Orders of the Day — LAW OF PROPERTY BILL [Lords],

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at on 15 May 1922.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Sir Gerald Hurst Sir Gerald Hurst , Manchester Moss Side

I am glad to join with other hon. Members in acknowledging the luminous and convincing exposition of this Bill given by the Solicitor-General to-day, together with the great industry and learning of those who have taken part in the draughtsmanship of this Measure. This Bill is really a great and courageous proposal on behalf of the Government. Probably history will much more than ourselves put this Measure in its proper proportion in relation to the law of the country than we can do at the present time. It will loom large. The industry and learning of those who have put their hands to it will be acknowledged when a great many more immediately interesting and debatable Measures of our days have passed into oblivion.

Like most lawyers—I fancy this applies to many hon. Members of the House who are lawyers—one approaches this Bill with a certain amount of diffidence and distrust, because as a body lawyers object to innovations, and I feel at least as conservative as other hon. Members. One has a very great and natural reluctance to re-learn our law long after the days when we learnt it originally. At the same time, these objections and those feelings of diffidence and distrust will be overcome when we realise it is for the public interest that a Measure of this type should be passed. The hon. and gallant Gentleman the Member for Newcastle-under-Lyne (Colonel Wedgwood) spoke as if the only point in the Measure which affected the public at all were those provisions which deal with leaseholds and registration. As a matter of fact, that is a very narrow view, for the public has an enormous interest in this Bill in so far as it modernises our law and simplifies it, and makes conveyancing cheaper and easier than at the present time. Nothing has been said by any critic of the Bill against its modernising tendencies. It is a great advantage to assimilate the law relating to real and personal property. It is a great advantage to place men and women for the first time in our history on exactly the same footing in respect to the law relating to intestacy. It is an enormous step forward to do away with primogeniture, which, originally, owing 1o the feudal system, may have been very desirable. In the interests of continued military service, it was desirable that there should be no breaking up of estates; it was an advantage that one man should hold possession, and that land and estates should not be broken up. These original reasons, however, are absolutely obliterated today, and it is absurd that primogeniture should have survived so long. By will a man, of course, will still be able to leave, as he always could do, his property to his eldest son, but in actual fact a man who dies intestate is usually a poor person. How many cases there have been where a man of very small means, possessing a small freehold plot of land or house, died intestate, and that land or house passed, contrary to what may well be supposed to be his intentions, to the eldest son to the exclusion of the other children?

It is high time that primogeniture in that sense was destroyed. That is a point in the Bill which I believe men of all parties must welcome as a real reform. In regard to the simplification of the law, that is an advantage. It can never be absolutely simple, but it can be infinitely more simple than it is now. We have to-day a great deal of mediævalism in the sense of lore and legal tradition, and we must get rid also of the glosses which eighteenth century lawyers placed upon mediaeval tradition. It will be a great thing to get rid of these incumbrances at the present time. With regard to conveyancing, my hon. Friend the Member for Bodmin (Mr. Foot) raised an objection that this Bill would, in his judgment, deprive mortgagees of the custody of title deeds. That is a misunderstanding of the Bill, because it is made quite clear by the memorandum and the Second Schedule that the mortgagee will still be enabled to hold title deeds. Therefore, that objection is entirely unfounded.

I do not want to go over ground which has already been traversed by various hon. Members with regard to the question of partition and the position and powers of trustees during the minority of infants. All those provisions are intended to make icgal estates more easily dealt with. There is one suggestion which I should like to make, and it is with regard to the date at which the Bill is to come into force. At the present time, as provided now, it comes into force on 1st January, 1924. I do not know whether the Solicitor-General has received representations from law publishers on that point, but I think it is an element which is deserving of consideration that a considerable number of text books are now in the press which would mean the expenditure of something like £5,000 on printing and paper. The suggestion has been made that possibly for two years from the beginning of this year might be substituted two years from the passing of this Act. As a matter of fact, one firm at present is about to publish new text books, all of which will require a sale of over 18 months if publication is to be remunerative. Another advantage of giving a few more months would be that it would enable writers of legal treatises more time to have their standard text books ready, which are essential to practitioners when, the law actually comes into force.

I disagree with the criticisms which have been made as to the provision in Part VIII with regard to the law of intestacy. The idea of giving the charge to the extent of £1,000 and all the personal chattels to the wife of the deceased is a great advantage. It is very easy, I know, to criticise this Bill upon the ground that it is an enormously long and ambitious Bill. It has been said by the Member for Portsmouth (Sir T. Bramsdon) that 14 separate Bills ought to have been brought in for the same purpose. It is obvious that we cannot discuss this Bill in the same way that we should discuss ordinary Measures brought forward in the House of Commons, but such critics must recognise that no reform on this scale would ever get through piecemeal. The one chance is to get it through as a great Measure in its present form. There must always be a lack of popular knowledge in regard to the subject matter in a Bill of this proportion and much pro fessional apathy, and therefore a Hill of this kind cannot be considered in great detail.

It is wonderful that there is such a great consensus of opinion in regard to this Bill amongst all classes, and that so much agreement from those professionally interested has been obtained. It really looks that, we shall now be able to have a code with regard to real and personal property as clear and satisfactory as that which now relates to partnership, trustees, and bankruptcy, and that is an enormous step forward. Instead of having the law and practice on this question in such a form that you have to seek for it in thousands of reported cases and innumerable treatises on the law of real and personal property and text books on conveyancing, we shall have it in a much more simple form based upon a bed-rock of learning and long experience.