is not this a most unusual situation which has never arisen in this country before: that while an individual may be brilliant in his profession, may have a high moral standard, may have treated many patients successfully, and there is no reason why he should be regarded as unworthy person, because he does not pay £5 his services are denied to the country?
LORD ABERDARE: Well, my Lords, this is the fact; this is legislation which has been in force for a very long time. The noble Baroness may think it wrong. I can only tell her that most of the doctors have now paid their fees, and of those that have been struck off for nonpayment of fees none so far has been employed in the National Health Service.
LORD WALSTON: My Lords, would not the Minister agree that from the point of view of patients, at a time when there is a shortage of doctors, it cannot be considered a desirable state of affairs that on a technicality of this kind well-qualified doctors should be denied the possibility of serving the patients who wish to use them?
LORD ABERDARE: My Lords, I do not think it is a technicality. If there is a body which regulates professional work and is responsible for the qualifications of the doctors, and is very largely manned by members of the profession, I think it is only reasonable to expect the doctors to carry out the law as it stands and pay whatever the General Medical Council may establish in the way of fees. But all this may change when we have received the report of the Committee of Inquiry.
BARONESS SUMMERSKILL: My Lords, may I ask the Minister one more supplementary question? Why is it that out of 48 members of the General

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Medical Council there are only two women?
LORD ABERDARE: My Lords, I am not responsible for the appointment of the General Medical Council.

E.E.C. AND COMMONWEALTH TRADE CO-OPERATION
3.10 p.m.
LORD BROCKWAY: 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 conclusions have been reached regarding trade co-operation between the European Community and India and Asian Commonwealth nations.
THE PARLIAMENTARY UNDERSECRETARY OF STATE, DEPARTMENT OF TRADE AND INDUSTRY (THE EARL OF LIMERICK): My Lords, under the Declaration of Intent to the developing independent Commonwealth countries in Asia, the enlarged E.E.C. expressed its willingness, from January 1, 1973, to examine any trade problems that may arise with a view to seeking solutions. The Council of Ministers has already agreed that a Commercial Co-operation Agreement should be negotiated with India. The other countries concerned have also set up a dialogue with the Commission.
LORD BROCKWAY: My Lords, while welcoming that reply— and I was asking for information generally—may I ask whether Her Majesty's Government will consider, when these matters have been discussed, the possibility that it may be to the detriment of India and Commonwealth countries in Asia that there are very exceptional arrangements as between France and ex-French colonies in the North of Africa which have close economic arrangements with France.
THE EARL OF LIMERICK: My Lords, I have no doubt that that is one of the matters that will be considered.

ROAD DEVELOPMENTS IN WEST DORSET
BARONESS STOCKS: 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, in view of the progress now being made in the construction of road links between South-East England and the West, they regard the further development of a Folkestone-Honiton trunk road through West Dorset as really necessary.
LORD MOWBRAY AND STOURTON: My Lords, the length of the Folkestone-Honiton trunk road in West Dorset was not included in the 3,500-mile network of trunk routes which was announced in June, 1971. Traffic conditions along the route are, however, kept under review and particular improvements are prepared as the need arises.
BARONESS STOCKS: My Lords, arising out of that Answer, may I ask a supplementary question? I gather that the continuation of the proposed trunk road is not going forward. Why is it proposed that there should be a further major road development, which goes right through West Dorset, in order to bypass Bridport?
LORD MOWBRAY AND STOURTON: My Lords, I merely said that it was not part of the comprehensive trunk network. We have comprehensive plans for individual improvements where they are needed, and Bridport is one of those places. We know that there are some local objections, and if a statutory objection were to be made we should need to hold an inquiry.
BARONESS STOCKS: My Lords, is it not true that there are other roads that either bypass Bridport or do not bypass Bridport which are in fact sufficient for the kind of traffic that they have to carry?
LORD MOWBRAY AND STOURTON: My Lords, the A.35, which is the road to which the noble Baroness is referring, carries a certain amount of traffic, and it is considered by the experts that an improvement is needed.
BARONESS STOCKS: My Lords, who are the experts?
LORD PEDDIE: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that two experts who have a considerable knowledge of traffic conditions in that area have described this road to bypass Bridport as being a "sledgehammer to crack a nut"? Further, would the Minister confirm or deny that local experts have presented an alternative scheme which is acceptable to people in that area, and that the road engineers have stated that they are willing to seriously consider such scheme if the present scheme 7 is turned down?
LORD MOWBRAY AND STOURTON: My Lords, no official suggestion of alternative routes has been made to us at the moment. If one of the local authorities wishes to make a suggestion there can be an inquiry. With regard to the expert who referred to it as a "sledgehammer crushing a nut" (I think that was in a Sunday Times article), the estimated cost for that bypass was double what we estimated it might be.
THE EARL OF SELKIRK: My Lords, I do not know whether this comes within the original Question, but can the noble Lord say whether any progress is being made on the Southampton bypass?
LORD MOWBRAY AND STOURTON: My Lords, I think that that is another Question.
BARONESS STOCKS: My Lords, the noble Lord has not answered my question as to who are the experts. Are they other than the Dorset County Council?
LORD MOWBRAY AND STOURTON: My Lords, no; the Department of the Environment and the Department of Trade and Industry have their own experts.
LORD NUNBURNHOLME: My Lords, is this East/ West trunk road a necessity for national defence?
LORD MOWBRAY AND STOURTON: My Lords, I do not think that this is a point that has been considered by me personally, or by anyone in the Department.
LORD WYNNE-JONES: My Lords, can the noble Lord tell us who is the
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nut that the sledgehammer is supposed to crack?
LORD HUGHES: My Lords, if this is a proposal to spend money on a road which people do not want, could the money be transferred to the Scottish Office and used on the A.90?
LORD MOWBRAY AND STOURTON: My Lords, I think that the people who do not want it are local inhabitants, who are probably not the majority using that road.
LORD HUGHES: But they would not require a visa to use the road.

MENTAL HOSPITAL PATIENTS AND OUTSIDE WORK
3.16 p.m.
LORD SHINWELL: 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 the experiment in operation in the Elms Ward at the Purdown Mental Hospital, Bristol, where a number of male patients are engaged in gainful occupation outside the hospital, is being encouraged by the Health Ministry and whether similar experiments will be adopted in other mental hospitals.
LORD ABERDARE: Yes, my Lords. It is our policy to encourage hospital authorities to develop well-planned schemes which will provide suitable training and occupation for patients in mental hospitals or assist their rehabilitation. A number of schemes involving local industry are already in existence, and we very much hope the practice will spread.
LORD SHINWELL: My Lords, after that encouraging reply, may I ask the Minister this question? Is he aware that the consultant psychiatrist at this particular hospital has stated that there are more than 100 patients who would qualify for gainful occupation outside the unit of the hospital, but the obstacle in the way is the lack of education on the part of the public, who regard persons who are mentally disturbed as unsuitable to mix with the community outside? Would the Government take note of that and use whatever publicity is available to them in

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order to encourage people outside these hospitals to assist the persons concerned? May I ask further whether it is possible for somebody from his Department—I would not dare to ask the Minister himself—to visit this unit in order to witness the experiment, which is a very valuable one indeed?
LORD ABERDARE: My Lords, I am extremely glad to know that the noble Lord is taking such an interest in health matters, and I am grateful to him for having drawn attention to this particular development at this hospital. It is not quite such an experiment, I venture to suggest, as he says; it is taking place in many of our mental hospitals and is one which we fully support. I recognise, as he says, that there is often a certain public anxiety, particularly when it comes to putting a training centre or a hostel in an ordinary community; but where they have been established the local community usually take them to heart very helpfully. As for visiting hospitals, I will certainly take note of what the noble Lord said. I hope that he will continue to visit many more hospitals.
LORD GRENFELL: My Lords, would my noble friend not agree that to the best of our knowledge most hospitals for the mentally handicapped do all they can to find jobs outside the hospital for patients? In the group of which I am chairman, where most patients are of low grade, having I.Q.s of 50 or below, there are employed outside the hospital nine girls with wages ranging from £10 to £13 a week, and six men with wages ranging from £15 to £23. We are always looking for new jobs. According to the amount of wages a scale of charges is made, but the hospital cannot take more than £6.
LORD ABERDARE: My Lords, I am well aware that the noble Lord is chairman of a very excellent group of hospitals, and it reinforces the point that I was making to the noble Lord, Lord Shinwell, that this excellent development is going on throughout the country.
LORD SHINWELL: My Lords, in order to remove any possibility of misunderstanding, may I ask the Minister whether he is aware that my visit to this particular institution was unofficial and completely voluntary?
LORD ABERDARE: My Lords, I am very glad to know that the noble Lord did not receive a coffee pot.
LADY RUTHVEN OF FREELAND: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that a great many patients from that particular group of hospitals have been working outside the hospital for a very long time? The one referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Shinwell, is only one of the group of Stoke Park Hospitals, which I know very well. It may be that the noble Lord, Lord Shinwell, is referring to 100 patients from the Stoke Park Hospital group, who are earning about £30,000 a year. I should just like to bring that to the attention of the Minister.
LORD ABERDARE: My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend.
BARONESS BROOKE OF YSTRADFELLTE: My Lords, can the Minister tell us how many hospitals are partaking in similar schemes of this kind?
LORD ABERDARE: My Lords, I cannot tell my noble friend exactly how many hospitals are involved. I can tell her that in 1970 2·8 per cent. of the patients in hospitals for the mentally handicapped, and 2 per cent. of those in hospitals for the mentally ill, were working outside the hospitals in open employment.
LORD PARGITER: My Lords, can the noble Lord say to what extent there is consultation between his Department and the Department of Employment? So much depends upon the money that they are prepared to spend on rehabilitation units for people of this kind.
LORD ABERDARE: My Lords, there is very close consultation with the Department of Employment.
LORD DAVIES OF LEEK: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that some of us appreciate very much the attitude of the trade union movement towards a better understanding of patients who require jobs for their rehabilitation? This House and the other place appreciate the attitude which the trade union movement has shown towards a better understanding of these patients, thus eradicating the fear about them which we used to have in days gone by.
LORD ABERDARE: Yes, my Lords. I am glad to acknowledge that.

CONCORDE: CANCELLATION OF AMERICAN OPTIONS
LORD BESWICK: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question of which I have given Her Majesty's Government Private notice.
The Question is as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they will make a statement on the cancellation of the options on Concorde by Pan-American and T.W.A?
EARL ST. ALDWYN: My Lords, wit the leave of the House, my noble friend Lord Drumalbyn will answer this Question at a convenient moment after 3.30 p.m. That will be followed by a statement to be made by my noble friend Lord Colville of Culross on the security situation in Northern Ireland.

SUCCESSION (SCOTLAND) BILL [H.L.]
3.22 p.m.
THE EARL OF SELKIRK: My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time. I have promised the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, that I shall be as brief as I can, and I shall follow that intention. In the Succession (Scotland) Act 1964, very considerable changes were made in the law of succession. These changes have, I believe, worked well and they have been well received. The purpose of this Bill is to amend Sections 8 and 9 of the 1964 Act, and it has no other purpose. The reason why that is necessary is that, in place of the traditional rights of "terce" and "courtesy", there were established "prior rights", to assure the position of the surviving spouse in marriage; and, as these were expressed in terms of money they have inevitably been eroded by the influence of inflation. It is to restore the former position that this Bill is presented to the House.
These rights arise only in cases of intestacy, and in such cases, under the principal Act of 1964, the surviving spouse was entitled to the matrimonial house up to the value of £15,000. He or she was also entitled to £5,000 of plenishings. Over and above this, if there was
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issue he or she was entitled to £2,500, and if there was no issue to £5,000. If one calculates the influence of inflation over the intervening period—and I shall be very happy to go into the figures, if necessary—the value of property since 1964 has risen by about 100 per cent. Accordingly, in the Bill the value of the matrimonial house is now put up to the sum of £30,000, which just about restores the position of the surviving spouse to what it was in 1964. In regard to the plenishings and the sum payable from the general estate, I think the figures in the retail price index are about right and they point to a figure of 60 per cent. in this case. Accordingly, the plenishings which can be retained in intestacy by the surviving spouse go up from £5,000 to £8,000, while the payment from the general estate in the event of issue will increase from £2,500 to £4,000, and, where there is no issue, from £5,000 to £8,000. This puts the surviving spouse in a comparable position to what he or she was in in 1964.
The Bill also looks to the future and provides for the Secretary of State to have power to make increases in these cash amounts, as and when it may seem necessary. It is suggested that he should do so by laying before this House a draft Statutory Instrument, which after the normal period of 40 days will be made in the normal form. I think that this is a wise provision for the future, because I am afraid that none of us can be assured that the present value of money will remain steady. This is very similar to the procedure which has already been adopted for England, and only last July the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor laid a Statutory Instrument which had the effect of raising what are called statutory legacies in England, to a figure more in line with the current value of money. I think that this is a desirable amendment to the principal Act, which I commend to the House. However, it is not intended to relieve anyone from taking proper legal advice when that is found necessary, and it would be quite wrong to think that the Bill would avoid one's taking that line. Conditions vary with almost everyone, and it is important that they should be examined both under the terms of this Bill and under the general conditions of succession. I think that this Bill is essential if prior rights

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are to be maintained at their 1964 level. My Lords, I beg to move.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 2ª. —(The Earl of Selkirk.)
LORD HOY: My Lords, I rise on this side of the House simply to say that we welcome the Bill which the noble Earl has introduced. We think that the figures included in it restore the position to what it was when the principal Act was passed. But, more than that, we are grateful to the noble Earl for including in the Bill provision for making changes in the future by Statutory Instrument, which will prevent further Bills having to be introduced to meet new circumstances. For all those reasons, we are grateful to the noble Earl and are delighted to support the Bill.
3.18 p.m.
THE MINISTER OF STATE, SCOTTISH OFFICE (LORD POLWARTH): My Lords when my noble friend Lord Selkirk was elected a Scottish Representative Peer at the same election as myself —I think 27 years ago—the gain of your Lordships' House was at the same time a loss to the Scottish Bar, where he had practised before the war with distinction. That he has not lost his skill in advocacy and explanation is clear from the way in which he has commended to your Lordships this small measure concerning what, to a layman is a very complicated branch of law. At least, it is a little less complicated than it was in the days of my own apprenticeship, when we had to know these legal rights by heart: we have at least, in the 1964 Act, got rid of the mysterious rights of "terce" and "courtesy", even if we are left with jus relictae, jus relicti and legitim.
As my noble friend has said, it is a limited measure but it is none the less valuable for that. It does not change in any way the legal standing of surviving spouses. It seeks only to bring up to date the provisions which were enacted in 1964; and to ensure that, if the amended figures proposed here need to be adjusted in future to take account of further changes in the value of money or property, this can be done more readily and conveniently by Statutory Instrument.
So on behalf of the Government I welcome this useful measure and commend it to your Lordships.
THE EARL OF SELKIRK: My Lords, may I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hoy, for the welcome that he has given to this Bill, and may I also thank the Government for the assistance with which they have provided me? Perhaps I should add that the Scottish Law Commission are taking a general look at the effect of the 1964 Act. That has now been in operation for eight years and it is wise and proper that they should do so, and we wait with interest to hear what comments they have to make.
On Question, Bill read 2ª, and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.

REHABILITATION OF OFFENDERS BILL [H.L.]
3.30 p.m.
LORD GARDINER: My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time. I have not asked anybody to speak on the Second Reading of this Bill, but I think that the list of speakers shows that the Bill has raised considerable interest in your Lordships' House. The subject is a somewhat complex one, however, and I hope, therefore, that the House will allow me some indulgence if I make a speech rather longer, perhaps, than is normal on the Second Reading of a Private Member's Bill.
It was in December, 1970, that the Howard League for Penal Reform, Justice and NACRO—the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders—appointed a committee, of which I had the honour to be chairman, to consider a problem of old convictions. I say on purpose "a problem of old convictions" because there are others. We were not proposing to concern ourselves with what are sometimes rather loosely called hardened professional criminals; and we were not concerning ourselves with any conviction which had led to a sentence of more than two years' imprisonment. We were not concerning ourselves in other words with those with whom the Criminal Law Revision Committee are particularly concerned. Nor were we concerning ourselves with another group where there is an equal problem, and that is that rather large group, which is a great trouble to society, made up of people who seem to go in and come out of prison over a

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considerable time. There is a problem there, because the files of all three societies contain many cases of men who, on coming out of prison, manage to get employment and do all right until the police come round and tell the employers and who are then given their cards. The reason why we are not dealing with those people is because theirs is a separate problem.
The group with which we are alone concerned is a different group, but a large one. It is made up of men and women —primarily, of course, men—who get into trouble during adolescence and who then reach a stage when they marry, settle down and lead regular lives. They in fact become rehabilitated personally; and, as I shall have occasion later to point out, the risk, after a certain time, of their ever again getting into serious trouble is not only no more than but is slightly less than that of people who have never been in trouble of any kind before. The question is whether, where such men have done everything they can to rehabilitate themselves but still find that at any time their lives may be shattered by a very old conviction—perhaps after 10, 20 or 30 years—it would not be to the interests of society that society itself should complete the period of rehabilitation.
My Lords, such men in fact get into difficulties in many different ways: obviously, in relation to employment and obtaining professional qualifications. I believe that even a conviction at the age of 12 is a fatal bar throughout life to being employed by a body like the Post Office. Then, insurance. If such a man is doing well and has saved a little money, he may want to start a business. When he goes to a solicitor he is bound to be told that it is very unlikely that he will be able to obtain any of the normal business insurances. The reason is that if such men as these disclose their conviction the risk is not accepted and they do not get a policy, and if they do not disclose their conviction and the insurers find out, then, for however long premiums have been paid, if a loss arises the insurers do not pay. Many people think that if you have a proposal form containing a lot of questions, so long as you answer the questions honestly and truthfully that is enough. But that is not the law of insurance. The law of insurance is that, what
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ever questions are asked, there is a duty on anybody proposing for insurance to give the insurers any facts which a prudent insurer would consider relevant on the question either of whether he should issue a policy or, if so, at what premium.
My experience in these cases, and I think the experience of all those in the law, is that once the insurance company has called an insurance broker to say, "Whatever you may think of this old conviction yourself, it is a fact which a prudent insurer would take into account, either for the purpose of deciding whether to accept the policy or at what premium. It is impossible to call evidence to the contrary, because obviously it is no good calling anybody except from the insurance world. I remember two cases in one year which I decided, sitting as an arbitrator. They were both cases in which a director of a company, to the knowledge of other directors, had had some conviction or other. A loss had occurred—there was no suggestion that it was not an honest loss; it was a burglary, or something of that sort—and in each case evidence was called that a prudent insurer would have taken those convictions into account. In one, I remember, the company was the father's company. The father owned all the shares, and he made his two sons managing directors of the company to give them a start in life. The company proceeded in an honest and proper way for a period of years, and then they had a burglary of about £40,000. It transpired that one of these two sons, when he was at Cambridge—I think it was on Boat Race Night—had what I thought was some rather minor conviction; and at the time of the burglary he was on holiday in South Africa. But, of course, I had to decide the case according to law, and I had to find for the insurers.
Then there is a particular form of policy which very much affects employment. It is fidelity bond insurance of the block bonding type. It is insurance against defalcation by, or dishonesty of, employees, but is on the footing that every employee has to be included—and this applies to employees who have no opportunity of stealing either goods or, still less, money. But as the insurers insist on this policy applying to all the employees, virtually anybody who has a

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conviction, particularly for dishonesty, cannot get employment in any capacity at all.
The next risk is that of getting involved in any way in a law case. By an Act of Parliament, anyone who is called as a witness in any case, whether criminal or civil, can be asked about every conviction, however old, that he has ever had, and however, to the layman, irrelevant. This is with a view to persuading the jury that because he has had convictions he is not to be believed upon his oath. The files contain many cases of that kind; and the risk is of getting involved in almost any way. "Matthew" (of course, we have not used their right names; the facts are right, but we have changed their names) was convicted in 1949 for a series of thefts. He later settled down, and in 1961 married a woman with strong religious beliefs. They opened a boarding-house in a seaside town, and later turned it into a convalescent home for old people. Everyone agreed that it was very well run and efficiently staffed. He became a much-respected member of the community, doing public work and helping people in trouble. Through carelessness he exceeded the number of patients permitted without a licence. He was taken to court, and his record was exposed. He had to abandon all the fruits of his new life, leave the town and change his name. "James" had some early convictions for dishonesty. He then settled down, and ran a respectable business in his local town. Eleven years after his last conviction he brought an action in the local county court to recover a civil debt, and found himself cross-examined by the defendant's counsel about his old convictions.
Paradoxically, the better you do in the worse difficulty you may be. If you do well, you may be pressed to enter public life; but there, of course, there is a risk that either a political opponent or a newspaper may dig out your old conviction. Those of us who know some of these people know that mostly they do not go to parties and do not like meeting large numbers of people because they are always afraid of running into somebody who knows about their trouble in early life. Equally perilous, of course, is almost any contact with the police.
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When "Charles" was a young man he was convicted of a sex offence. Later he married and settled down. He did well in business, and became a respectable and respected member of his community. Twenty years after his conviction he was found guilty of a minor motoring offence, and his old conviction was read out in court and was reported in the local Press. When "George" was convicted of having no "L" plates on his motor-cycle, the court was told that several years before he had been convicted of indecent exposure.
Another risk arises because on a criminal conviction the man's fingerprints and photographs will be taken and will be on the police records. These photographs are put to people to see whether they can identify a particular culprit. There is one case where a man with a minor conviction at the age of 18 and who has since become a respected T.V. executive was in this way identified by a witness and as a result was convicted of a robbery in a neighbourhood that he had not been in for ten years. Fortunately, he was acquitted on appeal, but meanwhile he had served nine months; and in that sort of case no compensation is available from public funds.
I confess that we had been considering these problems weekly for quite a considerable time when, for the first time, it occurred to one of us to say, "I wonder how many people we are talking about." We found that we did not know. We asked one of our members, a Queen's Counsel, an acknowledged authority on criminal statistics, to find out. He said he had done his best but was quite unable to find out how many people who had been convicted, particularly of the more serious offences, then go straight for five, seven or ten years. We asked the Home Office. They said, "We do not know." They said that it was an interesting point, that they would rather like to know and that they would ask the statistical branch to do a special survey. They had to go back some years because they wanted to know what had happened afterwards. They took 1957 as an average year and they took 4,000 males convicted on indictment as a random sample, which they said was quite sufficient.
They found this. Of first offenders, 64 per cent. had gone straight for 5 years and 60 per cent. had gone straight for

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10 years. Of those convicted before, 33 per cent. had gone straight for 5 years and 30 per cent. for 10 years. They said that the important things which seemed to follow are these. First, 9 out of 10 of those going straight for 5 years, go straight for 10 years. Secondly, the number who go wrong after 10 years is infinitesimal. In fact, they said, it is slightly smaller than the number of those who never have been convicted of any offence before, and probably this is because they have learned their lesson. Finally, they said, "We can fairly assess the total number of these people in the community and it is about 1 million"— which, I must say, surprised us very much. They said that for various reasons that is probably an underestimate. They said they had only taken males and that women are much more likely to stay out of trouble later on than are men.
I should have thought that it must be a disincentive to those who have been convicted to know that no matter what they do, no matter how honestly they act or how hard they work, there never comes a time when a conviction can be lived down. Conversely, I should have thought that it would be an incentive to a man to know that if he goes straight for five years, or whatever the period may be, he will be all right. The problem is not lessened by the number of new laws which are constantly being made. Taking indictable offences and the more serious summary offences, by the age of 60 about 31 per cent. of the population have been convicted. Nor is it made easier by the degree to which personal information can now be stored on credit data banks and in computers; nor by the inquiry agents, some of whom advertise that they can get you anybody's criminal record for £5 or £7. I will come back to that later.
My Lords, this country is the only member of the Council of Europe which has no rehabilitation law; so we made a considerable study of the laws of other countries, and particularly the rehabilitation laws of Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, Sweden, the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R.—and I shall come back to that.
Clauses 1 and 2 of this Bill set out the substance of our proposals: that if a man is convicted and has served a sentence or complied with an order in a case in which a rehabilitation period
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applies and he has not, with certain exceptions, been again convicted during the rehabilitation period, then he shall be treated as a rehabilitated person and the conviction treated as spent. Clause 2 explains what this means; namely, that with certain exceptions he will be treated in law as if there had been no such offence or conviction, and, again with certain exceptions, no evidence to prove either would be admissible.
There are two other features of our proposals which I think I should mention at once. The rehabilitation periods that we propose are these: where a man has not had a custodial sentence, five years; where he has had a custodial sentence of lip to six months at magistrates' court level, seven years; where the sentence was from six months up to but not exceeding two years, ten years. We had a number of letters saying that these periods were really too long and that they ought to be three years, five years and seven years. We gave close attention to these matters and we have two answers. First, we realise that these periods will bear more hardly on the young. For that reason, we propose that in the case of those from 12 to 17 years of age, the period shall be halved. Secondly, if in practice the period should be thought to be wrong, or it is thought that this age is too low or too high, we propose in Clause 3 that the Home Secretary should have the power by Order in Council subject to the Affirmative Resolution procedure of both Houses to alter either the period or the age limit.
May I digress before coming on to further details of the Bill?—because, while I have had considerable support from all parts of the House, I have had three letters which raise exactly the same point. They say, in effect, "Certainly this is a thing which ought to be remedied and in principle we agree with you; but it seems to us that what you are in fact doing is authorising a man to tell a lie. Can that be right?" May I now deal with that point? There are only four ways which have ever been tried or suggested for remedying this wrong. The first is to have a tribunal or board to which the rehabilitated person can apply for what in one country is called a pardon. This does not seem to work, probably because, first, the last thing in the world which a rehabilitated person

