I object to proceeding with this Bill. It is not on the Order Paper, and the Lords Amendment is not printed.

I object also.

This is a purely drafting Amendment moved on behalf of the Home Office, and in order to bring the Bill into line with the Representation of the People Act, 1928. If hon. Members will allow the Amendment to be read, they will see that it is an Amendment of no consequence whatever. It cannot possibly affect the principle of the Bill. It is simply an alteration of the title of Clause 2 in order to bring the Bill into line with the Representation of the People Act, 1928.

In that case, I hope the hon. Member will support the case of Hull next year.

As I object to the principle of the Bill, I am going to exercise whatever power I possess to prevent it becoming law, and I am going to maintain my objection.

Objection is taken. What day?

Monday next.

Before we proceed with the Vote set down for discussion to-day, I think it is desirable that I should say something on a point of Order that may arise in the course of the proceedings. I understand that questions will be raised on two Reports submitted to the Secretary of State for the Home Department in pursuance of an inquiry under the Tribunals Inquiry Act, 1921. I have thought it necessary to consider the status of tribunals appointed under this Act, and I find that they are endowed with all the powers and rights and privileges which are vested in the High Court, or in Scotland the Court of Session, or a Judge of either such Court on the occasion of an action; that they can enforce the attendance of witnesses, examine them on oath, compel the production of documents, issue a commission for taking evidence abroad, and that also they have powers to commit for contempt.

In view of these provisions, I feel bound to hold that the members of this Tribunal were exercising judicial functions, and are, therefore, entitled to the same protection as Judges of the High Court or magistrates in the discharge of their duties. In the present instance, there are two Reports coming from such a Tribunal, and it will be perfectly in order to argue that one Report should be accepted rather than the other, and to give reasons from the evidence given before the Tribunal, but it will not be in order to attack the members of the Tribunal, to criticise them on any ground of bias, incompetence or unworthy motives, either the three members as a whole, or any one of them separately. I think this will make the conduct of the Debate easier, and I thought it would be wise to make that statement at the first opportunity.

While with great respect, I desire to associate myself with what you have just said, I am sure, Mr. Chairman, that you do not mean in any way to limit the right of the Committee to discuss the substance of the Reports and that your Ruling applies purely to the persons of the three judges and only bars any such thing as you have described as the imputation of motives, or anything like that. So far as the substance of the Reports is concerned, it is absolutely within the discretion of the Committee.

Certainly, and I am sorry if I gave any other impression. It will be perfectly in order to give reasons why one Report should be preferred to the other, or to criticise either Report from the point of view of the evidence adduced, but it is not in order to make any personal attack on any of the Members of the Tribunal.

On that point, may I submit that, as these two Reports are widely divergent, in order to ascertain which is more probably correct it may be necessary to enter into the question as to whether the persons responsible for the Reports have any kind of bias or not.

That is exactly what I have ruled will not be in order.

In that case, I submit, that effective criticism is going to be impossible.

I think I need not answer that.

I beg to move to reduce the vote by £100.

Nearly two months ago this House appointed a Commission of Inquiry into the circumstances attending the examination at Scotland Yard of a young woman called Miss Savidge. The Reports of the Commissioners, a Majority Report and Minority Report, are now in the possession of Members of the House. I accept fully, Mr. Chairman, your indication that criticism of the Commissioners, or any of them, on grounds of bias or motive, would be wholly out of order; but it is essential, I think, for a proper consideration of these Reports that we should examine the atmosphere in which they were penned and the influences which must have operated, perhaps sub- consciously, on the minds of all three Commissioners. We have raised this question purely on the ground of civil liberty. I have never spoken to Miss Savidge; I have never had any communication from her. It is over four years since I had any communication from Sir Leo Money, and we on this side of the House are concerned in no way whatever with what is known as the Hyde Park case. Our concern was entirely with the methods by which Miss Savidge was examined subsequent to her acquittal, on the charge relating to what is known as the Hyde Park case.

We have sought no party advantage in this, and I for one regret the form which the discussion must take to-day, that is, moving a reduction of the Vote, because the Division would tend to follow party lines. We would far rather have had a clear discussion and vote in this House as to whether the House, irrespective of party, accepted the Majority or Minority Report. The right hon. Gentleman the Home Secretary is aware that he has what is called a Press Bureau at Scotland Yard. It has been in existence for about eight years. I shall not enter into the question as to why it was inaugurated, but it is there, and it is through that Press Bureau that all matters pertaining to the police, the Home Office, and important decisions are supposed to be communicated to the Press. I shall have a word or two to say about that later. But I want to begin by calling the attention of the Committee to the atmosphere in which this Commission began its inquiry. The right hon. Gentleman himself, perhaps unconsciously, set the pace. Speaking in this House on 23rd May, he used these words: might honestly and fairly have come on the evidence put before them. Let me give the House some illustrations. I hold in my hand a cutting from the London "Evening News" of 2nd July. There is almost half a column of it. The writer says: the origin of that article. It is not only one paper or two papers. Here is the "Daily Telegraph" declaring, "On the authority of highly placed officials at Scotland Yard," in criticism of the Majority Report—not only the Minority Report, but highly placed officials at Scotland Yard have taken it upon themselves to issue public pronouncements against even the Majority Report, before the Home Secretary has been in a position to give the views of the Government on the subject. They say on the 14th:

I suffer from the Press as much as anybody.

Quite so. I am only anxious to get the House to understand that there is a definite and clear connection between certain sections of the Press and Scotland Yard and that this connection is used for practical purposes and used for political and personal ends. Here is the "Daily Express" giving the right hon. Gentleman his orders. He is to "turn his lively intelligence in some other direction" than interfering with the police. He is warned off the pitch. He is told that there is "plenty to keep him occupied if he will only look for it" instead of "shackling the police with new regulations." He is even warned off his new Commission of Inquiry.

Not far from this House there are three places where there is regular contact, outside the Press Bureau. It may be perfectly honest. It may be that no money passes, but it is a fact, I am assured on very good authority, that there is a place called "The Dive," in St. Stephen's Terrace, opposite this House; there is the saloon bar of the "Red Lion" in Derby Street, and there is the basement of Messrs. Lyons' establishment in Whitehall where there is regular and daily contact between highly placed officials of New Scotland Yard and certain crimes experts operating on behalf of the Press. All this is outside the Press Bureau. The right hon. Gentleman will not expect me to be more precise than that. I ought to have added one remark more in that connection. I put this case specifically to the right hon. Gentleman. If he cannot answer anything else, can he answer as to this—that on Tuesday of this week the "Daily Mail" came out with a splash announcement that in future motorists were not to be prosecuted for a first offence, but that they were to be warned and subsequently prosecuted. That was a decision taken in the highest quarters in Scotland Yard and the Home Office. I have every London paper of that date here and only the "Daily Mail" came out on that date with that announcement. No other London paper had it until next morning—neither the "Times," the "Express," "Chronicle," the "Morning Post" nor any other.

Is it asking too much to suggest that the right hon. Gentleman from his place this afternoon should tell us how that announcement—important to every motorist in the country, important to the general public and important to the police—instead of being issued as an official communique through his Press Bureau, equally to every paper in London, to the Press Association and every paper in the country, should have been confined to the "Daily Mail," and that that paper should get one day's start? I ask the right hon. Gentleman to tell us about that this afternoon. Now we come to the question as to whether the Majority Report is subconsciously influenced by all this Press propaganda. It was obvious from the very beginning of this business that there would he a conflict of testimony as to what happened inside Scotland Yard. Indeed, the right hon. Gentleman, on the last day we discussed it, intimated to the House that the two police officers denied all, or almost all, the allegations that were made by Miss Savidge as to what happened inside Scotland Yard.

It was obvious that there was going to be a conflict of testimoney, but on the operations outside Scotland Yard, where corroborative evidence was available, there is no difference among the Commissioners. Where outside corroborative evidence was available, all three Commissioners support Miss Savidge against the police, and it is only as to what happened inside Scotland Yard that there is a difference of view as to the credibility of the evidence. There is no difference anywhere in condemnation of the secret, sudden, unannounced raid upon this poor girl at her place of business. There is no difference whatever as to the fact that it was deliberate. The Chief Inspector said so, admitted so, in course of cross-examination before the Tribunal. He was asked: Secretary recollect that the girl even then never knew that she was to be cross-examined or the nature of the questions that were to be put to her.

I said she got there by trick. There is no dispute about that, is there? The Majority Report says so, and the Minority Report says so. There was no such sudden raid on the police officers who were alleged to be the guilty parties in this matter. It was they who were to be examined for perjury, but there was no sudden raid upon them. They were examined together. The Chief Inspector went to Hyde Park to see them. They were not suddenly pounced upon and brought separately to Scotland Yard and then put through an examination. There is no dispute, is there, about the four or five hours' detention in the police barracks, in Scotland Yard? Nothing was said in advance to the girl that she was to be examined with a possibility that whatever she said would be used to incriminate her later, in defiance of the Judges' rule. Any accused person, not any witness, charged with an offence is warned in advance that any statement she may make may be used in evidence against her, but no such warning was given to that girl. There is no allegation that any such warning was ever given to that girl. Then what are we to think of the method of taking her evidence? No shorthand writer, no dictaphone, not even the girl's statement taken down verbatim, but construed, with all the finer nuances of language! Nobody will ever know exactly what was said or what was not said, but it is the expressed opinion in the legal journals which I will quote in a moment that, in an examination which took anything from three, four, four and a half, to five hours, there must have been elaborate questions and conversation which were not embodied in the document finally submitted and signed. Then there is no denial really about the collapse when the girl got home. All that is proved and not denied.

The majority accepted the police version as to what happened inside Scotland Yard on the question of credibility, and I am going to ask the House, irrespective of party, if before they vote to-day they will ask themselves this question: The only possible corroboration of Miss Savidge's evidence as to what happened at Scotland Yard was given by a reluctant witness, Miss Egan. She did not want to come; she did not come voluntarily, but came under subpœna. When she came into the box, her testimony, clear, distinct, was that to some extent—I put it no higher than that—similar questions were put to her at her home to what Miss Savidge alleged had been put to her at Scotland Yard; and the Tribunal was so satisfied with Miss Egan's evidence that Mr. Justice Bankes said there was no need to call her brother, who was there prepared to give corroborative evidence of Miss Egan's statement. If they were not satisfied with Miss Egan's evidence, if her evidence was not held to be complete, why not call the brother? But they were so satisfied that they did not call the brother, and yet, in this Majority Report; there is no mention whatever of Miss Egan's corroborative testimony—no reliance on it, no mention of it. I could have understood the Majority Commissioners referring to it and saying, "We dismiss it upon an x, y or z ground," but to have accepted it tacitly in court, to have refrained from calling her brother, and then to have ignored it altogether in the Report, seems to me to be a most extraordinary proceeding for the members of the Tribunal. They say, further, on page 15 of the Report, dealing with the question of Miss Savidge's credulity: done so, counsel turned to the Judge and said, "There you are, my Lord, what reliance can you place upon this witness's evidence?" There was every possible artifice known to the legal mind, backed by all the machinery of the police, poaching round the girl's school chums right up to the day the Tribunal met, crawling about among her school companions to get one word of smut to throw at her in the Court. Backed by all the machinery at the disposal of the police, they never shook her one word or made her contradict her narrative. If the evidence of Messrs. Syrett, the shorthand writer, and the managing clerk is to be called a concoction, and that this girl manufactured all this statement, backed apparently by Miss Egan's evidence, and prepared to be backed by her brother's evidence—to call that a concoction then, I think, it is the most amazing narrative that has ever been submitted to a Law Court in this country.

Then we are told by the police, and it is accepted by the majority of the Tribunal, that this girl voluntarily—the right hon. Gentleman is a man of the world; perhaps I ought to say, not very much a man of the world—that she voluntarily told two men whom she never saw before, in a police barrack without being asked, the colour of her underclothing and its length—that she voluntarily discussed intimate, personal questions about herself without being asked. Does the right hon. Gentleman believe that? Is there any man in the House who believes it? Is there anybody outside this House who believes it? When the majority of the Tribunal say they believe the police testimony that this girl voluntarily, without being asked, made the statement that she had kissed Sir Leo Money several times before the police came up, I can only conclude that the majority of the Tribunal were impressed with the necessity of restoring confidence in the police at all costs. The Majority make no comment upon several other significant facts. I will not ask the right hon. Gentleman to consider this. I will ask any of my hon. Friends behind me who are familiar with workshop life to consider this. The Chief Inspector—I do not want to say anything about him until a later stage, and that will be favourable—said in the witness box, before the public, and in response to a question—on page 29 of the Report—

Where is it?

In the "Law Journal" of to-day's date. Perhaps the hon. and learned Gentleman will be glad to hear this. He was not listening to the last quotation.

The hon. Gentleman has no reason to complain of my discourtesy. Having asked for the reference I will not interrupt him again.

12 n.

I do not complain about the hon. and learned Gentleman asking for the reference, but what I said was that he has not been listening, and I am within the knowledge of the Committee when I say that he was conducting a conversation with the Home Secretary when I was reading out the most important opinion—

The hon. Member knows that in cases of this kind I try to follow his argument, but I take full blame to myself. I asked the Attorney-General a question on a particular point of law which arose directly out of what the hon. Member was saying, and he gave me an answer. That is all; I take the blame.

I do not complain of the hon. and learned Gentleman the Attorney-General asking me the name of the paper which I quoted. I shall be only too pleased to read it again. What I said was that during the previous quotation the Attorney-General was not listening.

I heard it.

Very well; the right hon. Gentleman the Home Secretary says that he was conducting a consultation with the Attorney-General, and he takes the blame for it. The "Law Journal" further says in to-day's issue:—

I want to ask the right hon. Gentleman when he comes to reply whether he proposes to say anything about any ex-gratia payment to this girl for what she has undergone? I want to ask him how he is going to assure the public that what is condemned by both the Majority and Minority Reports shall never again happen? We want an assurance that this will never be repeated upon any other citizen in this land. We believe it is the system which is wrong; we ask for no penalisation of individuals. I want to say this perfectly frankly, that I went to that court with a very strong prejudice against Inspector Collins. I sat in that court from first to last, and I formed the conclusion, and I think I ought to say so here, that he seemed to me to be the average type of decent citizen, who would as readily, and more readily, operate a humane system than the contemptible and atrocious system which he is compelled by his duty to superior officers, and by established practice, to perform.

