Mr Ivor Richard: It is a privilege to be able to make a maiden speech, particularly after the last three speeches from right hon. and hon. Members opposite. I am supposed to be noncontroversial and I hope that anything I say hereafter will be taken in a noncontroversial sense. I want to answer, to begin with, some observations made by the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr. Geoffrey Lloyd). He said...
Mr Ivor Richard: If the right hon. Gentleman will be so kind as to bear with me, I will give him some concrete examples of how the issue was raised—I have past reports in The times—and one of how it may be raised, so it seems, by the Conservative candidate in the coming by-election at Leyton. I am sorry that the debate should have taken this turn. Up to the time that the right hon. Gentleman spoke, this...
Mr Ivor Richard: Hon. Members opposite keep referring to the 1958 Act. It is true to say that the terms of this Bill do not follow the 1958 Act. The great difference between the two is that the 1958 Act applied only to unfurnished accommodation and this Bill is designed to refer to furnished accommodation as well. Following on what my hon. Friend the Member for Paddington, North (Mr. Parkin) said, the...
Mr Ivor Richard: I understood the right hon. and learned Gentleman to make two points. The first one was that the Amendment, somehow or other, specified circumstances which might not be covered by the original words, and the right hon. and learned Gentleman gave certain examples. He said, for instance, that there might be circumstances in which a tenant was induced to go, by an agreement obtained by force,...
Mr Ivor Richard: Of course, this is not retrospective in the sense in which the term is being used by the other side. All that the Bill seeks to do is to stop a landlord evicting a tenant by force. It gives the tenant the right to stay in the premises until the landlord goes to court and gets an order. In answer to the hon. Member for Crosby (Mr. Graham Page), if one has a perfectly scrupulous agreement...
Mr Ivor Richard: This does not give the tenant a right, but merely restricts the present rights which the landlord has under the law.
Mr Ivor Richard: I am obliged to the hon. Member for Bromley (Mr. Hunt) for raising this subject. This is a matter which covers not only sport, but the arts, and it is on this subject that I wish to speak. I hope that the hon. Gentleman the Member for Bristol, West (Mr. Robert Cooke) will not be offended if I do not follow all his arguments. I did not follow them while he was speaking, so I could not follow...
Mr Ivor Richard: asked the Minister of Transport whether he will issue a general direction, in the public interest, to the Railways Board to undertake a review of the land they hold, with a view to securing the release of the maximum amount of land for municipal housing purposes.
Mr Ivor Richard: While thanking the Minister for that Answer, may I ask him whether he is aware that in the Metropolitan area virtually the only available building land which does not need a house to be pulled down in order to build municipal housing on it is railway land? Can he do anything at all to speed up the release of this land for municipal housing purposes, particularly in the Metropolis?
Mr Ivor Richard: With a large part of what the right hon. Member for Carlton (Sir K. Pickthorn) said, I found myself in entire agreement. It was the purist's view of retrospective legislation and, in so far as I am capable of appreciating the purist's view and agreeing with it, I would agree with the right hon. Gentleman. Unfortunately, we cannot apply the purist's view to the facts of political life, and it...
Mr Ivor Richard: No, I am not saying that. What I am saying is that if in 1946 a Bill had been introduced which purported to take away the common law right to receive compensation for denial damage, I should have thought that it would have been passed. This is purely a matter of judgment, and hon. Members who have been in the House much longer than I have are in a better position to exercise their judgment on...
Mr Ivor Richard: I thank my right hon. and learned Friend for that intervention. It answers the point raised by the hon. and gallant Member for Worcestershire, South. If one can project oneself back in time to 1946, the position would have been as follows. I should have thought that the House would have said that there was no common law right to compensation for denial damage; it would not agree that the...
Mr Ivor Richard: I am obliged to the hon. and learned Member. That was the next point I intended to try to answer. One cannot decide whether this retrospective legislation is or is not justified until one first decides whether the claim that one is trying to reverse would or would not be justified in itself. It seems to me that the attempt to divorce the two—[Interruption.] I am sorry if hon. Members say...
Mr Ivor Richard: That is not an argument against it.
Mr Ivor Richard: The hon. Gentleman has not got that quite right. It is not that we could have introduced legislation but that we would have introduced legislation.
Mr Ivor Richard: The hon. Member gives this example, but if he looks at the Bill he will see that it says No person shall be entitled at common law to receive from the Crown compensation in respect of damage … caused … by acts lawfully done by, or on the authority of, the Crown". Somebody driving a motor car in such a negligent fashion would not be doing so on the authority of the Crown.
Mr Ivor Richard: Was King David at war over the vineyard or was it a domestic dispute?
Mr Ivor Richard: It is with a sense of temerity that I now come south of the Border and start talking about railway land in the centre of London. However, there it is. The ways of Parliamentary democracy are strange, and often weird. I am grateful to have the opportunity of raising this matter tonight, because it is of great concern to my constituents and to many other people who live in and around London....
Mr Ivor Richard: Before my hon. Friend sits down, I should like to thank him on behalf of the London Members who are present. It is good news for London that we have had tonight.
Mr Ivor Richard: The hon. and gallant Gentleman has given us two estimates. One is that the additional cost will be £100 per constituency and the earlier estimate which he gave was that whereas 2½ per cent. of the electorate now vote by post, after the Bill became an Act that figure would go up to 5 per cent. Could the hon. and gallant Gentleman give us the basis of both those estimates?