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wants to do is himself to drag up that episode from 20 years earlier. He is living among people, none of whom knows about his past; and he hopes that nobody will. The cases can be heard in camera but they have to be listed; and in the case of anybody who is reasonably well known, the Press would find out. Secondly, not unreasonably, the first thing the tribunal or board does is to send the police along to see the man's employer and neighbours to find out whether he is leading an honest life. Thirdly, if I am wrong in thinking that they would not wish to take advantage of this, one reflects that there are 1 million people in this position—and I do not know where is the board or tribunal to deal with that.
A feature of a number of foreign countries as part of their rehabilitation law is that the record itself is cancelled physically. Although this is fairly general on the Continent, we were much opposed to that idea, for these reasons. First, in one of those very rare cases of a man going straight for, say, 10 years but who again gets into serious trouble and is convicted on indictment, is it not in the interests of society, and possibly of himself, that the judge should have access to the full record? If it is said: "Well, that is rather hard on him, but what he has done shows that he was not, after all, a rehabilitated person", I say that this Bill is only concerned with those who are in fact rehabilitated.
The second reason concerns the police. I should be the last to deny that the extent to which the police go talking to other people about people's records is perhaps excessive—the degree of traffic between the police, for example, and security officers of big companies and so on. This is a separate problem. The police are responsible for detecting crime. Surely, the police ought to be allowed to know who has done what. If you once literally remove the record, of course they will not. Then there are research bodies like the Home Office Research Unit and the Cambridge Institute of Criminology who seek to derive conclusions from the statistics. But once you falsify the statistics, once you obliterate the record, obviously their work will be of less value. Then there are public authorities which are charged with the surveillance of areas of known social risk: schoolmasters who interfere
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with small boys and indeed the whole field of child care. There is also the man who wants a licence to operate a casino, where there may be a security risk. At the moment, this field is dealt with by the Home Secretary, because the police act on his authority. If he authorises anybody to convey, for example, information of this kind to a professional association, he is answerable for that in Parliament; and in the Bill we do not propose to disturb this. But for all those reasons we were strongly opposed to any obliteration of the record.
The third alternative is to pass a law making it a criminal offence to ask anybody a question about convictions except to ask: "Have you ever been convicted of an offence which has not been rehabilitated?" We considered this in depth, but we came to the conclusion that in fact no such law could be enforced. In the first place, this is a free country, and if we are for the first time to make it possible to send an Englishman to prison for asking questions, I should think people would wonder what the country was coming to. There would of course be arguments as to how far you were at liberty to depart from the exact wording of the Statute in question. We could not really envisage a prosecution. Normally, the one man who would know would be the rehabilitated offender, if he is asked, "What convictions have you had?" instead of being asked the statutory question. Again, he is not going to prosecute, because the last thing he wants to do is to take any form of legal proceedings which are going to raise the whole of his past. And, of course, there would obviously be many ways round it. No doubt those who had not committed any offence would say: "No; I have never been convicted of anything in my life". And those who simply said, "No" at once would of course be suspect. So, although at first sight the idea might have some attraction, we felt that it was quite impracticable.
One is left therefore with our proposal; and its justification is this. If an offence has happened, nothing can make it unhappen Any remedy therefore will probably have some degree of artificiality. The thing is to choose that which has the least artificiality. Both the conviction and the sentence are creations of the law. Is not this therefore a case in which the law ought to take the lead, put a term to that which it has created

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and say: "In these conditions, and after such and such periods, the effect of this is to end."? There is nothing very new in this. We are quite used to Acts of Parliament which, usually for some good social or other reason, say that A is to be deemed to be B. Of course it is not B; it is A. But we are still a law-abiding country, and if the law is that A is to be deemed to be B, most people will accept it.
The way in which we have tried to do this, by saying something is to be inadmissible in evidence, is also very familiar to our law. Hearsay evidence may be true, but because it is so difficult to check we do not allow it to be given. It is a truth on which evidence cannot be given. And there are a lot of presumptions of various kinds. A tenant cannot be allowed to dispute the title of his landlord. The licensee of a patent is not allowed to prove that the patent is invalid. If one thinks of one's driving licence, it may have been littered with endorsements for exceeding the speed limit, but if you can keep straight for three years you are entitled to a clean licence, which foxes the policeman. If he knew that you had exceeded the speed limit several times already, and you have just done it again, he would issue a summons; but, faced with a clean licence, he does not know, and he gives you a caution—except that if one has been convicted of driving a car under the influence of drink or drugs then the period is ten years. It is not of course a true analogy because the conviction remains, but it is subject to the same principle.
LORD SHACKLETON: My Lords, may I interrupt my noble and learned friend? He knows that I am very sympathetic to his Bill, but a crucial point for many of us is this very point. He has said that the law frequently says that A can be deemed to be B. But, as I understand Clause 2, it does not say that; it merely says that it will not be a criminal offence to say that A is B—or have I misunderstood?
LORD GARDINER: My Lords, it is not that it is a criminal offence. The main provision is that no evidence will be admissible. It will not be for the man himself to say what the law is now saying; namely, that this conviction is to be treated as if it had never taken place and
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accordingly no evidence in any court will be admissible to prove it. This is in fact the most common method which other countries have used. Here I must confess that all my life I have been resistant to the argument that I have so often heard in the field of law reform: that something that works perfectly well in most other countries could not possibly work properly here, because they are foreigners. Of course there are differences between countries. Of course it does not follow that if something works well in the field of law in other countries it would necessarily work well here. But this is a point which I think should be considered.
In the law of Germany, for example, criminal records record losses of civil rights as well as sentences, and access to the record is first restricted after five years for lesser cases and ten years in others, and the entry is cancelled after ten years. Once the entry is cancelled, a person is in general entitled to state, even in court, that he has no convictions. French law is the same. The conviction is not mentioned in extracts from the criminal records and a legal fiction—that is what they call it; une fiction légale—is created that the reinstated person has not been convicted. And there, as here, I understand, it applies in all courts. It used to be, and I think still is, in France a ground for divorce that the spouse has been convicted of certain criminal offences. If evidence is taken of the criminal offence and of the conviction, that is a ground for divorce. But if the spouse waits until the rehabilitation period has expired, then she cannot proceed on it, because the conviction in law has ceased to exist.
There is a wide, very disparate group of countries which have almost the same law; namely, Austria, Egypt, Italy, Japan and Ethiopia. In case the House may be interested to hear this, I may tell your Lordships that Article 245 of the Ethiopian Penal Code says:
"Reinstatement, since it cancels the sentence, shall produce the following effects:

"(a) relieves the person concerned of any disabilities which are attached to the sentence;

"(b) the sentence shall be deleted from his police record and for the future be presumed to be non-existent;

"(c) a reproach referring to an old conviction made either by ill-will or any other reason shall come under the provisions of criminal law regarding defamation, and the

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defences based on justification or public interest shall not be admissible."

As I say, it is substantially the same in Austria, Egypt, Italy and Japan.
I now turn to the Bill. Clause 3 may look complicated, because if it is to be said that the man has not had a custodial sentence, you then have to say how detention orders, borstal orders, probation orders and absolute and conditional discharge orders are to be dealt with. Subsection (4) refers to statutory disqualifications which are to remain as they are—certainly disqualifications in other Acts. Most of them do not apply because they do not last for more than five years, but there are exceptions—for example, people who hold public house licences and who, if convicted of offences against our drinking laws cannot hold a licence during that period. We propose that such things as these should remain as they are. Subsection (8) raises the question of a young man convicted of something quite serious, for which he goes to prison for a year, so that he has a rehabilitation period of 10 years. For nine and a half years he leads an unblemished life and then is convicted and fined £2 for parking his car in the wrong place. The question is: does he then go back to square one? We thought that if the conviction is one on indictment the answer should be, Yes; if the conviction is one of those many cases which are indictable—that is to say, can be tried either on indictment or before the justices again, Yes; but if it is a purely summary offence, No. I hope that the House may think that that is the right balance.
Clause 4 was not in the Bill as originally drafted. The Home Office asked whether it would not be difficult for those people, and others too, to know what the rehabilitation period is in a particular case. Therefore we have inserted Clause 4, which provides that a court shall give everyone a certificate in the form set out in the Schedule, from which it will be plain what the application of this Act is to a particular case. Even if it is not practicable to do this in every single case, we feel that it would be of value if it could be done in most cases.
Clause 5(1) defines convictions for the purpose of the Act. Subsection (2) completely foxed the Home Office, and per-
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haps I had better say a word in explanation. What it says is:
"No order made by any court in respect of any person who has not been found guilty of an offence shall, after the commencement of this Act, be given in evidence as a previous conviction of that person upon his subsequent conviction of any offence."
Your Lordships may ask how, if he is not found guilty, can it be included in his list of previous convictions? My committee had no qualifications in particular for expressing moral views: that is entirely a matter for Parliament. What they were qualified on was experience, and particularly from the Bench, because the members included three justices of the peace, a barrister, a solicitor, the Secretary of the Howard League, the Secretary of Justice, a deputy Crown Court judge and two serving London stipendiary magistrates—men who know criminals, crime, the work of the courts and the police. If a child is deserted by its parents, it is the practice in many parts of the country to say that it is in need of care and protection and the child is then committed to the care of the local authority. This fact is always included in the previous convictions list. This seems to all of us wrong. We thought that it ought to be stopped, and that is the object of this subsection.
Subsection (3) specifies the four important cases in which, although a man has gone straight for the relevant number of years, and although he is a rehabilitated person, all his old convictions can still be brought up against him. The first case is if he is thereafter convicted on indictment. I believe that is right, because it shows he is one of those very rare cases who have not been rehabilitated after all. And not only does this apply if he is tried on indictment, but if he is sent up for sentence by the magistrates' court, because that also means that he has done something seriously wrong. Subsection (3)(b) I regret—we all make mistakes ! The Home Office said, "You have not allowed for the increasing way in which old convictions are going to be slung about when the Criminal Law Revision Committee gets to work." I thought it was rather unusual to anticipate legislation, particularly when many people hope that some of the recommendations will never be part of our law. But one always tries to meet Home Office points, so we have expressly said in (b) that this

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is subject to any changes which our law may make in the future. I do not think it does anything or that it is necessary, because naturally this Bill must be subject to later legislation. But that is the origin of it.
On adoption, we thought that the public would expect that a man applying for an adoption order should disclose his whole life. I do not know whether I agree, but there are usually applications, certainly in the county court, which are heard in private. However, I sympathise with the employer or the insurer who says: "Look at these two men: this man has been convicted of an offence of dishonesty. It is true that it happened when he was a boy and he has gone straight for 10 years, but still he is a risk in comparison with this other man, who has led an absolutely blameless life ". I sympathise with that, but of course they do not know what you know and I know and the Home Office know: that the rehabilitated man is less likely to get into any serious trouble in the future than the man who has never been in trouble at all; and I should think it very doubtful whether a court, when considering adoption, would pay any attention to a 21 year old juvenile offence. I think they are very much more likely to say that if this father adopts sons, then he is going to be more careful to see that they do not get into trouble than the ordinary father, because he knows what it is going to cost them and how long it is going to last. However, on the whole the Committee thought that exception should be given. The fourth exception, of course, concerns the consent of the rehabilitated person.
Clause 6 deals with defamation. Here one has to strike a balance, as always, between society and the individual. We all felt that the employer or ex-employer should not have to prove justification. Anyone who is in a position of either absolute or qualified privilege should retain it. Sometimes a man who gives a reference is sued for defamation. He never has to say, "Well, I am going to prove that what I said is true", because he has this other simpler defence of saying, "I was simply saying what I honestly believe". We felt that an ex-employer, asked for a reference, would be in an impossible position, and
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although this would be less protection to the rehabilitated person than would the contrary, one has, as I say, to take all aspects into account. We felt that the ex-employer giving a reference ought to be able to retain his qualified privilege. Then we dealt with things in Law Reports, textbooks and innocent republications there defined.
Clause 7 deals with police records. This is a difficult problem. The police are subject to the Official Secrets Acts so, strictly speaking, it is a breach of the Official Secrets Acts for the police to disclose criminal records unless they are authorised to do so. I have asked the noble Viscount to give consideration to this question because, as I have told him, I am not sure what the position is. He probably has not yet had time to consider it. My recollection is that about a year ago in the other place somebody made a fuss because the Home Secretary had authorised the police to give the criminal record of a doctor to the General Medical Council. That only surprised me because I thought it was so well known that the police, on the authority of the Home Secretary, always sent convictions of professional men to their professional organisation. Mr. Maudling said that he would reconsider the whole question, particularly whether the man, who I understand, is not usually told, should be told when that is done, and in effect what people should be involved.
It is so easy to forget a question, or to miss something, as I did the other day on the Administration of Justice Bill. I do not recollect having seen anything about that matter since, and perhaps the Minister could assist us. What the Bill proposes in this respect is to leave things exactly where they are. There are these highly sensitive areas, but it may be quite right to do this; the Secretary of State, after all, is responsible to Parliament for the way in which he exercises this discretion. I think the matter goes rather far sometimes. It may be all right, I do not know, if a foreign national is convicted of something, to tell his embassy, or if a Commonwealth citizen is concerned, to tell his High Commissioner. But there arose a case where a young man had committed several offences. He was a first offender and was sentenced to one year's imprisonment. That was a long time ago, and probably that would not

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be done now. When he came out of prison he got a job as a shop assistant and he worked very hard. He obtained "O" levels and "A" levels. He qualified for university and obtained a degree. He had a professional qualification.
Some 14 years after the juvenile episode he accepted an appointment as a teacher in his own speciality in a Commonwealth university. There was no question on the application form about convictions. He sold his house; he and his wife gave up their jobs; they took their boys away from school and the family pets were disposed of. Four days before he was due to sail, the university cancelled the appointment because the High Commissioner had asked the Criminal Record Office and they told him about the conviction 14 years previously. As it was a breach of contract the university had to refund the passage money and expenses, but there he was without a house 'or job. It took six years before he got back in the same position. This is perhaps going rather too far, but it is a case—and I am not criticising the Home Secretary—for a really good look at who ought to be included on the list of people to whom the contents of the Criminal Record Office are divulged, and how old the convictions should be.
Those are authorised disclosures. I am afraid that there are unauthorised disclosures, and these are of two kinds. One is when it is done voluntarily. Five years ago there were over a hundred detective agencies in London alone, many of them run by ex-police officers. They have friends in the C.R.O., and I am afraid that a certain amount of unauthorised information is passed on. Having mentioned inquiry agents, may I at once say that I have read of a case pending in the newspapers. I know nothing of the agency concerned, and nothing I say is intended to apply to them.
The other class of case is where it is done by fraud, and this happens, too. The ex-policeman in the inquiry agent's office knows the situation, rings up the C.R.O. and says, "This is Camberwell Police Station, we have a man who has been brought in". The C.R.O. is given the name and address of the man and, believing the telephone call to come from the police station, they give the information.
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We thought that this ought to be stopped. We thought that the first difficulty was that nobody wanted to prosecute under the Official Secrets Act. It is a sledgehammer which is unpopular with everybody. We thought that a police officer who voluntarily disclosed unauthorised information ought to be subject to a specific offence punishable by a fine up to £100. An inquiry agent who obtains information by fraud ought to be liable to fines up to £400, or six months in prison.
My Lords, it only remains for me to thank the Home Office, who I know have taken a lot of trouble with this Bill, leading insurers with whom I have discussed it, chief constables and judges with whom I have discussed it. I should add that the Bill applies to Scotland. We thought that it was a pity that so many Bills apply to England and Wales, leaving Scotland to tag along three or four years later. We saw no reason why, if it was right for England and Wales, it was not right for Scotland. We consulted our Scottish legal friends, and we hope and believe that we are right.
I should like to thank those who have supported the Bill. It has had a very good Press, particularly a good legal Press. The Confederation of British Industry has appointed a special six-man committee to go into every aspect of the Bill from the employer's point of view. I have seen them, and they have unanimously recommended to their Council that the Bill should not be opposed. I am equally grateful to the most reverend Primate, who referred the Bill to his Committee for Moral Responsibility, of which the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Lichfield is chairman. He is unfortunately unable to be here, but the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York is familiar with their views. I should like to acknowledge my personal indebtedness to the then Lord Chief Justice, the late Lord Parker of Waddington, with whom I was in touch during our deliberations and who, when I sent him the report, wrote to me and said:
"If I may say so, I think that the report is excellent and arrives at a proper balance between the interests of the individual and the interests of the public. Moreover, the idea behind it is not only more appropriate to our system, but is far better than that adopted by other countries. As at present advised, I should support a Bill carrying out the recommendations in the report, though it may be

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that I would seek to change it in some respects of detail."
He then very kindly made a suggestion about how hospital orders should be treated, which I need hardly say I adopted.
There is one case in our report that I know myself. She is called "Joan" in the report, though that is not her name. In 1929, Joan, then eighteen, was convicted of soliciting. A few years later she married and has ever since led the life of a good citizen. Two of her three children married, and she now has four grandchildren. Neither her husband nor her children know of her conviction. She has always known that if, for any reason, she became newsworthy any newspaper could publish the information. Since it were true she would have no remedy or redress. No newspaper has yet done so, although other people in a similar position have not been so fortunate. She has lived her whole life under this shadow and even now, at the age of 62, it is something which she knows may explode under her feet at any time. I think that this is wrong; society ought to do something at some time during the lives of these people—and there are a million of them—to relieve them of this heavy burden. I beg to move.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 2ª. —(Lord Gardiner)

CONCORDE AIRCRAFT: UNITED STATES AIRLINES' DECISION
4.19 p.m.
THE MINISTER OF STATE, DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND SOCIAL SECURITY (LORD ABERDARE): My Lords, it may be convenient if, with the leave of the House, I now reply to a Private Notice Question put earlier by the noble Lord, Lord Beswick. My honourable friend the Minister for Aerospace has just answered a similar Question in another place, and I will use the same words. He said:
"I very much regret that Pan American Airways and Trans World Airways have felt unable to purchase Concorde at present. Both have, however, indicated that they will maintain an interest in the future of the programme, and be open to further discussions with the manufacturers. I
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very much hope that both airlines will decide at a later date to order Concorde.
"The manufacturers are now engaged in an active sales campaign and are in detailed negotiations with a number of other airlines. The British and French Governments will continue to give the manufacturers every support in these negotiations."
LORD BESWICK: My Lords, we are grateful to the noble Lord for making that Statement on a matter in which there is considerable public interest. First, as I have done before, I must declare an interest with B.A.C.; but because of that interest I say the more confidently that those associated with this great project, and all those who wish it well, will approve the indication in this Statement of the Government's position, and especially when they say that they are giving continuing support to the manufacturers in negotiations that are now continuing. It is right to make clear that it is options and not orders that have been cancelled, and it would he quite wrong to allow this action by companies with temporary financial difficulties to determine the future of this great Anglo-French effort. I hope the noble Lord will agree that this undoubted disappointment should also be regarded as a challenge, and that he can make this the occasion when there is a decisive shift in initiative, so far as technical innovation is concerned, from the United States to Europe.
Finally, may I, as one who has always been in favour of the most open of open Governments, ask whether the noble Lord will agree with me when I say that the maximum public support for this project will be ensured if the maximum of facts are known by the public? In that light, would he therefore at this time consider very sympathetically the Amendment put down by the Opposition in another place to the Concorde Bill, asking for a Select Committee to look into the matter?
LORD GLADWYN: My Lords, I do not know whether I have the position right, but am I to understand that the Government are going to proceed with the production of Concorde irrespective of whether or not orders are forthcoming? If not, have they any plans for employ-

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ing in alternative schemes workers now engaged on the Concorde project who may become redundant?
LORD DRUMALBYN: My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Beswick, for what he has said. I am sure that what he has said reflects the view of the House as a whole. I quite agree with him that this is a disappointment, and at the same time a challenge. He asked whether maximum public support would be better obtained through the publication of facts, and, to that end, that a Select Committee be set up. The House will probably be aware that on December 11 last the idea of a Select Committee was turned down in another place. But, having said that, I would put it to the House that what has to be considered is whether or not setting up a Select Committee at this time would make it easier to carry out negotiations and to make sales of Concorde. This is the main consideration that is before us, but I will certainly convey to my honourable friend what the noble Lord has said.
The noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, asked two questions—an "either/or", really. We are certainly going to proceed with production. There are 16 production aircraft at present being manufactured. Five letters of intent have been put in, and 33 options are still outstanding. With the nine firm orders already received—that is to say, those from British Overseas Airways Corporation and the French—that makes a total of 47 in all. The noble Lord was right also to put the alternative: if we did not go on with it, what would the effect be? There are 24.000 people employed at the present time in this country in connection with Concorde.
LORD HARVEY OF PRESTBURY: My Lords, is my noble friend aware that his remarks are very reassuring and this is not the time for the Government to lose their nerve? Would he take into account that, though the United States are not proceeding with their own supersonic transport, the Soviet Russians are, with the T.U. 144, and that Britain and France and the E.E.C. cannot be left out of what is an international race, having gone so far? Nevertheless, is my noble friend aware that many figures are bandied around about the economics and the performance
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of Concorde? If he does not set up a Select Committee, could some Green Paper be published by an independent body giving the economics of the aircraft, once and for all to "kill" those who try to knock Concorde?
LORD DRUMALBYN: My Lords, I am most grateful to my noble friend. I can assure your Lordships that the Government have no intention of losing their nerve. Certainly nothing has been said in this House to-day which would in any way tend to shake their nerve. My noble friend is of course entirely right about the Russian T.U. 144, which will be coming into production in 1975. We believe that we have a better plane than they are producing, and we believe it is certainly the intention of B.O.A.C. and the French at the same time to be the first, or, rather, equal first, in flying international services with a supersonic type of aircraft. If I may answer the other question about the Green Paper, again I will put this to my honourable friend. I fully agree it is important that the public should be apprised of the facts.
LORD ORR-EWING: My Lords, would my noble friend agree that this decision by Pan Am and T.W.A. was not taken in any way on the technical merits of this aircraft, which have been superb, but was taken as a result of the fact that these two U.S. airlines and other airlines over-ordered in anticipation of a growing number of air travellers which has not in fact been realised? They therefore find themselves with too many aircraft, too few customers, and an adverse profit position. This is the reason why they have deferred any final decision on Concorde. Will my noble friend bear in mind that I endorse what has been said and that I feel that more information should be made available? I cannot help coming down against having a Select Committee, because one has to remember that a large amount of evidence would be given to that Select Committee. There is a strong anti-Concorde lobby, which seems to be very vociferous in our media, particularly on television, and I can see selective quotations appearing from that Select Committee which could be used against Concorde and might make the sale of this successful aircraft difficult for those who were driving ahead with a really worthwhile project. Lastly, would my noble

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friend bear in mind that, although the Atlantic route is important—it is a Blue Riband route—those of us who have to travel to the Far East, to Japan, and particularly to Australia, are longing for the day when we can travel in Concorde and not take 36 exhausting hours over the journey as at present?
LORD DRUMALBYN: My Lords, I entirely agree with my noble friend on the matter of the Atlantic route's being by no means the only route that is to be flown. The Far East route is in some ways easier than the other; and of course, being further off, it is in some ways all the more important. As for the reasons on the part of these two airlines for deferring purchase, it is for them to give the reasons, and not for me. Some of us will of course have read the morning papers, but I should prefer not to comment further. As to the idea of a Select Committee, again the factors which the noble Lord has mentioned will be among those that will be taken into account by my honourable friend.
VISCOUNT MASSEREENE AND FERRARD: My Lords, would not my noble friend agree that there is some commercial jealousy in the world of our great achievement in this supersonic aircraft, and that therefore it would be complete and absolute madness to cancel it? This puts us years ahead of the Americans in supersonic travel. I should like to support my noble friend behind me, Lord Orr-Ewing, and the noble Lord, Lord Beswick, opposite. I support them most strongly in what they have said.
LORD DRUMALBYN: My Lords, again, I cannot go into the psychological motives of others. But, apart from that, I entirely agree with my noble friend.