I want to ask the right hon. Gentleman if he can give the House any information about the terms of reference of his proposed new Commission of Inquiry? Will it cover all the 15 points of the hon. Member for Keighley? Will it deal specifically with the relationship between the Director of Public Prosecutions and the police? Will it deal with the general control of the police, as well as with police methods? Will it deal with the relationship between the Metropolitan Police and some popularly-elected authority? This House, with all its faults, faults of its mechanism and its century-old methods, and with all its political and class composition, is still, for weal or woe, the last rampart of our civil liberties. In the struggle for political equality, equal rights of citizenship, and individual security within the law, this House has broken kings and princes, oligarchies, deeply-rooted classes and institutions. The day is coming when, as the instrument of our race, this House will sweep away economic oppression and the manipulation of land and property, without which there can never be real freedom in this land. Until that is achieved—and no people or class, once politically free, has ever been content to remain in economic subjection—freedom and liberty for all are impossible. Meanwhile, it is our bounden duty to resist anxiously and resolutely any invasion of whatever liberties of the person we now possess, and because we on these benches believe that, I beg to move the Amendment.

After the presentation of this report, the whole of the issue has been narrowed down to a very small compass. Although important issues arise, there is very little room for discussion. The Majority and the Minority Reports agree upon certain points, but in other material particulars they are in disagreement, and it is unfortunate that the points upon which they disagree relate to matters of fact. One can understand a tribunal like the Court of Appeal having a certain dispute referred to it for decision, and members of the Court coming to a different conclusion upon questions of law as applied to the same set of facts. But in this case the tribunal has not been able to come to an agreed finding upon the facts themselves, and particularly in regard to what happened inside Scotland Yard, and it is left for the House and the public at large to exercise their judgment as to whether they will accept the findings of the Majority Report or the Minority Report. That is to say, it has been left to an absentee, jury to try to find out what the facts are—left to a jury which has not had the privilege of seeing the witnesses in the box, of forming any conclusions on their demeanour, or hearing the examination-in-chief or the cross-examination as to credibility and as to what happened at Scotland Yard. If the tribunal, which had the opportunity of seeing the witnesses under examination and cross-examination, could not issue an agreed finding, it is impossible for anyone outside, or for this House itself, to come to any conclusion upon what actually happened inside Scotland Yard itself. Therefore, in discussing this matter, one must dismiss that from the purview of the Debate altogether. One must regret that that finding of fact was not made, so that we might base a discussion upon it; but in the state of the Report it is impossible to discuss what actually took place at Scotland Yard itself. There remains, then, the question of the conduct of the police in taking Miss Savidge to Scotland Yard—the instructions that were issued to the police, and those who acted in pursuance of the instructions of the Director of Public Prosecutions.

With regard to the taking of Miss Savidge to Scotland Yard, there is an agreed finding by the Majority and the Minority Reports. Both the Majority and Minority Reports agree that the method by which Miss Savidge was taken to Scotland Yard was an unfortunate one, and an unjustifiable one. It is true there is a difference between the Majority and Minority Reports as to whether Chief Inspector Collins and his assistants were acting within their instructions.

The Majority Report finds that Chief Inspector Collins and Detective Sergeant Clarke were acting within their instructions, and that it was unfortunate that the instructions were such as they were. The Minority Report finds that they were to blame. Again, I am not going to enter into that discussion. I am quite prepared to accept the finding of the majority upon that point, that is, that the police were acting within their instructions. Then, if you exempt the police from all blame, you narrow down the position to two points, to the instructions that were issued by the Director of Public Prosecutions, and the position taken up in the first place by the Home Secretary himself.

I cannot help thinking that in this case all the subsequent troubles that have arisen from the action of the Home Secretary himself in directing that the papers relating to the Hyde Park case should be communicated to the Director of Public Prosecutions. I am not going to enter into the question of the Hyde Park case. I think the less said about it the better, from all points of view. I am not concerned with that. I accept the findings of the magistrate and have nothing more to say about it. But, the magistrate having dismissed the charge against Sir Leo Money and Miss Savidge, the evidence of the police officers not being accepted, I cannot conceive how there could have arisen a question of a charge of perjury being launched against the police officers at all. I am astonished to find in the letter which the Director of Public Prosecutions addressed to Messrs. Syrett and Sons on 17th May this sentence, which is printed on page 36 of the Report: must have been saying what they knew to be untrue. But there is a third possibility: The police officers may very well have been mistaken, and honestly mistaken, over what they saw. It may very well have been that they said truly what they thought they had seen, but it may also be the case that they were mistaken about it. In any event, even if a charge of perjury had been brought against these two police officers, how could he hope to succeed in establishing the charge? The Home Secretary himself should have taken up the attitude that there was nothing to differentiate this case from an ordinary case in Hyde Park. I do not know how many hundreds of Hyde Park cases occurred last year; but with the exception that here a well-known name was involved there was no difference between this case and scores of others in which proceedings had been taken. Why should the, right hon. Gentleman have stepped in? Why should he have sent those papers to the Public Prosecutor? All he should have said was, "The case has been dismissed, and costs have been given against the police." That decision as to costs may have marked the case out, but there was no suggestion on the part of the magistrate that there had been perjury by the police. It may very well have been that, in the view of the magistrate, the police were not acting with due care. If the right hon. Gentleman had taken that attitude, nothing would have been heard of it, and nothing more should have been heard of it. The matter should have been dismissed upon that test. Unfortunately, the Director of Public Prosecutions took the action that he did, and we had a new position. The Director of Public Prosecutions, on being asked by the Secretary of State to make inquiries, seems to have taken the view that he was inquiring, or was asked to inquire, into a crime that had been committed. On page 29 of the Minority Report we find this: burglary has taken place, or a murder has been committed, and the police are investigating the burglary or the murder. They are perfectly entitled to make inquiries of any persons who can give them information that will lead to the arrest of the culprit. In that case, however, a crime has actually been committed, and it is known that a crime has been committed; but in the present case no crime was committed. At the time when the Director of Public Prosecutions was causing these inquiries to be made, there was no crime in fact, as far as was known to the Committee. They were inquiring, not into the facts of a crime which had actually been committed, but in order to find out whether in fact a crime had been committed or not. That is to say, it was a fishing and roving inquiry, and the position was entirely different.

I suggest that the Director of Public Prosecutions really misdirected himself, and arrived at the confused position, indicated both in his instructions to the police and in his letters to Sir Leo Money and Messrs. Syrett, that he was inquiring into a crime which had been committed. He was doing nothing of the kind, and was not instructed to do anything of the kind. He was inquiring as to whether in fact a crime had been committed at all. I cannot imagine that he would have written those letters or given those instructions if he had not been acting upon that confused supposition. Then we come to the letters themselves. I agree fully with the quotation that was cited by the hon. Member for Dundee (Mr. Johnston). One cannot read the letter of the 17th May without amazement. Its terms were as follows:— had given her answers. Assume, as I have assumed all along, that the findings of the Majority Report are accepted, and that the story given by Miss Savidge as reported by the police was the true story. Even if there had been any doubt about it before, there could not in my view have been any question then of prosecuting these two police officers. The moment that that evidence had been given by Miss Savidge and taken down by the police, Miss Savidge, at a prosecution of the two officers for perjury would have been one of the principal witnesses for the prosecution; but if her evidence as put down be true, if the police representations upon it be true, there was an end for all time of any suggestion of putting these two police officers in the dock. One has only to look at her answer on page 23 to the question that was there put to her: Public Prosecutions and of the procedure governing the examination of witnesses by the police.

Let me take one other point with regard to the instructions that were issued. The police were instructed by the Director of Public Prosecutions to make inquiries. He said:

Surely, from the point of view of credibility, inquiries as to character would be material?

It might be material from the point of view of the credibility of witnesses for the prosecution, but it also illustrates the danger with regard to this particular class of offence, because this class of offence in Hyde Park was of the same nature. What was being tried here was not morality, but perjury. I admit that evidence as to credibility is admissible, but the danger——

My point is that these two persons would have been called as witnesses in a prosecution for perjury, and the first thing that would have been done would have been to inquire as to their character and their past.

I agree that it is admissible in the present state of the law, but, owing to the special nature of this case, it would have been a very dangerous thing to do. It would, however, have been a very material thing to know, and it would have been very useful information to obtain, if Sir Leo Money were being prosecuted for perjury, and it would have been far more relevant to such a prosecution than to a prosecution of these two officers. Taking the agreed procedure from beginning to end, as I view it, the original step was taken by the right hon. Gentleman himself, and I think he is mainly responsible for the occurrences that have taken place. If he had said at the beginning that he would not take any step to interfere in this case, because it was a perfectly ordinary case—the only difference between it and hundreds of other cases being the standing of one of the persons implicated—all this trouble would have been avoided. On the other hand, it may very well be that good will arise out of it, because some of the War-time regulations with regard to the liberty of the subject are really in need of drastic revision, and, if this provides the opportunity for revising them, good will come out of it in the end.

The hon. Member for Cardigan (Mr. Morris) has given me the opportunity of dealing with the initiation of the trouble in this case. It has been said that all the trouble has occurred because I jumped in rashly and asked the Director of Public Prosecutions to consider the question of a prosecution for perjury against the two police officers concerned. I should like to say that I hope the Committee realise that the Secretary of State, who has the final control of a body of 20,000 police, does not jump about like a trout in a pool, nor does he rashly do these things without consulting the very admirable and efficient staff that he has at his disposal at the Home Office. Here is a case which attracted a great deal of public attention, in which two constables gave evidence against certain persons. That case was fully and finally disposed of, and let me say at once, in reply to the partial suggestion made by the hon. Member for Cardigan, that I never had in my mind, or gave in any communication from myself to the police or to the Director of Public Prosecutions, either verbally or in writing, the slightest idea of prosecuting Sir Leo Money. I ask the Committee to take it from me that that never occurred to me. What happened was this: These charges were made, it is quite true, by two constables in the Metropolitan Police. The Magistrate, without calling one of the defendants at all, said:

"I have heard enough and I have come to the conclusion that the defendants are not guilty. I dismiss the charge. I award 10 guineas costs against the police."

And then the Magistrate said:

"If the evidence had been submitted to the Commissioner, the case would never have been brought."

I was forced to the conclusion that, in view of the Magistrate himself, it was not that a mere mistake had been made, but that one or other of these constables had doctored his evidence. I came to that conclusion on reading the Magistrate's statement, and in view of the summary dismissal of the case, the awarding of costs against the police, and the public intimation that, if the matter had been considered by the Commissioner, the case would never have been brought. That cannot have meant that it would never have been brought because the defendants were acquitted; it must have meant that it would never have have been brought because the evidence would not bear cross-examination. The Committee will realise that, in regard to cases of that character affecting members of the Police Force, it was laid down as long ago as 1868, by the then Home Secretary, as a definite rule, that, when the conduct of constables involved the possibility of a serious offence against the law, the matter must not be determined by the Commissioner but must be determined by the ordinary Courts of Law. That rule was considered by the Royal Commission in 1906, and, if hon. Members care to look at the Report, they will find on page 143 a statement approving that rule, and the Committee will see that it is a rule for the protection of the public and not the police. It is a rule which says that, if there is a serious possibility of a serious charge against the police, the Commissioner must not deal with it, but that it must be dealt with by the ordinary Courts of Law.

Can the right hon. Gentleman say whether there was a prosecution for perjury in the Major Murray case?

The hon. Gentleman intimated some time ago his views on that matter. I am proposing to put the case without bias and in the same fair manner that the hon. Member for Dundee (Mr. Johnston) put his case. It is not a case in which party bias should enter, and the announcement I shall make before I conclude my speech will, I hope, convince the Committee that I realise the importance, not merely from the police but from the public point of view, of all that has happened. That has clearly been the policy of the Home Office. I referred this matter to the Director of Public Prosecutions, as I should any similar case where I was convinced that in the mind of the Magistrate perjury had been committed. I was convinced that that was the view of the Magistrate. Obviously, if that were my view, and it was my view——

What words of the Magistrate led the right hon. Gentleman to conclude so decisively that the Magistrate was of opinion that perjury had undoubtedly been committed?

I have stated what the Magistrate said and the method in which he disposed of the case. If the hon. Member presses me further, I can answer the question. [HON. MEMBERS: "Answer!"] It is very difficult to go further than to say that when a man in the position of a Secretary of State, dealing with a very serious question of this kind, exercises his right to consult with the Judge who has tried the case, any such consultation must obviously be entirely confidential. I cannot say more than that. But I do say that before I wrote to the Director of Public Prosecutions I was convinced that in the mind of the Magistrate perjury had been committed. What followed is, of course, in the hands of the House itself. The Commissioners have inquired into the case. I should like—I am sure the Committee will agree with me—to express the thanks of the House to the Commissioners for the work that they did, and perhaps I might say both hon. Members of the House who were members of the Commission, the hon. Member for Cambridge University (Mr. Withers) and the hon. Member for Beighley (Mr. Lees-Smith) have intimated to me, as a matter of delicacy which the Committee will appreciate, that neither of them is taking part or is in attendance at to-day's Debate, because they occupied a judicial position.

Before I come further to deal with the Commission's Report, I should like to say a word or two with regard to the opening portion of the speech of the hon. Member for Dundee in regard to the Press. The Committee will forgive me if I do not go into the whole of the quotations from the "Evening News," "Daily Mail," "Telegraph," "Times," and "Daily Express." After all, the hon. Member knows more about the Press than I do. He himself knows the efforts the Press makes to get any kind of information on any subject whatever which is in the public eye. The Press Bureau at Scotland Yard was instituted by a predecessor of mine some eight years ago in order to prevent the Press intriguing round Scotland Yard to get information on cases which were much before the public. Certain information of an official or semi-official character is issued now by the Press Bureau to the Press. At the same time, I admit that the Press exercises its undoubted intelligence in trying to find out a great deal that goes on at Scotland Yard and at the Home Office. I will tell the Committee something that happened recently. There was an interview with me at my country house in one of the London papers about a fortnight ago—a circumstantial interview occupying about a column. It pointed out how I was walking in a country lane with Sir John Anderson, the Permanent Chief of the Home Office, and how I said so and so to the reporter. The sorry truth is that that man was refused admission to my house twice on that day. I never saw him, nor did Sir John Anderson, and we did not walk in any country lane.

