LORDS AMENDMENT (Hansard, 4 July 1994)

§ Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, I beg to move that the House do not insist on their Amendment No. 2 to which the Commons have disagreed, but do agree with the Commons in their Amendment No. 2A in lieu thereof.
Noble Lords will recall that when we last debated the Bill the Government accepted the substance of an amendment moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Lockwood, on the subject of mining museums. At that time we entered a proviso that the drafting may have to be altered. That has now happened, and I hope that the House will accept the new clause which reflects the substance of that moved by the noble Baroness. I commend Amendment No. 2A to your Lordships' House.

§ Lord Morris of Castle Morris
My Lords, I have examined the Commons amendment to your Lordships' amendment, Amendment No. 5.I have collated the two versions as if they were separate witnesses to a common hyparchetype in the manuscript tradition of a classical text. Indeed, it has been said of classical Greek that it is a language so subtle that it is capable grammatically of 997 creating a distinction where in meaning and function there is no difference. So it is with this proposed amendment to your Lordships' amendment.
The only possible change which might be inferred or induced by preferring Amendment No. 2A above Amendment No. 2 is that the process of report might begin a few months later by virtue of the one rather than the other—that is, a few months before the three-year period ends. Given that the three-year period is widely believed in the museum profession to be too short anyway, and given that in three years' time from the point at which the Bill becomes an Act we shall have a Labour Government, the legal maxim de minimis non curat lex—the law does not concern itself with tiny things—is well applied in this case. In three years' time we shall see that these museums—which have fought so valiantly for their future under the tireless and intelligent leadership of Dr. Margaret Faull—will be appropriately supported and properly funded, as they so richly deserve.
It is unfortunately typical of the Government's attitude to the social and cultural aspects of this unnecessary Bill that they could not be bothered to ascertain and rule upon the differences in the income needs and possibilities of these three museums. Two have expensive and extensive underground workings; the other does not. It needs no ghost come from the grave to tell us that museums with large underground activities need a higher annual income than those which do not. It does not need Price Waterhouse or KPMG to conduct an expensive survey for the Government to learn that each of these museums is likely to raise about the same percentage of its income from other than government sources. It is obvious to anyone. Thus it is careless and feckless and ludicrous to award them equal shares of the Government's last-minute bounty.
Above all, there is a certain pathos in watching Her Majesty's Government rush for cover when asked why they did not, from the beginning, seek the advice of the Museums and Galleries Commission and bleating that the commission is not a statutory body. It needed only some such phrase as, "After consulting the Museums and Galleries Commission", or, "Upon the advice of the Museums and Galleries Commission", to allow the Government to act in this matter of distribution on the best advice that they could possibly get, which they are now paying quite expensively to ignore.
So it will cost Her Majesty's Government £1 million to climb out of a hole that they stumbled into by their original ignorance and subsequent inadvertence. I feel perfectly justified in looking this gift horse in the mouth, and pronouncing that its teeth are not good, and that preventive dentistry would have saved us all a lot of trouble.

§ Lord Ezra
My Lords, when Amendment No. 2 was passed by your Lordships, it was made clear by the Government that they might want to amend it for technical reasons. We have the amendment before us and I can see nothing wrong with it. However, I should like to read into it rather more than it says. It states that at the end of a three-year period there will be a report 998 telling us how the museums have fared. I hope that that means that the whole issue will be kept under review for the whole of that period and that the Government are well aware of strong feelings that were exhibited by noble Lords on all sides of the House about the importance of the museums and of their achieving the necessary funding to allow them to continue with their very valuable work.

§ Baroness White
My Lords, what irritates me about the new clause that we are now asked to accept is the phrase, As soon as reasonably practicable". Those of us who have suffered from the Government's ideas of what is "reasonably practicable" in their handling of, for example, the national parks, feel very doubtful about how long it will really take the Government—should they by any chance still be in office—to produce the report in what they consider to be a "reasonably practicable" time, which to most of us will mean an intolerable delay.

§ Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, with the leave of the House, I sense an interesting confusion among the Opposition. They say either that the Conservative Party will still be the party of government, in which case they believe that we shall not come forward smartly with our proposals, or that we shall not be the party of government, in which case the party opposite will deal with all these problems with great munificence.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Ezra, for declaring his support for the Bill. The noble Baroness, Lady White, says that she has been stung in the past by the phrase, As soon as reasonably practicable", particularly on the matter of the national parks. I must advise the noble Baroness that the national parks issue needed primary legislation and I venture to suggest that nothing here will require primary legislation. I sensed that the noble Lord, Lord Morris, was enjoying himself. His language has certainly been colourful—and I mean "colourful" in the purest sense of that word.
I hope that I can leave the House in no doubt as to the Government's great concern and commitment towards the museums, not least because of the fact that we have made available a substantial amount of money. We shall discuss with the museums exactly how the money is to be spent.