I beg to move, That this House doth agree with the Lords in the said Amendment.

It would be convenient if we discussed with this Amendment the next two Lords Amendments: In line 37, leave out "and", and in line 38, at end insert: and the evidence which may be required or admitted in any such proceedings; and such rules may provide—". The first two are drafting Amendments.

Page 20, line 34, onwards, reads in Clause 22 (2) as follows: Without prejudice to the generality of the foregoing provision, rules made under this section may provide—(a) for regulating the persons to be made respondents to any application to the Court under this Part of this Act and the place at which the Court is to sit for the purposes of any proceedings thereunder; The term "regulating" is perhaps not a very felicitous one in that context and so make provisions with respect to". had been substituted. The third Amendment, in line 38, is to enable the Lord Chancellor to make rules about the evidence which may be required or admitted in any proceedings before the Court. As I think the House will appreciate, there would be data which ought to be before the Court in this sort of proceeding which would not be easily or conveniently, and certainly not cheaply, brought before the Court if they were sub-ject to the ordinary strict rules of evidence, which perhaps are not quite designed for that kind of thing.

An obvious instance of that would be statistics about international trade which might be very material in some cases. It might be desirable that such statistics should be before the court in the interests both of the parties and of the issue which the court had to decide but, according to the strict rules of evidence, such statistics could not be before the court unless the compilers of them were called to give evidence. In some cases, that might obviously be an inconvenience and unnecessary course, giving rise to costs out of proportion to the desirability or having the witnesses actually there. I suppose there might be cases with this kind of complicated statistics where it might be very difficult physically to produce the appropriate witness before the Court.

This is not a novel provision. It already exists in other sorts of proceedings which have been referred to in the course of the earlier stages of this Bill more than once. The Lands Tribunal Act, 1949, has a similar provision in Section 3 (6) and the Compensation (Defence) Act, 1939, under which the General Claims Tribunal operates, has such a provision in Section 9 (2.) I might add for the further reassurance of the House that the rules made by the Lord Chancellor under this power will be exercisable by a Statutory Instrument and they will be subject to annulment by either House of Parliament.