Would the right hon. Gentleman give the Committee some enlightenment upon two of the specific cases referring to himself, which 1 put: One with regard to the fact that an important decision, which he had taken himself, that there should be no further prosecution of the Hyde Park constables for perjury was announced in one paper which specifically stated it as his decision nine days before he came to the House of Commons with it; and could he further answer the point I made regarding Tuesday's announcement in one paper alone as an official decision taken at Scotland Yard?

I had repeatedly refused to make a statement or to express an opinion as to these two constables until after the Commission had reported. But the hon. Member is justified in saying that the statement appeared as to my decision seven days before it was made. I had made no communication. As a matter of fact, I had not seen General Horwood since the Debate about his resignation. I had not seen any of the heads of Scotland Yard in regard to the case. My advisers and I discussed it, but I declined to come to a decision until after this Report had been issued and circulated. The decision took place and was communicated by me in a letter to Scotland Yard, but that was seven days after it had been announced in that paper. There is such a thing as intelligent anticipation. With regard to the second point, about motoring offences, I authorised no such public statement. I can only imagine that, by means which those who are connected with the Press know, they got that information from someone in Scotland Yard. They are always trying. A year ago I made a very desperate effort to find out how leakage arose, and I saw personally the heads of two great newspapers. Both of them had the calm audacity to tell me to my face, over the luncheon table, that it was their business to buy news as and where they could get it, and that if I could stop them I was entitled to do it.

:Like the Zinovieff Letter.

I do not want to drag the Debate into a discussion on the Press, but I am quite prepared to agree with a good deal of what the hon. Gentleman said in regard to the action of the Press, which seeks to find out or to anticipate things, and which makes the government of this country exceedingly difficult. When the Government arrive at a decision, the proper place to announce it is the House of Commons, and I have always sought, as Home Secretary, to announce everything I had to announce directly to the House of Commons.

Will the right hon. Gentleman also refer to the instance in which every paper in London simultaneously, and in almost the same words, announced that he had written to me when in fact he had not written at all. I should like him to make it clear whether he thinks that was a case of intelligent anticipation or a case in which one might say, inferentially, from what he said about the interview with the two newspaper proprietors, that the information was purchased from Scotland Yard.

I do not wish to prevent the Home Secretary replying to that question, but we are in Committee. Hon. Members can not only speak once but twice, and, really, if these continual interrogations from all sides of the House go on, it will be impossible for either the Home Secretary or anyone else in a responsible position to make a detailed statement.

Let me come, if I may, directly to the Commission appointed after a Resolution by the House of Commons. There was general unanimity and general approval. That Commission consisted of one of the most experienced Judges, a retired Judge, who sat in the King's Bench Division and then in the Court of Appeal, and of two of our own colleagues in this House. It is quite true, as the hon. Member has said, that it is unfortunate that on the question of fact there was a difference of opinion and that there was a Minority Report. The hon. Gentleman the Member for Dundee has made a long speech criticising the views of the Majority Report, and, in effect, inviting the Committee to re-try the case, to express an opinion contrary to the views of the Majority and, in effect, in accordance with the views of the Minority. What is the good of the House of Commons, a body of 600 Members unanimously approving the appointment of a Commission, the names of whose members commended themselves to the House and, I think, I can can say commended themselves to everybody outside, and then, when you get a Report by the Majority—I admit only by a majority—coming back to the House and asking the House to re-try the case.

We did not hear the evidence. We did not see—the hon. Member may have done—but most of us did not see the witnesses in the witness-box. It is impossible for us to consider what effect the statement or denials of particular incidents may have had on the Judge who came to a particular decision, or to take out one little bit of evidence read in the papers and say: "That convinces me that the Majority or the Minority were wrong," or to say: "I am convinced from what I have read in the papers, from the demeanour either of Inspector Collins or of Miss Savidge that they were not speaking the truth." It is impossible, after a Judicial tribunal of this kind, that we should attempt at all either to re-try or re-hear the matter on hearsay evidence. I have no option whatever but to accept, on matters of fact, the view of the Majority Report. There was, at all events, the Judge who had no interest in politics at all, who had not heard the debates in this House, who came at great inconvenience from his retirement in order to perform what was a public duty which the Government of the day had asked him to undertake.

On a point of Order. May I submit to you, Mr. Hope, that, if it is competent for the Home Secretary to talk about the impartiality of a Judge, it is also competent for other Members to deal with the bias of a Judge.

I think there is a danger that in praising and eulogising any Members of the Tribunal contrary views may be invited. I suggest that neither praise nor blame should be given.

I am quite satisfied. I will not attempt to attribute either praise or blame to the members of that tribunal. All I say is, and I think the Committee will agree with me, that having set up a tribunal, as far as the question of fact is concerned. we must accept the decision of the Majority of that Tribunal, and, at any rate, though some of us may have a view in favour of the decision of the Minority, it is no good attempting to re-try the case ourselves. We must be content with the decisions of the Majority or Minority who had the case before them. Arising out of that, there is, of course, the position of the Director of Public Prosecutions animadverted upon by the hon. Member for Cardigan. The Director of Public Prosecutions is appointed by the Home Secretary, but subsequently, by a curious inversion of the ordinary method of conducting business, is under the authority and control of the Attorney-General. The Attorney-General will himself deal with the actions and letters of his subordinate officer, the Director of Public Prosecutions. I think that, as he is not a member of the Tribunal, there is no harm in my saying that I have been in touch with the Director of Public Prosecutions for some years. He is an officer of great experience and of high character, and I am perfectly certain that in his conduct on this occasion he carried out the traditions of the office in what he believes to be the very best interests of the country.

It is now suggested that the Director should have a quasi police staff of his own to deal with inquiries in which the police themselves are concerned. That, of course, is a very serious suggestion indeed, because that is an implication—I say it advisedly—that the police themselves are so imbued with esprit de corps —to put it at the highest point rather than the lowest—that you cannot trust them to investigate a case in which one of their men is concerned. Let us see what that means. Since I have been Home Secretary, there have been scores of cases in which police officers have committed various offences which have been detected, prosecuted, and dealt with on the evidence of their own colleagues and their superior officers. There has been no suggestion in any one of these cases brought before my notice that the police have tried to screen one of their own members who has committed an offence of any kind. I assure the Committee that, as far as I have been able to gather, the higher officers of the police are just as desirous as any member of this Committee to root out any man who is a disgrace to the force or commits offences against police regulations or the laws of the land.

Let me now take the recommendations of the Minority and Majority Reports of this Tribunal, because, although there is, on the facts of the case, a difference of opinion, there is in regard to the recommendations not nearly so great a difference of opinion. The general procedure will come before the new Royal Commission, which in accordance with the invitation of hon. Gentlemen opposite, I, on the last occasion, agreed to set up. It is said that there has been no Royal Commission in regard to police methods for some 20 years. It is said by the hon. Gentleman the Member for Cardigan, and received with a certain amount of applause on this side of the House, that some of the police methods dating from the War are contrary to the best interests of the country as a whole. Let us have a Royal Commission to inquire into that.

Let me say one word with regard to the action of the police in their ordinary duty. The Savidge case is a very exceptional case. Remember, you have a police force here of 20,000 men who are constantly at war with a more than equal number of the criminal classes of this Metropolis. Remember that I have far more invitations, far more requests from the public, to see that the police take steps to secure the conviction of offenders, to see that they trace out crime, than to see that they do not. There is an enormous number, as the Committee will see, of investigations and inquiries that must take place, and which cannot be brought to Scotland Yard at all. Let me take, perhaps, the most difficult cases of all, sexual cases, rape, etc.—I say that we must not be mealy-mouthed about these matters—where the defence of consent is always put up. This is one of the vilest crimes that there are in our land. I wish to say to the Committee quite frankly that if, by any new regulations, you cripple the action of the police in finding out the views of people connected with a case and of getting them to come and give evidence, you will destroy the possibility of getting a conviction in a very great many cases. The moment you go to a girl who has suffered from one of these assaults, you have to get her evidence quietly in the interests of justice. The moment you went and said to her: "Here is a very serious case affecting your morality, you may have to come into court, you may have to do this, that or the other," she would, in vulgar parlance, dry up at once, and the police would never get the evidence which they must get if the criminal is to be brought to justice.

In 1926 there were 133,000 of the major offences, of which there were 16,000 in London. There were 154 murders, of which 28 were committed in London. Since I have been Home Secretary, nearly four years, I know of only two or possibly three cases of murder unaccounted for by the police. I do not say that the murderers could all have been convicted. Some of the murderers have committed suicide, one or two have successfully fled the country, but there are only two or possibly three cases of murder which have been unaccounted for in this country since I have been Home Secretary. There is no other country in the world, no other police force in the world that could say that.

Let me go a little further. We are getting really to the heart of police organisation. I will take two cases. The House will remember the Robinson trunk murder which was discovered at Charing Cross Station. There were two minor clues, one of them being the cloth in which bits of the body were encased in the trunk. There was no clue until one piece of duster was washed very carefully and there, very faintly, was the word "Geryhound." There was also a piece of broken match, which was covered with blood. These two bits of evidence convicted and hanged a man. There were no fewer than 250 people interviewed before that case got into court. In connection with the Gutteridge case the other day which excited so much interest, over 1,000 people had to be interviewed by the police before the case could be proceeded with against the accused persons. Every known criminal in the district and every known burglar was interviewed. That is the way in which the police have to get to work. They have to see every known man who may have any kind of information to give in regard to the case. It may be said that you are never to ask a question of any man in such circumstances. [HON. MEMBERS: "We would not suggest that."] Of course you would not.

A crime had been committed in those two cases, but a crime had not been committed in the Savidge case.

Pardon me. In both these cases, there was a death. In the Savidge case, there was the possibility of perjury. No crime has been definitely committed until a conviction takes place which proves that it was a crime.

There was a crime, a death, in those cases.

True, a death may take place, but we have in our minds a very recent case where a death had taken place, and it is admitted that there had been no crime committed by a particular person.

There was a crime committed?

I would ask the Committee to note the enormous ramifications of these cases and the enormous efforts that the police must make and the steps they must take if the primary object of the Police Force is to be achieved, namely, to protect society and detect the criminal. Therefore, so long as the police do not descend to the methods of the third degree—nobody wants them to do that, least of all the Home Secretary, because I am just as much opposed to that method as anybody in this House—I do beg and pray of the Committee that, in considering this matter, we should not unduly restrict the police in their investigations. We must bear in mind, and I have no doubt that the Commission will bear in mind, the primary object of the police, namely, to unravel crime and to bring to justice the person who has committed crime. The whole basis and the whole foundation of society is dependent upon the quick bringing to justice of the man who commits a crime against society.

1.0 p.m.

I have said that certain matters should be referred to the Royal Commission. The Committee will desire, particularly in view of the reports in connection with the Savidge case, that before the Royal Commission get to work, I should give certain directions to the Police. I have, accordingly, with the consent of the Commissioner, given the Commissioner of Police provisional instructions that, until they may be revoked or altered by a decision of the Royal Commission, he will in any case—I adopt here the words of the Majority Report—

Will the right hon. Gentleman, in connection with the instructions, have a broad distinction made between two classes of inquiry—an inquiry into whether a crime has been committed and an inquiry which takes place by a police officer when a crime has been committed, in order to find out all about it?

The police do not start making inquiries unless there is an allegation that a crime has been committed. The hon. Member knows that the suspected criminal is already protected by the Judges' Rules. I do not know whether the Committee know that the Judges have laid down rules for the examination of any person who is suspected of being a criminal or of being guilty of a particular crime, and I think we may be satisfied that the Judges' Rules, if properly carried out, are a perfect safeguard in regard to that matter.

I think it is highly important that the Committee should be quite clear as to the proposed new rules. The right hon. Gentleman has said that in cases where youth and inexperience are involved a direct intimation is to be given of the possible consequences to the persons. But who is to decide the inexperience? It was the opinion of the majority of the Tribunal that Miss Savidge was an experienced and capable young woman, and it was also the opinion of Inspector Collins and Miss Wyles. Who is to decide on the inexperience? Will the right hon. Gentleman make it obligatory in every case that such a warning should be given?

I have already said that it is impossible in every case where the police are tracing a clue, and where thousands of people are interviewed in all kinds of quarters in order to get certain information which might lead to the elucidation of the crime. You cannot do it. I am prepared to go as far as I possibly can go. These are provisional instructions. The whole matter will come before the Royal Commission. I could very well have taken refuge today by saying that this Royal Commission is to be appointed, that I am asking experienced men to consider the whole of these matters and advise as to the rules which should be made. I have not done that, but I have said that, as a provisional measure, and in order to make sure that nothing of a wrong character shall occur again as far as I can prevent it, I have issued certain instructions to the Commissioner of Police, and, when the hon. Member reads them to-morrow morning, I think he will be convinced, as I am satisfied, that they will go a long way, as a provisional measure, to meet the ground of this complaint.

The hon. Member asked me whether the 15 questions put by the hon. Member for Keighley in the latter part of the Minority Report will be discussed by the Royal Commission. I will so frame the Reference to the Royal Commission that the whole of these questions can be discussed and settled by them. A question was put to me with regard to a payment to Miss Savidge. I cannot consider that. We have, as the Committee knows, arranged that her expenses in this inquiry shall be paid, and a very heavy expenditure I am afraid will fall on the taxpayers. I think it is right that she should be reimbursed with respect to these expenses. The only other question put to me was with regard to the relationship between the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Commissioner of Police. I am quite willing and anxious that the whole process of the investigation of crime should come before the Royal Commission, and I am ready to agree—and I am sure my hon. and learned Friend the Attorney-General will agree—that the relations between the Director of Public Prosecutions and the police should also be considered by the Royal Commission, and that they should arrive at some advice which they can give to the Attorney-General and myself as to the future relations between these very high officials.

