My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time.

This is a small, simple Bill. On the one hand, it is designed to promote choice for the consumer. On the other, it is a modest attempt to start winding in a banking system that is becoming increasingly unsustainable. It is in response to the recent Northern Rock crisis, which represents the first run on a UK high-street bank in the post-war era, and the systemic failure manifest in the worldwide banking system. Of course, Northern Rock is not the first bank since the war to go wrong because of incompetent management; there were the National Mortgage Bank, Barings and Johnson Matthey, to name but three. But no reassessment was made of the fundamentals after those crises.

I want to take a moment to set out the background. The present banking crisis was inevitable. The only question was when it would happen. Since 1971, there has been a massive change in the way in which the banking and monetary system operates, but there has been no discussion in Parliament, or a vote, as to whether the system is right and whom it is benefiting. The current system was designed by bankers for the use of bankers and for the benefit of bankers. One should not complain that they have done well out of it, but what about the depositor and the taxpayer? From their point of view, all Governments are at fault because they have not looked at this whole matter with the critical eye that it deserves. As the rest of us became more regulated, the banks were given a light touch—so light as to be almost insignificant.

In 1979, the total UK money supply was just under £31 billion. When this Government took power, it was £665 billion. Today, it is well over double that, and on the Bank of England’s calculation it is £1,700 billion. These figures show about a 5,400 per cent increase over 30 years and the graph is getting steeper. It seems to be on an exponential curve which promises a lot more problems ahead.

It is most appropriate that the debate following this Bill in the name of the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury is calling attention to indebtedness and credit. A consequence of the banking and monetary policy is that we live in a debt-based society which most people are beginning to see is dangerous and wrong. Yet the answer to the present crisis is to reduce interest rates and try to reduce the cost of mortgages. But what does that do? It merely encourages us to keep our existing borrowing and extend it. We shall not solve that problem unless we tackle its roots.

Since 1971, the proportion of notes and coins, which is the Government’s responsibility, has fallen from 14 per cent to 2.5 per cent, so the Government are increasingly irrelevant and marginalised. It is the banks, building societies and commercial lenders which have been responsible for this situation and now greed, incompetence in many cases, and lack of accountability have all become apparent. Even the Institute of International Finance has admitted that banks have been guilty of major points of weakness in business practice. No wonder there is a lack of confidence in the credit markets.

Although it was good to hear the Minister say on Monday, when he repeated the Statement on financial stability—although “financial instability” might have been a more appropriate description—that the Financial Stability Forum in Washington had agreed a range of actions, the genie is out of bottle and it is too little too late. Sadly, that body does not seem to have addressed itself to the position of the individual, and all of us, whether we like it or not, have to work with and through banks. In that, we have no choice, which takes me on to the Bill.

Most people do not know that, as the law stands, as soon as they put their money into their current or cheque accounts it is no longer their own. It becomes the property of the bank and they become unsecured creditors, ranking behind secured creditors in the event of failure. Far from putting their money into safe storage, they are actually lending it to the bank, and the bank is free to use it and invest it as it pleases within the rules of the FSA. The Minister, with his well known scepticism of the estate agency market, will surely agree with me that it makes a mockery of the need for solicitors and estate agents to have to account for clients’ funds in the way that they do, only for the bank to muddle up all that money, together with others, and put it at possibly greater risk.

As we have seen with Northern Rock and with the entire world banking system, bank managers are not necessarily prudent or wise in their investment strategies. Nor has the FSA proven capable of proper supervision of banking business plans, investment strategies or risk management. When Northern Rock refused to allow its depositors to withdraw their money, the bank acted correctly and responsibly. The law states that its first duty is to secured creditors and not to depositors.

At present, if we wish to pay our bills easily and conveniently, we need a current or cheque account at a bank or building society. There is no other choice. Yet in order to use a bank or building society current or cheque account, we must put our money at risk by becoming an unsecured creditor of an institution too many of which have proven to lack wisdom, prudence or safe investment practices. That is why there is such a hue and cry for Governments to make the banking industry safer. A new approach is needed, which is why I am putting forward this legislation. It offers depositors the service and protection that they believe they have, but do not, and to which they should be entitled.

