Land and Property (Compulsory Acquisition)

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 25 March 1955.

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Photo of Mr Reginald Paget Mr Reginald Paget , Northampton 12:00, 25 March 1955

I think that it may be convenient if I deal with the short town planning point which has been raised. That was the proposal that town planning programming should be shortened. The only effect of shortening it would be to switch any loss of value resulting from that programme from the seller to the purchaser. I think that it would have an additional danger. It would spread the field of uncertainty, and thereby depress values generally.

I believe it to be important that programming should be as far in advance as it possibly can be,so that people may be in a position to make a general assessment as to what are the prospects for land which they propose to buy.

Having dealt with that short point, I am bound to say that, in listening to the two speeches which preceded mine, I was surprised at the confusion which seems to have come into the Tory Party. It is odd, indeed, that the Tory Party should come here and demand the institution in England of the system of droit administratif. That is something that one would not have expected from the Tory Party. Not only would one not have expected it from the Tory Party, but paradoxically I think that it would not be a good thing. The whole system of droit administratif, which works reasonably well in France, is based upon a different conception of what the judicial function is.

A great many of the decisions for which the Minister appoints an inspector—and I would point out that it is an inspector and not a judge—are policy decisions. The question whether a certain plot of land is reasonably required for housing purposes is not a judicial one. It is a policy decision, and should be taken in the manner in which one makes policy decisions. The parallel is not to a court of law, it is to Parliament.

When the hon. Member for Hertford (Mr. Walker-Smith) said "Here we have a Minister being a judge in his own cause," I pointed to the Government and said: "Are they not always being judges in their own cause?" That is because the function of the Minister and the Minister's inspector is parallel to the function of Government. They have to decide matters of policy. It would be perfectly possible for a Government, instead of having a debate in this House about their proposals, to have a public inquiry about them, to call all the witnesses affected, to refer the matter, if one likes, to courts set up under a system of droit adminis-tratif, but ultimately that Government would have to be the judge in that cause. They would judge their own proposal.

I do not believe that the Government would be well advised to abandon the system of debate and to go over to a bastard system of judicial inquiry. The hon. Member for Hertfordshire, Southwest (Mr. Longden) has proposed an elaborate system, including independent inspectors, discovery of documents, rules of evidence and all the other machinery of judicial trial. It would all be bogus, fundamentally, because the Minister is the person who is going to decide, and he is the person who is inquiring as to the rights which he proposes to exercise.

I think that it is the greatest mistake to go through it. It would involve great expenditure. It would involve enormous delay, and when the hon. Member for Hertfordshire, South-West suggested that this would be a quick way of arriving at decisions, I was certainly astounded. It should be understood that the inspector's job, the inquiry job, has to be exercised by Government for Government and of Government right, with regard to property. That is a function analogous to debate in this Chamber. The object of debate is to bring before the Government all the facts and arguments that may be relevant to their decision. So the inspector is entitled, by means of evidence, of what would not be called evidence in the courts, or by means of letters or of any other methods by which the inspector chooses, to get the Minister the best information he can in order to arrive at what is fundamentally a political decision, which can only be a political decision, and which should not be confused with a judicial decision.