There is only one other point put to me during the course of the Debate, and that is whether I should refer to the Royal Commission the question of the future control of the Metropolitan Police, that is to say, whether the police shall still continue to be an Imperial force directed by the Secretary of State on behalf of the House of Commons, or whether they shall be under the control of the London County Council, plus representatives of the Middlesex, Essex, Hertfordshire, Sussex, Surrey and Kent County Councils, and I think also the Boroughs of East and West Ham which are also within the Metropolitan area. I say at once that I think not. It is a matter for the Government of the day to decide. If hon. Members of the Opposition desire at any time to challenge the Government of the day and say that they think the whole position of the Metropolitan Police must be changed, that it should be under a Standing Joint Committee or a Watch Committee, and no longer under the control of the Secretary of State, then that is a matter not for a Royal Commission, but for the House of Commons, and, if they desire to make such a challenge, I say at once that the Government are prepared to take it up.

This question has been considered many times before. There was an idea of the sort about 20 years ago, but it has gone; it has faded away completely. The London County Council no longer ask for it, and, having regard to the enormous size of the force, and to the fact that every capital city in the world has its police force under Imperial control—in Washington in the State of Columbia the Police Force is under the control of the Central Government—I think it will take a long time to convince the House of Commons, the representatives of the people, that they should give up the democratic control they have over the police force. There is no more democratic control than that of the House of Commons. I am the servant of the House of Commons, and every action I take, every decision I come to in regard to the police, can be brought up and discussed here. What would the hon. Member for Luton (Captain O'Connor) have done if the police had been under the control of the local authority?

When the hon. Member for Dundee (Mr. Johnston) was speaking, I was following the general argument so closely that I did not call him to order on the ground that this is a matter which would require legislation, and it, therefore, cannot be discussed.

I am afraid I was led astray by the question put to me by the hon. Member for Dundee. I will not pursue that matter further. I cannot put that question before the Royal Commission. I hope I have satisfied the House that we have done our utmost to deal with all the points raised. I have decided to appoint a Royal Commission, to which all the points raised in the Minority Report will be referred, but in the meantime I have given such directions as I think and hope the Committee will agree will ensure that no trouble will occur in the future.

May I ask whether there was a verbatim report taken of the interrogation of Miss Savidge on the occasion referred to?

If the hon. Member looks at the Report, he will find that there was no verbatim report taken when Miss Savidge gave her statement to her solicitor. What happened was that a clerk took down Miss Savidge's statement in the same way as it had been taken down by the police, except that the summarised answers were taken down in shorthand.

There was a shorthand writer there taking every word.

I cannot contradict the hon. Member, because I was not there. But the Report of the Commission is that it was undoubtedly taken down in the same way as was taken by the police. A summarised statement was dictated to a shorthand writer. I think the statement, as far as I have seen it, is nothing like a verbatim statement.

In taking part in this discussion, I am sure the Committee will realise that it is almost impossible for me to divest from my mind my association with the police service, but, in examining the general question and the Reports which have been submitted to the House, I have endeavoured to do so from the point of view of public policy, and with regard to the peculiar nature of the duties which the police have in these particular matters. It is quite apparent, from the general observations in the Press and the Debate in this Committee, that lawyers disagree on this question. We have the hon. Member for Cardigan (Mr. Morris), who speaks with a considerable knowledge of the law, finding himself challenged by another hon. and learned Member. We find also that there are different opinions, even among Judges, as to what constitutes correct and proper procedure in some of these matters. Summed up, what we seem to be expecting of our police force to-day is the virtues of an archangel and the wisdom of a Solomon. In saying that I offer no apology and I do not claim that the police force is perfect. The fact that the police are so human is a clear indication that they are heirs to all the difficulties to which ordinary members of the public are heirs.

In relation to the two Reports, let me say that I think the Majority Report is cautious. It is the kind of Report that a mother might give to a next-door neighbour with regard some little peccadillo of her child, whereas the Minority Report is the kind of report that a sympathetic next-door neighbour might be able to give without responsibility for the child. I do not quarrel with the, Majority Report, but I certainly do support much of what is contained in the Minority Report and that much, I imagine, after reading the Majority Report, might well have found a place in the Majority Report. Where I disagree with the Minority Report is in the censure upon the officers employed in this particular case. I do not make that observation merely because I happen to have been a police officer. My service sense tells me that the difficulties with which the police are faced are difficulties which I am glad an opportunity has arisen for both the police and the public to face.

I shall say why I do not think the police ought to have been censured. The while of their actions are based upon an understanding that is admitted in both Majority and Minority Reports—an understanding that has been built up by custom and procedure; and the fact that the Home Secretary has, after very careful review and consideration, I am sure, issued certain instructions amplifying already existing orders and clearing up up any ambiguity that may exist as to the methods that are adopted, does indicate—if such amplifications were necessary, to say nothing of any new instructions—how difficult it has been, or at least what a wide discretion was left to the individual officers in carrying out their duties.

There is only one thing I want to say on those new instructions, and that is with reference to the instruction that, whenever a statement of an intimate character is to be taken from a woman witness, not necessarily a person who is to be the subject of a charge, there shall be either a woman police officer or a matron present, unless the witness herself requests that there shall not be one present. Let me put another point of view. Suppose there is a case in which a woman declares that she prefers to make a statement not in the presence of one of her own sex. It is a common occurrence in the police service. The police officer, as a result of this case, is entitled to turn round and say, "Yes, you may prefer not to make this statement in the presence of a member of your own sex, but we as police officers, respectable married men who may be the subject of charges such as have been made in the past, are entitled to say that we will not take a statement from you unless it is made in the presence of one of your own sex."

I think that the hon. Member, speaking from knowledge, has raised a very important point in connection with the protection of police officers, and I shall certainly consider whether an option should not be given to a police officer to insist on a woman being present in such cases.

I am very much obliged to the right hon. Gentleman. My personal experience may not have been more than 10 years, but I was born in the service, and the experience of my own father, who has had similar difficulties, is that the most extraordinary concoctions occur from time to time, and that, with regard to the conduct of police officers, statements are made which they never had the slightest idea, in the atmosphere and the circumstances in which they began to do their work, would ever arise in any private person's mind. Therefore, I am glad that the right hon. Gentleman will carefully consider giving this protection. Let me refer to the censure that I have mentioned. In the Minority Report it consists of two things. There is the statement as to the method and manner in which Miss Savidge was conducted to New Scotland Yard and the lack of information as to the purpose for which she was required to go to Scotland Yard: After all a policeman is just paid to do a certain job. He has the same sense of citizenship as the average member of the community. He may develop a mentality peculiar to his particular kind of work; that I do not deny. You cannot expect 60,000 men in the country to be organised into a police administration for the suppression and detection of crime and the arrest of criminals, with all the ramifications of the work and its varied contact with the underworld, and not in some way or other to develop a mentality that may be a little different from that of the average member of the community. I say that at once and, as I remarked in the beginning of my speech, I myself have a service mind. But in the development of that mentality the police themselves are governed by laws and regulations and by rulings given from time to time by the Judges in order that such mentality shall not conflict with what is regarded as the ordinary civil liberty of the public. Therefore the policeman says: "If the general public do not like what we have done in this case, it is for the general public to declare unmistakably just what they want us to do." The police may be keen, they may be zealous, they may be enthusiastic in their job, but they say "If the methods which we adopt and which we conceive to be within the law and within custom, as is admitted in both reports—if those methods are unpopular, then we are entitled to be told what the general public desire, since we are supposed to carry out the desire of the general public." The other censure was contained in the complete rejection of the police officers' evidence as to what happened at New Scotland Yard. I do not quarrel with the Minority Commissioner's statement except to say that he, of course, must not expect everyone to accept it. He has given what I believe to be a frank expression of his personal conviction. It is his opinion, he says: Park, but I think it is important to remember that the credibility of witnesses is determined by their interest in having a certain version accepted or otherwise, and that it depends, to a great extent, on the point of view and mentality of those who are going to decide upon credibility. I took the opportunity of looking up what the Home Secretary I am sure will agree is a standard work on evidence, namely "Best of Evidence" and I find these words:—

There you get something which very often creates a difficulty for the police themselves. You get the type of man who, in build and appearance, may have some resemblance to a policeman in plain clothes. That person hangs about in those places where indecency takes place and sometimes pounces upon an unoffending couple. This occurs in nearly all our parks and open spaces. The assertion is made by this person, who poses as a police officer, that the couple have been guilty of an act of indecency, but that for a consideration they may be allowed to go on their way rejoicing. That is not an uncommon complaint. The right hon. Gentleman must know that it is a complaint often made against the police themselves in ordinary conversation; but there are, from time to time, arrests in the West End of London which show that there are people who practise this kind of thing. As, obviously, you cannot arrest the person concerned on every occasion when such a thing takes place, these persons probably do the same thing on many other occasions before or after they are caught. That is a great problem, and how the right hon. Gentleman is to deal with it I hardly know.

Nobody detests having to put on plain clothes in order to detect these offences, more than the policemen who are chosen for the job. I have known men refuse to do the work. That was a very improper thing for them to do, but there are always two ways of refusing. There is the blunt refusal which I do not think is wise when you are a subordinate officer, but there is the other way of saying, "If you do not mind, sir, I would rather not be employed on this job." and the superior will probably reply, "Very well, if you are a bit squeamish about it, I shall get someone else." That is the attitude of the general run of policemen. If you confine your observations to the uniformed men, you do not deal with the question. I do not mind, and the police generally do not mind, allowing the matter to remain if the general public do not object and if there is no offence to the public sense of decency. You cannot shock a policeman's sense of decency. Some people say that he has none. Anyway, you would not shock him, and if the public do not mind, he does not, but the public does mind. I will wager that the Home Office has piles of papers containing extensive reports submitted by all kinds of agencies which have employed people to indicate to them just what a tremendous amount of work there is for a police force to do; and these piles of papers—I have seen them—are moved from registry to registry, sometimes upon trucks, con- stituting, not complaints that the police are arresting everybody, but positive complaints that the police are not arresting almost anybody.

If you are going to employ merely uniformed policemen almost to give adequate warning of approach, as one might say in motor car parlance, the offence will stop when the policeman approaches, but, I presume, will be resumed after he has disappeared. That is not the way in which we can deal with this kind of thing, and while I do not agree that for the detection of ordinary offences of indecency officers should be secreted—I think that is abominable: and, in fact, it is contrary to the regulations, and they are told not to secrete themselves—this simple fact remains, that if there is one section of the community that gets to know what is the general policy of the police in dealing with these matters, it is the very element against whom the police direct their activities. They get to know quickly, because they are watching the way in which the straws are going, and immediately the police are employed in plain clothes, it has a deterrent effect on that type of undesirable person in Hyde Park and such places. I have referred to that because it is a question that has been raised in this House and used in the Press, and I think the police are entitled to ask just what it is that they are expected to do and how they are asked to do it.

With regard to the methods of taking statements, I think there is much yet to be said for an alteration of the practice of taking statements, but I recognise the tremendous difficulty that the police are put under, if regulations are to be too explicit, in carrying out very important duties that have a tremendous effect upon the morality of our nation as a whole. I have this in mind, that under the League of Nations certain arrangements are made under which a very careful check is kept upon the publication, sale, and sending to this country of indecent and obscene literature and prints; and I have in mind this—and do not let us be mealy-mouthed about this—that our public schools often become the objects of the most improper attentions of certain people who get an extraordinarily good living out of this horrible business of the sale of indecent and improper literature. I do not mean our public schools as schools, but those who are scholars or students in them. It is not because those who go to our public schools desire it. On the contrary, they do not desire it; but you have to recognise that the youthful mind is a curious mind, and that it is at the age when these things are so readily absorbed and noted and when their effect very quickly takes place and at an age when it is very difficult to eradicate it.

Supposing for a moment that a substantial parcel—I think I remember a question being raised in the House not very long ago, when an hon. Member asked the right hon. Gentleman if an officer of his Department read this literature—of this material comes to this country from France; that at the Customs they have certain information as to the likelihood of certain supplies being sent, and they seize a parcel. The information is transmitted eventually to New Scotland Yard, to the police authorities. Inquiry has to be made to find out the purpose for which this material comes, and in the course of the inquiry the person to whom the parcel is addressed has to be seen. It may be that that person is not known at the address under the name that is put on the parcel. The officer making the inquiries is bound to trace it, and in pursuing his inquiries he may have to interview people who could not possibly commit any offence of that kind, but who may be able to give very substantial information as to the character, the habits, the business, and the activities of the person to whom the goods are addressed.

It may be possible that the person who has to be interviewed does not desire, for some reason or another, to disclose to the police all that he knows about the person to whom the goods are addressed; and if he has to be told, before he makes a statement, that he is at perfect liberty to say "Yes" or "No," or not to make any statement at all, or that he can consult his solicitor, the answer is simple. His solicitor will say, "You will make no statement at all. It is not your duty to provide the prosecution with evidence. You may commit yourself in some unsavoury case, and you may break a friendship with a man who you did not know was doing this sort of thing." That is the difficulty. I am not pleading that we should not amplify the regulations, but I am asking that in all the condemnation that proceeds from various angles there should be some notice taken of the difficulties in such cases. I welcome the fact that a Royal Commission is to be appointed, because I believe that before that Royal Commission there will be given evidence of a character that will put both sides of the case, that will disclose some of the real difficulties in the way of the police, and, what is more, that will make it clear to the public that they have certain rights that they may exercise, and that the police themselves will know just exactly what is the course which they are to pursue.

The right hon. Gentleman the Home Secretary in due course will have to consider, as he is the responsible officer, a complete revision of the General Orders governing the Metropolitan Police. We understand that those General Orders are now being revised—I think the Commissioner said that he had started on them five months ago—but before any General Order can be operative in the Metropolitan Police it must be with the approval and sanction of the Home Secretary. He knows probably very well that no such set of General Orders exists outside the Metropolitan Police, that 20,000 men in London are governed by General Orders and that 40,000 men outside London are governed, according to their respective police forces, by orders, standing orders. declarations, and interpretations made by chief constables. I think that is undesirable, not that chief constables should put interpretations on the duties that they are called upon to carry out, but that there should be a whole series of regulations governing the conduct of the police; and I think the right hon. Gentleman himself would prefer that there should be a standard code governing the whole of the police forces in this country in relation to the manner in which they should carry out their duties. All the more is this so when one gets a Judge's ruling, because it may be that it is brought to the notice of the police in one force in one way and to the notice of another force in another way. Where you find a police force in one county interlocking with that of another, there may be some overlapping or discrepancy in action or policy consequent upon the interpretation of the particular order. I hope, therefore, that the Home Secretary will consider the desirability of having a standardised set of regulations governing the whole of the country. Finally, Chief Inspector Collins and the officers involved in this have been censured.