The Bill offers depositors the choice between a present at-risk current account and a safety deposit current account in which the funds deposited remain the property of the depositor and which guarantees to depositors both secure storage and secure distribution. With safety deposit accounts, banks will be required to maintain for each account the precise amount on deposit in the form of cash in their vaults. That cash must be segregated from the banks’ other cash and be available to depositors on demand. Banks will not be allowed to use funds in safety deposit accounts for any purpose whatever, other than according to the instructions of the depositors. Therefore, a bank will not be able to put depositors’ money at risk in order to earn money for itself. That is the essence of Clause 1.

Without the ability to try to earn money with these deposits, banks will have to make a reasonable charge for both storage and distribution. This is covered by Clause 2. These accounts will be more expensive than existing current accounts, but depositors will in future be given a choice: safety at higher cost or risk at lower cost. These accounts will need proper monitoring. Although the FSA has not covered itself in glory to date, Clause 3 requires it to audit banks continually to ensure that the cash held physically by each bank in its vaults is both equal to the amount on deposit and segregated from the bank’s other funds.

From the taxpayer’s point of view, these safety deposit accounts offer a considerable saving. Northern Rock alone has already cost the taxpayer some £1,800 each. My noble friend Lady Noakes reminded us on Monday that it could be considerably more. That was before an additional £50 billion was made available to banks by the Bank of England on Monday in its dramatic U-turn. The previous position argued by the governor was that banks should pay for their mistakes. Now the commercial banks’ prayer, “Forgive us our sins”, has been answered. The clear perception now is that the Government will ride to the rescue of those who have managed a bank badly or incompetently. Let us not forget that it is the taxpayer who has to guarantee these funds and thus remains even more at risk to the entire banking system.

With a more sensible banking option having been established by this Bill, it is only right that the taxpayer is better protected than at the moment. Thus, under Clause 4, safety deposit accounts will be the only accounts that public funds will be allowed to insure or guarantee. Surely it is right that taxpayers will no longer be required to bail out the irresponsible and greedy behaviour of some bankers, whom the Government treat differently from normal companies. The FSA will be limited to guarantee precisely what it audits regularly and ensures is physically present in the vaults of each bank. For this guarantee, there should be little if any risk at all. The consumer will be offered a choice of current accounts and the right to continue to own their own money when stored for them. I commend the Bill to the House.

Moved, That the Bill be now read a second time.—(The Earl of Caithness.)

My Lords, I had intended to put my name down for the debate, but was told that the speakers list had closed at 6 pm. So I wondered whether I might say just half a word in the gap, although I had not expected the gap to be after the first speaker.

I congratulate my noble friend on thinking up this idea. He has explained the purpose of his Bill very well. Fundamentally, it is that if you put money on deposit, it should be in the form of cash; it should remain there; it should not be the property of the bank; and if you ever want to take that cash out, you can get it out, and the bank cannot squander it on other things. That seems fine.

My only concern relates to Clause 1(5), which states:

“Money held in a safety deposit current account must be … kept in the form of cash”.

I remember an elderly lady who had about £40,000 in a deposit account. She went along to the bank and said, “Can I please have my money out?” The bank said, “Yes, we will give you a cheque”. She said, “I don’t want a cheque, I want the money”. “You mean you want all the £40,000?” She said, “Yes”. The bank said, “Well, will you come back after lunch, because we’ll have to count it all out?” So she came back after lunch and there were great piles of notes all over the place. She said, “Oh, that’s fine. I just wanted to make sure it was still there, so will you now put it back again?” I fear that this is the kind of thing that might happen with my noble friend’s Bill, so I merely offer that tale as a caution.

My Lords, we should all be grateful to the noble Earl, let alone his noble friend for his intervention, for raising what is clearly a significant issue in the current climate. The debate is particularly opportune, because, as he indicated, it is being taken on the same day as the debate which follows, on the Motion of the most reverend Primate.