NORTHERN IRELAND: SECTARIAN MURDERS
4.30 p.m.
THE MINISTER OF STATE, HOME OFFICE (VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS): My Lords, with the permission of the House I should like to repeat a Statement which has just been made by my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland in another place. The Statement is as follows:
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"Following the spate of sectarian killings towards the end of last year a Joint Task Force of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the Royal Military Police was set up in December to investigate and prevent sectarian murders. In the first three weeks of January there was a marked decline in the number of murders and of murder attempts. Two people were murdered in this period, one Catholic and one Protestant. Bad as this was, it was a marked improvement, and much of the credit should be given to the Task Force, which was responsible for the arrest of three men who have been charged with three murders committed last year.
"However, there has now been a fresh and appalling wave of murders. During the last four days five people have been murdered, one of them a mere boy, and there have also been cases of attempted murder. And now this morning at about 8 o'clock a grenade was thrown in Kingsway Park on the East side of Belfast at a bus which was carrying men to their work in Dundonald. One man was killed and nine others injured, of whom three are still in hospital.
"On behalf of Her Majesty's Government I would like to express deep regret and extend our sympathy to the families of those killed and injured in these recent bestial incidents. Every effort is being made by the security forces to apprehend those responsible for these crimes. Since January 1, sixteen people have been charged with ten murders. A massive security operation has been carried out to-day by the security forces in the area in which the bus was attacked, and is still going on."
LORD SHACKLETON: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Viscount for repeating the Statement, and I understand why the noble Lord, Lord Windlesham, is unable to be present. I should like first to echo the sympathy expressed to the families for what the noble Viscount has rightly described as "bestial incidents". It is almost impossible to imagine what sort of people could commit these recent crimes.
We have consistently supported the Secretary of State, and indeed all those

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forces of law and order in Northern Ireland. There are just a few questions that I should like to ask. First, how far have the U.D.A., as well as the U.D.F., possibly some connection with these killings? We have heard the statement made recently by Mr. Heron, that they would no longer seek to control these assassination attempts; and of course against this background there is a suspicion that these forces may be going more extremist. It is not for me to interpret, and I recognise that the Government may feel hesitant in doing so. None the less, I think it is right to say that there has been some acceptance of responsibility for bombing, although I think that it is the U.D.F. who have in fact done it. No doubt the Government are looking closely to see whether there is a link of this kind. On the other side, it is noteworthy that some of those who sympathise with the Nationalist forces—the Social Democratic and Labour Party—have now been asking for firmer action against such assassinations. I could only wish that they had all given firmer support to the security forces on other occasions. It is as a consequence of this appalling train of events that these things have occurred.
There are two other questions that I should like to ask. First, would not the Government, who are in grave difficulties in this matter, as we all appreciate, do better to get on and publish the White Paper at this moment? Almost any new movement might perhaps change the atmosphere, although I appreciate that the Government may think that it might change it for the worse. But they have to face this at some stage. Then there is the suggestion that even legally held weapons ought to be called in, even if subsequently they have to be reissued to those who need them. My Lords, I think there is little that we in this House can do, beyond expressing sympathy and hoping that the security forces are successful in their efforts. And it is to be noted that a number of prosecutions for murder are taking place.
LORD GLADWYN: My Lords, since the people in Northern Ireland seem to be reverting in considerable numbers to the level of the beast, might not the Government perhaps now consider the introduction of some kind of martial law
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whereby anyone found in possession of an unauthorised lethal weapon would be automatically condemned to a long spell of imprisonment? Secondly, can the Minister say how many of the fifteen people charged with nine murders recently are Catholic and how many are Protestant?
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Shackleton, for echoing what I believe to be the reaction of the whole House to these recent events and sharing the sympathy of us all with those who have been deprived of their relatives.
As to the noble Lord's particular questions, I am a little hesitant to go far into the question of the involvement of some of the Protestant organisations. For one thing, I personally do not know at first hand what the situation is, although it is perfectly true that recently a very large number of articles of ammunition and weapons and explosives have been found in Protestant areas. In precisely whose hands, or the hands of what organisation they are, I do not know. We, of course, keep permanently under supervision and under control the situation as regards both the Protestants and the Catholics, and there is no differentiation between the care with which we investigate offences against the one as opposed to the other sort of community. This fact cannot be stressed too much.
As for the White Paper, I know that this is urgently under preparation at the moment. I am afraid that I do not know when it is going to be published, but the question of legally held weapons is one that has been raised from time to time and I know how concerned people are. My right honourable friend is also very concerned about this matter, and he has in the forefront of his mind the question of deciding what should be done(and, if anything, when) on the question of calling them in. But I do not think he has yet made any decision. If he does, we shall soon hear about it.
The noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, asked about martial law. I do not think one needs martial law in Northern Ireland to attract a pretty severe sentence for carrying illegal weapons. I should have thought that, without any question, anybody found with weapons in the sort of

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circumstances that the noble Lord had in mind would very soon find himself serving an extremely long term of imprisonment or suffering some other form of penalty. With regard to the numbers of Catholics and Protestants, the figures that I have show that there were 15 Protestants charged with the murder of 7 Roman Catholics and 2 Protestants in January and December. What the religion of the 16th was I am not sure, but 15 were Protestants.
LORD OAKSHOTT: My Lords, would my noble friend ask his right honourable friend the Secretary of State to have conveyed to the task force to which he referred, and to the security forces generally, the very warm appreciation of their efforts of both Houses of Parliament and our constant support in what they are trying to do?
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS: My Lords, it must be a very great comfort to the security forces in Northern Ireland—and I do not mean just the task force which is mentioned in this Statement but also the Army, the Special Branch and the police, and all those concerned—that they should have the consistent support and congratulation of my noble friend Lord Oakshott and many other noble Lords in this House and of Members in another place, and I shall gladly do what he asks.
LORD HUNT: My Lords, may I ask the Minister a question arising out of his answer to the noble Lord, Lord Shackle-ton? I know that I am treading on very delicate ground, but can he assure the House that, or ask his noble friend Lord Windlesham whether, the information in the possession of the Special Branch in Northern Ireland about the activities and organisation of the Ulster Volunteer Force is approximately—and I mean only approximately—as good as that on the I.R.A.? I ask this question because my colleagues and I in 1969 were not satisfied on that point.
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS: My Lords, the question of the calibre of information about any particular sector of the population in Northern Ireland is rather a delicate one. I entirely understand the anxiety that lies behind the noble Lord's question. I would rather not say anything about it, but I will
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certainly pass on to my noble friend Lord Windlesham the fact that the noble Lord has raised this matter specifically in the House this afternoon.
THE EARL OF SELKIRK: My Lords, can the noble Lord say in respect of how many sectarian murders someone has been charged during the last two or three months? This is the point that particularly worries people. They do not hear —and perhaps it is their fault—how many people are identified.
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS: My Lords, 130 people have been murdered and so far 24 people have been charged since last May, including the 16 I mentioned earlier. But some of those charged are alleged to have been involved in more than one of the murders. So we are beginning to get results; and the results have greatly increased in the last two months.

REHABILITATION OF OFFENDERS BILL [H.L.]
4.43 p.m.
Second Reading debate continued.
LORD FOOT: My Lords, after listen-to a grave and tragic report of the kind we have just heard from the noble Viscount, it is always a little difficult to revert to the more pedestrian business on which we were engaged. But possibly my intervention, being very brief, will be of some assistance to the noble Viscount in allowing him a short interval of time as he moves from one subject to another.
I shall be very brief because I am a wholehearted supporter of this Bill and I do not think that the House will be very much concerned to listen to somebody who is such a wholehearted supporter but will no doubt be waiting, first of all to know what the attitude of the Government is towards this Bill and, secondly, to hear the criticisms—if there are going to be any—which will be developed later in the debate.
There are just three things which I should like to say. The first is that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, in concluding his presentation of the Bill expressed his thanks to all those who were associated with him and to all those who had given him and his Committee

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assistance in the preparation of the report and of the Bill. I am sure that it will be the wish of the House that the first person speaking after the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, should say on behalf of all of us—and I certainly say it for myself—how very grateful we are to him, and to the Committee over which he presided, and which prepared the report which is the basis of this Bill, because, in my humble estimation, this is a major contribution in the field of penal reform. I do not know which to admire more: the good sense and compassion which have inspired this Bill, or the ingenuity of the solution at which they have arrived.
I do not think that there will be very much argument in this House, or anywhere else, about the need for something to be done to deal with the present situation. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, referred us to some of those shocking examples which appear in the report of the way in which people commit an offence and are convicted, very often in early youth, then rebuild their lives and, some long time afterwards—it may be years or even decades afterwards—suddenly, possibly by pure accident, the ancient conviction comes to light and may result in public ruin and domestic disaster. As I say, I do not believe that anybody is going to dispute the need for reform, and I suggest that it should be borne in mind. Here I refer to the last example which the noble and learned Lord gave us, of the woman who was convicted of soliciting and has had that fact hanging over her head all these years. The tragedy involved in these cases is not much less for the people who take their secret to the grave, because they live their lives day in, day out, year in, year out, with this shadow over them, never knowing when the bomb that they are carrying about with them is going to explode. Those people live lives of prolonged tragedy and uncertainty. They are the people for whom this Bill also provides, because the object of this Bill is to de-fuse the bomb with the passage of time.
Therefore, I doubt very much whether there will be much argument about the need for something to be done. Where I believe we shall have some dissension or dispute is on whether the method which
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has been evolved by this Committee and by the noble and learned Lord is indeed the best solution to the problem. My own view, for what it is worth, is that the solution which has been arrived at is at the same time ingenious; it will he effective to achieve the purpose which the sponsors of the Bill have in mind, and—this is the point which I want to emphasise in particular—it seems to me that the solution which has been put forward, the proposal that has been made for trying to cope with this situation, is one which does not in any way conflict with the principles and practices which are part of our legal system and which have been part of our legal system for centuries past.
What is proposed by this Bill—putting it in a couple of sentences—is not (and the noble and learned Lord gave us the reasons for this) that the fact of the conviction should be expunged from the record. What is proposed is simply that after the passage of the rehabilitation period, which may be appropriate to any particular offender, he should be protected by a curtain of silence. It is not an attempt, as the noble and learned Lord said, to make something "unhappen". It is not an attempt to alter the unalterable or deny the undeniable, but simply an attempt to provide that a fact shall not be admissible in evidence simply because it is true.
It does not seem to me that this is in any way repugnant to the practices of our legal system in the past. The noble and learned Lord referred, for example, to the rule of evidence by which we do not admit hearsay evidence. There are various other forms of evidence which are inadmissible, however true they may be. It is inadmissible to put in irrelevant evidence, however true it may be. It is prohibited in the discretion of the judge to admit evidence whose prejudicial effect outweighs its probative value. And, of course, as we all know, in the generality of cases in criminal trials it is not permissible to give any evidence of the accused man's previous convictions. However true all these things may be, we say, "No, it is not right that they should be put forward".
May I consider what is the reason, the philosophy, behind it? I suggest it is this: it is a recognition that if you admit anything in evidence simply because it is

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true then in fact you may be led into grievous error. Not only may it be a grave injustice to the individual himself, but the court which admits such evidence, simply because it is true, may be leading itself into mistake and error. It is, of course, important and salutary that people should not tell lies, but I suggest that it is also important and salutary that people should not tell unnecessary truths. We are all familiar with the concept of the injurious falsehood. One of the concepts which is embedded in our legal system, with which we are perhaps not so familiar, is the concept of the injurious veracity. The virtue of this Bill is that, as it seems to us, it puts forward a solution to this problem which is wholly consistent with the practices and principles of the laws of evidence in this land as they have been for a long time. For these reasons, and for many others, it is my earnest hope, and I think it is a hope which is shared by a majority of my colleagues on these Benches, that the noble and learned Lord will add still further to his distinguished record in the field of law reform by eventually carrying this Bill on to the Statute Book.
4.52 p.m.
THE LORD ARCHBISHOP OF YORK: My Lords, I must apologise that before the debate is through I shall have to leave the House for an engagement long entered into before this Motion came up. I should like to express my gratitude to the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross, for allowing me to take his place in the order of speakers. We are indeed grateful to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, and his colleagues for the Living it Down report and for the work that has gone into the drawing up of this Bill, a Bill which I am sure will elicit a large measure of support from a great number of people on both sides of the House. It has been said that a man's real punishment begins when he comes out of prison, and that has all too frequently been the case in years gone by. I think we are agreed that there should be a time when the stigma is removed and when the bogey is no longer likely to emerge from the cupboard and damn the man's life for the future. How many men there must be who have come out from supportive hostels—and may the number of such hostels increase!—and who have found work and begun a good career,
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only to have that work snatched from them because their fellow employees have refused to work with them because of their past record and have forced their dismissal. An offence has been dragged up and the man's good record has been ruined.
There are certain points which I hope will be looked at perhaps comparatively minor compared with the main drift of this excellent Bill. No one sentenced to a term of over two years' imprisonment can benefit from its provisions. It may be thought that that is a little severe, and perhaps that the periods of rehabilitation are a trifle long. I hope that both those points will be looked at again. May there not be cases, especially among the younger prisoners, where so long a period may lead to the very thing we want to avoid, namely, recidivism? True that between the years of 12 and 17 the period is to be halved, but the formation of character goes on well past the 17th year, and one wonders whether possibly that period ought to be extended at least a little. Shortening the period of rehabilitation would indeed have to be hedged around with caution in order to protect the public, but I think this would not be impossible.
It was some sixty years ago that the Home Secretary of the day pleaded—and I quote his words—for
"… tireless efforts towards the discovery of curative and regenerative processes for the convicted criminal against the State."
These processes, he declared, required an attitude of what he called unfailing faith that there is a treasure, if only you can find it, in the heart of every man. And they are the symbols which, in the treatment of crime and criminals, mark and measure the stored up strength of a nation and are sign and proof of the living virtue in it. The "Home Secretary of the day" was one called Winston Churchill.
My Lords, it seems to me that a very significant aspect of this Bill is that it expresses a sensible concern to further the efforts already being made in encouraging those who have paid the price of their crime to re-establish themselves as responsible and useful citizens. It would, I think, if passed, promote a new social climate in which the returning offender may come to feel that the community is

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more friendly and encouraging than suspicious and hostile towards his efforts to make good. It is bound to have some effect for good, even during the years of the rehabilitation period, and in that it will tend to make vindictive and self-righteous people think twice before they deliberately impede the man's progress towards rehabilitation.
If the passing of this Bill did something to reduce the recidivism which clogs up our prisons and reduces the effectiveness of their training programme, it would be infinitely worth while for that alone. Indeed, it could be a kind of posthumous fulfilment of the work of men like the late Lord Stonham, who campaigned to reduce the appalling total of human waste represented by recidivism. And I think it would also underline the emphatic insistence of the report of the Working Party so ably presided over by the late Lady Reading, which insisted that the essential point to get across to the public is that the vast majority of offenders are not dangerous criminals but individuals who are handicapped by their inadequacy. To go on treating them as second-class citizens who can have their future dragged from under their feet at any time by their past serves only to make our social problems, which are intractable enough already, even more intractable.
The basic need is for a social framework of positive and stable relationships which will encourage such men and women to make good. This Bill at least recognises their reversionary rights to the society against which they have offended, and it is, I believe, another step forward towards a social climate in which the caring community can develop its capacity to cope with a problem which has hitherto outstripped social attitudes which have not yet come into line with our deeper new social awareness.
The noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, has already mentioned the point about which some of us still feel an element of unease. It was put crudely in an article in a Sunday newspaper last weekend, the writer of which gave a very appreciative review of the Bill before your Lordships. The article began:
"At least a million people in Britain will be encouraged to lie about their criminal records with the full approval of the law."
That was putting it very bluntly. To
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this, I suppose, members of the Committee which wrote Living it Down, and were behind the drawing up of this Bill would reply that in law such statements will be true. But I think there will continue to be very many—and they will include those whom this Bill is aimed to help—who think that a lie is a lie, whatever the law says about it.
One hopes that reform would proceed by making it an offence to ask questions in a form other than that to which a person could give a truthful answer without his disclosing his criminal record. I speak as a layman in these affairs, but would it not be possible to put such a question as, "Have you ever been convicted of an offence which, in the past, has not been rehabilitated?", and insist that the answer be a monosyllabic "Yes" or "No", with no qualification at all, such as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, hinted might have to be made, or would be made, by one who had never previously been rehabilitated? However, these are minor matters. They are warts which I think could be cured by a bit of careful surgery. The main tenor of the Bill seems to me to be an admirable one, and it is much to be hoped that it will be given the overwhelming approval of your Lordships' House.
5.2 p.m.
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS: My Lords, it is very easy for me—and I shall be genuine in so doing—to echo the sentiments expressed by the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York and the noble Lord, Lord Foot, who underlined the good that this Bill will do to those who, having run foul of the law, have suffered either a prison sentence or some other penalty, but have now lived it down. It is a just tribute to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, and his colleagues on the Committee, who produced first of all the report and now, after a great deal of work, the draft Bill, that there should be so much interest in your Lordships' House this afternoon and so long a list of speakers. It is the sort of Bill in which this House excels, and I think that we shall debate it with very great advantage this afternoon, and on future occasions as well.
I want to make some comments on what is in the Bill, and I have also, I am

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bound to say, some criticisms to make. It would be irresponsible of me if I did not draw attention to some of the by-products of the Bill. I do not do so in any sense hostile to the noble and learned Lord, but I want to try to demonstrate to him—and perhaps to some others who may not have thought of all these points—that there are other aspects of these proposals which do not appear in his report. It may just be that even his great legal brain has not thought of them; but they are matters which we should consider at the same time as we are dealing with the more general issues that have been covered in the speeches—not so much of his own speech, because the was a resumé of the report—but of other noble Lords who have already spoken. If, as the debate goes on, there are other individual cases of the sort that the noble and learned Lord mentioned that we ought to try to deal with, I shall be just as interested in them as I was in the ones at the beginning of Living it Down.
I should not be surprised if, at the end of this evening, the broad principle of the Bill were accepted by everybody who speaks in the debate this afternoon. Of course this is only one of the methods whereby we can deal with the matter. We have to decide whether the legislative approach adopted in the Bill is justified in principle, and in terms of the restraints that it places on other people in other circumstances, and whether it is likely to be workable and effective. The noble Lord, Lord Foot, says that it is ingenious. I wonder quite how effective it is, and whether it does not have some unforeseen by-products. Before I continue with that theme I must echo my own sense of slight doubt about something the most reverend Primate has already mentioned: this idea of the authorised untruth. It may be the best of the four choices open to the noble and learned Lord, but it is not altogether palatable to everybody. After all, the Bill itself talks about the oath: the oath is to tell the whole truth. As I understand the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Foot, it is that the whole truth may, on some occasions, be the unnecessarily whole truth. But "the whole truth, and nothing but the truth," has been the basis of the oath in the courts for a very long time in this country, and one
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becomes a little hesitant in overturning that principle.
LORD FOOT: My Lords, would the noble Viscount allow me to interrupt for a moment? Would he not agree that the fault may be with the oath? We call upon people to swear an oath saying that they will tell "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth", and before they have gone very far in giving their evidence we tell them, "You cannot tell us that, because although it is true you are not permitted to do so under the laws of evidence."
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS: My Lords, if I am tempted into the hearsay analogy, I am bound to say that I have some doubts about the complete propriety of that analogy with the solution that is put forward in this Bill. I do not want to get involved in this aspect. I make my point: I do not think that everybody likes the authorised lie—and we should face up to that straight away—but it may be the best method we have so far of dealing with the issue.
Let me first deal with the certificates—that is Clause 4 and the Schedule. It is a little hard, perhaps, on the noble and learned Lord, if he put this in at the behest of the Home Office because we did not see how it was going to work, that he should now receive the next passage of my speech in return. I am sorry about it, but there it is. What one has to do if one can is to devise a method which is suitable for this country. I am fascinated about the law of Ethiopia, and I am equally pleased to know what happens in the courts where the law is derived from Roman law, such as France and probably Austria. But, my Lords, we are not, in this country, dealing with a situation where a criminal conviction carries with it a loss of civil rights as a matter of course. This is the reason why, in most of the Roman law countries, there is some method, whereby, after a time, a man gets his civil rights back and is allowed to vote again and do whatever it is that he was precluded by the conviction from doing. This is the essence of the process of rehabilitation; and although it may have some very useful by-products in other respects as well, it does not apply here because we do not have that system.

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Without going further into foreign law, I will merely point out that we must have a system that works well for our own country.
The system here is the certificate; that is what the noble and learned Lord suggests. It is intended to have evidential value, but the principal piece of evidence that it carries is of course the one thing that the Bill is setting out to obliterate. It draws attention to the very offence from which the person is to be rehabilitated. Therefore, although I appreciate that it is the best that has so far been produced, it has exactly the opposite effect of what one would hope if it is ever to be produced in any circumstances at all. Either it is produced to show that the man is not rehabilitated, in which case he is no better off, or he produces it and in doing so draws attention to the very offence that he is wishing to get away from.
There are further points than that. One of the points made is that after the certificate has been given in respect of one conviction, there shall not be another one afterwards; or, alternatively, if there were conditions such as the payment of a fine those conditions shall have been fulfilled. Most fines are paid eventually, but they may not be paid in accordance with the order of the court, and one does not know exactly how anybody is to find out whether the full requirements of the sentencing court have been fulfilled. One certainly cannot see from the certificate itself whether there has been a supervening conviction which cancels out the effect of the original certificate and starts the process over again. So, certificate or no certificate, the offender, and anybody else who wants to know whether a stale conviction can be safely disregarded and is indeed obliterated, has one source to go back to; that is, the court records. These will have to be kept very accurately and with a great deal of cross-referencing for many years—for ten years in the case of the longest rehabilitation sentence—and where different courts are concerned they will have to cross-check with each other.
I must suggest to the House that this will mean a good deal in terms of manpower and extra work for the staff of the Crown Courts and the magistrates' courts.
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The number of people found guilty of criminal offences, both indictable and non-indictable, in 1971 was 1,687,980. That does not mean that they were necessarily all different people, because there may have been several offences in the same case. One could deduct perhaps 3,000 for long sentences not covered by the Bill, but I should have thought that somewhere in the region of 1 million certificates would have had to be issued in 1971 under the Bill. I do not think the noble and learned Lord has consulted the staff of the courts about this point. I do not think he had time and I do not blame him for not doing so; we have not yet done so either. But it is a formidable job that we are putting on them and, at the end of the day, I wonder what use this certificate, if it has been kept, will be except to draw attention to the very thing we want to forget. There is one other technical point about the certificates. The Bill does not deal with what happens on an appeal, and this is something which would also have to be put right.
I should like to look away from the criminal law for a moment at a field that has only been touched on in the Bill and in the speeches so far, and that is the by-product effect of the Bill on the civil law. Like the noble and learned Lord who prefaces his report with some case histories, I should like to give some examples to the House of what could happen under this Bill. I do not think these are ridiculous cases. I have rejected the ones which are so farfetched and so rare as not to be on the cards at all. May I take the example of a road accident involving a young man of seventeen and his motor-cycle, which I regret to say is a fairly common occurrence, in the course of which he seriously injures somebody else, and that other person's injuries are of the sort that take a long time to recover from? As the noble and learned Lord will know very well, in these circumstances a civil action for damages is very often not brought until very near the end of the limitation period, in order that the final outcome of the injuries can be examined. It is no use starting an action too early, because if the damages are assessed before the final outcome of the medical reports you either give too much or too little, owing to the fact that you have not reached the end of the illness.