Not in the Majority Report.

I have known Collins for many years. I feel that my hon. Friend the Member for Keighley (Mr. Lees-Smith), for whom I have a very high regard, will understand very well my reference to this, that while Chief Inspector Collins may have escaped any censure from the Majority Report, he is human enough to feel that in the Minority Report, nevertheless, there is an undeserved censure. One remembers that he has had 32 years' service. His reputation and domestic life are as dear to him as the reputation and domestic life of people who are found in Hyde Park at 10.30 at night, and when considering the question of credulity, you cannot dissociate the relevance of the circumstances in which this unfortunate situation arose. Collins was performing his duty. He may have done it in a way which is not acceptable to certain representatives or certain sections of the community. But when it is admitted on all sides that it is the system that is at fault, he is entitled to say, "It is unfair to make me a victim of a system, when it is my lot and duty to carry out my work under the very system complained of." In view of his record and the peculiar difficulties under which he has done his work, I hope that those people who may feel that the censure has been fully warranted, will review the conditions and circumstances, and that any further activities that take place will be directed towards an alteration, or to a challenge, of a system, but that individuals should not be subjected to a censure to which, I am positive, in this case they are not entitled.

I want, first of all, to make a slight personal reference which throws the course of our discussion this afternoon out of gear, and I take the opportunity of doing so while the Home Secretary is here. I was, unfortunately, unable to be present yesterday afternoon in the House of Commons when certain questions arose which involved me, and I want to deal with them in the inverse order in which they were asked, because I think that, although there was no misapprehension in the House or in the right hon. Gentleman's mind, it has been brought to my notice that there has been misapprehension outside as to the effect of the answers. My hon. Friend the Member for South Cardiff (Captain A. Evans) asked the right hon. Gentleman the Home Secretary:

The second has relation to a reference that I made in my remarks last week to a certain chief constable. That was also raised yesterday by the hon. Member for Edge Hill (Mr. Hayes), and the right hon. Gentleman said: would like it to be made clear that there was an offer to give it, subject to certain assurances for which I asked in my letter. I want to make these two points clear with reference to the matters that arose yesterday, and if the Home Secretary confirms at this stage what I have just explained to the Committee, I can pass away from that part of my remarks.

My hon. and gallant Friend has put me in a little difficulty. He did write me, and I am sure he will not mind my reading certain passages from his letter, although it is marked "Private," in reference to this question. He says:

"I can only put their names forward subject to this, that I have given an assurance in each case that none of their names should be made public or communicated to the police. I intend to make it clear to you that I make that stipulation on behalf of my informants and in that sense the information I am giving you is confidential."

Then in regard to the chief constable he says:

"You invite me specifically to give you the name of the Chief Constable, which I am most reluctant to do … It would be unfair to let you know his name unless I had a definite assurance from you that it should not be communicated to the Police Authorities and that if you desired to verify his story you should only do so personally at a private interview with the gentleman concerned."

My hon. and gallant Friend, I know, means to help, but he must realise that, although any criminal who is charged with committing a crime knows who his prosecutor is, my hon. and learned Friend is prepared to make a charge against certain members of the police force and then comes forward and says, "I cannot give you the names of my witnesses and informants unless you keep them secret." I want to go into these questions, but supposing my hon. and gallant Friend gives me in confidence the name of the particular chief constable—I take that because it is the clearest case given in a very grave charge—and I send for the man and he makes certain definite, clear allegations against the police. How can I go any further? He gives me information which makes me very uncomfortable about my own officers, and yet I cannot challenge them, because if I challenge them they say, "I know that case; it is Chief Constable So-and-so," and it might be concluded, inferentially, that I had given away the name submitted by my hon. and gallant Friend. I have thought it over carefully—my hon. and gallant Friend was good enough to see me a few days ago, when we had a long interview—and I want to meet him as far as I can, and I want him to help me, because I want to get at the bottom of all these quite serious charges he has made. But I am afraid I must say to him, with the best wishes in the world, that he must not make charges against individual police officers unless he is prepared to substantiate them. You cannot get away from that elementary principle of justice. He is a lawyer, and I will ask him to think that over, to see whether, on consideration, he does not realise that he must give me some of these names, so that I can deal, as I will deal, thoroughly with them.

The right hon. Gentleman is not unmindful of the fact that I have given him the statements of six persons attached to my letter. I do not wish now to enter into the merits or demerits of the proposition that this chief constable's name ought to be disclosed to the Metropolitan Police at the present stage. All I wished to make clear was that, while I am sure that there are none of my contemporaries in the House who would believe that I put forward a bogus case, and that there was in fact no chief constable or anything of that sort, the confidence which I venture to think the House of Commons reposes in me might not be felt outside, and it is because I think the right hon. Gentleman's remarks might have caused that conclusion to be drawn, that I thought it proper to make this personal explanation. I will certainly bear in mind what the right hon. Gentleman has said. What I had in mind was that possibly the right time to communicate that name was to the Royal Commission because I have not the smallest reason for thinking that the gentleman about whom I am talking is the least reluctant, or would endeavour in any way to withhold evidence that would be valuable to the Commission.

In the same letter, my hon. Friend asked that this person should not be put before the Royal Commission. In his letter, he says:

"May I further suggest that a public Commission of any sort, which I understand the Labour party is asking for, would be the worst possible tribunal of inquiry. Per- sonally, I would rather see a Departmental Committee set up."

I want to deal with that matter in a later portion of my observations. May I first of all make one or two observations in regard to the so-called Savidge Tribunal. In the first place, I very much regret that the hon. Gentleman the Member for Dundee (Mr. Johnston) made the speech that he did, because it seemed to me that he had been anticipated many days ago by the speech of Sir Patrick Hastings for Miss Savidge before the Tribunal, and, in view of the result of the Tribunal, I do not think that we can really re-open the value or otherwise of the evidence that was given on either side in that Tribunal. Much the fairest thing to say is that the Tribunal came to no conclusion at all. It really is in the same position as a jury that has disagreed and has been discharged, and so far as any finding on fact was concerned, all that one can say is that really nothing emerged at all. One side says one thing, and the other side says another, and the fact that it is two to one is of no value either way. That, to my mind, is just an indication of the viciousness of the whole system, because what it means is that something took place which not only this Tribunal, but I venture to think any Tribunal, however constituted, could never really agree upon a finding as to the precise happenings. Does not that illustrate the real danger of investigations of this kind?

The right hon. Gentleman said to-day that, in regard to one case of crime alone, no less than 1,000 people were interrogated. He must bear in mind that 999 of these people were innocent, so that in this one crime alone there were 999 investigations of innocent persons in respect of whom, until we are given an assurance, or until investigations are regulated by some proper rules, we have no guarantee that something similar to the type of the interrogation of Miss Savidge is not likely to take place. I mention that to emphasise, if it needed emphasis, that the right hon. Gentleman's own remarks indicate the enormous importance to the public at large of regulating the machinery and the circumstances in which inquiries of this kind are to be made. These inquiries take place within four walls, with only one witness on one side, who is usually a witness Whose credibility can be attacked in a public tribunal, and on the other side two officers of unimpeachable past records; and, as to the comparative value of the evidence of the two parties, there can usually be no question. It ought to make the House of Commons especially vigilant to see that, at any rate, safeguards are provided for investigations in these circumstances.

2.0 p.m.

I have considered very carefully the various alternative methods of safeguarding that kind of procedure. I am satisfied that it needs safeguarding. One method which has been suggested is the shorthand note. I do not think that that is possible, but I think that wherever a person is being invited to make a statement of the kind which might involve reflections upon him, there ought to be a provision whereby a request could be made that no statement should be taken except in the presence of a semi-judicial officer. I am aware that there is a judicial inquiry in France under the juge d'instruction, and the duty of that inquiry is to apply third degree methods in certain directions on persons who make statements. I do not suggest that we should have that system here, but where you have a case like the case of Miss Savidge, which has to be investigated, there would be no difficulty in calling in a person of an independent and semi-judicial position, such as a magistrate, or stipendiary magistrate or a commissioner for oaths, who would be always available for inquiries of this kind, so that there might be some assurance that impartiality had been observed, and that nothing irregular had taken place.

I think that the right hon. Gentleman was entirely right in framing a provisional Order, for public confidence will be disturbed on any view of the circumstances of the case, and not without reason, because one of the most alarming features of all is the points of agreement between the Majority and the Minority Reports, which are not so unimportant as people may think. They are much more important than the points of divergence. The points on which agreement was arrived at are so important that some provisional Order had to be made. So far as I can gather the terms of that provisional Order can, be reasonably said to deal with the situation between now and the time when a Commission of some sort deals finally and completely with the whole situation. It is fortunate that the right hon. Gentleman should not have made the provisional Order too wide, because the Committee will appreciate that it would be much more difficult for him subsequently to recede from a system which he framed too wide, than it would be to enlarge it if the Commission which was set up recommended that his Regulation was not sufficiently wide.

Finally, as regards the Commission, the right hon. Gentleman was good enough to refer to my view as expressed in a letter which I wrote to him, which I do not depart from for a moment, and which I had every intention of mentioning when I got up to speak this afternoon. You are not going to get any way whatever, so far as the investigations of complaints against the police are concerned, with any large and public inquiry. You will not get anything at all. I have had numerous communications from persons who have been making complaints over a period of some years. I have made certain inquiries into this matter, and the House may be interested to know that during last week I had literally hundreds of letters every day; and so I have some knowledge of the type of information which may be expected to be put before this Commission. First of all, the persons who will be prepared to give evidence openly will, in most cases, be found to be cranks, either cranks or lunatics. Those are the people who are quite prepared to come out into the open and give their evidence in public. That will all take up a good deal of time. It has to be remembered that the crank is not always an obvious crank from the moment he opens his mouth. He is very often very cunning, very well informed, and intelligent, and it takes quite a lot of time to discern whether a man is a crank or whether he is not. A good deal of the time of the Commission is going to be taken up in investigating purely worthless cases in public, and not in dealing with cases which are of more fundamental importance. In a public inquiry the really serious matters on which complaint can be made will never be brought to light at all.

It is all very well for the Home Secretary to laugh at my difficulties, but he knows perfectly that what I am saying is true, and true for very good reasons. First of all, in most cases where a person makes a complaint against the police force of corruption or of bribery or anything else of that kind he is himself, by the very reason of his knowledge, a wrong-doer. He has been guilty of a criminal act—guilty of an act from which he has derived benefit. As a general rule, those people are not going to come into the open; they will not appear before a public tribunal where their records will be broadcast. The second reason why I say there ought to be some form of private tribunal is this, that in whatever form you set up the Commission in the beginning, whether you begin by saying it is to be a private Commission, or whether you begin by saying it is to be a public Commission with power to take evidence in camera, ultimately it will become in fact and in substance a private Commission—so far as any evidence which is of value is concerned. Of that I am quite certain, and I think that if at the very beginning you say it is to be a private Commission you are really only stating in advance what you will ultimately be driven to. But there is this advantage in making the declaration in advance. The evidence ought, in many cases, to be correlated and sifted by people who could save the Commission from wasting a good deal of time. If it is known from the beginning that evidence is to be presented in circumstances of privacy and of secrecy, those people will be able to get the evidence together, and will be able to persuade their informants that they have nothing to fear from coming forward, and a good deal of the preliminary work which the Commission would have to perform would be taken off its shoulders and regularised for it in that way.

There is one other argument which I wish to address to the Home Secretary. I am not naturally an alarmist, and I am not naturally a sensation monger, but I assure the Home Secretary that he must not under-estimate the force of terror that fills the mind of wrong-doers and of people who have information which they might disclose. That force is very, very great indeed. Any assurance that the Home Secretary can give them, though he may say with all the dignity of his office, "I give them my guarantee that there shall be no reprisals," will be absolutely worthless when passed on to the man himself. I have tried it. I have shown the Home Secretary's letter, and have used every inducement at my command to get men who I knew had positively true evidence to give to identify places, names and everything else; but that assurance alone does not suffice in a great many cases. The Home Secretary must recognise that there is—whether it be justifiable or not is no business of mine to say—a reasonable fear on the part of people who might be of assistance against coming forward, not because of fear of the direct consequences of what they say or do, but on account of the indirect reprisals which they fear will reach them in their homes or surroundings in some way or another.

I have been led on by a subject in which I have taken close interest for some time to speak at greater length than I had intended, but I do think the Home Secretary ought not to come to any conclusion now, or even in the immediate future, as to what form his tribunal is to take; he should take counsel as to the form that tribunal shall take with those investigators who can put him in touch with the material which the Commission is likely to have to investigate. I do not feel that a public inquiry will be of very much use. For the reasons I have given I think it will not get the evidence. If it does get evidence, and if the evidence is anything like as devastating as some of us have been led to believe in particular cases, the work of that Commission might possibly render the greatest disservice to the State, because it might shake public confidence very much more than it is shaken at the present time. The very knowledge of that danger to public confidence might even react upon the minds of the persons who were holding the inquiry. One does not talk about Judges or judicial tribunals being intimidated—there is no such thing—but the sub-conscious knowledge of the devastating result of a conclusion in one direction or another must affect the mind of the person who is presiding over the tribunal, and in my submission that fear would be very much minimised if the obvious course were taken of definitely constituting a private tribunal for the investigation.

Everyone must admire the courage and independence of the hon. and gallant Member for Luton (Captain O'Connor). He has throughout endeavoured to defend the liberties of the subject in a matter of the very gravest importance. I am inclined to agree with him that very little public purpose is to be served by further public inquiry into this matter. The Public versus the Police threatens to be as protracted a suit as that of "Jarndyce v. Jarndyce," and it is calculated to demoralise the police force if, in perpetuity, we are going on from inquiry to inquiry and investigation to investigation. Already we have had the Savidge Tribunal and the Street Offences Committee, and now we are to have this further examination into alleged third degree methods. Very little purpose is served by any of these inquiries. The whole matter could be fully and finally settled by executive action. What is required is a revision of the rules.