I think that it will be common ground in your Lordships' House that the recent events involving Northern Rock, let alone some of the problems that the major clearers have got themselves into, indicate, or perhaps a lift of a veil on, banking problems of which most of us had been only dimly aware until the unhappy events of the past few months. It has been said to me by a senior banker that what the public have never appreciated is that, for most of the past 150 years, almost every bank has been technically insolvent, because the practice of borrowing to a large extent short and lending to a considerable extent long has been supported by the ability of banks to borrow significantly in the inter-bank lending market. If that starts to be difficult, banks by any rational test of solvency become insolvent because they have difficulty knowing how they are going to meet their liabilities. That banking practice, which in the case of many of the well established banks has been based on long-standing accepted ratios of short-term to long-term lending, and endorsed, or to some extent ignored, by the regulators, has existed for a long time. Only in the past few months have we come to realise that the banks were perhaps not as prudent as they might have been. In raising this topic, the noble Earl has touched on something that is fundamental in the operation of our financial system.

Having said that, on these Benches we have some difficulties with the noble Earl’s solution. In practical terms, I assume that he is suggesting that the banks should provide a safety deposit box for people’s money and assets, give them a key and enable them to turn up at the bank whenever they want to get their money back—or, in the case of the friend of the noble Earl, Lord Ferrers, have their money counted and put back in the safety deposit box. In reality, that is the effect of this Bill. I suppose that in many other countries of the world where there is concern about banking stability, people buy a safety deposit box to keep their money in and put it under their bed. Indeed, I somewhat frivolously wonder whether it would be cheaper for members of the public, rather than taking up the opportunity presented by the Bill, to get themselves a safety deposit box and pay for a good burglar alarm company to protect their property while putting the cash under the bed.

In a slightly frivolous sense, I worry that the Bill would not have the real effect on the customer that the noble Earl clearly believes that it would have. In a wider sense, however—and this is where this short Bill would have a volcanic effect—what the noble Earl is really suggesting is that the whole basis on which our banking system has been built for 500 years should be overturned. He is saying that banks cannot take our money and lend it on in a prudent manner but that they should leave it in our ownership, not pay us interest on it, charge us a small fee and allow us to have our money back whenever we want. That is fine—but I dare to suggest that, were this to be implemented, commercial life as we know it and have known it for 500 years would actually come to an end.

My Lords, it is a pleasure to respond to this Bill today. My noble friend Lord Caithness is to be congratulated on developing a Bill which makes us challenge basic notions of what our banking system is about.

When I first saw my noble friend’s Bill, I was somewhat perplexed by it, but he took pity on me and gave me some recess reading in the form of a book by Mr John Tomlinson entitled Honest Money—A Challenge to Banking. The book was written in the early 1990s, when there were concerns about recession and unemployment. The book laid the blame for this at the door of bankers and their continuous search for new lending opportunities, which created a spiral of inflation. The solution in the book was to stop the lending merry-go-round, replace debt with equity and thereby largely fix the stock of money supply, which would stabilise the system and eliminate inflation.

That is a rather extreme version of the scenario on banking that my noble friend has opened up for debate. I do not think that the banking system is quite the ogre that the book portrays. I think that banks have had a net positive impact on wealth creation by facilitating investment and growth in the global economy. On the other hand, I do not believe that banks are perfect. The reason we have banking regulation throughout the world is to ensure that banks do not create economic mayhem. We have seen in the past nine months or so how much economic harm can be caused by a banking system which kept liabilities off its balance sheet and which created ever-more complex borrowing vehicles, disconnected from the underlying transactions. Mortgage securitisation sounded and looked simple until the music stopped and no one knew where the sub-prime losses would end up. The consequential failure of confidence in the international financial markets is still causing many problems in the world, including the UK.

I do not think that we should lay at the doors of the banks all the blame for the asset price bubble that is now bursting, but they clearly have some responsibility. Banks respond to demand within the regulatory constraints placed on them. Those constraints have recently been updated after much consideration by the Basel committee, but it is already clear that the Basel 2 rules do not deal sufficiently with liquidity or off-balance sheet transactions—and already they need to be revisited.

We believe that the capital requirements for banks within the credit cycle should also be revisited, so that a monetary element of the capital adequacy calculations could be used to control credit in times of boom and expand it in times of contraction. In this way we could harness the energy of the credit cycle in a positive way and mitigate boom and bust. The Prime Minister used to boast that he had abolished boom and bust, but we now know that he knew only how to ride the crest of the wave in boom times and knew nothing about preparing the economy for a downturn. We are currently paying the price for that. That requires us to have some new thinking.

