New Clause. — (Compensation for injury to business.)

Part of Orders of the Day — Cotton (Centralised Buying) Bill – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 18 April 1947.

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Photo of Mr Robert Hudson Mr Robert Hudson , Southport 12:00, 18 April 1947

Really, the hon. Gentleman must be more accurate. I have already shown him up in regard to what his right hon. and learned Friend the President of the Board of Trade said. On 11th March, in standing committee on the Bill, the Paymaster-General—and ha ought to know by now that I do not make statements of this kind without being able to produce evidence if I am challenged—said: Nobody could have more sympathy than my colleagues in the Government and I have for men returning home from the war, of whom we have heard today, who find that they are not able to enter the business they had hoped to enter … My own constituency has nothing to do with cotton in the slightest degree, but a number of my constituents, ex-Servicemen, come to me and tell me of their difficulties in establishing themselves where they hoped to establish themselves."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, Standing Committee C, 11th March, 1947; c. 337.] That is not re-entering; it is entering. The point I want to emphasise is that a large number of the men concerned are ex-Servicemen who were in the business before the war. They went into the business and have the right, not to enter into the industry, but to re-enter it. They have a statutory right of re-employment. There is no question of a feeling of frustration about not being able to enter an industry. By the Government's action they are not being allowed to re-enter their former business.

The Paymaster-General said that employers had no "grouse" because, during the war, they were paid small sums while the market was closed and while the Control Board was in operation. But they were paid those sums, not by way of compensation for the permanent loss of business, but to keep a nucleus staff going against the day when the market would re-open. The whole essence of the payments was to keep a nucleus staff going against the day when the Liverpool futures market would re-open. It is idle for the hon. Gentleman to ask the House to believe that these payments were compensation for the closing of the business. So far from that being true, a great number of these firms found that the sum they were getting, in order to keep a nucleus staff, was wholly insufficient. In fact, they incurred substantial losses during the war. They would not have gone on doing that if they had been told, at the beginning, that their job and business would never be re-opened. They were confident in the belief that they would have the chance, after the war, of doing the job they did before the war.