Such trouble as has arisen is attributable to the spirit with which the police force is directed. It is quite wrong to attach blame to an individual police officer, who is only carrying out his duties in accordance with instructions, but there is no doubt that there has existed at the head of Scotland Yard the prosecuting mind. With a change in that direction it is to be hoped that the whole of this unfortunate series of incidents will be finally laid to rest. It is quite comprehensible that that prosecuting mind should have existed, because it is a survival of the War, but with the new appointment I very much hope that a more tolerant and sympathetic spirit will prevail.

The Home Secretary has spoken to the House with extreme candour, and I think that from first to last in this matter, as in other matters, he has shown conciliation. He is one of the best Home Secretaries who have ever held that office, and everybody must have a very great admiration for the way in which he has discharged his duty, not in any partisan spirit but with a complete desire to break down any reasons which may exist for criticism. But there is a danger in his conscientiousness. He seems to be reluctant to take any step on his own initiative. He desires rather to have some kind of Committee to advise him what to do. I think there has been complete confusion about the whole of this Savidge affair. The Committee seem to forget the circumstances in which the Tribunal was appointed. The appointment arose in this way. There was indignation because a young lady had been taken off from her place of business and had been detained at Scotland Yard for an examination lasting four or five hours. The House of Commons wanted to know how that came about, and to whom the responsibility was to be attached; and it was for that reason that the Tribunal was appointed. The Committee will remember very well the speech of the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Spen Valley (Sir J. Simon). He asked, "What would any Member of this House think if his daughter were treated in that way?" and the House of Commons approved of that attitude with great applause. We seem to have forgotten that.

The two reports, to my mind, are superfluous. It was not a question of examining into the character of Miss Savidge all over again. That young lady had been acquitted. Nobody was entitled to be interested in her physical appearance or her mental characteristics. All that we wanted to know was how it came about that this young lady was taken off to Scotland Yard, being accompanied by a woman police officer, and how it came about that that woman police officer was not present during her very lengthy examination. Both reports are decisive on that point. The police officers acted under instructions, and are completely vindicated. They followed the procedure which, unfortunately, has become the practice at Scotland Yard. The Home Secretary should, without more ado, revise the rules of that procedure. If he did that the whole case could be completely forgotten. If we are going on with these inquiries Sir Leo Money will still be giving evidence when he is an old man with a beard, and Miss Savidge will be giving evidence as a respectable married woman with all her children. For Heaven's sake let us forget about this matter. To ask the police to continue their duties with all these inquiries occur- ring is like asking a man to do work with a lot of mosquitoes buzzing round his head.

So much for the Savidge case itself; but how did the Savidge case arise, because that is the root of the whole matter? It arose out of a Hyde Park prosecution. These prosecutions are becoming too frequent, and they are becoming too frequent, not by the desire of the police force, but by the desire of those who direct the police force. What justification is there for having plain-clothes officers in Scotland Yard, unless those who direct the police force were inflamed with the prosecuting mind? Let these policemen discharge their proper duties in connection with -the detection of crime. Those duties, as we have learned this afternoon, they carry out with complete satisfaction, and they are very much to be praised. The police force hate this Hyde Park duty. The police force is not a moral force. What is wanted in Hyde Park is to warn people. It would be far better if, instead of having plain-clothes police, the police went about in red uniforms with a brass band, so as to warn people that they were coming. In the old days the police force were instructed to be tactful; now they are instructed to get prosecutions, and it is very distasteful to them.

I want to ask the representative of the Government who will speak later this question. There is such a thing as proficiency pay. The police force get pay for their proficiency. Is that pay withheld from them if they refrain from making arrests in Hyde Park? Are they encouraged to make those arrests? That is a matter of very great importance, and I believe that they are encouraged to make those arrests. The whole question is becoming like Prohibition in America. The public will not stand for it, and magistrates who try to protect the liberty of the subject very naturally seize upon any excuse to dismiss these charges. It is not fair, therefore, to consider prosecutions for perjury against the police simply because these charges are dismissed. The magistrates are as reluctant as any Member of the House of Commons would be to ruin a man's career on a charge of this kind, because the consequences of being charged with an offence of that sort far outweigh any possible fine that could be imposed. Magistrates are to be congratu- lated on the readiness which they have shown to dismiss these charges, and what the Home Secretary has to do is to stop encouraging these prosecutions.

He has another Committee of Inquiry sitting, the Street Offences Committee. What is the position there? We never wanted that Committee to be established; it was established for the same reason that the Savidge Inquiry was established, namely, because the public were indignant that men were charged with these offences with possible disaster to their whole future. What was wanted there was an instruction that no one was to be charged with an offence of that kind unless the person bringing the charge was prepared to come and corroborate it. You do not want lengthy inquiries, with bishops and old ladies and all the rest of it sitting on them month after month; you want a full and final settlement of the question by executive action, and executive action inspired by common sense. Every decent citizen deplores the bringing of charges of this kind, particularly when there is a suspicion that they have been brought quite unnecessarily. The magistrate in this case used no words which would have justified a prosecution for perjury against the police. The magistrate was anxious to dismiss this case, as all magistrates are anxious to dismiss these cases, and the mere fact that there may be ground for bringing a prosecution does not justify a prosecution being brought.

The third inquiry which is being held, that into alleged "third-degree" methods, is also, as has been pointed out by the hon. Member who has just spoken, completely unnecessary. If the "third-degree" exists in England, let it be stopped by executive order. From first to last everyone of these matters—the Hyde Park cases, street offences and "third-degree" methods—could have been settled in five minutes by executive action without coming to the House of Commons at all. Therefore, let us make an end of this zealousness for inquiry, which only produces two reports instead of one, and which settles absolutely nothing. Let us give complete protection to the British public against the risk of this kind of charge being brought, and let us give complete protection to the police, whom we have every reason to revere and respect, from being put in the position of being accused of perjury when they are merely carrying out what they are told to do. That is all that is required in this matter, and I commend to the Home Secretary what I am suggesting.

I want to say a word or two about the action of the Home Secretary which led to this inquiry. That action was the passing of all the papers to the Public Prosecutor and asking him whether a charge of perjury would lie against the two policemen. He said that he did that purely as an act of routine, that in all cases such as this it was his duty to pass the papers to the Public Prosecutor in order to see whether a prosecution for perjury should be instituted. I do not profess to know the records sufficiently well to challenge that, but it has occurred to me that there was a well-known case not so long since, that of Major Murray, in which heavy damages were paid because of a mistake by the police, and no action in regard to perjury was taken in that case. Be that as it may, the Home Secretary said that he had not in his mind when he sent the papers to the Public Prosecutor any idea that what might result would be a prosecution of Sir Leo Money for perjury. I am prepared to accept the word of the Home Secretary for that, but what was not in his mind may conceivably have been in the mind of the Public Prosecutor, because it has been brought out earlier in this Debate that there was an alternative course open to the Public Prosecutor. He had not only to assume either that the policemen had spoken the entire truth or that they had deliberately lied, but there was the middle course that they might conceivably have made an honest mistake. The Public Prosecutor apparently conceived it to be his duty to rule out entirely that third possibility that the police had made an honest mistake, and we are entitled to ask why he should have done that. I want to say that it lends colour to the belief which was prevalent in the lower ranks of the police—and often what is prevalent in the lower ranks has come down from the higher ranks—that, if they could only get Sir Leo Money in the box again, they would be able to prove that he was the perjurer and not the two policemen. I say that by acting in that way the Public Prosecutor seems to me to have laid himself open to legitimate censure.

I want to deal now with the Report as a whole, and I believe that there is widespread public disappointment with the nature of that Report—disappointment because it is indeterminate and inconclusive. Having got the two reports, the public has no clear guidance now as to whether the police were guilty of improper conduct or not, and I am going to charge the Home Secretary with a considerable degree of responsibility for that unsatisfactory result. He it was who was responsible for the selection of the personnel of this tribunal. Before the tribunal had been selected, I ventured to say in this Chamber that it should be borne in mind that even our very finest judges, from the nature of their long association with the law, their training and experience, did incline inevitably to the side of the police. A Judge was appointed as Chairman of this tribunal. I am not entitled, and I do not intend, to say anything at all about the possible bias of that judge, but I will say this, that an essential part of the machinery of justice is the truthfulness of the police, and if you begin to doubt the veracity of the police you doubt the whole fabric of your judicial system. Anyone who has come to regard that system with great respect and veneration will therefore be extremely reluctant to pass any kind of reflection upon the veracity of the police.

Having that as a background, there is this further fact, that the Home Secretary, for reasons best known to himself, chose to appear in a state of panic as to the possibilities of the destruction of public faith in the police. He said publicly that all sorts of dire calamities would result if public confidence in the police were not restored. Remarks of that kind would not fall upon entirely deaf ears, and it is quite conceivable that the tribunal, having impressed upon them by the Home Secretary the imperative necessity of restoring public confidence in the police, may have been—I do not say they were—influenced in their final decisions. I would draw an illustration of that possibility from what happened during the War. It is common ground in all quarters of the House that there were times during the War when serious blunders were made by those in charge of affairs, but those blunders were not talked of at the time, they were not punished at the time, because it was felt to be imperative that confidence in the military machine should be maintained. Let the Committee consider the position. Here is a tribunal told that it is of the highest importance that the faith in the police should be restored, and the obstacle to that is doing a certain amount of injustice to a poor defenceless girl. In the Army injustice was done to individuals deliberately for the sake of the general well-being, and it is quite conceivable that in this particular case, weighing the rights of this poor girl against the general well-being of the community as stressed by the Home Secretary, that the rights of the poor girl would go by the board. I see that it is reported that Scotland Yard is very well satisfied with the results of this inquiry. It was said by a high authority in Scotland Yard a day or so after the report was issued:

I cannot allow that. The hon. Member must not criticise the members of the Tribunal.

May I put it in this way, that it was believed that there was a stain resting upon the reputation of the police—

I think that perhaps it would be well that I should tell the hon. Member that I ought to have stopped him a few minutes earlier, if I had realised what he was saying. He might be entitled to say what facts he thought might cause unconscious bias or partiality on the part of the tribunal, whomever it was composed of, but if I understood him rightly a minute or two ago to suggest that the Tribunal might deliberately have come to some decision on grounds of what they considered to be policy rather than of justice, he is not entitled to make any suggestion of that kind.

What I was trying to suggest was this. The Tribunal, being human, and, therefore, fallible, could not perhaps been entirely indifferent to the frenzied appeals that were being made by the Home Secretary for the restoration of public confidence in the police. Let me go on to deal with one or two other points in the Report which seem to require comment. The first is that there is common ground that this poor girl was inveigled, or tricked, to use the word employed by the hon. Member for Dundee (Mr. Johnston), into going to Scotland Yard. [An HON. MEMBER: "Where is the common ground?"] It is in both Reports. [An HON. MEMBER: "There is nothing there to say she was tricked."] I am using the word tricked. She was, shall I say, beguiled into going to Scotland Yard. There is common ground also that she was taken there without any knowledge of the nature of the inquisition to which she was going to be subjected. The evidence shows that she was asked to go to take part in an inquiry. She might easily assume she was just one witness in a general inquiry. She would never dream that she was going to be alone and to be subjected to an inquisition for something like four hours. There is common ground on those two points and they are enough to make a heavy indictment against the police.

On the third point, as to whether the story of the police or the story of Miss Savidge is to be believed as to what actually took place at Scotland Yard, it is said we are not entitled to re-try that issue now. Perhaps we are not, but I think we are entitled to examine the kind of evidence upon which the two Reports based their different conclusions. In the case of the Majority Report the police are believed implicitly, but there is no kind of reason adduced for that belief in the version of the police. It is just a bald statement to the effect that they believe in the police as against Miss Savidge, whereas if you take the Minority Report you find a closely argued case for believing Miss Savidge as against the police. Do not all of us who have had any experience of Police Courts at all know how the police tell the same story to the last word when they are giving evidence together?

I will give one illustration of an incident that occurred within my own knowledge. In 1919, when I was still in the uniform of the Army, I heard a man speaking at Marble Arch. He made some derogatory references to War profiteers and to Mr. Horatio Bottomley. The crowd were amused but they were quite peaceable. Suddenly two policemen rushed up, pulled the man off the platform and took him to the police station. I had never been near a Police Court before but this was such an outrage on justice that I went and offered my services as a witness. A few days later we appeared at Marlborough Street Police Court and, to my utter amazement, never having had any experience of the lying of policemen, I heard one man after the other say in exactly the same words that this man had been making remarks which had so incensed and infuriated the crowd that they had taken him into custody for his own protection. It was absolutely grotesque lying. That little experience of itself is enough to make me suspect the complete concord with which these officers gave their evidence against Miss Savidge. You will not be able to get out of the mind of the public that at Scotland Yard someone, either the police or Miss Savidge, lied and in my opinion—I am only expressing my own opinion—the girl's story rings true. It is inconceivable that she should be able to invent and imagine the kind of incidents she has put into that statement and, in my opinion, if there was lying at Scotland Yard, as there was, that lying was not done by Miss Savidge. I gather the Home Secretary is not going to take any disciplinary action arising out of these Reports. I take it he is not going to take any disciplinary action against the Public Prosecutor on his strange conception of his duty when the papers were passed on to him. I take it he will not take any action against the police officers. He is protected by the Majority Report, which finds that all is for the best in the best of all possible police forces, and I ant sure the Home Secretary will be quite content to shelter himself behind that. He will be satisfied. But the public are feeling very keenly about this matter and, if he is satisfied by this Majority Report, they are not. They will regard this exoneration of the Public Prosecutor and of the police officials concerned as a wholly unsatisfactory termination to the indefensible treatment of a poor defenceless girl.

I wish more Members had been in the House when the hon. Member for Edge-hill (Mr. Hayes) spoke, because it was a very human speech. I think it is a tribute to the House of Commons that, whenever any subject arises, one can always find someone who has a real intimate experience of it. I agree with the hon. Member for Devonport (Mr. Hore-Belisha) that we have had enough inquiry, yet to-day we are promised even another investigation. I wonder if to-day we might make some suggestion to see if good could result from it in future. I am an enthusiastic believer in the Metropolitan Police. Of course, there must be black sheep in all the cities of the great world, but I believe there are fewer in our police force than in any other. My right hon. Friend the other day said he was impressed by the lack of confidence that was coming over the public relative to the police and the way they were losing the affection of everyone.