That brings me to my noble friend’s Bill, which genuinely does represent new thinking. The Bill recognises that the Brown-Darling guarantee of Northern Rock’s liabilities was an undesirable outcome of the bust phase and offers a way for the Government to escape from their guarantee to the banking system. However much the Government like to deny it, the practical impact of last September’s guarantees of Northern Rock is that they will be expected to stand behind retail deposits as a minimum in future. The Financial Services Compensation Scheme did not deal with the Northern Rock crisis and the Government had to go way beyond guaranteeing retail depositors as they progressed through their messy journey towards privatisation, de facto guaranteeing the whole of the liabilities of Northern Rock.

The Bill’s elegant solution is a new class of bank account, a safety deposit current account, which will always be preserved at the cash value at which it was created. My noble friend’s solution does not involve putting cash in safety deposit boxes, as the noble Lord, Lord Razzall, suggested. I am sure that my noble friend was mindful of the experience of the Central Bank of India, where an invasion of termites attacked safety deposit boxes in which Indians were accustomed to putting large amounts of bank notes. When customers turned up, the termites had had ’em.

The Bill proposes a new account which will be backed by an equivalent amount of cash, audited and inspected by the FSA. Owners of such accounts will get no interest because the bank cannot use the money to work within its balance sheet. They may incur fees and they will almost certainly lose value in real terms, but they will at least be able to sleep easy at night knowing that the nominal monetary value will remain safe. On the other hand, those who have an appetite for risk would be able to deposit money with banks on any other terms that banks offer and can earn a return on that money, but Clause 4 of the Bill says that these accounts will not be guaranteed by any authority. I am not sure that the use of the terms “any authority” and “public money” are unambiguous, and my noble friend might consider tightening the wording if this Bill proceeds to Committee.

I am not aware of any clamour among the public for safety deposit current accounts. However, given the Brown-Darling guarantee, there is unlikely to be much call for an unremunerated bank facility, if the Government already underwrite retail deposits. The bigger question is whether we should facilitate this by making it absolutely clear that public money will not bail out any other bank liabilities. I cannot myself see a banking industry which did not encourage return-seeking deposits. One problem facing our economy is the slump in the savings ratio and the fact that too few people have savings as opposed to debt. We need to encourage saving and, if that is to make a meaningful contribution to retirement incomes, the money has to seek a return. Of course, most of that investment will not be in bank deposit accounts but it would seem odd to steer people away from seeking a return when depositing cash as opposed to investing in other assets.

That of course means that I see the need for a robust compensation scheme for retail deposits. We await the outcome of the Government's review of the existing scheme. The Minister might like to talk about that today, and, in particular, whether they can come up with a scheme which deals with the fact that some of today's banks are so large that if they did fail they would overwhelm any industry-funded scheme. But, given the systemic risks of such a failure, it seems very difficult to do away with public support in all circumstances. I have doubts that the Government will be able to produce a scheme that extricates them from de facto underwriting retail deposits.

My noble friend has given us a lot to think about. I look forward to the Minister's response and, indeed, to later stages of the Bill if my noble friend chooses to take it forward.

My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to debate the issues the Bill raises. Lest noble Lords thought that as a Private Member's Bill it represented not much more than the extrication of a small pin from the ground, let me say that the pin contained in the Bill is more akin to the one in a hand grenade, as a rather loud explosion will go off if in fact the Bill ever becomes law.

I must say that I have a great deal of sympathy with the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Razzall, who indicated the implications of the Bill. I am not sure that I can follow the line that this is a fundamental onslaught on the concept of banking since the 14th or 15th century, but there are aspects of it that are not far off. That is why the Government look at the Bill not only with interest but with a certain anxiety about its implications, particularly as, as the noble Baroness has taken the appropriate opportunity to say, we are concerned about how we best support confidence in our banking system. In a few moments I will relate the Government's proposals in respect of this.

Inevitably, I suppose, we were bound to go over a certain amount of old ground, and I did not think that I could face this debate without some reference to Northern Rock and perhaps even to the Statement made earlier this week. Let me reiterate again—and I cannot say this much more strongly than I have sought to do in the past—Northern Rock was not bailed out. Northern Rock is in public ownership with the shareholders having lost very substantially. The shareholders are possibly bringing a case about the level of the shares and the compensation to which they are entitled. But, let us make no bones about it, there are losers in Northern Rock as far as concerns the shareholders. In addition, as was predicted—and this point does not get quite the same level of currency in the House in contributions from the other side—announcements are being made that Northern Rock will lose substantial numbers of staff as its business contracts. So several hundred people are going to pay the price of the failure of Northern Rock in circumstances where they may have the most marginal, if any, responsibility for the debacle which occurred.

