Police Pensions

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 16 December 1969.

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Photo of Mr David Renton Mr David Renton , Huntingdonshire 12:00, 16 December 1969

This is a parliamentary day of dilemmas. Many of us were faced with a dilemma in the last debate, and my hon. Friend the Member for Bury St. Edmunds (Mr. Eldon Griffiths) has defined one dilemma which arises on these regulations. On the one hand, he finds it unsatisfactory that there is to be no appeal against a complete refusal by a police authority of the nevi kind of award under the regulations but, on the other, he says that that will be all right because police authorities are generous.

I will come to this question whether it lets us out of our parliamentary duty for the Home Office to ride out on the general proposition that police authorities will be generous. I do not think that it does.

There is yet another dilemma. If we do not approve the regulations tonight as they stand, welcome though they are as far as they go, in what the Select Committee on Statutory Instruments and I consider to be a defective state, bearing in mind that they are to come into force with effect from 1st January, 1970, and are not retrospective, they will have to be postponed, and some widows may be deprived of this new benefit.

But if we approve the regulations there will be no right of appeal, in effect, where the police authority has expressed its opinion that there should be no award made at all. These words have been written into the regulations; the opinion of the police authority has been made the test, although in Section 5(1) of the 1948 Act, Parliament said that there should be a right of appeal by a person aggrieved.

This is a rather serious matter. I do not think that we can necessarily reproach ourselves for not having taken up this point on the earlier regulations, much though we may wish that we had done so. It is a somewhat technical point which we would not necessarily expect hon. Members to have spotted without the advice given, through the Select Committee on Statutory Instruments, by counsel to Mr. Speaker. I have served on that Committee in the past. I know how it works and how thoroughly Mr. Speaker's counsel does the work. But it is not a satisfactory situation which is now revealed, whether there was any default on our part in the past or not.

Let us examine the particular point which the Select Committee has taken, which has already been dealt with by my hon. Friend the Member for Crosby (Mr. Graham Page). I endorse his remarks when he says that Parliament, by approving these regulations, will in effect be giving with one hand and taking away with the other and will be depriving a potential beneficiary of a right of appeal against a complete refusal by a police authority. That, in practice, will be the effect of having approved the regulations, as they were before, by making the test the opinion of the police authority.

Hon. Gentlemen who have not only read the report of the Committee and the Home Office memorandum, but also the evidence, will see that the Home Office spokesman, a gentleman I know and have known for many years and for whom I have great admiration, has sought refuge in the point that it is better not to have a right of appeal to the police authority. He makes that point for what I consider to be a very strange reason. He suggests that we write into the regulations that the matter shall be one which, in the opinion of the police authority, gives rise to entitlement—I am paraphrasing—and let it rest there. He goes on to justify that by saying that we should let the opinion of the police authority be a condition precedent to entitlement and not let it be a question of fact.

That is what I find so strange. How can the police authority reach any opinion on this matter unless that opinion is based on some facts? To suggest that there is no decision on facts must, in my opinion, be misstating the position altogether and is creating an artificial situation for Parliament to consider when depriving somebody in effect of a right of appeal as an aggrieved person.

I hope that the Under-Secretary will listen to this with an open mind. We are dealing with an unusual situation, as has been described. It is a situation in which 'the injury was received in the course of duties performed, in the opinion of the police authority—

  1. (i) for the immediate purpose of saving the life of another person or of preventing loss of human life, and
  2. (ii) in circumstances in which there was an intrinsic likelihood of his receiving a fatal injury …".
The police authority must reach an opinion as to what, in the mind of the police officer who died, was his purpose in doing this heroic act.

There are many occasions in law when the courts are asked to infer from such facts as are available what was in a person's mind, whether that person is now dead or is still alive. Intention in criminal cases is an obvious example, and the intention of a testator in a dispute over a will is another—perhaps in some ways, strangely enough, more analagous to what we are discussing. When the courts—and the courts are in the same position as that in which we envisage a police authority being—make an inference, they are reaching an opinion. They are reaching an opinion having established the facts as well as they can. They may not be able to find every possible fact which might help them to reach an opinion, but from such facts as are available they must do their best.

So to say that no question of fact comes to be decided, as the Home Office spokesman said in his evidence to the Select Committee, is not accurately describing the situation. The true situation is that the police authority will first have to establish the facts as nearly as it can, and then it will have to reach an opinion from such facts as it has been able to get.

When people are asked to do that it is possible for them to make a mistake in the inference they make from the facts, in the opinion which they reach, and if a police authority makes a mistake there should be a right of appeal to quarter sessions. But for the reasons which the Home Office intends, I cannot think why it should have intended this—and which the Select Committee on Statutory Instruments has pointed out, there will in effect be no right of appeal, because of the phrasing of the regulation. I think that that is wrong, and it places us in a very awkward and unfortunate position tonight. We are in a real dilemma.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bury St. Edmunds (Mr. Eldon Griffiths) and the Joint Under-Secretary of State have said, "Never mind. That is a little technical difficulty. Police authorities are generous. There will be very few cases—only three or four a year, we hope. All those cases will of course arouse great sympathy. We can rely on the police authorities to be generous". So instead of getting the law right, which it is our duty as legislators to do, we can forget the difficulty in the law and need not trouble to get it right. We can rely on the generosity of the police authorities dealing sympathetically with the very few cases that will arise.