He mentioned, casually, motor cars. I want to put this seriously before the Committee. Has not the motor car a good deal to do with the whole of this question? We have a law to-day which is so absurd that whereas years ago we were never in combat with the police, we are now in combat with them frequently. Members of the public get brought up on the perfectly absurd charge of going, say, 25 miles an hour. They appear before a tired bench of magistrates sick to death of hundreds of motor cases who take the glib evidence of a policeman and fine them some nominal sum. They go away full of bitter resentment at what they consider gross injustice. Their feeling of injustice and resentment is not against this House of Commons as it ought to be for not making laws according to present day conditions in these things. Instead of their resentment being directed against us for our slackness in not keeping up-to-date, it focuses itself on the police. They begin, to say to themselves, "If this is the way that I am convicted for going 23 miles an hour, is it altogether well between the police and the criminal classes? Are the criminal classes being convicted on the same type of evidence that I was convicted?" That is the sort of reasoning which has lost a lot of the confidence of the English people in the police. Motorists are hounded about.

Take the ordinary case of parking. I have never seen perfectly law-abiding folk until quite recently look up and down the street like a thief to see if a policeman is about before they leave a car outside some shop. That is really putting us into a perfectly ridiculous position with regard to the law. I have voiced my opinion before in this House as to the efficiency of the police as traffic regulators. I always say and always will say that they are bad. Nobody ever agrees with me, although I always advance the perfectly convincing argument that the traffic of London never went better than when the police were on strike. That is a thing which actually happened, and I do not think that there is any more that can be said against me, because everyone knows it to be true. On this question of traffic, my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary knows perfectly well that no policeman likes regulating traffic because it is not a duty which leads him to advancement in his particular calling. It is a type of fatigue, and whether he is good or bad at it, it has no reference to his promotion. I maintain that everybody who can regulate the traffic in London well, deserves the greatest credit from the citizens of London. There should be a vast future stretching before a man if he really understands traffic circulation. I think that the time has very nearly come when a separate body of men should regulate the traffic and when separate Courts should be set up for dealing with traffic offences.

May I say one word as emphatically as I can with regard to night clubs. I am not one of those people who pretend that they do not know anything about night clubs. I know a lot about night clubs. I go to as many as I can, and I like them very much. I do not think that there is anything more pleasant after leaving this rather drab House at 11 o'clock than to go to a night club. There are some night clubs to which you could take your wife and family with every confidence and there are others at which you would be quite ashamed to be present yourself. What strikes me as so curious, and what arouses certain suspicions in the mind of the ordinary citizen, is the way in which some of these clubs are left alone and some are closed up. We have had a case of a very big night club—a perfectly respectable night club—which was closed because of some trumpery charge that persons were getting admitted without actually being members. I can point to another case of a night club which went on for six years and which never started filling until 3 o'clock in the morning and never made any pretence that you could not get champagne and wine at any hour. That was allowed to go for six years. I know that it is a very easy thing to slip down the slippery slope of bribery in connection with night clubs. At some night clubs where they supply drinks after hours money is slipped into the hands of the police, and so it goes on. I am very pleased to see that lately the raiding of clubs has been done not by the district police—that is one of the dangers of the whole thing—but by Headquarters. I should like to see the police of London, from the point of view of Divisions, changed every three months, so that you cannot have people knowing too much about what goes on, and about the arrangements as to whether clubs should be raided or not and what they can get out of people. I see that the Metropolitan Police are now raiding these clubs by what is called a "flying squad." Why they are called a "flying squad" I do not know. They have little to do with aviation. As long as this sort of thing is done from Headquarters without any reference to the local police, I think it will prove a very salutary thing.

I should like to back up my hon. Friend the Member for Luton (Captain O'Connor) with regard to the secret side of the Commission that is to be held. After all, we know that there are many things which go on in the Metropolitan Police. They are not frightfully bad things. For instance, there is the case of the taxicab driver who has to slip his 10s. note underneath the carpet before he gets his licence. That is all very bad, but it is very difficult to get a taxicab man to give evidence on such a matter if you conduct an inquiry in open court. I hope that my right hon. Friend will allow the Commission to take evidence in secret should they wish to do so, otherwise I do not think that you will ever get at the bottom of some of these curious things which happen and which give a very bad name to the police. It is important., as hon. Members on both sides of the Committee have said, that the public should have more confidence in the Police Force than in any other civic body; they used to have it, and will, no doubt, have it again if one or two of the matters to which I have referred are taken notice of.

I do not propose to follow some of the earlier speakers in criticising the Majority or the Minority Report of the Savidge Commission. I agree with my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary that no useful purpose can be served. Whatever has been done, has been done, and if this House were to upset the findings of this Commission, where should we stop? What is the next Commission going to do? Is it suggested that the House of Commons should reverse the findings of that Commission? The House of Commons, I suggest, should accept these findings as representing the balance of opinion of the majority of the members of the Commission and give effect to such findings as have been put before them. What I wanted to do was to go a little further back and to deal with one or two suggestions that I have seen in the papers as having emanated from the Home Secretary as his idea of how to eliminate those alleged unpleasant conditions which at present exist in Hyde Park. I am told by the Press that the Home Secretary has the idea either of closing the park earlier or having increased lighting. I earnestly suggest that he adopts neither of these two policies.

To my mind there are two supreme and vital questions at issue in connection with this problem of the parks. First of all, for what purpose are the parks? What is Hyde Park for? Secondly, what are the functions of the police in Hyde Park? If I may, with all deference, make a suggestion to the Committee, I should like to say that Hyde Park can shortly be described as being for the use of three sections of the community: (1) for children to play in, (2) for young people to court in, and (3) for old people to rest in. Children are usually in bed at the time that the necessity for artificial lighting arrives. Old people have transferred their rest in the park to the rest by the fireside by the time that that time arrives. Therefore, we are only left with one section.

I refer to the young people who go to the park, rightly and properly, to court there. What are my reasons for making this suggestion? Not many are fortunate enough to have homes where the seed of love can be cultivated in happy surroundings. The reasons for this may be manifold. It may be that poverty has created an and soil in which that seed has to be developed. It may be that a large and perverse family prevent the girls from bringing their young men home and carrying on their courtship under the eyes and wise guidance of the parents, or it may be that the parent is harsh and truculent and not particularly fond of having young men about the house. Whatever it may be, the fact is that we have been provided by nature and by the Office of Works with an alternative in the park, where these young people can meet under charming surroundings, in a place of beauty, and where the spark of love can grow, untrammelled by the unhappy influences of sordid and material life. Therefore, I would suggest that the Home Secretary should remember how easy it may be for these young people to be frightened away by an excess of artificial light.

I come to the second point. What are the functions of the police in regard to the park? I submit—I do not agree with the hon. Member for the Edge Hill Division of Liverpool (Mr. Hayes)—that the functions of the police are to prevent crime rather than to detect it. What is the solution of that problem? The solution is to clear every plain-clothes policeman out of the park, and to lower the lights. If a couple, a man and a girl are doing anything wrong in the park and they see a uniform policeman coming, they will stop their wrong-doing. Therefore, the purpose is achieved and you prevent a crime taking place. It is not really a criminal thing but merely a technical breach of the law. If you are committing a technical breach of the law, that is an offence, but if you are not seen, then it is not an offence. I put forward these two suggestions with the greatest confidence in the Home Secretary's broad, unbiased attitude towards social problems.

We do not want our police, for whom every one of us has the highest opinion and the highest respect, to be turned into a force of peeping Toms and organised legalised footpads. We want to maintain the high traditions which have been built up and to look upon them as the finest asset that this country has ever produced. It will be for the benefit of the police themselves to do away with the system of plainclothes officers in the parks. It is not good for their moral characters, or for their moral development to be regarded by the public with suspicion, and it is not good for the public to feel that they have no confidence in the police. I would reinforce this point because I am very serious about it, and it is not entirely a matter for laughter. It is not a good thing for the public to feel that the only safe way of going through Hyde Park is in a high-powered car. That will induce speeding, and speeding will create a physical danger in addition to the great moral dangers that the public have to run in going to Hyde Park. Therefore, I would ask the Home Secretary carefully to weigh the suggestions which I have made, and I am sure that if he could see his way to carry them out it would be well for the force and for all concerned.

The House have listened with great interest to the observations of the hon. and gallant Member for Ayr Burghs (Lieut. Colonel Moore) who has just spoken. If I remember aright, the hon. and gallant Member won very considerable notoriety by describing certain things that were going on, he said, in Moscow. The suggestion that he makes now with regard to lowering the lights and clearing out the police seems rather to be a sort of footnote to the accusations which he once made regarding the views of certain Bolshevist leaders with respect to women in the State of Russia.

I do not want to interrupt the right hon. Gentleman, but I could speak at some length on that suggestion which he has made.

3.0 p.m.

Then I am very much obliged to the hon. and gallant Member for not interrupting me. The hon. and gallant Member for Chatham (Lieut.-Colonel Moore-Brabazon) made some very practical suggestions. There can be no doubt whatever that the Home Secretary ought very seriously to consider the duties that he is imposing upon the police. Whether the law is sufficiently clear or sufficiently up-to-date or the Regulations are sufficiently clear or sufficiently common-sense to enable a human being, clothed in blue and called a policeman, to enforce them, the Home Secretary ought to satisfy us. I believe that every hon. Member of this House without agreeing with every detail to which the hon. and gallant Gentleman who has just spoken referred, will agree with him in his general proposition that if the law is fumbling, is out-of-date and cannot be applied to modern circumstances, then the policemen doing their best to enforce it are bound to be unfortunate. If policemen are to be put in the position in which some of our Metropolitan policemen are put and that they are beset by innumerable temptations, it is impossible for everyone of them to resist those temptations. But that is not the question before the Committee to-day.

The question before the Committee is a much more serious one, and it is raised by the report of the Savidge Tribunal. That question raises the very fundamental consideration of what is the relation or what ought to be the relation between a British citizen and the British police. The Home Secretary, at the close of his speech, referred to the wonderful work in the detection of crime done by his policemen. He referred to the trunk murder case, and so on. I hope that the Home Secretary is not going to allow his mind to be confused by raising that issue. The questions raised in the Savidge case, why the policemen went to Miss Savidge in the way that they did, why they took her to be examined at Scotland Yard, the conditions under which the examination was conducted and the kind of record that was made of the examination, have nothing whatever to do with the type of police problem raised by such cases as the trunk murder case. We must not be deluded by the suggestion that there is any sort of similarity and uniformity between the question of crime and the question of its detection. If police administration in relation to the rights of the subject is to be accurate and just and give us confidence, the right hon. Gentleman must not mix up the Miss Savidge problem, or the Hyde Park case problem, with the problem which is presented by any of the matters to which he referred. That is one point.

Another point is this. It is perfectly true that it is this Hyde Park case that has given rise to the proceedings we are now discussing, but the Home Secretary knows that there have been other cases. There was a case that has been turned down, and I suppose has been finally and completely closed. I wonder if the Home Secretary has the same unhappy feelings about that case as I have. I mean the Syme case. It was mixed up with various things which were done, most unfortunately, by the person who was the leading subject in that case, but leaving all that out of account I do confess that having gone into the papers my mind was left in a very unhappy state as to whether justice was done in that case. I only refer to this case because if injustice was done the failure lay in police methods, not in policemen, not in individuals, but in the working of the system. To-day, after this Debate started, news came over the tape which really must further unsettle us and make us feel that so far from doing any wrong to policemen or inflicting upon them anything which they can regard as a legitimate grievance, that an inquiry and survey into the whole methods of police administration would establish public confidence and undoubtedly conduce to the respect in which the police are held. I refer to the decision of the Scottish Courts in the Oscar Slater Appeal case. What has happened in that case, and still more what might have happened in that case, is too horrible to contemplate.

But it is the Savidge case which is now before us. The Home Secretary was perfectly right, and I hope he will allow me to join him in this, that the Hyde Park case was tried and finished, and that no- body, Public Prosecutor or not, had any business to take any act that was going to reopen it. The constitutional way of trying these people was adopted. The witnesses were heard, and the Magistrate pronounced his verdict. For anyone to try to reopen the merits of that case in connection with any question that was referred to him, was to commit an altogether illegitimate action. The Home Secretary was perfectly right, and I associate myself with him in his statement that the circumstances were such—and they were such—that he had to consider whether it was his duty to prosecute for perjury the two policemen concerned. The circumstances were such that he would have been blamed most justifiably if he had taken no steps as a result of the verdict of the Magistrate in that case.

But when the Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Archibald Bodkin, got this inquiry handed over to him, he had no business to assume special rights against Miss Savidge because it happened to be that he was making a police inquiry. There is his first and most serious and most reprehensible mistake. When he began to inquire into this case and into the question whether the evidence would justify him in advising the Home Secretary to institute a prosecution for perjury, he was bound, as any hon. Member of this House would have been bound if acting as a solicitor, to consider how he was to get his evidence without doing violation to the right that the two accused persons, who had been tried, had acquired by the verdict that the Magistrate gave. He did not do anything of the kind. The clear proposition must be laid down that in inquiries regarding police conduct, the police have no more right to obtain evidence or to approach witnesses than the Home Secretary and myself have if we happen to be in a position to require evidence in order to support us. Sir Archibald Bodkin violated that sound principle.

Then his next mistake, the next step which was absolutely unjustifiable, was his disregard of constitutional rectitude regarding his position when he wrote that letter to Miss Savidge's solicitors. The only thing I regret is that the solicitors accepted that letter at all. I regret very much that the solicitors did not simply return the letter and ask the Director of Public Prosecutions to remember his position, and to address to them a letter which any solicitor could, in accordance with his position and his relation to his client, accept from Sir Archibald Bodkin. The tone of the letter, the bullying of the letter, the threats of the letter, where the Director of Public Prosecution says—it is more than a suggestion—that "If you, the solicitors, do what you think you ought to do as the legal agents and advisers of a certain person, I will see to it that something is going to follow"—I think that is going a little bit too far, and that the public official who committed himself to that line of conduct is worthy of the most severe censure.