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In the case I have mentioned, the young man was fined for the offence which caused the accident. After 2½ years he becomes rehabilitated under this Bill, because he is under 18. The result is that all the evidence tending to prove that he is other than innocent of careless or dangerous driving is precluded from admission in any court, and that includes the civil court. That means that the person who was injured must make certain that his or her civil action for damages for negligence is brought to court before the 2½ years are up, because otherwise the measurements which the policeman took on the road cannot be mentioned, and any evidence connecting the young man with carelessness cannot be mentioned, because they will tend to show that he has been guilty of an offence and such evidence is made inadmissible under the Bill. On the other hand, if the action is started so that it is heard within the 2½ years, you may be in exactly the position that I have mentioned; that you have not yet reached the stage of knowing the final outcome of the injury, and the case ought not really to be tried at that stage.
Then one comes to divorce. The noble and learned Lord mentioned divorce in France. There are some circumstances, which I shall not go into in detail, where wives—or indeed husbands—who wished to base divorce petitions upon criminal incidents in which their spouses had taken part could get into difficulties. The most obvious one relates to an offence for which the other party was put on probation, but since I disagree so fundamentally with the length of time of rehabilitation after probation, I shall leave that out because that could be cured. But may I put one point on divorce to the noble and learned Lord? Everybody now knows that the divorce itself does not turn any more on fault, on guilt or on innocence. But these matters of responsibility for the breakdown are relevant in sorting out the money and property, because although it is behind the scenes it is part of the divorce hearing and the court will wish to go into the full history of the marriage; to try to see how much money each of the two parties should have and how it should be shared out; to go into the question of who should have the children and so on.
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Are we to prevent the courts from knowing that the reason why the parties originally separated was because the husband went to prison; or the reason why the wife had to sell all the furniture was because the husband was in prison and she had no other money to live on? After certain periods in prison, and after a rehabilitation period, the registrar or the judge would be precluded from hearing any evidence at all on this point, or any evidence to suggest that the husband did anything to the wife, such as beating her up, for which he got a prison sentence. So we could have a very strange state of affairs and a very unfair settlement of the matrimonial property. This is a matter which needs seriously to be looked at, because although it has nothing to do with crime itself it could lead to great unfairness and hardship in another field.
Insurance was considered by the Committee, and the noble and learned Lord said that he has discussed this Bill with leading insurers. But let me tell the House how it will work. Let us suppose that a company had a block fidelity bond insurance with an insurance company, and there was an employee who stole, say, £200 in 1963 and was sent to prison for two years. He came out and in due course, in 1973, got another job with another company which had a block fidelity bond insurance with the same insurance company. Unfortunately, and perhaps as a great exception, in due course he stole from the second company. Now he told his second employer that he had no previous criminal convictions, and he was entitled to do so because, under the Bill, he was rehabilitated, it being more than 10 years. The company therefore claimed on its policy, but the insurance company knew from its own records and from the previous case that this man had a record, and it therefore sought to repudiate, saying, "The company has failed to tell us something which is material"—and under the law it is for the insurance company to show that something material has not been disclosed. Under the Bill they could not do so, because if they were sued for the money under the insurance policy they could not bring evidence to show that that employee had previously been convicted of dishonesty.
I do not know whether the insurance companies have realised that this is the

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situation, and I do not know whether they are convinced by the noble and learned Lord's statistics, on which, I am bound to say, I place a little less faith, because I have not seen how they break down as between different sorts of offences— and this is relevant in this connection. I do not know whether the insurance companies realise the risks they are taking and what the effects would be on their premiums. But let me say this. Suppose we take the very same case but assume that on the first occasion the employee was not sent to prison but was fined. Then, of course, the rehabilitation period is five years. There is nothing whatever, even in the statistics that have been produced, such as they are, which suggest that he is not a risk again in five years. But, equally, if he does offend again, the insurance company will not be able to find out and the employers will not be able to find out, and the insurance company will not be able to avoid payment on that policy even though they know that that man has been previously convicted of dishonesty. My Lords, I wonder whether the insurance world has fully grasped the details of this.
Of course, to take it further still, we get the ridiculous situation—and I shall come back to this—where if, on the first occasion, instead of being prosecuted and either fined or sent to prison, the employee had simply been sacked, then the insurance company could find out and could act upon the matter, because they could discover from the employer and there would be no rehabilitation period and no bar on the use of this information for ever afterwards. But I shall come back to this in connection with references, because there I think it is even more important.
In defamation, which has also been mentioned, we have a main pivot of the Bill, because it is upon the frightening effect of possible defamation suits that I think many of the changes in the public attitude which the noble and learned Lord wants will turn. In this country, defamation traditionally carries with it the defence that what was said is true. This is the defence of justification. Of course, I hope that private people and newspapers will not go "muck-raking", but let us just consider people's position in the field of defamation. I have already
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explained that under the certification procedure it will not be very easy to know when a person is definitely rehabilitated from an offence. It will not be very easy for the neighbour next door. He will not go round searching in court records and asking earnestly of the courts to see whether something which he knows has happened to his neighbour has now been cleared from the books. Suppose that he does not do so and that in the course of an argument he says that his neighbour is a very bad driver, and the reason why he thinks this is because a few years ago his neighbour was convicted of dangerous driving and fined. It may be perfectly true that he was fined for dangerous driving; but unfortunately for the man who says it, the offence occurred more than five years earlier. When the neighbour sues the man for slander, he no longer has any defence at all, because he cannot tell the truth about that conviction. Perhaps it serves him right; but, on the other hand, it is not easy for him to know when the five-year period from the conviction is up, and when it is absolutely dangerous to make any further reference to it. One day it is safe: the next day it is a bomb under his path.
But I am much more concerned with the question of references. Despite the fact that I am still not very happy with the drafting of Clause 6(1) (because I am not quite certain what the words in brackets mean), I know that the noble and learned Lord wants references to be retained so that employers can say in honesty what they know in circumstances where it is their duty to pass on even disagreeable information about former employees. But let us look at the situation at the present moment. An employer, in a reference about a former employee, tells the truth. Let us again take the case of the man convicted of dangerous driving. If he is sued by the employee in defamation, he has at the moment two defences. First, he can say that it is true, anyway. That is an absolute defence, and that is an end of it. The other thing he can do is to rely on qualified privilege. Qualified privilege arises (I am not very good at the law of defamation) where the two people between whom the communication has passed are in a position of trust, the one against the other; they are privileged in what they say so long as the person making the allegation is not

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actuated by malice. So the person who gives the reference has a second defence. He can say that it is true, and he can also say, "This is a matter of qualified privilege, and all I have to say here is that I believed it to be true." The only way the person who says that he has been libelled or slandered can get round that is to claim that the man who made the statement was actuated by malice. Suppose that, in the simple case that I have instanced, qualified privilege was involved, and that the employer who gave the reference says, "I believed it to be true". "Why did you believe it to be true?", asks the other side; and he replies, "Because it is true—and I can prove the conviction." That is the present situation if malice is alleged.
Now look at it under the Bill. The first defence, that of simple truth, has gone, and only the defence of qualified privilege remains. Let us see what the employee who was guilty of dangerous driving, who did not get the job because of the bad reference and who brought the action for defamation will say. He will sue for defamation; the defence will be qualified privilege, and he will say in his reply that it was malicious. The referee, the person who made the reference, says as his part of the case, "I believed it to be true"; the person on whom the reference is given says, "You are just being malicious", and the person who gave the reference says, "No, I am not; I believed it to be true". Then, when pressed, he says, "I cannot tell you why I believed it to be true, but I just believed it to be true". The reason why he cannot tell why he believed it to be true is because under this Bill he is debarred from mentioning the conviction.
LORD GARDINER: My Lords, with respect, and if the noble Viscount will allow me to interrupt, is not the reason why he believed it to be true the reason which he will give—"I read in a newspaper that he had been convicted", or, "Because Snooks, who is an honest man as far as I know, told me he had been"? There is nothing to stop him from saying that.
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS: I think there is, my Lords, because to say, "I read in a newspaper that he had been convicted" is evidence tending to show that he is other than an innocent man,
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and it conflicts with Clause 2. If that is what the noble and learned Lord wishes, then I am much happier. If he is allowed to say, "Oh!, but I read about it in the newspaper", that is fair enough. But as the Bill stands he cannot say anything that tends to show that that employee is other than innocent of dangerous or careless driving. That is the way the thing stands at the moment, and I am not sure how he is going to establish that he believed it.
At the end of all this, as the Bill stands, I wonder what the honest employer will say to himself. I think he may say, "These references are storing up trouble for me; I will play safe; I will not say anything about that careless or dangerous driving, after all". Will that not, in the end, be contrary to the sort of thing that we want when references are given from one employer to another?
LORD DONALDSON OF KINGS-BRIDGE: My Lords, may I ask the noble Viscount a question on that point? It has become a very exaggerated picture. If you are asked to give information about a lorry driver and he had been convicted for dangerous driving, the shortest period in which this can arise is five years. Most drivers do not stay with the same firm for five years, and even if one did and he had driven perfectly ever since it would be an odd employer who made that point. I think it is an exaggerated case and wants toning down a little.
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS: My Lords, my difficulty is that in order to try to explain the law of defamation and of qualified privilege in a form comprehensible to me I have to take it very gently. I am sure that noble Lords are much better off in that respect, but I find it difficult. Therefore, I may have oversimplified and emphasised the situation; but I know that this is something the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, wants to preserve and therefore I am going through the mechanics to see why there may be difficulties about it under the Bill as drafted. I hope that I have the law right.
Talking about references, I should like to say a word about Clause 7, because this is another area where I know the noble and learned Lord has sought to put in safeguards, and I am not sure they

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are all there. Certainly he sought to protect many areas of national security and Government Departments and things of that nature, but I wonder whether Clause 7(4)(c) is as tight as it should be. Noble Lords will remember that when we were dealing with the Criminal Justice Bill one matter we talked about (and the noble Baroness, Lady Wootton, was very keen on this) was a register of people who had been convicted of sexual offences, who should not be employed in schools or in certain sorts of hospital. There was no doubt in the House that everybody wanted to make sure that this did not happen. I feel sure that there should be a register and that even if people had been rehabilitated this is something which employing authorities should know about. I do not think the noble and learned Lord will dissent from that.
What is the defence available to the person who gives the information to the hospital authorities, the hospital management committee or the local education authority? The hospital management committee or the local education authority are not a court, not the police, not a Government Department. I am not certain whether the Secretary of State would duly authorise everybody—and this is under Clause 4(c). And if the authority was given, could it be said to be for the maintenance of law and order? It is for the protection of people in the school or patients in the hospital. It is not for the rehabilitated person.
If that is so, we have a gaping hole in the drafting of the Bill which is doing something that the noble and learned Lord would not wish to see. And what about the professional organisations? Incidentally, I should tell the noble and learned Lord that that exercise is still going on. There were quite a lot of professional organisations, quite a lot of people, including the police who would like to get into the act and who may or may not be able to, and in the way things have been going in the past consultations have had to take place between one person to another person in order to get everybody to agree. It is actively under way but it is not yet finished.
Let us look inside the professional organisations. I suspect that the Bar Council, the Law Society and the medical
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authorities keep a list of naughty lawyers and bad doctors who have committed criminal offences. They take account and are probably told by the court of the criminal offences so that they can take their own disciplinary action. What happens if they use it? They have—I should have thought this was inescapable in the case of those who under the present system are supplied with information by the police—indirect access to official records and information contained in it. That is under Clause 7(2). In other words, they have the information about the conviction. They make use of it. The Church, I suspect, come in this category. I do not suppose the ecclesiastical authorities wish altogether to disregard serious offences committed by vicars or curates when they are coming to consider their further promotion.
THE LORD ARCHBISHOP OF YORK: My Lords, the Church has her own special provision for this kind of thing. If a man is convicted of a very serious offence, on that conviction being reported to the ecclesiastical authorities by the secular court the clergyman in question is declared to be prohibited from holding office in the Church for the rest of his life or until the Archbishop withdraws it.
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS: My Lords, I thought that there was something like that, but I suspect that there are offences lesser than those which lead to such dire results. Nevertheless, it is something the Church will wish to bear in mind.
These professional bodies— perhaps the Church is not the right one to choose, but the Law Society, the Bar Council and the medical authorities come into this category—are in due course bound to pass this information on to somebody. What happens if the barrister is reinstated and does very well and later some question of a judicial appointment comes up? It may be that he has lived it down, but they must he at liberty, if necessary, to tell the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor about it. But if they do so, as I read Clause 7, they commit a criminal offence, punishable on indictment to a fairly substantial term of imprisonment and a fine. In the case of the professional bodies I do not think that this is right. The noble and learned Lord may like to consider whether Clause

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7(2) does not also catch the employer giving a reference; because he has had, surely, on the words of it, indirect access to the information contained in the official record if he even reads about the event in the newspapers and then passes it on. I believe that he could be in danger of committing a criminal offence if he passes on the information at all.
Another category I am very worried about is the whole range of social workers. There are case conferences about problem families. May I take again what is perhaps an exaggerated example, to give the idea? Dad is in for his third term of imprisonment; Mum is on probation for the second time for shoplifting: little Willie has a care order and two of the elder siblings have been in trouble with the law at one time or another. We have a situation here where another of them, perhaps, is due to be considered for parole. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, wants a good idea of what the release plan is to be for this person.
Over a period of time those social workers build up their knowledge of this family; they contribute to it; it is in the hands of a probation officer very often for some purposes, but it could go around the children's department and many other people in the social work department. How are they to know when the various offences have been rehabilitated? Are they to go dashing to and from the courts to find out when a 5-year or a 7-year or a 10-year period has run out? Anyway, ought they not to be able to talk among themselves about and present to people like the Parole Board a complete history of this family, so that those who are making delicate decisions, such as an the matter of parole, have the full knowledge they ought to have—not for any evil purpose but simply in order to help and certainly to know whether this is a supported family into which somebody can go back? If they mention any of these things to anybody, or even to each other, as I understand it, they are committing a criminal offence under Clause 7(2). I am sure that the noble and learned Lord does not want that to happen.
I am sorry that I have been so long, my Lords, but I have a good precedent this afternoon. I am coming to an end. I think there are further problems about sentencing. I have already said that I have a great deal of sympathy about the
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quoting of stale offences in public. I wonder to what extent this is done. There are of course cases which have been quoted. But I remember from my somewhat rare expeditions to quarter sessions, what happened when I used to prosecute what were usually "guilty" pleas. When it came to the police officer being in the witness box and the antecedent history having to be read out, if I did not do it myself the learned chairman or deputy chairman usually said: "I think we will start with that one in 1964, Lord Colville", and we skipped all those going back into the dim and distant past.
This, as I understand it, is commonplace in crime courts to-day. Some magistrates' courts may not be quite so good about it, but what we in the Home Office have just done is to issue a circular about it. In fact, it was the Magistrates' Association who approached us in the first place. They expressed anxiety about this and asked whether we could help them to devise some procedure which would avoid citing old and irrelevant convictions. It was in fact quite a difficult process to come to agreement on it. But what we are inviting in the circular, which has already been issued, is that magistrates should follow the practice of the Crown Court, where a list of convictions is supplied to the court and the court selects those which are irrelevant and those which should be cited in open court. The different circumstances in magistrates' courts may not produce universal application of this process, but we believe that it is going in the right way: and it is something positive that can be done by administrative means—indeed, we have done it already.
My Lords, in this Bill there are some things as to the correctness of which I am not sure. Is it right that the magistrates' courts should themselves be kept in the dark about all the past history of the man in the dock before them, as opposed to telling the public about it? Is it right that the magistrates should not have the full antecedent history? Should they be different from the Crown Courts in this respect? Under the Bill, that is the position. Then, as has been mentioned already, they have power to send a person for sentence to the Crown Court either for borstal training, under Section 28, or for some other sentence under Section 29 (incidentally, Section 28 is not in the Bill, and I think it should be),

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if they feel that because of that person's character and antecedents the sentence which he deserves is a larger one than they themselves can give. If the magistrates have not the full antecedent history, how can they know about the character and the seriousness of the offence? After all, to take a borstal case, a young offender under 17 is rehabilitated from convictions leading to fines in two and a half years; but these might be very relevant even on a later borstal sentence. Yet under the Bill as it stands, the magistrates are not allowed to see them.
But the worst point of all, I think, relates to probation. Under Clause 3(3) no reference to a probation order may be made after it has terminated, provided that it was satisfactorily concluded: it may never be referred to again. Once more I come back to the Criminal Justice Act of last summer. Did not virtually every noble Lord who spoke on social inquiry reports say that the courts should have these reports in as many cases as possible before sentencing people appearing before them? I think there was an Amendment to make that compulsory in every case. What is the use of putting a social inquiry report before magistrates when it is not allowed to mention the way in which somebody has behaved on a probation order that has just been completed? The probation officer, under the Bill as it stands, cannot say how the person responded, because he is not allowed to mention to the magistrates the fact that there was a probation order at all. But, ludicrously enough, if the case is in the Crown Court it may be mentioned. If it is a case where the magistrates have committed for sentence, it means that we have an expurgated social inquiry report before the magistrates, and a new one for the Crown Court which for the first time exposes the former probation order and how the man or woman responded to it.
LORD WELLS-PESTELL: My Lords, is the noble Viscount correct? As I read it (I may be wrong about this, not being a lawyer), the probation officer would be precluded from mentioning it if the person had completed his or her probation period satisfactorily without any breach and had been free of any further charge for the length of time that he was on probation. Is that not so?
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS: That is right.
LORD WELLS-PESTELL: So if the person had been on probation for two or three years, and had kept clear for two or three years after the offence, it could not be mentioned. The noble Viscount is objecting to that, I believe.
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS: Yes, I am indeed; because perhaps the very next day, by ill-chance, he comes back and the magistrates cannot know that he has been on probation yet alone how he has responded to it. It was all very well when probation started—and the noble Lord quoted from Section 12 of the Criminal Justice Act 1948 in his Report. In those days probation was on trial—it was perhaps for the young and less serious offences. But now we are all trying to use it in every case where it is possible for quite serious matters—matters which might, but for some extenuating circumstances, have led to a prison sentence. Yet we have an instant cut-off and no method whereby the magistrates can see whether or not it has been an effective way of dealing with the man. I am sure that that is wrong. I am also sure that the equivalent provision under conditional discharge is wrong, because we have an instant cut-off here. If the man satisfactorily fulfils the period of the, as it were, binding-over, if he commits an offence again in the eleventh month of a year's conditional discharge he can be taken back to the magistrates' court and dealt with for both offences. If he does it in the thirteenth month, he can be dealt with only for the offence that he last committed, and the magistrates are not allowed to know that he was conditionally bound over and that expired exactly one month before.
LORD GARDINER: My Lords. I wonder whether the noble Viscount has considered this in relation to probation, because, after all, this committee of stipendiary magistrates sentences people every day of the week. Is it not right that if a man is put on probation for two years, and he completes his two years without further offence, what he is told is: "If you behave properly, do what the probation officer says and get into no further trouble during these two years, you will never hear of this offence again."?
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS: Yes.
LORD GARDINER: If after the two years he does something wrong, the first thing that happens is that his old conviction is raked up against him. The exact opposite of what he has been told. We thought that put it right.
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS: My Lords, this is a matter which we shall plainly have to argue about, because I think we should have a longer period in the case of probation orders, and possibly conditional discharges as well, because they are sometimes the result of quite serious offences which under this Bill would, if they have been dealt with by way of a fine, have carried a 5-year rehabilitation period. If they are dealt with by a probation order, they carry two years, or perhaps three years at the outside, and the magistrates cannot know afterwards that any such thing was ever in existence. What happens if it is the same magistrates' court and they remember perfectly well anyway, I do not know. We have not had the reaction in Scotland as yet; I do not know what this means.
Foreign convictions worry me a little. There are Admiralty cases and arbitration cases relating to foreign ships. What happens if the master of a Greek or Liberian tanker has been convicted in his own country for an offence relating to matters that arose out of the collision and has now under the Bill been rehabilitated? Are we not going to find the courts and the arbitrators in this country precluded from knowing any piece of evidence relating to that collision which might have a bearing on showing that that man was guilty of criminal negligence in the Greek court or the Liberian court? That is the way that the Bill would work at the moment, I think, in relation to foreign convictions: and it is not very easy.
The Bill is completely silent on appeals. If a convicted person wins his appeal and has his conviction quashed, he is presumably regarded as never having been convicted, so that anybody can talk for ever about the original conviction, the facts that surround it and all the other concomitant matters. There is no rehabilitation period at all, even if he got off on a technicality. I do not
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think that reflects the spirit of the noble and learned Lord's Bill, and it may be something he would care to consider—though how to deal with it is a very difficult matter, and one for which I have no solution. I looked at the cases at the beginning of Living it Down. Two of them, I think, are specifically helped by the Bill: three of them would be helped as well by our circular as by the Bill. There are some aspects of one or two of the other ones which in some circumstances might be helped by the Bill but in others might not.
I am afraid that, wearisome though this analysis has been and very lengthy, it has led me to the conclusion that we have not solved, even with this Bill, all the problems. We have created a great many others—of which I have given some examples, though by no means the whole list—particularly if we are going to insist on the present provisions about probation orders, because we shall get into serious trouble in the divorce courts if we do that. I left out specific instances relying on probation. I know that the noble and learned Lord would like to consider with great care these points—and no doubt any others that I give to him privately—because I put them forward in all honesty in an attempt to show that there are many difficulties that we have not so far considered, mainly in the civil law.
My Lords, I hope that the House will consider these matters again. I am certainly not going to suggest that we should vote against the Bill to-night, but I believe that we have a long way to go before this is a satisfactory piece of legislation—and I am not absolutely certain that this Bill is ever going to be the vehicle for it. But I do not want to abandon hope. I hope that we shall go on with this debate and that we shall be able to make some constructive amendments during subsequent stages.
5.52 p.m.
LORD SHACKLETON: My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Viscount, not only for the clarity of his speech but for the fact that he just managed to miss cutting the 50 minute line.
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS: My Lords, so did the noble and learned Lord.
LORD SHACKLETON: I know, my Lords; and I wonder at times how it is possible for us in this House to find the time to deal with these highly technical measures. I rise now to speak very briefly because I hope—encouraged by what the noble Viscount has said—that your Lordships will give this Bill a Second Reading. I think we can all take it as proved by my noble and learned friend's speech that grave mischief is caused to individuals in the present situation and that people are suffering very grave hardship which we would not think it right for them to suffer. I believe his eloquent speech has very clearly made the case on that point. Therefore, the first question is whether satisfactory legislation can be produced to deal with this situation.
I have listened very carefully to what the noble Viscount has said, and some of the points he has raised have bothered me personally. I have been in correspondence with my noble and learned friend about this very interesting document, in regard to which I had a number of reservations on technical and practical grounds. I should like to mention very briefly some of the points that still bother me, but all against the background that I believe it is right that this Bill should have a Second Reading to-day and should be examined in Committee and, if necessary (though my noble and learned friend may not perhaps welcome this course) be examined by Select Committee. This Bill, if I may say so, is a very much better and much more practical Bill than the Anti-Discrimination Bill to which we gave a Second Reading, and which I supported in principle and indeed urged should go to the Select Committee. Thanks to the efforts of my noble and learned friend Lord Gardiner, it is likely now to emerge as a satisfactory measure.
Briefly, my first point of anxiety concerns Clause 2. I really am bothered that it should so appear to a layman, although I am encouraged to believe that there are some lawyers who are also bothered by Clause 2(a) which says:
"any statement made by him … shall not render the maker guilty of any offence"—
that is, in denying that there was a conviction. I find it risky in the extreme always to argue legal matters with such brilliant colleagues but I do not, any more than the noble Viscount, find the
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analogy drawn by the noble Lord, Lord Foot, in relation to hearsay evidence to be a valid one. Nor was I happy about my noble and learned friend's statement that it is perfectly reasonable to say that something in an Act of Parliament can be deemed to be such, when it is not in fact said in this particular subsection. This has worried me most about the Bill; nevertheless, I believe the difficulty can be overcome.
My noble and learned friend referred to the fact that in France they acknowledge it as a legal fiction. I would hesitate to start looking at French law, but I see no reason why it should not be possible to find a phrase which, instead of saying
"any statement made by him … shall not render the maker guilty of any offence …",
says that
"any statement shall be deemed to have the meaning …
or possibly better still:
"any question in regard to this matter shall be deemed to have the meaning as in the subsection above."
It seems to me there is here a real problem, not only to me personally but perhaps also to lawyers. It may be that the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Dilhorne, shares my view on this matter. I believe there may be a real difficulty to individuals who may be very honourable people and who, having had such a conviction, would find it intolerable to have to say in court or anywhere else that they had not been convicted, simply because the law says that, as I understand it, they would not be guilty of an offence in so doing. I do not believe it to be impossible to redraft this clause in a way which would not create this particular difficulty.
I make these criticisms because I am most anxious to see this Bill, amended as necessary, become law. Therefore I should like to mention two other areas of criticism. I am also worried about certificates being automatically sent. Surely it would be possible to amend that provision so that people could apply for a certificate if they so wanted. Perhaps I have misunderstood, but it appears that there is an obligation to deliver a certificate; it arrives in a special envelope which somehow becomes recognisable—though of course it might be possible to disguise it as an income tax return. Frankly, I would rather not have it automatically

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given. This again is the sort of Committee point which can be dealt with later.
I come now to the area in which I have had some experience, namely, references. I have been responsible for giving or handling references of more people than practically any noble Lord in this House. This is because in my personnel management days in a large organisation I had to operate this system over the whole organisation. I believe there is scope for some legal inquiry of the kind that Justice has carried out as to how references are given. I believe that most people attempt to give references in a responsible way, but the recklessness with which some references are given and the fact that they are not available to the individual about whom they are written is, to my mind, a very serious handicap and I am coming on now to explain why I am not entirely happy about this part of the Bill.
My organisation used to issue references under specific rules. We never volunteered information for which we were not asked. We never concealed that somebody had been convicted; we always said that the reference could be shown to the recipient, and we always refused to take information by telephone. The art of reference examination covers not only the details of the information given, but the completeness of the career check. Time and again one found, in looking into somebody who was being considered for a very sensitive job, like a security post, for which a responsible employer might well ask for almost a lifelong reference —certainly 10 years—that almost immediately there was a glaring gap. How does the individual explain this away? I hope that Justice, or someone, will look at this particular system. None the less, I am worried about the action of a responsible employer anxious to be honest and to do his duty, but doing so against the background of certain of the provisions of this Bill.
Access to the Criminal Record Office has been all too easy. My noble and learned friend Lord Gardiner exercised some caution in not revealing the extent to which access has been had to that Office. This is a disgrace. I find it difficult to see how information, which properly should be made available to certain employers, is to be sifted or judged. We
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can talk about the public authority, but what about the private authority? I am not sure whether I want the private authority to have access to the Criminal Record Office. A school, or an employer who employs a large number of young girls, does not want somebody who has had a previous conviction of a sexual kind. The position of the employer needs further examination, and I hope that this can be dealt with in Committee.
If I may hazard one suggestion to the noble Viscount, he has listed a number of areas where it appears to him that this Bill creates difficulties, and particularly in civil cases. He produced some powerful arguments, and I will wait with interest to see how some of my legal friends deal with them. It is surely not beyond the bounds of possibility to draft a clause which would make it possible within defined and appropriate examples—the noble Viscount certainly gave some, and I cannot believe that the categories are inexhaustible—where it was necessary to give this information. I have a difficulty regarding Clause 2; the conviction is not expunged under this Bill; it remains for ever in the records, and it may have to be referred to, for instance, when a person applies for a visa to the United States, or is at a foreign port. Would it be possible to define those areas where this could not be regarded as a spent conviction?
This is not the first Bill that has come before your Lordships' House that has had, as I hope it will have to-day, a Second Reading, and which has finally become Statute Law. Although many of the earlier Bills have not had quite the legal distinction that has gone into the drafting of this particular Bill, none the less I believe that we ought not as a House to reject this Bill, but that we should seek seriously to meet the arguments which the noble Viscount has put forward. It will almost certainly be better to do this in Committee than go into great detail during the Second Reading, unless we are going to be here all night. I suspect—and I apologise for this—that some of us will have to be absent for some of the time. Therefore, whether it be in this Session or in another Session, we shall get an Act of Parliament which will deal with a mischief that is causing great anxiety, and sometimes the grossest injustice and hardship, to individuals.