Likewise I reiterate, as I sought to emphasise on Monday, the Bank of England is not bailing out banks; it is increasing the degree of liquidity in circumstances where we all recognise that limited liquidity is producing great strains on the financial system and would feed through to the real economy. But the whole concept underpinning Monday’s Statement is that the banks locate with the Bank of England securities that not only are appropriate and level to the resources made available to them but are of greater value than the money that becomes available to them. The idea that it is some kind of bail-out is a complete misconception.

The noble Lord, Lord Razzall, was concerned to emphasise that banks play a critical role in the economy and that we should take care about any possible onslaught on the principles on which they work. The noble Earl, Lord Caithness, sought to bring to the House’s attention the fact that I had taken an interest in the past in the other place with legislation I introduced concerned with client money and estate agents holding money for third parties. It is a very important consideration. I was very glad that although I could not, as a Back-Bencher, get that legislation through, it eventually became government legislation a few years afterwards. This concept is different. It is not about a third party’s money but the individual going to the bank and the bank having a special arrangement for the deposit which the individual makes.

Banks use resources made available to them through accounts for investment. They distribute capital across the economy and allow financial needs to be managed over time. Banks play a critical role. That is why we are all concerned. I am not talking just about legislators; every one of our fellow citizens is inevitably concerned when the banking system gets into the level of difficulty that has obtained over the past few months.

The Bill seeks to strengthen protection for the bank’s customers in one particular area, namely deposits. The proposal is that the bank should be required to provide a safe custody service for the money. That is entirely different from how banks operate when we deposit money or open current accounts with them. The new account would mean that the banks are not borrowing from the customers at all. They would hold the customer’s money on his or her behalf, and could not lend it to other customers. That is a massive inhibition on the centuries-old role of banks and the long period in which building societies have operated. If there were a high take-up of the proposed safety deposit current accounts by consumers, there would certainly be a significant impact on the cost of borrowing and therefore on the real economy.

Secondly, the new account which the noble Earl presents has the great virtue of absolute protection, but it is not a savings vehicle. Money has to be held in cash and will remain the property of the customer. Everyone will be able to follow the illustration of the noble Earl, Lord Ferrers, of the individual who goes along and demands there and then to see their money, and everyone of course can take out their money there and then, even though it is a deposit account. That would of course affect the flexibility with which banks operate with regard to resources, and the money would not grow. It would freeze at its current position. Although the House will recognise the Government's significant success over the past decade in managing and restraining inflation, inflation still erodes savings over time and this deposit account would be worthless the longer it was held in the bank.

The other aspect is that there is no reason why a bank should not offer this facility here and now. We do not need legislation to allow banks to provide a deposit facility. In fact banks offer safety deposit boxes. It is true that they charge for them, but that is the agreement between the customer and the bank. That guarantees what is in the box. The concept of the safety deposit box is that the bank does not know what is in it. It is merely a secure place in which things are lodged. I do not think that we need to prescribe anything in legislation in relation to that.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, emphasised, we need to take urgent steps to strengthen the banking system and to restore confidence in the light of developments over recent months. I am not sure that this Bill will make any contribution to that. However, as the noble Baroness indicated, it is important that the Government think very seriously indeed about, and produce proposals to deal with, the situation with which we are confronted.

In October last year, the Chancellor announced a review of the existing supervisory regime, including complex areas such as the legal framework for dealing with banks facing difficulties. As a result, a consultation document was published in January 2008, Financial Stability and Depositor Protection: Strengthening the Framework. We allowed time for consultation on this framework document, which ended on Wednesday. That does not mean that the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, has not contributed something to that. I am not suggesting for one moment that he is out of time. The Government are ever open to representations from all quarters but particularly from parliamentarians and the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, is timely in his representation. But we need something more significant than this Bill. We intend to bring forward legislation later this year once we have evaluated the consultation and reached our conclusions. The document envisages action by the Financial Services Authority to make rule changes and by the Bank of England to address the key objectives of strengthening the financial system, reducing the likelihood of banks failing, reducing the impact of failing banks, designing effective compensation arrangements in which customers have confidence, strengthening the role of the Bank of England and improving co-ordination between the authorities charged with the supervision of the financial system. This work will bear fruit in a government Bill, which will come before this House not long from now, and in a range of other measures to restore confidence in the banking system and improve protection for customers. We have all learnt very sharp and important lessons from developments over the past few months. I emphasise that the Government are responsible for the British banking system but the House will recognise that the difficulties we face are reflected internationally across all the advanced economies and even beyond.

