STATUTE LAW (REPEALS) BILL [H.L.] (Hansard, 6 February 1973)

THE LORD CHACELLOR
My Lords, I rise to move that this Bill be now read a second time. It presents me with a certain problem. Most measures of law reform inaugurate some new provision of the law which its sponsors regard as desirable. This Bill is a bonfire of 118 whole Acts and parts of 140 more which are no longer considered of practical utility. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, in a speech which he made two or three days ago, spoke about the awful state of our Statute Book, and I am not sure that he was not right. It is really a sort of Augean stables and, short of diverting the Styx into it, as I seem to remember from my school days Hercules did, the only method we have of reducing its awful state is to ask the Law Commission to propose periodical bonfires of unwanted furniture. This is the fourth such Bill which the Law Commission have produced and it forms part of their systematic cleansing of the Augean stables. I am sure the House will be grateful to the Law Commission for their continuing work in this field.
Your Lordships will see from the Schedule to the Bill that there are 13 categories of enactments proposed for repeal. I had better enumerate them. They are respectively: the demise of the Crown, Bishoprics, other ecclesiastical enactments, banking, criminal law, highway and traffic law, overseas territories, agriculture, land acquisition, the coal industry, public schools, legal aid and miscellaneous. I now come to the difficult part, because at one time I desired—indeed, I have written them down here—to try to select out of these 118 useless old Acts and 140 useless parts of Acts some which might interest your Lordships, to explain what the Bill is all about, but the choice would be a little arbitrary.
The explanation of it all is to be found in Command Paper 5108, the 4th Report on Statute Law Revision by the two Law Commissions—and I should like, in passing, to thank the Scottish Law Commission for their work no less than the English one—and in a very much larger green document, which I have, called 1043 Notes on the Bill. Although I am therefore not selecting—I have been through them with some trouble—any particular enactments for special mention, I have, if I can delve into these two documents, the capacity to reply to cross-examination should the research of noble Lords inspire them to find out exactly why any particular document has been put on the bonfire. With those words of introduction and commendation, I commend the Bill for Second Reading. My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time.

§ LORD GARDINER
My Lords, I rise only very shortly, I am sure on behalf of the whole House, to thank the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor for putting this Bill before us, and also to thank the Law Commission. I confess that I had thought, when I saw their previous three Acts clearing a great deal of junk off the Statute Book, that they would be hard put to it soon to find any more, but that evidently is not so. Of course, if he were here it is possible that my noble friend Lord Maelor might have objected to the repeal of the, Acte for the translation of the Bible and the Dyvine Service into the Welshe Tongue". And I do not know how the Act of Anne … for completing a chapel of ease in the lower town of Deal in the county of Kent by a duty on waterborn coals to be brought into the said town has lasted so long. I should have thought that the chapel of ease must have been built by now.
I do not have sufficient knowledge, whether historical or geographical, but there is the Act of 1774, … to establish a fund towards further defraying the charges of the administration of justice and support of the civil government within the province of Quebec in America. We know already that, unlike the present day, they had meat in the reign of Henry 1044 VIII, because there is an Act of Henry VIII … licensyng the bochers of London to kyll theyr cattell within the walls of the same cytie. It is greatly to our advantage that the Law Commission are to continue this very good work. As I said, it surprises me that we should still have on the Statute Book so many Acts which are obviously junk and which we ought to get rid of.

§ THE LORD CHANCELLOR
My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble and learned Lord for raising those points. So far as the three Statutes which he has mentioned are concerned, I think I can give him a brief answer. The Welsh Bible provision is no longer necessary, for two reasons: the first is that the Bible has been translated into Welsh; and the second is that the Welsh Church has been disestablished so that it would not be our business even if the translation had pot been made. The Quebec church fund became spent on the repeal in 1888 of the relevant provisions in the British North America (Seignorial Rights) Act 1825. The residue of the Act is no longer required and the Anglican Church of Canada has agreed to the proposed repeal.
As regards the Henry VIII slaughterhouses in London, this is a more interesting story. In the fifteenth century the butchers were creating a public nuisance in London—by which was then meant the City—by slaughtering cattle without there being suitable provision for the removal of the remains and the blood. During the course of the reign of Henry VIII, they were persuaded to provide suitable sewerage arrangements; so the Statute of Henry VIII was then passed to enable them to slaughter cattle in London. This is now dealt with by more modern legislation, so the old legislation can be regarded as obsolete or spent. My Lords, I am grateful to the noble and learned Lord; and those are the answers to the questions which he has raised.