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Therefore I shall certainly support the Bill.
6.7 p.m.
LORD DONALDSON OF KINGS-BRIDGE: My Lords, the best way I can help this Bill forward is by speaking very shortly. All I had intended to say was that I agreed with every word my noble and learned friend said, and leave it there; but as I disagreed with so many words that the noble Viscount on the Front Bench opposite said, I must say a little more. We had 47 fascinating minutes of trees, and two minutes of wood. This is a very important point. The Second Reading is supposed to be concerned with principle. Is there anybody in this House who differs with the principle contained in this Bill? Even the noble Viscount does not do so. We need to find a way of putting the intentions of this Bill into practice. That is easily said but difficult to do. If the noble Viscount thinks that I, as a layman am going to take him on point by point, I would remind him that we have some of the most expensive counsel and solicitors in the world on our side of the House. I shall leave it to them to deal with detail.
This Bill is trying to do something which everybody with any knowledge whatever of the penal field thinks ought to be done, which will relieve a good deal of hardship, and which, at any price, must not be allowed to disappear. The noble Viscount knows that I respect him and his views—we have often discussed things before. I do not wish to be personal, but I think he spoke as though he had spent two or three days working out a brief on how to destroy this Bill. That is absolutely the wrong attitude. The noble Viscount ought to have come to the House and said: "This is a Bill that we should all like to see go through. I do not think that it is right as it stands; there are many problems and I will help you sort them out in Committee." If his team of research workers, and his own extraordinary, brain, can be devoted between now and Committee to finding ways round the problems that he has posed, he will be doing the House and the nation a much greater service than by opposing the Bill.
I do not object to him showing us the difficulties in the Bill; but we heard some
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exaggerated language, such as "a bomb in your path". I thought that was overdoing it a bit. It was an advocate's speech, and I am deliberately complaining about it.
This is a Bill which we have to get through Parliament. If it is wrong in certain ways, let us employ the lawyers—this is, after all, what they are for—to find a way of doing what we want. This is what you do when you go to a solicitor. You usually have to tell him how to do it, but even so this is the normal practice. And with the talent we have here, I think it is absurd for me to start telling the House how to do it. But I shall not be content—nor will anybody, I think, on this side of the House—if we fail in the end to find a way of doing what my noble and learned friend, and so many of us, wish to see done.
6.10 p.m.
LORD BALLANTRAE: My Lords, it takes a great deal of nerve for a layman to take on the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, and risk breaking a lance with him; and my only qualification for doing so is this. I am a member of the Committee on Defamation set up in 1971 by the Lord Chancellor and the Lord Advocate, under the chairmanship of Mr. Justice Faulks, to go into the whole question of the law of defamation and how it can be amended. Much of what we are discussing this afternoon comes very much under this heading. All of us on the Committee have studied, read, discussed, and I think I can say sympathised with, Living it Down—a most persuasive pamphlet, with those eight heartrending cases quoted early on, some of which the noble and learned Lord has resurrected for us this afternoon. By the fact of his courtesy we were able to see an early draft of his Bill. The Bill in its present form we have not yet had a chance to discuss in our Committee, but we have all seen it. We hope to be able to report before the end of this year, anyway. Some of us are more optimistic than others about how early in the year. Of course, everything that has been said to-day, and what may be said later on, will be taken into account by our Chairman, my colleagues and myself, and will be studied very carefully. I think all my colleagues would agree with me in saying that I hope very much that no attempt

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will be made to deal with the law of defamation—that very tangled area of the law—piecemeal.
So far I am pretty sure I have been saying what my colleagues would approve of. Now I launch out on my own, speaking entirely for myself, though I think that some of my colleagues would agree with most of what I am going to say. Personally, I am nervous of the idea of creating a whole category of people about whom we cannot tell the truth, whether it is in the public interest or in the interest of the individual. We are all concerned with the hardships which have been so eloquently described by most speakers to-day, and which the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross, did not gloss over in any way. But to take just one minor point—or perhaps a major one—the task of historians, of biographers, let alone journalists, would be made incredibly difficult if this Bill were to pass in anything like its present form. Also, I feel there is a great danger that in its eagerness to protect the deserving it may result in protecting a great many undeserving, and protecting them in their self-imposed task of fleecing all the rest of us.
There are several anomalies about the Bill—I say this with great respect. Here is one; and I think the point has been hinted at before, if not made. Although the Bill protects the convicted, it does not protect the unconvicted. One case particularly springs to my mind: I am not going to mention the name again, but your Lordships will know whom I mean. I recall the career of a distinguished politician which crashed about 10 years ago. That man has lived it down; one might say that he has lived it down nobly. He was convicted of nothing, and the story can be raked up again and again, and is raked up again and again; in fact it was raked up again by the B.B.C. three weeks ago. Of the other people in that case, a young woman was found guilty of perjury; a man, who afterwards took his own life, was found guilty of living on immoral earnings. Because they had been convicted they would have protection under this Bill. This seems to be an anomaly, and I do not know how on earth one would set about curing it.
Quickly let me take two hypothetical cases. Again, the noble Viscount touched
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on something very like it. X is employed by a company. He embezzles. The company has mercy and does not prosecute. As I understand it, you and I can go around saying "You know about X …" till the cows come home. But Y belongs to a less merciful company. He embezzles; they prosecute and he is convicted. He is completely protected from anything we might say.
Let me take a third case, in my own experience—and a very sad one. A nation-wide association of youth clubs was looking for a new secretary. Among the applicants was a man whom I will call Z. I was asked if I knew Z. I did know Z. I also knew that he had had a conviction 10 years earlier for an offence of indecency against a male. Now what could I say morally? It was not the right job for him; he was not the right man for the job. But because he had been convicted, as I understand it, he would have protection under this Bill as it stands, and if I had said what I knew I should have been liable. I do not think I could have pleaded qualified privilege. Frankly, I am not very good at understanding Bills: I find them as difficult to understand as the Athanasian Creed. But I find that even my legal friends tell me that some of Clause 6 of this Bill is incomprehensible to them.
To sum up, my Lords, I recognise that this Bill, like the pamphlet, is inspired by the highest motives, and motives with which one must sympathise. Secondly, I think that if it were to pass into law in anything like its present form it would complicate still further this highly complicated law of libel which my colleagues and I were appointed to try to simplify. Thirdly, I repeat that although many deserving people would benefit from it, I am nervous about how many others who do not deserve to might benefit from it—people who would regard it as a mere cover for further misbehaviour. Finally, let me say again what I have said already. I believe that this part of the defamation law ought not to be treated in isolation, and I would ask your Lordships to have patience with our committee who are working very hard and earnestly to produce a really worthwhile report which would be a solid foundation for a new law of defamation.
6.18 p.m.
THE MARQUESS OF HERTFORD: My Lords, every now and then there comes before your Lordships' House a measure which is so obviously right, so clearly just and so extremely necessary that one's first reaction is one of amazement that this is not already the established law. This, I feel, is such a Bill. I am quite sure that it is essential and long overdue. Until I heard the noble Viscount I also thought that it was a relatively short and simple Bill and one that was easy to understand, and I did not suppose that it would be unduly controversial. I feel that its merits are enormous and far outweigh any difficulties that it may create. If this Bill becomes law, a dark shadow will be lifted from the lives of perhaps a million people. My Lords, we do not every day have the opportunity to help so many.
I have the honour to be the Chairman of the New Bridge, a voluntary society founded by the noble Earl, Lord Longford, the official title of which is an Association of Friends of the Discharged Prisoner. In that capacity I of course welcome the Bill. But I must say that I am a little disappointed by the proposed periods of rehabilitation shown in Clause 3 of the Bill. Many of us who are concerned with the care and resettlement of offenders would like to see some hope held out to ex-prisoners who have been sentenced to more than two years. The periods of five, seven and 10 years suggested here seem considerably longer than is either necessary or desirable. A great many of the prisoners and ex-prisoners who come to the New Bridge for help have been sentenced to more than two years, and of course nearly all of them have only just left prison. To these people this Bill brings no immediate benefit. Their punishment will continue long after the sentence of the court has been served.
It would seem right to offer some hope of eventual rehabilitation, even to the more serious offenders. No doubt these details can be discussed at a later stage. I certainly do not want to say or do anything to delay the passing of such a useful Bill as this one. It is perhaps surprising to find such a very conservative measure coming from the noble and
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learned Lord opposite. If he feels that nothing more radical is likely to be accepted by this Parliament, then of course I must bow to his wisdom and experience. I sincerely hope that your Lordships will give your approval to this excellent Bill and that its passing will not be long delayed.
6.22 p.m.
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: My Lords, it is most agreeable to follow the noble Marquess, Lord Hertford, who at the moment is probably doing more for ex-prisoners than anyone, unless it be the noble Lord, Lord Donaldson of Kings-bridge, who was kind enough to mention me. I wish to speak briefly in strong support of this measure. Indeed, I cannot imagine a measure of penal reform introduced by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, which I would not wish to support. I might even feel inclined to "sign on the dotted line", which perhaps is dangerous, even in his case, but naturally anything coming from him has a first claim on my allegiance. He has powerful support for the Bill, both in this House and in the preparation of it. So as far as I am concerned it comes with every advantage on its side.
I do not think this is quite such an easy matter as perhaps even some noble Lords who were speaking in favour of the Bill might suppose. I do not think that it is quite so easy that we can say, "Here is an obvious principle of which we are in favour and it is just a question of the lawyers working out the details". I believe that some of the points raised by the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross, are fundamental points which force one to ask oneself—to use the language of the noble Lord, Lord Ballantrae—how far one is ready to have information of a certain kind suppressed and how far that is interference with human knowledge, which is usually regarded as a dangerous process. One has to face that fact and to make up one's own mind, not in a mood of sentiment, although sentiment is a fairly good guide, but to make up one's mind whether, on balance, one is in favour of a measure of this kind, and for my part the arguments for it are far stronger than any possible difficulties. I will not go into detail now. The noble Viscount, Lord Colville, and my noble friend Lord Shackleton, raised a number

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of points which will clearly have to be answered. I would call them Committee points, and in that sense they can be answered during the Committee stage of the Bill. But they are points which one could not ignore and I am sure that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, would not wish to ignore them.
I also wish to support what has been said by the noble Marquess, Lord Hertford, and I can assure the House that we have not been in any sort of collusion. This is not some New Bridge conspiracy. I did not know what the noble Marquess was going to say, although perhaps I might have guessed if I had been intelligent. I agree that this is a good Bill, but of course it does not go far enough. I agree with the noble Marquess, Lord Hertford, that no one is more imaginative or in that sense more radical in these matters than the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner; and if he thinks this is as far as we can get on this occasion then it is extremely likely that he is right. But to say, as is said here, that no one who has served more than two years in prison is to receive any benefit at all under the Bill as it stands is to rule out completely a great many people who are in need of redemption and are in need of encouragement. All the language about "the shadow", which is good and eloquent language, applies to them, and indeed in a sense it applies to them more than to anyone else because the shadow is darker and deeper.
So I would not like anyone to suppose that this Bill goes far enough. But to be fair, one must point out that it lies within the power of the Secretary of State to extend the period, and so far as I am concerned I hope that he will not delay very long and that pressure will be brought to bear on him to extend the period. I agree absolutely with the principle which I have enunciated many times, that no human being is irredeemable, and I shall not be satisfied until this measure goes a great deal further and holds out hope even to the worst criminals. Nevertheless, I hope that this Bill will obtain a Second Reading and that it will not run into the kind of troubles at the Committee stage which the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, seems to envisage. I hope that it will go on the Statute Book and I am sure it will be a blessing.
6.26 p.m.
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: My Lords, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, moved the Second Reading of this Bill with an eloquence and clarity which one expects from him. It may suprise him to know that I completely support the object which he seeks to achieve, and I hope that whatever I may say after that he will recognise that his objective in this Bill is one that I wholeheartedly support, because I think it is wrong that a man who has been convicted a long time ago should have his career prospects wrecked many years later by the disclosure of his past conviction.
The noble and learned Lord told us that there were something like a million people who have not had a further conviction in the space of ten years after their first conviction. It is very gratifying to know that. One does not know, of course, how many of those have met with the kind of difficulties of which the noble and learned Lord gave us an illustration. One would hope not very many. But be it a small number or a large one I think we should do what we can to remedy that situation.
Where I part company with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, is in thinking that this Bill, as it stands, provides the right solution to the problem. I must confess that in the light of the criticisms made of it by the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Cuirass, in a speech which I thought was excellent in its clarity and also which condensed into a very small compass some difficult and intricate subjects and in which he could not justly be accused of advocating any particular course—it certainly was not an advocate's speech, nor, so far as I could judge, was he guilty of the slightest exaggeration—and in the light of the criticisms which have been made from other quarters I myself venture to doubt whether it is possible within the framework of this Bill to construct in a Committee stage the sort of measure which should go out from this House.
The first matter which I find it really impossible to accept is that to which the most reverend Primate drew attention, but it seemed to me that he did not really attach quite so much importance to it, as I do, because he spoke about it as being "one of the warts on the Bill". Here I refer

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to the provision of which the noble Lord, Lord Shackleton, spoke—the provision legalising perjury, because that is what it does. Clause 2(a) provides that a man who has been convicted of a crime and who has gone through the rehabilitation period, or anyone else who speaks of that crime and who gives evidence on oath, shall not be liable to any penalty if he gives a false answer in relation to the question whether such a crime has been committed. To me such a proposal is wholly novel, wholly wrong and quite impossible to justify.
Having said that, as I am in favour of the object of the Bill, I have been giving some thought to the possible ways by which that situation can he avoided. I believe that it can be avoided but it means a radical alteration of this Bill and acceptance of one of the alternatives of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner—which, for reasons I did not find wholly convincing, in his speech he rejected: that is, (and it would also be far simpler) to provide that after the lapse of a certain length of time, without any conviction occurring within that period, the conviction (be it five, ten or 15 years ago) shall be deemed never to have occurred and should be treated as a nullity. It seems to me that if you so provide, and after that conviction has been wiped out by Act of Parliament, a person asked about his previous convictions can, if he is asked "How many convictions have you had?" in the light of the fact that he has had one conviction which has gone, say "I have none." But that result may need to be subject to the further qualification that you cancel those convictions for all purposes except proceedings in criminal courts. I do not see why there should be that exception. I am very doubtful whether it is really necessary to provide that judges dealing with these cases should be given particulars of convictions which have taken place perhaps 10 years before when there has been no conviction in the intervening period. I do not believe that people faced with the task of sentencing will pay any attention to a sentence passed so long ago; they will be inclined to treat that man, despite his previous conviction, as a first offender. So far as actual sentencing in the criminal court is concerned, and provided that the period
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of rehabilitation was long enough, I doubt that it would matter at all if the cancellation affected convictions put before criminal courts for the purpose of sentence.
I shall not deal with social inquiry reports and matters of that kind. The noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross, dealt with those very fully and met a great many of the difficulties. Nor shall I deal with the periods of rehabilitation proposed. Of course, as the noble Earl, Lord Longford, has said, this Bill covers a rather narrow field, namely, only those sentences of up to two years in prison. I feel that I should ask the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, to consider the disparity between the periods to be undergone for rehabilitation. It seems to me that a five-year period of rehabilitation when the sentence does not exceed six months imprisonment, and seven years for a sentence of two years imprisonment, shows a certain lack of proportion.
Having spoken about what I feel to be one of the major defects of this Bill, namely, the statutory perjury which it proposes, I come to one or two matters which I hope the noble and learned Lord will have a look at before the Committee stage. One of the difficulties about the operation of this Bill is that no one, apart from the convicted person who may get a certificate, will probably be able to find out whether or not he has been rehabilitated; and whether the period has elapsed. How will the ordinary member of the public know that? The period may be extended. If the man commits a further offence during the period, the period is prolonged. In that connection I feel that the Bill is a little harsh. The Bill says that the second offence must be of an indictable character. Supposing it is. Supposing it is dangerous driving in the fourth year of a rehabilitation period that will expire in five years. Is it right that that shall extend the rehabilitation period of a conviction for theft four years or so before?
I feel that more thought—and I say this with the greatest respect—ought to go into this measure. I should like to see the kind of offence which will extend the rehabilitation period to be one either of dishonesty, or of violence, or of a sexual character, or something of that kind. I would exclude indictable offences

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such as dangerous driving from having that operation and those consequences. When one comes to the position of the ordinary person, it will be very difficult for him or her to tell, or remember, whether or not the rehabilitation period of a particular person is over. It is one thing if that conviction is talked about or published years after the event in the Press only to effect sales, but an entirely different matter when particulars are given because someone wants a reference. I am glad to know that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, wants fully protected references given in good faith.
I do not think it is possible to deal with the defamation provisions—if you are going to have this Bill—only after receiving the report of the Committee on the Laws of Libel of which the noble Lord, Lord Ballantrae, is such a distinguished member. That is a committee before which I had the pleasure of giving evidence, and they gave me a very rough time. But that is by the way. If you are going to have this particular scheme you must have some provision for dealing with defamation, and I do not think that this one will do.
I admit that I am puzzled in my mind as to what is a satisfactory alternative. The man who perchance says, "So and so has been convicted", after he has been rehabilitated, will be liable in damages. He will have no defence of justification, as the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross, said. He will not say, "I am not liable to pay you anything because what I said was true." That defence is taken away by Clause 6. But it is said that he can have the defence of absolute privilege or of qualified privilege. Qualified privilege will arise, as the noble Lord said, where he has spoken without malice; and where there is that plea the question of malice will arise, and he will say, as the noble Lord said, "I honestly believe what I said." Is he to say, as I gathered from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, that he was to say, and could say in answer to that point: "I honestly believed that because I read it in a newspaper"? That is only another way of saying, "I honestly believed it because I knew it to be true." If that can be said on a plea of qualified privilege, what nonsense it makes of not being able to say it unless you plead qualified privilege.
LORD GARDINER: My Lords, would the noble and learned Viscount consider whether there is any difference in this case between what we propose and the present law? The present employer is given a reference and is always told by his lawyers: "You need not plead justification; all you have to show is that you honestly believed it to be true, and if you are asked why, you can say so." All we are proposing is that this law should stay the same.
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: My Lords, I do not believe that the Bill does that. The Bill says that you cannot give any evidence tending to show that a person has been convicted; and if that is so you cannot go on to say, "I honestly believed it because I knew he was convicted." That seems to be a nonsense. I believe that a better approach would be to pursue what I call the cancellation approach, giving limited use, despite the cancellation for certain purposes—but not many—for statistics, research and that kind of thing where the use will not gain publicity but dealing specifically with the reference question and dealing with it as a separate subject.
I believe one can produce a workable and satisfactory Bill. I am very doubtful indeed whether it can be done by amendment of this present measure. Supporting the noble and learned Lord, as I do, in his objective—and I hope he will accept that I do support it—I hope that he will give serious consideration to the question thrown out by the noble Lord, Lord Shackleton, that this Bill should be considered by a Select Committee in an endeavour—everyone here has spoken in favour of the principle—to find a more workable solution than this Bill provides.
May I say, in conclusion, that I hope the noble Lord will forgive me because I have another engagement, and I am sorry to say that I shall not be here for his reply. I think this is the first time I have ever said that. If he says nothing in reply to what I have said, I will understand.
6.41 p.m.
LORD WELLS-PESTELL: My Lords, I rise to add my support to the Bill presented by my noble and learned friend Lord Gardiner. I hope the noble and learned Viscount who has just sat down will not think me impertinent if I say how

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much I myself appreciate his sympathetic and understanding approach to this Bill. It may be a bad Bill—I would not know; I am concerned only with what it seeks to achieve. I hope that noble and learned Lords like the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Dilhorne, and other distinguished lawyers in this House will give their time and attention to converting it perhaps into a workable Bill, so that the principle behind it does in fact come into being.
In my opinion, it is very appropriate that a Bill of this kind should start in your Lordships' House. In the years that I have been a Member of this House many goods Bills have emanated from here and have become Acts of Parliament. I need not go into them. But perhaps this House has been more far-seeing than another place when it comes to measures for the welfare and the happiness of people generally. It is for that reason that I hope this Bill will not be referred to a Select Committee, because I think that would limit the number of people who, like myself, would wish to participate in it. Even though we could not do it on a legal level, we could perhaps make some contribution at a sociological level. Having said that, I must say that the noble Viscount, the Minister, depressed me. There has been no collusion between my noble friend Lord Donaldson of Kingsbridge and myself; we have not discussed the Bill. I had hoped that after the noble Viscount had, quite rightly, pointed out the pitfalls and set out very clearly, as he always does, what this House ought to be directing its attention to, he would have finished by saying that he and his Department would direct all their energies towards improving the Bill and making its purpose feasible.
If I were asked why I support the Bill, I should reply that it is for a very simple reason. For many years, as your Lordships know, I have been interested, concerned and involved in the Probation Service. I have sat regularly for something like 26 years as a lay magistrate, and have had the privilege of sitting in the last year fairly regularly in a Crown Court. This means that I, along with other Members of your Lordships' House, have had direct contact over the years with a good many delinquents. I know
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what society has tried to do for them. I know what Governments have tried to do for them, and we who are working in the field of the ex-offenders are very grateful to this Government for what they have done in the last few years and for the money they have provided for these things to be done. We are most grateful. I know that my noble friend Lord Donaldson feels precisely as I do about this.
We are doing a great deal by way of social rehabilitation. Is it not time that we began to direct some of our energies, some of our thoughts, towards providing opportunities for legal rehabilitation? I do not want to go into the disadvantages that ex-offenders are under, because this aspect has been adequately covered by my noble and learned friend. I do not suppose many people outside will believe that some offenders go on offending because they believe they cannot live down the past. But they do. Many feel they cannot live down the past, so why bother; and so they go on and on. This may be true of only a very small percentage, but this attitude of mind does exist. Many of these people live in fear of their past coming to the surface, and of much that they have done being undone. I feel that, having done so much on the social side, we ought now to be concentrating on providing opportunities for legal rehabilitation.
At this stage I do not think I am competent to enter into the field of discussion with regard to the various matters which the noble Viscount the Minister has raised. I hope that we can do this in Committee, and that the Government will come forward with sufficient Amendments to make this Bill workable. I believe it is of supreme importance that, however inadequate or deficient this Bill may appear to be to those who are better able to make a judgment, it will be made workable, because it is in the interests of the community that we should do so. I think we ought to give people an opportunity of living down their past, of being able to wipe it out completely and entirely. I am sure that this is the sort of step that we ought to take at the earliest possible opportunity.
6.48 p.m.
LORD GOODMAN: My Lords, the noble Lord who has just spoken I think

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said precisely what needs to be said about this Bill, because he emphisised the realities of it in contradistinction to the technicalities. This is a humane and coinpassonate measure that we ought to try to enact if we possibly can. It has be-en my experience that if you want to make some progressive move you nearly always encounter formidable procedural difficulties. I do not think we ought to be deterred by procedural difficulties from achieving the objectives of this Bill, which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, if I may say so, has so convincingly presented in point of principle.
When I heard about the Bill and looked at the text, it was quite clear that there were considerable difficulties, and the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, has presented them with great skill and ability, even with a faint gusto, if I may say so. But I am sure that that does not mean that he is not strongly in support of the measure. There are difficulties, and I think it must be very encouraging to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, to have heard assent on almost all sides to the principle—because we all accept the principle—and I am sure that if we put our heads together we cannot fail to achieve a measure that will make this modest change in our criminal jurisprudence.
I believe that one of the major defects of the Bill is that it has been too conscious of the technical problems. My own view is that it might well be that in the end it will be necessary to exclude altogether from the Bill considerations such as defamation; and even to exclude from it any penalty for the unauthorised disclosure of a conviction. I would venture to suggest to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, that there is an objection in principle to imposing a penalty because someone has disclosed the fact that another person has a conviction. I think the objection in principle is to making the appearance of the conviction seem even worse than it is. If it becomes a dark secret that people may not speak about except under the threat of possible prosecution and very dire penalties, I am not sure that in a way we do not make it worse in the sense that we convey to the minds of people that there is something rather awful about this conviction that makes it necessary to bring the man
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to the Old Bailey if he is foolhardy enough to disclose it.
A point that I would venture to suggest the noble and learned Lord might consider at the Committee stage, is that really it is not necessary to impose penalties but that what one really wants in essence is that a man should not be obliged himself to have to disclose the fact that he has a conviction, and that the record of the conviction should no longer be extant. This would achieve everything that is really required.
I have a feeling that when we come to the question of defamation, and how one seeks to defend an action where someone alleges that a conviction has taken place, we shall be pursuing the most difficult course and end up with the most complicated legislation, and not really have achieved a great deal. Hence I believe that what we want to achieve in this Bill can certainly be achieved by ordinary Committee processes.
It is a very short Bill, and I do not think that it is necessary for us to make quite such a mouthful of it as to send it to a Select Committee. I am quite sure that appropriate Amendments, which might even involve the substitution of totally new clauses, can be dealt with in Committee, and that we shall be able to bring about a modest measure of social reform about which we shall all be very contented. I see that there is no longer a Bishop on the Bench, but may I say that in this way we shall demonstrate that the quality of mercy can exist on this earth as well as in heaven.
6.52 p.m.
LORD HUNT: My Lords, I rise to speak now and not in the place shown on the list of speakers, at the request of the noble Viscount, Lord St. Davids, who had not expected to be back in his seat in time. I understand that I am in order by agreement between the Whips on both sides of the House.
As one who had no legal training—and this, I have no doubt, is well known to your Lordships—I confess that the first time that I heard of a principle and a system by which a citizen could be spared from the prejudice arising out of his criminal background was during a visit to Israel in 1970, when I met Professor Feller, of the Hebrew University in