As I said at the beginning, this Bill looks modest in intent, but, if implemented, its impact would be explosive. I welcome the opportunity to debate it and I very much enjoyed the noble Earl’s opening speech but I am not sure that the Government will feel the greatest joy if this measure finally arrives on the statute book.

My Lords, I am grateful to all who have spoken. It is clear that the banking system has been shrouded in mystery for far too long and that it has some very serious structural faults which need addressing. Like the rest of the House, I thoroughly enjoyed what my noble friend Lord Ferrers said about the woman going into Barclays Bank. All I can say to my noble friend is that had she gone into Northern Rock in the middle of the crisis, it would have turned round to her and said, “No, you can’t have your £40,000 back because you’re an unsecured creditor”. That is the point of this Bill. Indeed, that is what Northern Rock did to people who tried to withdraw their money.

The noble Lord, Lord Razzall, rightly said that the current situation is beginning to lift the veil on the secrecy of banking and many of the problems. I am grateful to him for saying that the Bill addresses a fundamental point. It tries to do exactly that, but it is only a small point. However, I take issue with his remark that I am trying to change the banking system as it has existed for the last 500 or so years. I disagree because the banking system changed dramatically in 1971 when the link with the gold standard changed. When President Nixon changed that, he changed, either deliberately or inadvertently, the whole way in which the banks operated. I go back to the figures that I mentioned earlier. The money supply in 1971—which is why I referred to that date—was £31 billion, but it has now shot up to £1,700 billion. That would not have happened under the old banking system. So it is really only in the last 30 or 40 years that the banking system has evolved into what we accept and take for granted today, which so many think should not be looked at with a severely critical eye.

I also take issue with the noble Lord’s remark that I am forcing a change in the way that we operate commercially and in how the banks operate. I am not forcing a change; I am merely offering choice to the depositor. If the depositor does not take up the option, that is fine, but at least there will be an option which there is not at the moment.

I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Noakes for her serious look at this. I say to her what I have just said to the noble Lord, Lord Razzall. She said that there is no clamour from the public for safety deposit accounts, as the Government now seem to be guaranteeing all deposits. I agree that there is no clamour, but the Government should not be guaranteeing all deposits. All I am asking is for the option to be offered and for the depositor to have choice.

I congratulate the Minister. There is no finer exponent of the straight dead bat on the government Front Bench. He is head and shoulders above the rest, whom he makes look like No. 8 big sloggers at the end. He is a fine talent. However, I disagree with him that it is the role of the banks to lend money. That was not their original role—which was to store and distribute money safely at the depositors’ request. They became lenders later and we have all got used to that. My little Bill tries to put back a little bit of the banks’ original role. I agree with him that the safety deposit account is not a savings account; it was not supposed to be. If somebody wants to save, there are other ways of doing so. I encourage and welcome the idea that we should increase our savings. All I am trying to do is give safety to unsecured creditors.

The Minister also said that there is no reason why the banks should not offer these accounts now. Of course, there is not in theory but, as he so rightly said in the first half of his speech, it is not in their interest to do so. It is in their interest to lend money, not to store it safely. I am grateful for what he said about the banking problems that we all face and about the consultation that has just taken place. He also said that something more substantial than this Bill is needed. I agree with him totally. A whole new approach to banking is needed if we are to retain confidence in the banking system and stop the very worrying trend of the increase in the money supply which the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury will discuss in a moment in relation to debt. Debt is the huge concern behind all this and, given the uncontrolled money supply that we have had for the last 30 to 40 years, our children and grandchildren will face a potentially horrendous situation. I am grateful to all those who took part in the debate.

On Question, Bill read a second time, and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.