Control of Office and Industrial Development Bill

Part of Ballot for Notices of Motions – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 14 April 1965.

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Photo of Mr Patrick Jenkin Mr Patrick Jenkin , Wanstead and Woodford 12:00, 14 April 1965

I am grateful for the protection of the Chair.

The difficulty of reconciling the rights of the individual with the powers of Ministers and the Executive was aptly summed up in a short verse by a humorist who coined the lines: If anything shall seemThen the Minister may deemA certificate of demptionShall provide complete exemption. I think that we are getting away from legislation of that type and constitutional lawyers and others have performed a notable service in bringing public attention to bear on the desirability of making sure that legislation shall be framed in that form so as not to be beyond challenge, and that it shall take account of the rights of the individual and, so tar as it is possible to do so, reconcile those rights with the legitimate demands of the administrative machine whose decisions shall be open to challenge wherever possible.

It seems to me that office development permits are exactly the sort of thing where this conflict arises in a fairly acute form. It appears to me that the requirement which it is sought to write into the Bill by Amendment No. 14 at any rate goes part of the way in making the control, which I have said that I broadly welcome in principle, acceptable to those who, as it were, feel it at the sharp end, those who submit applications and have them turned down.

12.15 a.m.

It goes a long way to reconcile people to accepting decisions of the Government, even though they may be unpalatable and may be directly against the interests of the applicants, if they at any rate have the satisfaction of knowing the reasons for which their applications were turned down.

Now the Minister of State has sought to justify the rejection of this Amendment on the grounds that the experience the Board of Trade has had the industrial development certificate field has indicated that it is difficult, can be embarrassing and indeed even improper, if the Board of Trade were to give the real reasons, which would have to be included in the "full reasons", for the rejection of the application.

I would have liked to be able to say that in the course of my dealing with I.D.Cs. in industry I have had the experience of an application of mine being rejected. But in every case, I am happy to say, when I was responsible for pursuing these applications, we always got the answer "Yes". Like, in a sense, the young lady who returned from a foreign country and was asked what the Chinese for "Yes" was—it was China she had returned from—and she said she did not know, because she had always said "No."