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Jerusalem, who told me of his own researches into this subject in countries on the Continent of Europe. He very kindly sent me a copy of his treatise which was, unfortunately for me, in Hebrew, so I promptly sent it on to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, who no doubt had no difficulty at all with the language. Had I known of his interest, I would have sent it to the noble Lord, Lord Janner, instead.
I rise, like all other noble Lords whom I have heard to-day, to say that I support this Bill in principle, although as a result of earlier speeches I am now wiser than I was about some of the snags which have emerged. May I make two brief observations, the first of which has been made already, but I should like to add weight to it? From a background of reading thousands of dossiers of the cases of prisoners for parole in the past five and a half years, I believe that the two-year sentence, beyond which this Bill does not propose to allow for rehabilitation, is too short. It could be extended to 30 months, or anything short of three years, in my opinion, without detriment. It is possibly of interest to know that there are in our prisons at the moment over a thousand prisoners serving a sentence of over two years and under three years, and when one adds up the total it would no doubt add considerably to the million citizens who have served sentences of two years or less mentioned by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner.
From my experience reading these cases, offences commanding a sentence of three years are of the same order of seriousness as those of two years. The three-year sentence is the divide which we, on the Parole Board, have seen for some time, broadly speaking, as the divide between the more serious offences and the less serious ones. Of course I am talking strictly in the context of the consideration of a person for parole. Sentences within this rather wider bracket, in my experience, normally represent much the same order of seriousness as those of two years. They also reflect the considerable variation in sentencing by the courts, and they often include a breached suspended sentence which, I think many of your Lordships will agree has not always in the past been wisely imposed. Sometimes such sentences
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have been imposed unfairly, in terms of the stress to which they have subjected offenders; nor has proper support been given to them to stand up to that trial. I should like to see this somewhat bolder approach. I should like to see a 10-year gap, following a sentence of under three years, as causing a criminal record to be "spent". I hope that some Amendment to this effect may be made to the Bill when it goes into Committee.
I should like also to be reassured on one point. In the document, Living it Down, at pages 11 and 12, Lord Gardiner's Committee have not followed the Continental practice of expunging or cancelling, or destroying, the record—and the noble and learned Lord referred in his speech to this aspect. Does this mean that under the terms of this Bill the record will be available to the Parole Board and the local review committees when we are considering prisoners for parole, even though that criminal record has been spent? There is no mention of this point in Clause 5(3) of the Bill, but I certainly think that that record should be available to us. This is a slightly different point from the one made by the Minister when he was speaking about the home surroundings, although I agree with what he then said.
Substantial gaps in recorded offences are normally, and naturally, viewed by ourselves as a factor in a prisoner's favour when we are deciding on parole, and this is especially the case when we are looking at the record of a recidivist, where particular credit may be due to an inadequate and insecure offender for keeping out of trouble even for a year or two. I have in mind one or two people now serving their sentence in the community on parole for very long periods. Considerable risk was taken in granting them parole, but so far they are holding out and have not got into trouble again. One would like to think that we have gives, them credit for the gaps in their back ground. Of course there are some cases in which we are sceptical about the reality of those gaps, because, as everybody knows, not all offences are uncovered and brought to the courts.
I have made this point to allay any fear that the availability of a prisoner's con: victions to the Parole Board, despite a successful rehabilitation period, might pre-

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judice a man's chance of parole. It would not—with one possible exception, which I mention simply to stress the need for the Board and the local review committees to have the full record, no matter what the interval of time is. This exception is that of the sexual offender. Of course I am not thinking of the sort of woman referred to by the noble and learned Lord, who was guilty of soliciting in the distant past: I am thinking of the sexual offender who uses some violence, and particularly the sexual offender against children. It may be significant, in the case of a prisoner serving currently a prison sentence for such an offence, to note that even as long ago as 11 years or more there was a previous and similar offence, or perhaps more than one offence. I am pretty sure that my eminent psychiatrist colleagues on the Board would support me in saying this. Certainly it is my experience over the past several years that this is something we must take into account before we decide whether it is appropriate to parole a person. Perhaps the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, would support me on this point, and consider amending the Bill in this sense. In all other respects, I support the principle of the Bill as strongly as any of your Lordships who have spoken so far.
6.59 p.m.
LORD VIVIAN: My Lords, we have had a very interesting and informative debate this afternoon on the Second Reading of this Bill. Like many other noble Lords, I feel that great credit is due to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, for introducing it into your Lordships' House, and I owe him my apologies for not having replied to a letter received from him concerning this Bill. In apologising to the noble and learned Lord, I can only say that inadvertently his letter came to hand only two days ago. So in an attempt to make amends, I thought I should make a special effort to speak this evening.
This is a subject which interests me a great deal. It is not a Party issue, but it is an important issue concerning humanity. In this country, due to the research of Justice, the Howard League for Penal Reform and the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders, it would appear that at last we have guidelines for this Bill, which suggests legislation whereby we can-
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and, I would add, should—accept back into the community a person who, despite a conviction, goes straight for a number of years. I understand that at the present time the United Kingdom is the only member country of the Council of Europe which has no legislation on the Statute Book to help the citizens whom we are discussing this evening. I hope I use the term "citizens" forcefully. In my opinion—and I trust that it is also the opinion of many of your Lordships—the citizens whom we are trying to help by this Bill have, through living down a previous conviction, earned the right to be fully accepted into the community again. I submit that it is inhuman if we do not legislate for this.
Are we in your Lordships' House to turn our hacks on them? No, my Lords; it would be unthinkable. I would go so far as to suggest that we in this House would be failing in our duty if we did not legislate to help these people to regain their full rights as citizens, when, through their own efforts over a period of from five to ten years, they have lived down their conviction. I agree with Clause 3, which lays down different rehabilitation periods geared to the original sentence imposed, but I would beg your Lordships to give these people a chance of having the slate wiped clean, which I think is the main intention of the Bill. Is it right that we, a progressive country, should be one of the very few who do not have rehabilitation laws to expunge from the record the first offence of a juvenile, or for that matter of an adult, or second offence by either a juvenile or an adult?
My Lords, the hour is late and we have had many interesting and informative speeches, especially from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, who introduced this Bill so lucidly. So may I say in conclusion that my noble friend Lord Colville of Culross quite correctly criticised some of the drafting and content of the Bill, and I am in agreement with him on some of his points. But I hope that both noble and learned Lords can get together to perfect this Bill, which I consider can, in its right form, relieve great hardship and prove to be one which can be of great benefit to the cause of humanity. I therefore hope that your Lordships will give this Bill a Second Reading.
7.4 p.m.
LORD SOPER: My Lords, in rising most enthusiastically to support the principle of this Bill and to advocate its Second Reading, I remind myself that this is an attempt to put into legal constitutional form an article of moral philosophy. Therefore, it surprises me a little that more has not been said about the nature of that rehabilitation for which this Bill seeks to provide the appropriate measures. It was adverted to, of course, by the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York, and there was a penultimate aspiration about it in the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Goodman. But if we believe that there must be a place in all penal administration for the process of reformation, then we are committed to the subsequent principle that there must be a place for forgiveness; and forgiveness is a process by which the past is, if not obliterated, disregarded as having no further impact upon either the present or the future in the life of the man who is forgiven. This Bill is an exercise in both justification by faith and justification by works, and it seems to me to be much better able to deal with this problem than some of the ecclesiastics have been. But it certainly means that the beginning of a new life must be the ending, in principle, of that life which has preceded it.
It occurs to me that a number of the very real problems which arise in the implementation of the principle behind this Bill are problems which arise precisely because the concept of real forgiveness is a much more absolute concept than perhaps we are inclined to think. I would say, with some diffidence, that Charles Wesley has said this very well in a hymn in which he records the words:
"He breaks the power of cancelled sin and sets the prisoner free."
There is a manifest difference between the august author of that blessing and the authors of this Bill, but nevertheless it contains two principles which are identical. One is that a sin can be cancelled, a crime can be cancelled, but unless the prisoner thereafter is free then the impact of that crime continues. This has been referred to again and again in your Lordships' debate to-day, and is a very real and an absolutely vital element in our consideration.
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I hope, therefore, that the real concept of the new beginning will be regarded as the primary objective of such a Bill as this, and that the various practical difficulties which arise will not be considered sufficient to relegate this Bill to any kind of dustbin because it is inefficient. I think it is inefficient in many respects, but your Lordships are embarking upon a principle which, in fullness, has not yet been appreciated, which is a very radical and, from the standpoint of moral philosophy, completely new idea, as represented, I suppose, in British law, of what we regard as the new beginning and of how we regard the total ending of the processes and the impact of punishment, which after expiation and reformation, and indeed penitence, makes a new man. This has an immediate impact upon the concept of forgiveness for those whose prison sentences have not been as much as two years, when the same principle is denied under the Bill to those whose offences have attracted longer sentences. This is a very dangerous thing to do, and I hope very much that we shall not divide miscreants into those whose sins can be forgiven and those who have committed unforgivable sins.
I am sure that this is a matter which can be resolved in the processes of debate and in Committee. But it would be disastrous if we endeavoured to drive a wedge between those who find available to themselves this kind of reparation and opportunity, and those who, because their sentences are longer though their crimes may not have been more grievous, are denied this opportunity. Furthermore, if we consider this concept of forgiveness and the beginning of a new life in such a way as to regard the prisoner or ex-prisoner or ex-convict as now blameless—and this is the only kind of word which can really fit the case—. then I am sure that the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Dilhorne, was right in suggesting that it will not be beyond the wit of this House to devise words which can express the difference between the fact that a man has in the past committed errors, sins or crimes and has justly been punished for them, and the fact that he must now be regarded as a new man and that the past must not be held up against him.

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I am sure that there is a real importance in one other matter—and because the hour is late I shall talk about only one other matter—and that is the question of certification; the idea that a man who is convicted of a crime and is about to serve or is in the process of serving his sentence will be furnished with a document. The noble Viscount the Minister referred to this as something of evidential value. I think the value of it is much more personal and much more psychological than evidential. In my experience as a prison chaplain, I have come across how little heed is paid to verbal assurances, and how much even a very small piece of paper can be treasured. I should like to see this document set out in the most impressive style, because I am completely satisfied that in many cases it will be a source of comfort, inspiration and incentive to those who can take it out of their pocket from time to time and look at it.
I should like it supplemented—and I think this is very important—by a certificate at the end of that process. If I may delay your Lordships a little, I remember one occasion when, in the open air, I was talking about this and that, and a man in the crowd said, "The trouble with you parsons is that you are all mad". I resisted that, but he went on and finally said, "If you are not mad, can you prove you are not mad?" I found that a bit "dodgy", and hoping to play for time I said, "Can you prove that you are not mad?" He said, "I can", and he did: he produced his discharge certificate from a mental institution. That is not entirely apposite, but I thought I would drag it in. At least it confirms in my own experience the value of the definite statement which can be read again and again and is not merely of oral tradition, which, as everyone with any historical background knows, is extremly dangerous.
I believe that this Bill is a very good Bill in its intention. I think it strikes new ground. I think that theologically, as well as in general terms of moral philosophy, it is compatible with what Christians ought to believe. I think it has many difficulties; and I have listened with great care to the presentation of the technical disadvantages or difficulties within it. But I am sure that it ought to have a Second Reading; and I would
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echo words that have already been said, that within that Second Reading it is possible, if we hold fast to the principle of the Bill, to work out the various processes by which it will become effective and, I believe, of great value in the community.
7.13 p.m.
LORD JANNER: My Lords, let me say at once that the expression of opinion which has just been given vent to by the noble Lord, Lord Soper, as to what is a Christian outlook is certainly a Jewish outlook as well, and I strongly commend what he has said to the consideration of those who are still left in the House and to those who may read it to-morrow. I think the position as it stands at present is really an alarming one. It is high time that this matter was dealt with; and in my view my noble and learned friend has rendered a great service to us and to the country by having introduced this Bill and by having preceded the introduction by going very carefully, as is obvious from the report which has been issued by his Committee, into the circumstances relating to the matter and the method of dealing with it. I would say to the House that we are very considerably indebted to my noble and learned friend, whose advice in other respects many of us have sought, at very much greater expense than has been placed upon the shoulders of this House. When a situation perhaps as significant as this has arisen, we have relied on his judgment and his manner of handling the matter in the definite certainty that he has given the fullest consideration to the points involved.
I am satisfied that this Bill forms the basis of what we need, and I sincerely hope that not only shall we give it a Second Reading but that we shall give it enthusiastically, so that in the end, when it has passed through its Committee stage, we may have a Bill which will please, I hope, all the Members of this House. The idea that a sentence, once having been imposed on an individual, remains with him, as it were, from the moment of sentence "until death us do part", has to be destroyed. Once a man has in fact served his sentence and has satisfied all the needs of society in respect of the crime which he has committed, he is entitled to live in a free world, free from what has been hanging over his head. In

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my view, the success of the three periods of rehabilitation—that is, in custody, during after-care and when free in the world—depends on one essential factor: the finding of work for the ex-offender. In this respect, of course, the Bill has a very important part to play. But I go further. In my opinion we should have a provision—I do not think it will be very acceptable to the Government; perhaps it may be a far-reaching idea—that would enable the Government of the day actively to help in the rehabilitation.
One of the chief drawbacks to employers offering work to ex-offenders is the difficulty of their not being able to be covered by a fidelity bond. Many employers would gladly employ such people if the Government or some responsible body would bond the offender. If it could possibly be done, I should like to see inserted in this Bill a clause empowering the Government to bond such offenders as, after proper inquiry, they can find reason to believe will not be recidivist. I should like the Government to say that they would then bond such persons. Let me give, as an example of such a provision, the case of a man who went to a Bridgehead House which, as your Lordships know very well, is a place which provides a home for ex-prisoners, enabling them to live in proper circumstances while they seek to go to work. This man had a wife and two children, to whom he was hoping to return when he had established himself in a job. He gained a post as a salesman and was doing well until he was asked to take out a fidelity bond. This he could not secure owing to his past record, and after nine days he was dismissed. That was in June, 1972: and he has been unemployed since, with his family on social security. He has now changed his name by deed poll to try to overcome the difficulty, but, of course, everybody in this House knows that this kind of thing can be held against him.
When I was listening to the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Colville, I thought he was finding every conceivable reason why the Bill should not be given its Second Reading while at the same time commending it to the attention of the House. Of course there are difficulties. We are changing from one set of ideas to another; and since we are looking for a
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way in which to give an individual a chance in life, a chance to which, as I have said before, he is entitled, having paid the penalty and having fulfilled the obligations placed upon him, there are bound to be difficulties the nature of which has been raised. I am sure they can be overcome. All other Governments have overcome them. I am sure I am quite wrong but I thought the noble Viscount was talking as though he had no knowledge of the fact that legislation in this respect had been passed in so many countries—and certainly, I believe, in the countries that we are going to have close connections with and are already having close connections with in Europe. Nobody has suggested that these provisions have failed hi their objective.
I was going to suggest to the noble Viscount if he had been here, that he might go into some of the provisions which are in legislation in these countries. One noble Lord mentioned Germany. The question of a man stating in court that he has no convictions has, in fact, been passed into legislative being in Germany. It happens to be in the provisions operating in Germany and, I believe, in France. Rehabilitation wipes out all the convictions and all punitive incapabilities. The conviction is not mentioned in extracts from the criminal records, and (here I quote):
"legal fiction is created that the reinstituted person has not been convicted".
It worked in France. I know that we are not the same as the French. We may differ in our outlook from some of the countries that pass these laws; but they cannot all be wrong and we be right. In the course of the Committee proceedings we ought to investigate what they have been doing and see whether what apparently has been successful in those countries should not be brought into use in the Bill itself. I am glad the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, has come back. I appeal—
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS: My Lords. I apologise to the noble Lord. I was talking to a very important member of the team behind the Bill. I was not wasting my time.
LORD JANNER: My Lords, I do not for a moment blame the noble Viscount; he has been here throughout the proceedings. With his, if I may say so, brilliant

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approach to matters (and I have had occasion to sit under him in Committee; so I know), I hope that he will find it possible (either himself or together with his very useful helpers) to devise an appropriate method of dealing with the points he raised. Perhaps he will go into the provisions of the Acts which are in existence in the other countries and see why they work—because they do. There is no suggestion here that what the other countries have been doing has gone wrong. Therefore, there must be a method of meeting many of the points he raised. I hope he will give enthusiastic support to the Bill because I believe that a question of time is involved here. It is high time and very important that we should deal with this problem.
I am going to make another suggestion which I hope will not upset even my noble and learned friend. I am not happy at all about the two-year limit. I hope it will extend to those who have served sentences for more than two years. I cannot see why there should be a two-year limit. In this connection I would draw the attention of my noble friend to the Criminal Justice Act 1961. Section 3 reads:
"Without prejudice to any other enactment prohibiting or restricting the imposition of imprisonment on persons of any age, a sentence of imprisonment shall not be passed by any court on a person within the limits of age which qualify for a sentence of borstal training except—

(a) for a term not exceeding six months or

(b) (where the court has power to pass such a sentence) for a term of not less than three years."

In a case like this the two-year limit would act very heavily against a person; because apparently the court has no alternative but to impose either a six-months sentence or a three-year sentence. This may be a very exceptional case, but I came across it in the course of my inquiries. I think it is interesting and one that we should consider.
Under that section young people so sentenced would automatically be outside the provisions of this Bill. It may be that the limitation is a concession to public opinion. We know that there are certain views held by a large number of the people on how crime should be dealt with. I remember the great fight on the question of the death penalty. I hope it is not a concession to them. I think we
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ought to consider the limitation. The Living it Down Report suggests that rehabilitation following sentences of over two years might be possible by application after the period prescribed. I would strongly commend that that possibility be considered carefully.
Clause 6(2)(b)(i) could defeat the objects of the Bill. Names can be mentioned in textbooks or articles for educational, scientific or professional purposes. I should like to see this altered so that professional articles and textbooks could mention the date and the court but not the name of the convicted person, once he has been rehabilitated. I do not know whether that is a practical suggestion, but I think it ought to be considered. Reprints after the date of the rehabilitation would require to have the name deleted. That would solve some of the problems about referring to previous cases.
I should like next to refer to the form of the certificate. In the Schedule, paragraph 6, referring to reconviction, says:
"If you have been convicted before, and a similar certificate was given to you, then you will become a rehabilitated person…"—
This is a technical point. I hope your Lordships will not mind my referring to it—
"both in respect of that other conviction and your conviction to-day on the later of the two dates given in paragraph 3 of the two certificates, but only if you fulfil the conditions set out in both certificates."
Paragraph 3 says that certain conditions must be fulfilled in order to be rehabilitated. These include paragraph 4(b), which gives the condition
"that you do not commit any other offence on or before the date given in paragraph 3…"
Paragraph 6 says that a person must fulfil the conditions set out in both certificates. This, in my view, cancels out the provisions of paragraph 4. I make this technical point in conclusion, and I hope that the House will consider this a matter of extreme urgency.
I practised as a solicitor in the courts many years ago, and in a solicitor's office one really gets to know what people think. In my experience in the courts there must have been a considerable number of people who, if a law of this description had been in force, would never have gone back to crime and who were forced back to it simply because the world would

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not accept them. I think we have to provide an opportunity for them to be re-accepted into society. It will save them and their families, and taking the example I have already mentioned, it will save the State a considerable amount of money by preventing them from becoming charges on various national funds. This is a human Bill that is needed. It may have faults, but whatever the faults are, I think we can rectify them, and I hope that your Lordships will give it a warm welcome on Second Reading.
7.32 p.m.
VISCOUNT ST. DAVIDS: My Lords, I want to speak to-night for three reasons: first of all, because this is a good Bill; secondly because on the parts that I know something about, those relating to juveniles, I feel even greater enthusiasm for the Bill; and thirdly, because I have a private duty to perform. I will not speak in general support of the Bill because I strongly dislike repeating other men's speeches, but on the subject of juveniles I think I have something that I should add. If a juvenile comes before the court and is convicted, it is of course partly his fault: but in these days, to a large extent, it is very much more the fault of his family, and maybe of their advisers. It is a common practice in these days, which I strongly support, not to bring a juvenile before the court except for some special purpose, and there are many juveniles who, although they have committed precisely the same offences as those who are brought before the court, are not brought before the court and therefore are not convicted. So that a juvenile's conviction is not necessarily very much related to what he has done, but much more related to his background, his family and perhaps their advisers.
My Lords, in the course of my seven years at a children's club I have seen many children go before the court, and a few I have had to send there myself. A great many, thank God!, I have managed to save from going to court. But I have one particular case in mind which occurred fairly recently. Two boys took a boat without the owner's consent—the offence, as we all know, under the Theft Act, of taking and using a vehicle. They had confessed to two different sets of people; there was full identification, and
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no doubt at all about the offence. I wrote to the parents. The mother appeared with one boy. The matter was admitted, with the consent of the parents; it was dealt with out of court, and the court never heard the boy's name.
That afternoon the father of the other boy appeared, with the boy. Regrettably, he was a father of the type that one finds occasionally, who was quite convinced that his boy always told him the truth—and I rather suspect the reason why the boy did not tell him the truth was because lie would be far too severely dealt with if he did. The father refused to hear any evidence, even plain evidence, which was a matter of geography which he could have investigated simply by looking at it. The father was convinced that his son was innocent. and nothing could be done about it. For that reason, we could not even use the admirable provisions that now exist by which a boy can be warned by the police. Unfortunately, this course cannot be adopted without an admission of guilt, and of course the parents' consent. In this case even that admirable and useful power was denied to us. Short of letting the boy go, nothing could be done but to put him in front of the court. This was done; the evidence was quite clear, and the boy was convicted. It was a minor offence—although a little more important than it looks, because if a boat is left adrift it can become a killer of small children—and the boy was convicted through no fault of his. I only hope that the most careful provisions will appear in this Bill to make sure that that kind of conviction is removed from the boy's record at a very early date. I am not sure whether the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, can tell me whether a police warning can be struck off—or perhaps it does not appear.
LORD GARDINER: My Lords, I do not think it appears.
VISCOUNT ST. DAVIDS: My Lords, that is better still. Hearing that, and with that one point which I wish to bring out, that is all I wish to say about this Bill. However, I should like to tell your Lordships that I intend to send a copy of my speech to the father of that boy, because I feel that I got him convicted. In that I did my duty, but I should not consider that I had done my whole duty

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if I did not do my utmost to get that conviction removed from the boy's record at the earliest possible moment.
7.38 p.m.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR (LORD HAILSHAM OF SAINT MARYLEBONE); My Lords, before the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, garners in the sheaves of almost universal acclamation with which his efforts this afternoon have been greeted, perhaps he would listen with compassion to one or two rather critical things that I should like to say so that he may take them into account. No one who has read the Justice pamphlet or heard the noble and learned Lord this afternoon—and I have done both—would doubt that he has a very real problem here, and one which needs tackling constructively There are a number of different points that he has made, I think of varying importance, but certainly which might yield varying results. The first is the sentencing problem. I think everybody would be agreed that when a man comes up for sentence it is abominable for many irrelevant and past convictions to be read out against him. The only point about that I would make, quite briefly, is that that could be dealt with much more simply than by this Bill by simply prohibiting it administratively. That, at any rate, is the purpose of the circular to which my noble friend Lord Colville referred. I am bound to say that I am surprised that this has not been done before. I am equally doubtful as to how great an evil the evil is, because my experience has been rather similar to his namely, that judges and magistrates have the wisdom and humanity to prevent an error of that kind being made, unless a very inexperienced police constable happens to be giving the antecedents.
Secondly, the noble and learned Lord has made what I think is an absolutely valid point—the pamphlet makes it at somewhat greater length—about cross-examination as to credit in civil proceedings. I want to say straight away that I believe judges and advocates are much too lax about this matter. Judges ought to be much more stern in dealing with cross-examination as to credit, and advocates ought to be much more restrained and careful about the use of what I might call discreditable incidents they may
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happen to know about the opposing party. There is less justification than ever for reckless cross-examination of this kind now that the main body of civil proceedings is tried by a judge alone—and the judges are usually wise enough to disregard certain matters. However, damage might be done outside the court if cross-examination is permitted.
The only two points I make about that is, first, that this could be done entirely without legislation—that is, by a greater degree of self-discipline on the part of the Bar and a greater degree of severity on the part of the Bench against members of the Bar who forget their duties and responsibilities. Secondly, it is not by any means confined to previous convictions. I should like to return to this because it leads me very much to the heart of the matter of the mischief to be discussed, which is living down disreputable incidents in one's past. The truth is that this is not confined to previous convictions. It can be a finding of guilt of some kind in a civil proceeding; it can be a finding of guilt in a matrimonial court or affiliation proceedings, or it can be something disreputable which did not ultimately result in any proceedings of any kind.
I think that most of us in this House would agree that it is abominable to rake up incidents out of anybody's past, whether there are convictions or not. I want the noble and learned Lord who proposed the Second Reading to bear that in mind when I come to say what I have to say, because my view is that there ought to be some legal protection against the resurrection of disreputable incidents after a certain time, whether there are convictions or not. It may be that it ought to be made a summary offence to publish episodes, true or false, of events coming out of the past. It may be, again, that it ought to be a tort, yielding an action for damages; or both of them. But the fact is that, for reasons which are perfectly intelligible if one reads the pamphlet but the logic of which is not absolutely plain to me, the sponsors of this Bill have made two classes of humanity: those who have been convicted of a crime and who are put in a privileged position, because their past may not be resurrected (although they are, of the two classes, probably the less meritorious), and those

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who have not been convicted of a crime and who are given absolutely no protection at all. I think that is a serious criticism of this approach to this Bill.
That brings me to one or two of the broader criticisms that I should like to make. The noble and learned Viscount Lord Dilhorne, from the Cross-Benches touched on this point, which was also touched upon by the noble Leader of the Opposition: that the method adopted by this Bill is not to expunge the events by a legal fiction of saying that it cannot be used for certain purposes. It is to license the person affected to tell a lie about it and to prohibit anybody else from telling the truth about it. I believe that is much more serious than people might think at first sight. I believe that it diminishes the value of truth-telling as a vital moral principle in the community. And though I would not necessarily by any means oppose such a proposal if it were the only way of setting about it, I am not wholly satisfied that it is the only way of setting about it, for the kind of reason given by the noble and learned Viscount from the Cross-Benches.
Moreover, I think it is at least arguable that if you choose to set about it in this particular way—that is to say, licensing untruthfulness on the part of the former criminal and prohibiting truthfulness on the part of everybody else—you do (and this was a point of detailed criticism put forward by my noble friend from the Front Bench earlier) perhaps give rise to a greater number of anomalies and injustices, spread over quite a wide range of largely unforeseen contingencies, than you save by prohibiting the disclosure of truth in certain circumstances.
The other thing I would say about this Bill—and I would echo what the noble Lord, Lord Goodman, said on this, although he was an enthusiastic supporter of the Bill—is that to my mind, it tends to be much too complicated. It complicates the law instead of simplifying it. I am not at all sure that that is a good thing. The complications into which we have had to go this evening indicate to me that there may be a basic vice about this Bill. Here I would say a word to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner. When he was discussing earlier in this Session the proposals
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of the Criminal Law Revision Committee, he made what may or may not have been a valid point in favour of the Law Commission—the immensely wide range of consultation which he recommended as a necessary preliminary to law reform. I wonder myself whether the process of consultation in regard to this matter has gone quite far enough, because clearly a very wide range of potential commercial and other interests are involved. There is the whole of matrimonial law and the whole of defamation law. It so happens that this is the one field into which I have been able to make an inquiry, and the Defamation Committee have grave reservations about Clause 6. Then, of course, there is the whole field of insurance and employment. These things require very careful consideration. I wonder whether there has been enough.
The fact of the matter is that, for reasons for which this House is in no way responsible, it is quite unlikely that this Bill will, with the best will in the world and with all the enthusiasm it has engendered, reach the Statute Book this Session. I therefore wonder whether it might not be a good thing to consider seriously the suggestion made by the noble Lord the Leader of the Opposition that the matter might be referred to a Select Committee or that in some other way a more detailed examination of its proposals might be possible. It is easy to say, with the noble Lord, Lord Janner, that this is an extremely important matter, although it refers to a state of affairs which has existed for a very long time; but I believe that if we are to do a legislative job here, we ought to make sure that it is a good one. With that word of caution, I leave the field to the noble and learned Lord. He has every reason to congratulate himself on the result of this evening's debate. I do not wish in any way to delay or obstruct the passage of this measure, if and in so far as on reflection it receives the good will and approval of the House; but I think that, standing where I do in the Office which I hold, I ought to utter cautionary words where cautionary words may improve the situation. I hope, therefore, that the noble and learned Lord will not take it amiss that I have said these very few words in criticism of what he has proposed.
7.49 p.m.
LORD GARDINER: My Lords. I am extremely grateful to all noble Lords who have been good enough to take part in the debate on the Second Reading of this Bill—one of the largest number of speakers that I remember. There has not been a single speaker who has opposed the Second Reading of the Bill. It never occurred to me that the Bill was likely to be properly drafted—very few Private Members' Bills are—and I am very grateful that a great number of points have been taken. To those who have been good enough to stay to the end of the debate, may I say that we shall take all these points into account, the ones, for example, made by my noble friend Lord St. Davids, with his great knowledge of boys, and the point made by my noble friend Lord Janner, about the two years in the Schedule.
If I may mention one point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, the position is that criminal records come under the Official Secrets Acts; therefore, those who maintain the records have no right to divulge them to anybody without authority. The normal source of their authority is the Home Secretary, and while the noble Viscount could answer this point better than I, I simply cannot conceive of any Home Secretary who would not allow both the Parole Board and the local committees full access to all information, whether the person concerned is rehabilitated or not. It is, I am afraid, the fact that sometimes the police reveal things in a sense rather off their own bat. I will read, even at this hour, a very nice letter from a boy (I am indulging myself really in referring to it). It is an example of an unauthorised disclosure. It was a letter written to the son of my noble friend Lord Janner, who, as you know, is a Labour Member in another place. The boy wrote:
"Dear Mr Janner,
I see you want ideas for new laws. I am 15 and have a good idea. My Dad is a good kind man and votes labour too. He has worked in his job for 17 years.
Two months ago some goods was stolen from a shop near to us. A policeman came round in plain clothes and asked everybody questions. My Dad was being questioned downstairs and the policeman said, 'We know you have a record and been in trouble You was in trouble in 1954'. My Dad said, Yes I was only bound over for a year'. We all heard
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it and Mum cried and we was all upset. But it was not my Dad who done it and two other men was fined…
I think you should change the law so as if a person lives a good life for some years these things should be forgotten and taken off the records. I won't give my address as we have had enough worry and we have all forgiven Dad. I was not born then anyway."
I am very grateful to all noble Lords who have made such helpful comments and raised a number of very clear Committee points. When we reach the Committee stage I shall rely particularly on my noble friend Lord Shackleton, and the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Dilhorne, as well as the Home Office, for their assistance.
I will confess quite frankly that something we never considered is the Liberian tanker in Greek waters. Some of these points may be matters of opinion. The Committee would probably still feel, rightly or wrongly, that if you say to a man, I am giving you a chance, putting you on probation. Do what you are told for two years and there will be no trouble; you will never hear of this offence again", it is not right if, after the two years he does offend again, then the first thing he gets is the old conviction thrown at his throat—the conviction he was told by the judges he would never hear about again.
The defamation position has been somewhat exaggerated. One of the very few branches of the law that I know anything about is the law of defamation. There was a time when I was in danger of being thought of as a libel specialist. This is always fatal at the Bar, as the noble Viscount knows. It is not uncommon in a libel action for somebody who has given a reference, to plead justification; but he is under no obligation to do so. If he has not pleaded justification he cannot say, "Yes, this man was convicted". But, having qualified privilege, he is entitled to say, "I believe what I said was true, and I will tell you why". However, all these fascinating points can be considered on Committee, and I shall rely very much on the kindness and help of those who have promised to help. I believe that the noble Lord, Lord Goodman, was right in saying that with good will on everybody's part we shall get the Bill right.
On Question, Bill read 2ª, and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.

SUPPLY OF GOODS (IMPLIED TERMS) BILL [H.L.]
7.55 p.m.
THE EARL of LIMERICK: My Lords, I beg to move that this Report be now received.
Moved, That the Report be now received.—(The Earl of Limerick.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.
Clause 4 [Exemption clauses]:
THE LORD CHANCELLOR THE LORD CHANCELLOR moved Amendment No. 1:
Page 4, line 1, leave out from beginning to end of line 46 and insert—
Exclusion of implied terms and conditions
(". For section 55 of the principal Act (exclusion of implied terms and conditions) there shall be substituted the following section:—
"55.—(1) Where any right, duty or liability would arise under a contract of sale of goods by implication of law, it may be negatived or varied by express agreement, or by the course of dealing between the parties, or by usage if the usage is such as to bind both parties to the contract, but the foregoing provision shall have effect subject to the following provisions of this section.
(2) An express condition or warranty does not negative a condition or warranty implied by this Act unless inconsistent therewith.
(3) In the case of a contract of sale of goods, any term of that or any other contract exempting from all or any of the provisions of se-etion 12 of this Act shall be void.
(4) In the case of a contract of sale of goods, any term of that or any other contract exempting from all or any of the provisions of section 13, 14 or 15 of this Act shall be void in the case of a consumer sale and shall, in any other case, not be enforceable to the extent that it is shown that it would not be fair or reasonable to allow reliance on the term.
(5) In determining for the purposes of subsection (4) above whether or not reliance on any such term would be fair or reasonable regard shall be had to all the circumstances of the case and in particular to the following matters—

(a) the strength of the bargaining positions of the seller and buyer relative to each other, taking into account, among other things, the availability of suitable alternative products and sources of supply;

(b) whether the buyer received an inducement to agree to the term or in accepting it had an opportunity of buying the goods or suitable alternatives without it from any source of supply;

(c) whether the buyer knew or ought reasonably to have known of the existence
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and extent of the term (having regard, among other things, to any custom of the trade and any previous course of dealing between the parties);

(d) Where the term exempts from all or any of the provisions of section 13, 14 or 15 of this Act if some condition is not complied with, whether it was reasonable at the time of the contract to expect that compliance with that condition would be practicable;

(e) whether the goods were manufactured, processed or adapted to the special order of the buyer.")

The noble and learned Lord said: My Lords, I hope not to take too long on this Amendment. I suggest that it might be desirable to consider Amendment No. 5 at the same time. Amendments Nos. 3 and 7 follow from the changes it is proposed to make by Amendments Nos. 1 and 5. Therefore they ought to be considered as consequential. If I may now speak to Amendments Nos. 1 and 5 with that premise, Amendment No. 1 relates to the sale of goods and the other Amendment to hire purchase. It has been our intention throughout that the provisions of the Bill relating to hire purchase agreements should follow as closely as possible those applicable to the sale of goods. The first thing we have done in this Amendment, following a suggestion by the Law Society, is to restate in Clause 4(1) what is in fact the existing Section 55 of the Sale of Goods Act. This has the effect of bringing together in Clause 4 all the provisions relating to exclusion clauses in contracts for the sale of goods. As originally drafted, users of the Bill would have found it necessary to refer to both the Sale of Goods Act and the Bill for these provisions. This will no longer be necessary. No change of meaning or intention has so far been introduced, and I regard this as basically a consolidating Amendment.
I should point out a minor difference, The words, "contract of sale of goods" appears in the fifth line of the Amendment, whereas the comparable words in the old Section 55 were simply, "contract of sale". This makes no difference to the construction of the clause. Subsections (3), (4) and (5) of Clause 4 have been largely re-drafted. Many of the changes involve no alteration of meaning or intention: taken with the new subsection 4(9A), which is the subject of Amendment No. 3, they simplify and clarify this part of the Bill. But there

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are two important changes to which I now refer. The first is in the words, "any term of that or any other contract" in Clause 4(3) and 4(4). The change will prevent potential evasion of the ban on exclusion clauses in consumer sales by an ingenious method first drawn to our attention by Mr. John Whitmore of Leicester University, to whom we are much indebted. As the Bill now stands, evasion of the ban would be possible through collateral contracts. The wording now proposed, "any term of that or any other contract" will make this impossible. I could explain this in greater detail, if pressed, but I hope that I may be excused at this hour from doing so.
The second and the more important of the changes introduced by these Amendments is to the so-called guide-lines, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, will remember the debate that we had in Committee about this, in which I promised to take back the then proposals in the Bill and discuss them with my friend Sir Geoffrey Howe. The general contest was between the proposals of the Bill, which were short and simple, and the more elaborate guidelines designed by the Report of the Law Commission of which the noble and learned Lord expressed his approval. I hope that the noble and learned Lord will feel that in these Amendments we have gone a long way to give satisfaction to his point of view. No doubt he will wish to offer comments and criticisms on what we have done.
Obviously, there is an almost infinite scope for discussion. We had a number of suggestions from the Law Society which we discussed last time, and there is in fact no limit to the number of factors which might be taken into account. It is, I think, common ground that the guidelines simply draw attention to those factors which will generally be the most important, not only for the courts to consider in disputed cases but also as a guide to buyers and sellers in drawing up their contracts. With this in mind, the redrafted guidelines have been based more closely on the Law Commission's proposals than the original text of the Bill.
If I may go very rapidly through them, without dealing with them in too much detail, Guideline A, to be found in the new subsection (5) of Clause 4, can be
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equated with the original Law Commission's A. The differences between the two relate mainly to the need to focus on the relative bargaining position of the two parties. We would see it as perhaps an odd way of looking at a contract to refer, as the Law Commission's proposal appears to refer, to the bargaining position of the buyer relative to other suppliers; and we believe that reference should be made to the availability of alternative products which may be just as important as alternative sources of supply of the same product.
Guideline B is analogous to the Law Commission's Guideline D. It does however make it clear that it covers cases where the buyer adopts the active role of seeking, as distinct from the passive role suggested by being offered, an inducement to accept an exclusion clause. The new version also draws attention to an additional factor which we believe may be of considerable significance; namely, whether in accepting an exclusion clause the buyer had freedom of choice. This of course is the substance of Guideline B of the Bill.
Guideline C in the Amendment brings together the substance of the two Guidelines B and C in the Law Commission's Report. We think it overcomes two deficiencies in the Law Commission's wording. The Law Commission's B, for instance, might allow an unscrupulous buyer to agree deliberately to an ambiguous term in order to be able to rely on its ambiguity later. In our view, it is necessary to provide only for the case where the buyer did not know, and could not reasonably have known, of the scope of the term. Similarly, the Law Commission's Guideline C does not allow for cases where no steps need be taken to bring the terms to the buyer's attention. This might apply, for example, when the buyer and seller have been dealing with each other for a number of years. Again, the important test is whether the buyer knew, or ought reasonably to have known, of the existence of the term.
Guideline D in the Amendment is of course the same as Law Commission's Guideline E, with the element of retrospection omitted. We continue to take the view that whether it is reasonable to allow reliance on a term of a contract should be decided in the light of the

803
circumstances at the time of formation of the contract. To take account of later events for this purpose could be equivalent to changing the rules in the middle of the game. It is also to be noticed that Guideline D in the Amendment relates only to the implied terms in Sections 13, 14 and 15 of the principal Act. Section 12 is not included because of course it will not be possible to exclude undertakings as to title in any contract.
Guideline E is the same as the Law Commission's Guideline F and is unchanged. As I said at the Committee stage, we have not really been able to make sense of Law Commission's Guideline G. I hope, my Lords, that having indulged in what I am afraid is a rather technical explanation, the House will come to the conclusion that the Government have redeemed the undertaking I gave in the Committee stage and have applied their minds to an improvement which will meet some of the doubts expressed by the noble and learned Lord and others, and that we have genuinely sought a satisfactory answer to the questions which were discussed then. My Lords. I beg to move.
LORD GARDINER: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor for what he has been good enough to say. I think that on the Committee stage of the Bill the only non-Government Amendment proposed was the one that I moved, in effect to replace for the guidelines in the Bill the Law Commission's guidelines; and the noble and learned Lord was good enough to say that he would consider it with the Minister. He has redeemed that promise and has now virtually accepted the guidelines of the Law Commission, subject to one or two points of terminology—which is always in question—and except also for the question whether something should be judged as at the time of the contract or later. That again is a matter of opinion.
Curiously enough, when it comes to A, the Law Commission ended their A after "sources of supply at the time of the contract"; but this draft does not. But when it comes to considering whether a term could practically be complied with, they are insisting on the time of the contract instead of at the time of the hearing. As to what the court is trying
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to do at the hearing—to decide whether in the circumstances it would be fair or reasonable to allow the trader to rely on the term—I should still have thought that that was best judged at that time, But this is entirely a matter of opinion. Broadly speaking, the noble and learned Lord has been as good as his word: he has discussed it again with the Minister, and I think has in substance accepted the Amendments which I then moved. Accordingly, I am grateful to him.
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
8.8 p.m.
THE EARL OF LIMERICK: My Lords, this is no more than a drafting Amendment. The existing wording could conceivably be taken to mean that the provisions referred to are those which are common to Sections 13, 14 and 15 collectively, and this small change makes it clear that for this purpose the reference is to each of these sections separately. I beg to move.
Amendment moved—
Page 5 line 4, leave out ("sections 13 to") and insert ("section 13, 14 or").—(The Earl of Limerick.)
On Question. Amendment agreed to.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, Amendment No. 3 is consequential. I therefore beg to move.
Amendment moved—
Page 5, line 15, at end insert—
("(9A) Any reference in this section to a term exempting from all or any of the provisions of any section of this Act is a reference to a term which purports to exclude or restrict, or has the effect of excluding or restricting, the operation of all or any of the provisions of that section, or the exercise of a right conferred by any provision of that section, or any liability of the seller for breach of a condition or warranty implied by any provision of that section.").—(The Lord Chancellor.)
THE EARL OF LIMERICK: My Lords, I am just a little curious about this numbering. May I say just a few words? This Amendment I think is not quite consequential: it has been mentioned in connection with Amendment No. 7. These Amendments, again, do not in any way alter the provisions of the Bill, but allow Clauses 4 and 12 to be much more succinctly stated. What has been done is to take out a common factor from Clause 4, subsections (3), (4) and (5),

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namely, the exemption term, to define this in the Amendment and give it effect for the purposes of the relevant clause. I feel that the House will welcome the brevity and increased clarity with which it is thus possible to express the provisions of these subsections. A similar course has been followed in relation to Amendment No. 7 which relates to the parallel Clause 12, dealing with hire purchase agreements. I beg to move.
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
Clause 7 [Interpretation]:
8.11 p.m.
THE EARL OF LIMERICK THE EARL OF LIMERICK moved Amendment No. 4:
Page 6, line 42, after ("other") insert ("relevant").
The noble Earl said: My Lords, this Amendment and Amendments Nos. 9 and 10 have a common purpose and it may be convenient to consider them together. All three arise from a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Airedale, in Committee. I am sorry that the noble Lord is unable to be present, but I appreciate his courtesy in sending me an apology and explanation of his absence. As at present drafted, the Bill prescribes that among the factors to be taken into account in deciding whether goods are fit for the purpose are
"the price (if relevant) and all the other circumstances".
The noble Lord, Lord Airedale, pointed out that there was some inconsistency of approach in this. By this Amendment we make it clear, for the sake of consistency, that other circumstances are to be taken into account only if they also are relevant. I beg to move.
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
Clause 12 [Exemption Clauses]:
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, subject to my noble friend's better opinion this Amendment is the same as Amendment No. 1, relating to Hire Purchase. I beg to move.
Amendment moved—
Page 9, line 13, leave out from beginning to end of line 3 on page 10 and insert—
("(2) A term of a hire purchase agreement or any other agreement exempting from all or
806
any of the provisions of section 8 above shall be void.
(3) A term of a hire purchase agreement or any other agreement exempting from all or any of the provisions of section 9, 10 or 11 above shall be void in the case of a consumer agreement and shall, in any other case, not be enforceable to the extent that it is shown that it would not be fair or reasonable to allow reliance on the term.
(4) In determining for the purpose of subsection (3) above whether or not reliance on any such term would be fair or reasonable regard shall be had to all the circumstances of the case and in particular to the followirg matters—

(a) the strength of the bargaining positions of the owner and hirer relative to each other, taking into account, among other things, the availability of suitable alternative products and sources of supply

(b) whether the hirer received an inducement to agree to the term or in accepting it had an opportunity of acquiring the goods or suitable alternatives without it from any source of supply;

(c) whether the hirer knew or ought reasonably to have known of the existence and extent of the term (having regard, among other things, to any custom of the trade and any previous course of dealing between the parties);

(d) where the term exempts from all or any of the provisions of section 9, 10 or 11 above if some condition is not complied with, whether it was reasonable at the time of the agreement to expect that compliance with that condition would be practicable;

(e) whether the goods were manufactured, processed or adapted to the special order of the hirer.")—(The Lord Chancellor.)

On Question, Amendment agreed to.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, I am told that this is a drafting Amendment similar to Amendment No. 2. The revised wording now explicitly states that the provisions referred to are those of Section 9, Section 10 or Section 11 of the Act. I beg to move Amendment No. 6.
Amendment moved—
Page 10, line 6, leave out ("sections 9 to") and insert ("section 9, 10 or").—(The Lord Chancellor.)
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
THE EARL OF LIMERICK: My Lords, we discussed this Amendment with Amendment No. 3. I beg to move Amendment No. 7.
Amendment moved—
Page 10, line 18, at end insert—
("(8A) Any reference in this section to a term exempting from all or any of the provisions of any section of this Act is a reference

807
to a term which purports to exclude or restrict, or has the effect of excluding or restricting, the operation of all or any of the provisions of that section, or the exercise of a right conferred by any provision of that section, or any liability of the owner for breach of a condition or warranty implied by any provision of that section").—(The Earl of Limerick.)
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
Clause 15 [Supplementary]:
THE EARL OF LIMERICK: My Lords, Amendment No. 8 arises from an undertaking which I gave in Committee to the noble Lord, Lord Airedale. Its purpose is simply to give an indication of where in the Bill the definition of a "consumer sale" is to be found. I beg to move.
Amendment moved—
Page 11, line 11, leave out ("this Act") and insert ("section 4 above").—(The Earl of Limerick.)
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
THE EARL OF LIMERICK: My Lords, we discussed this Amendment with Amendment No. 4. I beg to move Amendment No. 9.
Amendment moved—
Page 11, line 28, at end insert ("relevant").—(The Earl of Limerick.)
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
Clause 16 [Terms to be implied on redemption of trading stamps for goods]:
THE EARL OF LIMERICK: My Lords, again this Amendment was discussed with Amendment No. 4. I beg to move Amendment No. 10.
Amendment moved—
Page 12, line 40, after ("other") insert ("relevant").—(The Earl of Limerick.)
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
Clause 18 [Short title, citation, interpretation, commencement, repeal and saving]:
THE EARL OF LIMERICK: My Lords, this is essentially a drafting Amendment. The addition of Section 29(3)(c) to those parts of the Hire Purchase Acts to be repealed is consequential upon the repeal of Section 19 of each of those Acts. I beg to move.
Amendment moved—
Page 13, line 16, leave out from ("20") to ("the") in line 18 and insert ("and 29(3)(c) of each of the following Acts, that is to say, the Hire-Purchase Act 1965, the Hire-Purchase (Scotland) Act 1965 and").—(The Earl of Limerick.)
On Question, Amendment agreed to.

HOUSING (AMENDMENT) BILL
8.15 p.m.
LORD MOWBRAY AND STOURTON: My Lords, it would perhaps be helpful to noble Lords if I were to begin by outlining the main purposes of this small but important Bill before turning to examine some of the broader housing policy considerations upon which the Bill has a bearing. There are two purposes to the Bill. The first, set out in Clause 1, is the proposal to extend to June 23, 1974, the availability of a higher rate of grant and Government contribution towards house improvement and general area improvement within the development and intermediate areas. This extra help, originally provided under the Housing Act 1971, would otherwise terminate in June, 1973. This Bill therefore proposes an extension of the availability of these higher grants by a further year.
Clause 1 also extends the 1971 Act very slightly in scope. For example, under the 1971 Act local authorities are not able to receive the higher 90 per cent. contribution from the Government towards a grant to a private owner if that grant does not amount to three-quarters of the approved expense of the work. This provision was originally designed to encourage local authorities to be generous, but in practice it has been found to give rise to some anomalies in cases where owners applied for grant-aid towards expensive and ambitious improvement schemes. In such cases local authorities, for perfectly good and sensible reasons, having decided not to make a case for special treatment but having restricted grants to the normal maximum, then find that they are penalised by not receiving a 90 per cent. Government contribution but only 75 per cent. This Bill proposes to remedy this administrative defect by allowing a 90 per cent. Government contribution on all grants approved at the normal maximum figure, whether or not that maximum amounts to three-quarters of the

809
approved expense of the work. This concession is to be made retrospective to August 4, 1972, when the Government's intention was first announced.
The provisions of this Bill will help to keep up the momentum of improving living conditions in those areas where the tendency has been for the harsher economic climate to hold back progress. I believe that the extra year provided by this proposed legislation will take us a good deal further towards our ultimate aim of providing every family in the country with a decent home.
The second purpose of this Bill is to give the Secretary of State power to allow or to require local authorities to attach conditions to the sale of council houses for a longer pre-emption than the five years which is the limit imposed under existing legislation. This proposal is set out in Clause 2. Clause 2 will enable local authorities in areas where there have been exceptional rises in council house prices to offer discounts of up to 30 per cent., instead of the normal 20 per cent., if they wish to do so, coupled with the imposition of pre-emption conditions for eight years, instead of the normal five. In 1967 the Labour Government introduced the idea of allowing local authorities the discretion of giving discounts of up to 20 per cent. on council house sales in areas of special housing scarcity. Many local authorities since then have availed themselves of this facility, creating the new restricted market value by the imposition of the conditions restricting re-sale for a period of five years. That period is the present legal maximum for which such conditions may be imposed. When, therefore, it was felt right to grant the request of several local authorities in recent months to grant discounts of up to 30 per cent., legislation became necessary for authorising longer pre-emption periods.
The Government's policy is clear. Many tenants of council houses want to buy the homes in which they live. We believe they should be given the chance to buy and that the ability to give them this provides local authorities with a unique opportunity to encourage owner occupation for many people who do not want to move and could not otherwise afford to buy. Tenants' wishes in this matter should be taken into account by local authorities. Of course they should also see to the
810
needs of people waiting for houses to rent, and the way to do that is to provide more accommodation. Stopping sales does not help them. We believe that as time goes on local authorities will become increasingly aware of the extent of the demand from their tenants to buy, and more and more authorities will decide to adopt positive sales policies. We want local authorities to use their discretion in this matter voluntarily and in response to local demand. I trust that noble Lords in all parts of the House will feel able to give this measure their unqualified support.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 2ª.—(Lord Mowbray and Stourton.)
8.20 p.m.
LORD GARNSWORTHY: My Lords, the House will be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Mowbray and Stourton, for his explanation of the Bill before us. The Minister for Housing and Construction, Mr. Paul Channon, speaking in the other place on November 28 last year, paid a very deserved tribute to the Housing Act 1969, for which my noble friend Lord Greenwood of Rossendale was responsible. I think it proper that his constructive enterprise should be remembered to-day, for it is following the initiative of what the Minister, Mr. Channon, stated was a "radical and imaginative measure" that the 1971 Act was enacted. I would in turn acknowledge the value of the later measure. The 1971 Act was aimed at securing an acceleration in the rate of improvement of houses in development and intermediate areas by way of improving the rate of grant and Government contributions. The ambition of the Government appears to have been to break the back of the problem by June, 1973, and some £46 million was provided for that purpose. Whatever speeding up was achieved has been most welcome, but quite clearly more remains to be done; hence this present Bill, which extends by one year the period for which the higher grants will be available.
It might have been useful if we had been given some indication of the size of the problem remaining because, having regard to the size of the problem yet to be tackled in the light of the rate of progress experienced, one wonders whether one year's extension will be adequate. If two years were allowed, as they were, for the expenditure of some

811
£46 million, by what reckoning do the Government anticipate that in an additional year £41 million, as provided in this Bill, can be successfully employed? If the Minister says that the limited extension of one year is to secure speed in the rate of improvement, then I should like to ask whether the Government are being realistic. I ask that question against the background of the question which I have just put to the Minister: what is the size of the problem remaining, and has there been any recognition that the problem will inevitably grow with the passage of time?
There are a number of other questions that arise in one's mind about the use of grants and the rate of take-up. We have all heard or read of houses being bought, improved by the assistance of grant aid, and then sold at a grossly increased price. Indeed, this matter was referred to yesterday, and because it was referred to at some length I shall not take up your Lordships' time this evening. I wonder what is being done to ensure that local authorities use their powers to deal with any abuse such as was referred to in the debate yesterday afternoon. The matter is one of considerable concern for, as the Minister, Mr. Channon, showed in the other place, he is aware of the problem and of the social implications that follow from what is taking place in this regard.
On the matter of the rate of take-up (and here again the Minister showed some awareness) the percentage of grants that went to landlords of privately owned houses, as I understand what he said in the other place, was only some 20 per cent.: indeed, he gave figures which suggested a fall from 21 per cent. for the first six months of 1972 to 19 per cent. in the third quarter. Without much doubt, this is the sector which most stands in need of improvement. They will be the properties which can all too soon deteriorate below any reasonable standard and become unfit for human habitation. What impetus will the Government provide for an effort commensurate with the need in this particular field? The examples of local authorities and housing associations are on record and prompt me to mention the attractions of public ownership of these rented properties—perhaps by way of municipalisation. In
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those cases where the landlord is unable or fails to bring about the improvements which this Bill is aimed at securing, or to maintain properties at reasonable levels, we certainly need a new approach. I suggest that serious consideration should be given to the municipalisation of these properties as desirable social policy.
I should like to ask the noble Lord, Lord Mowbray and Stourton, whether grants on the scale on which they are being made available for development in the intermediate areas will be made in the areas of housing stress—because the problem is a considerable one. I ask that because I believe it ought to be made clear, not only for the benefit of landlords but also for the benefit of tenants, whether Government grants will extend to and include such matters as electrical re-wiring.
The second part of the Bill, as the noble Lord has said, makes provision to enable conditions imposed by local authorities in England and Wales on the sale of their houses to be applied for a longer period than the existing five years. I have nothing to say against the principle of home ownership. I own the house in which I live, as I suppose do many of your Lordships. But, despite that fact, I view housing as a social service, and in the case of a very substantial section of the community their housing needs can best be met by renting; indeed, for a great many it is the only possibility. Not only is it the only possibility, but it is also the only sensible solution. In the overwhelming majority of cases, provision for those who need houses to rent, on the scale required, can best be made by public enterprise, by local authorities —who might, incidentally, build more for sale to those who want to buy than at present they are doing.
I appreciate that the idea of the sale of council houses rejoices the hearts of the Front Bench opposite. It is a political gimmick that stirs the enthusiasm of those who so dislike public enterprise, and particularly successful public enterprise. But the sale of council houses does nothing to add to, and will not add a single house to, the stock of housing. I have refreshed my memory as to the terms of a circular sent out in 1967 by the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, Circular 24/67. Again I think these were the years when my noble

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friend Lord Greenwood of Rossendale was at the Ministry. If I may, very briefly, I will quote what that circular had to say on this particular topic of the sale of council houses:
"The Ministers take the view that, in areas where there is still an unsatisfied demand for houses to let at moderate rents, they"—
that is to say, the councils—
"should not sell their existing houses except where there are special reasons in the case of a particular property. To do so would postpone the time when an adequate supply of rented housing becomes available; and could mean that families on the waiting list, who are among the most inadequately housed, would have to wait longer for a vacancy. Moreover, the sale of a substantial number of the older houses and their replacement by new houses to let could have the effect of unnecessarily increasing the rents of the remaining houses or of putting extra charges on the general ratepayers, or both."
The Housing Finance Act is going to do enough damage in the matter of rents, and the rating revaluation may well have a very damaging effect additionally in some parts of the country.
The circular continues:
"Local authority tenants who wish to move to a private house can be given every encouragement and assistant to do so. The authority can then relet to a family in need.
"The principal consideration is that the sale of existing council houses reduces the stock of houses that can be let at moderate rents.…Any reduction in the stock of rented houses both reduces the chances of families on the waiting list and restricts the opportunities for transfer and exchange among tenants. Thus a valuable element of flexibility in the management of the council's housing stock is diminished."
I thought if I read what the circular said the issue would he put more succinctly to the House than I might have done by using my own words to cover the matter. Nothing has occurred since to alter or to detract from the soundness of that advice given there. My noble friend was right then, and what was said then remains valid now. I have to say that the circular sent out in June of last year added nothing of value, as it added nothing to the stock of houses available for living in.
The Government do not seem to be doing too well in this matter of housing provision. As I understand from yesterday's Press, fewer new houses were available last year than at any time in the
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past nine years. The number of council houses slumped by nearly 25 per cent., to 1961 levels. These are the houses that the Government want to see increasingly sold. For the first year since 1963 the total figures have dropped below 350,000—down to 319,100. I remember when we were sitting on that side what was said from the Benches behind me when the present Conservative leaders were in Opposition. They chided and derided us for what we achieved in the field of housing construction. Here we are to-day at a point when we have gone back to before 1963.
On slum clearance, despite their declared intention of clearing slums by 1980, the programme shows a drop of from more than 70,000 in 1970 to just over 66,000 in 1972, the lowest figure for five years. All this against a background of soaring resale prices. The figures issued by the Nationwide Building Society are startling, indeed, alarming, as to the increases that have been taking place in these last 12 months. When we are told that perhaps the percentage increase has not been as great as it has been in other years when it has been extraordinarily high, I ask: percentage of what—the enhanced price that followed the other very substantial percentage increases?
We talk about home ownership. Let us consider the issue of land prices. We are told that the average price for an acre of building land throughout the country is running at about £25,000, varying from less than £10,000 in Yorkshire to, in the county where I live, Surrey, £100,000 an acre. These are figures that give some indication of the background against which the Government want to encourage local authorities to sell council houses, despite the very heavy lists in so many areas of applicants for houses.
We shall not oppose this Bill; indeed, we welcome the extended period as far as the grants are concerned. The second Part we note, but hope, perhaps with little expectation of realisation, that the Government will, however reluctantly, realise the error of Mr. Julian Amery's ways when he was in charge, as revealed by his endeavours in 1972, as they have lived to learn the folly of so many of their other policies. Meantime, we shall do nothing to delay the passage of the Bill.
8.37 p.m.
LORD HYLTON: My Lords, I welcome this Bill for two reasons. I am sure it will help forward the work of improvement which is so badly needed particularly in the development and intermediate areas, and it will also do something to tidy up and improve the arrangements for the sale of council houses.
I would, however, like to raise two particular points. One is a general point and concerns the effect on prices of the system of improvement grants. The other is more specific and concerns housing associations. The existence of the present system of improvement grants has had, I believe, a definite effect on the demand for unimproved properties, and as a result prices for these have risen. Vendors have found that they can add perhaps up to £1,000, and maybe a little more in development areas, to the price of an unimproved property without in any way affecting the net cost of the finished article to the person who purchases and improves. This would appear to convey a benefit to the previous owner, and to reduce, and perhaps even eliminate, the benefit to the purchaser and improver.
I think this cannot have been intended when the system of improvement grants was brought in in the first place, and later on was improved and extended in several ways. I understand that a general review of improvement policy is being carried out at the moment within the Department of the Environment, and I hope that, as a result of that review, new and better incentives will be worked out which will encourage improvement without inflating the prices of unimproved properties.
For consideration I would put forward the idea that a fiscal incentive might replace the present cash grants. This kind of incentive already exists in the case of the improvements that are made to agricultural workers' houses. In this particular instance, the whole of the cost of improvement of such a house is eligible for tax relief, but the tax relief is spread out over a period of 10 years. If this system of tax relief could be adapted and extended to cover improvements to all dwelling houses, I believe that there would be an incentive to improve and that there would be less of an inflationary effect on the prices to be obtained for
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unimproved old houses. It might well be considered whether the period for the tax relief could be shortened from 10 years to perhaps five years in cases where the income of the person carrying out the improvements is sufficient to absorb the relief.
Now I come to the much more urgent, immediate and specific point relating to housing associations. Under Section 21 of the Housing Act, 1969, associations are able to receive Exchequer contributions instead of the ordinary cash improvement grant, and in many cases this is very much to their advantage. In August 1969 a ceiling was fixed for these Exchequer contributions in the sum of£2,500. That was almost immediately after the Bill became an Act. This ceiling has been overtaken by the rise in house prices and the equally serious rise in building costs. Fortunately, the Secretary of State has discretion to vary this ceiling. I believe that he should vary it, and that he should raise it to at least£3,500 in the development and intermediate areas. A higher ceiling will probably be needed in other areas because higher costs obtain there. If nothing is done, I fear that what will happen is that the work of improvement by housing associations will simply grind to a halt. The reason for this is that there is an accidental relationship between the "fair rents", which housing associations are now obliged to charge—and the ceiling for Exchequer contributions in respect of acquisition and improvement. Unless the ceiling is roughly equal to the total capital cost of the improved dwelling, associations charging fair rents are virtually certain to make a loss, to incur a deficit, and that deficit will go on for a period of up to 20 years unless the fair rents increase very rapidly in the meanwhile.
Housing associations are improving properties in the inner city ring—otherwise known as the "twilight zone". They are providing rented dwellings, they are increasing the range of choice available to people who need houses, and they are intentionally choosing as tenants persons and families who are in great housing need at this moment. Therefore, if this work that they are doing is considered to be valuable, I urge the Secretary of State to raise the ceiling which I have mentioned immediately, and not to wait until the

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general review of improvement policy has been completed.
8.45 p.m.
LORD HUGHES: My Lords, this Bill applies to Scotland as well as to the rest of the country, and I take advantage of the fact that the noble Lord, Lord Milverton, is not in his place to say a few words without necessarily adding to the total of what otherwise might have been said. I want to emphasise how much I am in agreement with what my noble friend Lord Garnsworthy has said about the adequacy of the period of one year's extension. I have no knowledge of the situation this side of the Border, but I am quite certain, both from my present knowledge and the knowledge which I acquired during the time when I had responsibility for these matters in the Scottish Office, that there remains far too much to be possibly undertaken in the period of another year.
I welcome what the Government did when they extended the grant to 90 per cent., and there is no doubt that it has increased very considerably the improvements which are taking place, but even if that accelerated rate continues for the period of the year which is being added, it will still leave a great deal to be done. We have more and more come to the point where it is obvious that what is being done in a particular Bill will not see the end of the matter of giving the Minister, or Ministers, power to extend by Order being placed before Parliament in due course, and I would suggest to the noble Lord, Lord Mowbray and Stourton, that he convey to his right honourable friends the possibility that this course might be adopted in this measure. If, after all, it turns out that my noble friend and I are wrong and the problem is solved in a year, then no Order may be introduced; but if the Government find that they can add to the good they are doing by extending the provisions for the further period, then it enables that to be done in the simplest possible way.
The second point I wished to make, also briefly, concerned the way in which people are using grants for the wrong purpose—by which I mean the extent to which people are buying properties, and sometimes using rather disreputable methods of getting the existing occupiers
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out, so that they may pocket the whole, or a very large part, of the grant on the sale of the improved house. Until last year the position in Scotland was different from that in England and Wales, in that there was a condition attached to the grant that the whole, or part of the grant, would be repayable if the house was sold within a period of five years. That was not the position in England and Wales. I understand that this was largely because of the fact that it was so easy for people to get round it by giving long leases rather than freehold sales, and apparently it did not count as a sale if this was done. I regret that the Secretary of State for Scotland decided to follow the English example and removed that condition.
What is happening in Scotland—and I see no reason why it should not happen on this side of the Border also—is that a number of local authorities, even though they are anxious to have the maximum amount of improvements, are refusing to give grants to those who are obviously developing for the purpose of pocketing an extra profit, but are confining their grants to owner-occupiers or to owners of properties who are to continue to rent the improved property. Very largely, of course, the second category is being undertaken by the housing associations, who often acquire the property for the purpose of improvement and then subsequent letting.
I would suggest to the noble Lord, Lord Mowbray and Stourton, that even at this late stage the Government should either consider reinserting a period during which the grant may be repaid in whole or in part, or alternatively, if it were possible to do it by administrative action, advising local authorities not to make grants payable to speculative developers, but rather to confine them to those who are going to continue to rent properties or who are going to occupy the property themselves after the improvement has taken place.
That is all that I had intended to say, but the words of the noble Lord, Lord Hyton, make me feel that I must add two further points. First of all, I agree with him wholeheartedly about the need to help the housing associations. I think that the ceiling is now completely out of date. After all, there was a wage award which took effect in June of this year,

819
which immediately added 30 per cent. to housebuilding costs; and I know from my own business experience—certainly in Scotland—that that was the equivalent of a 23 per cent. overall increase in the cost of building. The cost of some of the materials has gone up and imported timber, for instance, which is not affected by the freeze, has gone up by 20 or 25 per cent. in the last few weeks. So there is an urgent need for an increase in the ceiling.
However, I do not find myself able to go along with the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, in suggesting that grants should be replaced by fiscal incentives. They would undoubtedly make it very difficult for many owner-occupiers to carry out improvements, because they would not be able to lay their hands on the necessary money to enable work to go ahead. I know that this can be a great difficulty, and one of the stumbling blocks which was removed in the last Government's legislation was when we enabled the cost of necessary repairs to be reckoned for grant purposes, in addition to the actual improvement. Sometimes an improvement could not take place without essential repairs being carried out, and if an owner had to find money for that from his own resources the work could not go ahead. Therefore, a system of financial incentives might mean that, at the end of the day, an owner would have to find someone to lend him the money to go ahead, and he could not always rely on the local authority to do that. Although fiscal incentives would be a useful way of ensuring that money was being used in the right way, a better alternative is to restore the former situation so that if somebody attempts to profit from doing a job he should be required over a period to repay either the whole or a part of the grant.
8.53 p.m.
LORD MOWBRAY AND STOURTON: My Lords, we have had an interesting debate ranging widely over the housing field. This small Bill does not range quite so widely as one might have imagined from listening to some of the speeches. As we know, its purpose is simply to extend the higher grant limit for one year, and to enable councils to sell houses more cheaply. Noble Lords have spoken of the necessity to
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extend the time limit. The original objective was to get a short, sharp stimulus to house improvements in the assisted areas, and it has become clear from the results that we have achieved what we were aiming at. We should not have been able to achieve it in a two-year period, but there is no reason to go beyond the proposed year. Everyone knows that not all the problems will have been solved by 1974, and that not all houses will have been improved by then.
What we expected was that the rate of improvement in the assisted areas would be brought up to the level achieved in the rest of the country, and in that we have succeeded; in fact, the figures have now overtaken those for the rest of the country. So what we have done has generated a good head of steam, and we hope that there will be enough momentum to keep a high level of improvement work going after June, 1974. After all, we are not withdrawing grants, which will remain at the 50 per cent. level of the rest of the country, and local authorities will be able to qualify for additional help under the terms of the Housing Finance Act. We see no reason why local authorities in the assisted areas should not have made very major inroads into their problems within the time available. Indeed, we know that several authorities in the North-East and the North-West plan to have improved all their council houses needing such treatment by June, 1974.
As to the period beyond that, I would remind your Lordships that last November the Minister for Housing and Construction announced that we had embarked on a comprehensive policy review of improvement grants. The aim of that review is to consider ways of concentrating our efforts and resources increasingly on those parts of the country where areas of sub-standard housing still remain. At this moment, we are receiving from local authorities statements of their remaining problems, and we shall take these into account in the policy review. I think we have already received 70 per cent. of the returns requested from local authorities. I must apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Hughes, for the fact that the figures to which I am referring cover England and Wales, and I do not have the Scottish ones in my head. This review will examine ways of concentrating our efforts

821
and resources more specifically on those parts of the country where areas needing improvement will still exist after 1974. This has been a three-stage exercise.
The review will also consider the question of abuses of improvement grants. I shall come back to that point in a moment, because I know that noble Lords generally are worried about this point. The adequacy of the existing cash grant limits is something that will be looked at and, if necessary, may well receive action. Anything else at which we think we should take a fresh look in the light of experience gained and information coining in will also be dealt with. The noble Lord, Lord Garnsworthy, asked whether the problem of repairs, including re-wiring, could be dealt with; and that is one of the points which will be looked at in the overall review.
On housing stress, I have said that we recognise the need to do more here. We have not overlooked the needs of people living in sub-standard houses in London and in the inner Midlands. Their problems will of course be considered in the comprehensive policy review of housing and related matters, which has now been embarked upon.
LORD GARNSWORTHY: My Lords, before the noble Lord leaves that point, can lie tell us when we are likely to get the result of this review, because the problem is a very large one and daily becomes more urgent?
LORD MOWBRAY AND STOURTON: My Lords, I cannot give the noble Lord a specific date, but I can assure him that the present Minister for Housing and Construction is not a person who likes to let the grass grow under his feet.
LORD GARNSWORTHY: My Lords, is the noble Lord suggesting that we need an improvement to Mr. Julian Amery?
LORD MOWBRAY AND STOURTON: I am not saying that, my Lords. I bow to no one in my admiration for Mr. Julian Amery; and Mr. Paul Channon, also, is very much a "live wire" and is very keen to finish the policy review as soon as possible. I can promise the noble Lord that things are moving in the Department. Speculation is something
822
which worries the Party of the noble Lords opposite—
LORD HUGHES: My Lords, does it not worry the Government?
LORD MOWBRAY AND STOURTON: My Lords, bad speculation is never to be encouraged. We do not aim to have speculation, and if there is a little of it it is not the fault of the Government: it is very difficult to get everything perfect in this world.
The noble Lord, Lord Garnsworthy, was correct in saying that owner-occupiers and local authorities have been getting 80 per cent. of these grants in England and Wales. The figures for Scotland are similar, though I cannot give the exact figures. The Sunday newspaper which stated in October, 1972, that only 50 per cent. of all improvement grants awarded in England and Wales go to London, was incorrect. The proportion of grants given to people who could be speculators is very small indeed, and I do not think they are a major problem. Our problem is to get the houses improved. If you take the overall picture you see that we are getting these houses improved.
I should like to inform your Lordships that in the year 1972 some 368,000 housing improvements grants were approved. This is the highest total there has ever been. Going slightly wide of the field (because noble Lords opposite went slightly wide), in 1972 there were also some 350,000 starts made in the housing field—I am talking now about the whole of Great Britain. That makes a total figure for house improvement approvals and house starts in 1972 of 718.000. That is a figure which has never been equalled in this country previously.
LORD GARNSWORTHY: My Lords, I think the noble Lord did not take the point I was trying to make with regard to landlords taking up grants. I think I used the figures that were employed in the other place by his noble friend Mr. Channon and by members of the Opposition speaking in Committee. I was referring to the failure of landlords to take up grants. There is—and, again, this was referred to in the other place; and it seems to me we have had no clear indication that we are going to have anything done about it—the owner of one

823
or two houses who is relatively poor and does not feel he can afford to make any kind of contribution at all. What is going to be done? I do not think we can ride off by claiming that some record achievements are to anybody's credit in this field. There is so much to be done.
LORD MOWBRAY AND STOURTON: My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Garnsworthy. If he can help the Government to draw the attention of landlords to getting their properties improved, we shall be as pleased as the noble Lord himself. We shall do everything we can to encourage landlords, tenants and owner-occupiers. We want everybody to persuade other people. There would be no happier people in the country than myself and my right honourable friend the Minister for Housing and Construction if we could do this. But the starts are coming along, and the housing improvement grants are going up. Councils are taking advantage of grants; and I think that as landlords see the effect of houses being improved, with massive Government help, they will probably take the hint and do it, too, while the going is good. As we know, there is not a great deal of time to get the higher grants.
If I may now come to the second Part of this Bill, the sale of council houses was a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Garnsworthy. The noble Lord said, in effect, that the sale of houses was not going to help towards a solution of the housing problem in this country; that was the gist of his message. We all know that there is a difference of philosophy between the Parties here, but we feel that if our policies are taken together they make a sort of grand strategy for housing in this country. The sale of council houses is just one integral part of the encouragement of owner-occupation. This, my Lords, is no Party issue; we all believe in owner-occupation. It has been one of the greatest attractions in social democracy for a long time. A property-owning democracy is something we have all been taught since Burke started discussing the matter. The aspiration of council tenants to own their houses represents a very significant aspect of local housing need which can be realised without any disadvantage to those waiting for council houses to rent.
LORD GARNSWORTHY: My Lords, if I may say so with respect, that is just not true. May I put it to the noble Lord in this way? The Government are seeking to sell off houses at up to 30 per cent. below what should be the market value, knowing full well that the local authority cannot buy land at the price of the land on which the old house stands and cannot build at the price which the old house cost.
LORD MOWBRAY AND STOURTON: My Lords, if the noble Lord will be patient I shall be answering his questions. We point out that if a tenant wants to own his house but cannot buy it from the council, he will not leave that council house; he will stay as a tenant. So you are not helping the people on the waiting list one bit. If he cannot buy it, he is still the same man occupying the house. There is also, as is obvious, no Government restriction on the number of new houses which a local authority may build to let to meet local housing needs. This is what local authorities should do. I know there are still cases where, as the noble Lord says, there are great problems; but selling to tenants will not hinder or help this problem one little bit—and it is certainly not, as the noble Lord said it was, a gimmick.
There is just one more point on houses for sale. Last year, of the 350,000 starts I mentioned, 227,000 were in the private sector. This is the third highest number since the war and the highest since 1967. In the previous year, 1970, influenced by the previous Administration, the number was 170,000; so that is a figure which is going up. I think the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, mentioned the impact of grants on resale values. There is no certainty of anyone receiving the grant. Most improvement is still non-grant-aided. People naturally go about making their houses more comfortable to live in. Therefore there is great difficulty about the taxation proposals. But I was interested in the noble Lord's view and will bear it in mind in relation to the policy review.
The Department is conscious of the difficulties being met by the voluntary housing movement as regards the cost of improvement and conversion in assisted areas and elsewhere. Up to the beginning of last year this was not a major problem,

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but recent cost movements have been rapid. We accept this. Cost trends have been to some extent the penalty of success. The rate of improvement in development and intermediate areas increased dramatically. The actual rate of increase in 1972 was 154 per cent. up on 1971 in terms of grant approvals. Not unnaturally, this led to pressures on local builders which caused prices to move up sharply. One of the objects of this Bill is to reduce that by allowing more time for work to be done, which should mean that building costs during the corning year will moderate. Nevertheless, I admit that the housing associations will be placed in a particular difficulty because the cost ceiling set by the Governament in 1969 is now proving to be too low to cope with 1973 prices.
This is a matter which we are examining urgently as part of our comprehensive policy review. It would not have been sensible, or advantageous to the voluntary movements, for the Minister for Housing and Construction to deal with the problems of the housing associations outside the scope of this full review; because to reach a clear judgment on the way in which the improvement policy may develop it is essential to consider the very important contribution which the voluntary movement can and will make. I must ask the noble Lord to contain his patience a little longer, but I would say that my right honourable friend has on a number of occasions made it clear that if a housing association has on any particular occasion got into difficulties because of cost, and if the local authorities in the area will support the housing association, the Ministers will give the most sympathetic consideration to an application for a higher grant in that particular case. But it must have local authority support. I think that is a very generous gesture on the part of the Minister and shows that before policies can be established he will consider each case on its merits.
The housing field is so wide and this Bill so narrow that I do not think that at this late hour I should go on. So, confident that noble Lords on both sides of the House share the view, despite minor points, that this Bill is essentially a good one, I commend it to your Lordships.
LORD HUGHES: My Lords, I do not think we should leave it without two notes of congratulation to the noble Lord, Lord Mowbray and Stourton. He read the speeches as if he had written them himself and, what is more, read them as if he believed them.
On Question, Bill read 2ª and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.

GUARDIANSHIP BILL [H.L.]
9.11 p.m.
EARL ST. ALDWYN: My Lords, on behalf of my noble friend Lord Colville of Culross I beg leave to introduce a Bill to amend the law of England and Wales as to the guardianship of minors so as to make the rights of a mother equal to those of a father, and so as to make further provision with respect to applications and orders under section 9 of the Guardianship of Minors Act 1971 and with respect to the powers of a guardian under that Act in relation to the minor's property, and to amend section 4(2) of the Matrimonial Proceedings (Magistrates' Courts) Act 1960; to make provision in relation to like matters for Scotland; and for purposes connected therewith. I beg to move that this Bill be now read a first time.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 1ª.—(Earl St. Aldwyn.)
On Question, Bill read 1ª, and to be printed.