As far as the Debate is concerned, the text for it is to be found in the two reports presented by this tribunal. I regret exceedingly that there was not a unanimous report. It would have made the matter very much clearer if the three Commissioners could have seen their way to have signed the same report; but, that being impossible, I am very sorry that no attempt was made to abstract from the two reports the common ground in the two reports, and to get the three Commissioners to sign the common ground, with separate notes relating to the points where there was disagreement. If hon. Members read these two reports, they will find that the agreement between them is far more substantial than appears on the surface. It is unfortunate, after you read down page after page of one report, to find that only two names follow; and, having finished that report, you start another report, and having read page after page of it you find one name. The psychological suggestion is that there is absolutely nothing in common between them, whereas that is exactly the opposite to the facts. As a matter of fact, there is more in common between the two reports than there is of opposition between the two reports. Of course, from Miss Savidge's point of view, it is of the most supreme importance that her personal character should come out unimpaired and clear, but if I may, for a moment, leave Miss Savidge out of account, the parts of the two reports that are in agreement, are far more important than the parts where there is disagreement.

The parts where there is agreement relate to everything that took place outside the closed walls of that room in Scotland Yard. The language in which the point of view is expressed in the Majority Report is, perhaps, not quite so definite or so strong as the language employed by my hon. Friend who was the third Commissioner. Nevertheless, the parts relating to the visit of the police officers to the business place, and the way in which Miss Savidge was taken from the business place, show common ground between the Majority and Minority Reports and there is common ground between them when certain suggestions are made as to how the public can be protected against a repetition of all this. As my hon. Friend the Member for Dundee (Mr. Johnston) has shown in the admirable, closely-reasoned and well-documented statement with which he opened the Debate, the law journals make the position perfectly plain. I approach them as a layman and I read them as I would read the inspired Word. The "Law Times" says in a passage which was not read by my hon. Friend:

Is that from the "Solicitors Journal"?

Yes, it is. It goes on: but he sent a message to me that he did not propose to discuss with me or any of my colleagues here the question that had been referred to him until he had finished his Report; and I was so very careful to have no personal communication with him that I, also through a third party, sent a message that I highly approved of his decision and that I hoped that he would strictly carry it out. I think it is very unfair to my hon. Friend, after taking those precautions, to be accused in the way that he has been, in what I suppose we must call the leading paper of the country.

Therefore, we have common agreement that the methods of the Savidge Inquiry were wrong, and we must be protected against a repetition of those methods. That is quite plain. Do the Home Secretary's proposed Regulations do that? I doubt it. I have not had the advantage of seeing them, and I never like to pronounce an opinion upon a document unless I have seen it, but I listened as carefully as I could to what he was saying when he was reading, and I do not think that he has blocked up all the holes that have been the subject of agreement between the two sides of the Tribunal in the Savidge Inquiry. I do not like the wording of the qualification to which my hon. Friend drew attention in an interjection. The right hon. Gentleman knows perfectly well the point that my hon. Friend made, that Miss Savidge was regarded by the police and by the majority of the Tribunal as outside the fence that he has put up. If I followed him aright, Miss Savidge has already been regarded by the police who are going to apply this Regulation, and not only by the police but by the Majority of the Tribunal, as being outside the fence which he has set up to protect innocent persons like himself or myself.

That will not do. It is not innocence as defined or admitted by the police that is to be protected; it is citizenship. It is not a question of whether we are innocent or whether we are knowing, of whether we have got the experience of night clubs that the hon. and gallant Member who addressed the House a few minutes ago confessed, or whether, like some of us, we are rather glad to go from this drab and weary place to our beds at 12 o'clock at night. Those are not the two categories that have to be taken into account when you are laying down rules for the protection of British people. What you have to consider is simply this, that if A, B, C, or D, innocent or man of the world, respectable lady or otherwise, is going to give evidence which may incriminate himself or herself, they have certain rights that nobody can take away from them in the course of giving that evidence. They must be warned. Therefore, I do hope that the Home Secretary will reconsider the wording of that Regulation, provided that I have read it aright and taken in all that is implied.

The right hon. Gentleman knows that I want to carry out the views of the Commission. If you take Clause 30 of the Majority Report, on which I founded my instructions to the Commissioner, I will say here and now that my intention is to carry out the decisions of that Commission, and if there is anything in the instructions I have given already to the Commissioner of Police to minimise or in any way derogate from those decisions, I will alter them to see that they entirely coincide with the findings of the Commission.

I am obliged to the right hon. Gentleman, and may I suggest that, if it is not so wide as the doctrine I have been trying to impress, he may also take my doctrine, which is to protect citizenship and not a state of mind. With regard to this shorthand report, I am informed that the Home Secretary—I am quite sure inadvertently—is altogether wrong when he says that Miss Savidge's statement, which was taken down by her solicitor the morning after her examination at Scotland Yard, was taken in precisely the same method as that adopted by the police of Scotland Yard. I am assured by one whose word must be taken as final, that the Home Secretary was quite misinformed, that what happened was that the statement taken by Messrs. Syrett's clerk was literally word for word as given by Miss Savidge, with, of course, a little assistance from time to time in the form of questions. That raises the point I think my hon. Friend raised. I believe that the Committee will agree with us all that if a serious statement is being made by a person who may become a very important witness, it is not enough to give it literary grace, but the actual words should be given. No one knows better than the right hon. Gentleman that if I were to tell him a story, which I am sure would be a perfectly good one, and if he were going to tell it to the Attorney-General and the Attorney-General were to tell it again to the Lord Advocate, and the Lord Advocate told it to me, the alterations that would have taken place in the course of the telling would be very considerable indeed, and if it is a matter of accuracy—I am only accusing them of being human and having the imperfections of the human mind—if one word was displaced or one word slightly altered, so that its colour was different, one word was used in the way the other was not used—in fact, this is one of the key points in the Oscar Slater case; the misuse and the misunderstanding of the use of a word—and if that takes place the evidence is absolutely worthless. I think that the Home Secretary must open up his mind again with reference to the taking of verbatim evidence.

I will make another point, but I will make no comment upon it; it is an important point. A person who obeys an order of the police to go with them and gives evidence must not be taken to be a willing witness. The police have got an authority over a person's mind, and, the less a person has had to do with the police, the greater is that latent power on the part of the policeman by simply saying, "Come with me," to compel the person to come. You cannot by any process of common-sense or reason distinguish willingness from obedience when a person is asked by a policeman to do something. That is another exceedingly important matter from the point of view of public confidence.

I hope that when the new inquiry is set up, the Home Secretary will, first of all, put in front of him what really is the problem. Undoubtedly, it is the importance of police methods and police administration, but the problem is also to give public confidence. The terms must be so wide as to give public confidence, and so wide that the Commission may report upon what it thinks the best way to improve police administration. Are the police to be so organised that from the bottom the stream of men can go up and fill all the various grades of the higher posts, until at last one of them becomes Chief Commissioner? Is that possible? The present organisation does not allow it. Do not make any mistake about that. On the other hand, it may be that that is a thoroughly wrong method of dealing with the police. If so, let the Commission say so. I am sorry that the Home Secretary is not going to give us the chance of an illuminating inquiry on the part of the Commission into the control of the Metropolitan Police. The Home Secretary's first reaction to-day was a thoroughly typical Tory reaction.

I am an old-fashioned Tory.

The right hon. Gentleman is a thoroughly old-fashioned Tory, fundamental and characteristic, compelled every now and then by circumstances to abandon all his prejudices and all his fads in order to save himself from his Government. That is what he has to do now. It is another case in point. He begins with a certain assumption. The assumption is that Government control of the Metropolitan police is absolutely essential. We will not quarrel with him there. Are the Berlin police and the Paris police the types for the Metropolitan police? I hope not. I hold them in great respect, but they are not the type of organisation that I should like here or that the British public would like here. I should certainly be the last man to quarrel with you, Mr. Hope, but we never suggested any legislation. What we did suggest was that the Home Secretary should so frame his terms of reference that the Commission would inquire into this subject, and that, I think, requires no legislation. It only requires a little bit of change of heart, a little bit of wisdom illuminating the Home Secretary's Toryism, and a little bit of enlightenment regarding the real problem. If the Commission say the Home Secretary is right let the Commission say so, but let the public have a chance of getting a decision from them. I hope the whole House will see the tremendous importance of the issues raised to-day. This is not an anti-police trial, this is an attempt to establish public liberty, and at the same time to restore public confidence in the police forces of this country.

Which has never been lost.

The right hon. Gentleman's good temper and compliments have been reserved for my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary, who is here to defend himself. His more severe strictures have been reserved for the Director of Public Prosecutions, who is not here to defend himself, and it is therefore the more incumbent upon me to take such opportunity as the time affords for calling attention to such matters as deserve to be mentioned before the Director of Public Prosecutions has to suffer from the criticism which the right hon. Gentleman has passed upon him. The right hon. Gentleman began by making the very true observation that this Debate is concerned not with murder cases but with the Savidge case, and the Savidge case alone, but almost in the next breath he proceeded to make some references to a case in which, if my recollection is not wrong, he himself gave evidence, the Syme case.

No.

At one stage, I think. If I am wrong I will withdraw in a moment. I was under the impression that many years ago, in the original inception of the Syme case, the right hon. Gentleman was a witness.

Really, that is monstrous. I received a letter from this poor fellow threatening the life of a certain Minister. I handed over the letter, as it was my duty to do, and from that arose the case.

I made no suggestion of anything improper. I was merely going to say that the Syme case was more within the knowledge of the right hon. Gentleman than within my knowledge, and partly for this reason, that it was the Home Secretary in the right hon. Gentleman's administration who directed the public inquiry presided over by a Judge of the High Court into the Syme case, and with that my information ends. This Debate is not concerned with the Syme case, nor is it concerned with the Slater case, to which the right hon. Gentleman in the next breath referred, despite the fact that he had begun by saying that we were concerned with the Savidge case. I will not say anything more about the Slater case than this, that the right hon. Gentleman will no doubt find stated at full length the grounds upon which the High Court in Scotland, the Court of Criminal Appeal in Scotland, have arrived at their conclusions. Let me, therefore, leave the Syme case and the Slater case, and come to the Savidge case.

The right hon. Gentleman said, what any student of the two Reports will confirm, that there is a good deal of agreement which is worth noticing between the two Reports. I prefer the right hon. Gentleman's appreciation of what is contained in the Majority Report as well as in the Minority Report to some observations attributed to him, properly or improperly, two or three days ago, when it was reported that he had said that the majority seemed to have gone on the assumption that the first duty of the Tribunal had been to whitewash everything. If the Majority Report agreed with the Minority Report in making some severe criticisms upon the police and the Director of Public Prosecutions, it would not appear that they began with the conception of duty described in the words to which I have referred. There is one matter upon which I venture to think there has been a little misconception so far as the Director of Public Prosecutions is concerned, a matter upon which the two Reports are in absolute agreement, and it is in favour of the Director of Public Prosecutions and not in criticism upon him.

Let me say a word or two as to who the Director of Public Prosecutions is. He is an officer appointed in pursuance of Acts of Parliament, appointed by the Home Secretary, and directed to institute, undertake and carry on criminal proceedings under the direction of the Attorney-General. The present Director of Public Prosecutions is a gentleman who has held that office for some eight years. The time has passed when ordinarily he would retire. He desired to retire some 18 months ago, but under a sense of public duty and at the request of my right hon. Friend he retained the position which he has occupied for eight years, as I think to the public advantage, and there will have to be a very strong case, I suggest, before the Committee could allow any censure to be passed upon him. He has conducted something like 18,000 to 20,000 cases, of each of which, as I know from facts within my own knowledge, he retains personal cognisance and control. He directs a staff of efficient and trained persons to conduct the proceedings as advocates in the Courts of first hearing, the Police Courts and other Courts. Those gentlemen instruct the counsel who may be employed to conduct prosecutions.

It has to be borne in mind that the Director of Public Prosecutions is not an official whose duty is confined to the serious cases that come under his notice, and with ample leisure to write this letter or make that inquiry, but he is an official who conceives it to be his duty to retain personal control of every single case, be it great or small, that is committed to him in accordance with his duties, and he has informed me that he reads every single paper and deposition in connection with every one of the 3,000 cases which come before him in the course of a year. I hope the Committee will bear that in mind in judging whether a letter, when I come to mention it, exhibits any guilty intention of infringing the rights or impinging upon the rights of the public.

Then the right hon. Gentleman said, quite truly, that the two reports were in agreement. May I call attention to the fact that the Majority and the Minority Reports agree upon this, that the Director of Public Prosecutions behaved perfectly properly in not directing the examination of Miss Savidge to be undertaken by members of his staff. The hon. Member for Dundee (Mr. Johnston), as the Committee will recollect, made a criticism, which I think he repeated from a journal, that the Director of Public Prosecutions has, as I think he said, two assistant directors, three chief clerks, five assistant chief clerks, and five professional clerks, any of whom were available to conduct this examination—

To take the statement.

To take the statement. The Majority in their Report, however, on page 12, paragraph 27, state their agreement that:

"The Director … has no staff for conducting such inquiries as he desired to have made in the present case."

The hon. Member who signed the Minority Report also expresses most emphatically, on page 28, the same opinion, when he says that:

"In arranging for this to be done, the Director of Public Prosecutions was following the established practice.… He is not provided with a staff suitable for such work."

Is it any longer possible, when the Minority agrees with the Majority in saying that the Director is not provided with a staff for conducting inquiries or suitable for such work, for him to come under the censure of this Committee for asking the police to undertake an inquiry that has been entrusted to him by the Home Secretary? The Committee, and the right hon. Gentleman and the hon. Member for Dundee must acquit the Director of Public Prosecutions on that charge, unless they disagree with the opinions pronounced by both the Majority and the Minority in their Reports.

I never made that charge.

But the hon. Member for Dundee did. He referred to the point that the Director ought to have used one of the members of his staff instead of committing the duty of taking the statement to the police.

I quoted a legal paper to that effect.

I said that he quoted a legal paper, but, as I have said, that opinion, which was quoted with approval by the hon. Member, is not the opinion which is supported by the Minority any more than by the Majority Report. Whether the right hon. Gentleman made the charge or not, everyone knows that that charge has been made against the Director. It has been said that, instead of taking the statement through the police, he ought to have had the statement taken by an official in his Department or by the solicitors whom he may employ. I have pointed out that that is not a criticism which is supported by the two Reports.

The next charge that is made against the Director of Public Prosecutions is in connection with the letter which he wrote and the inquiry which he made of Sir Leo Money. This is a matter on which it is not easy to dogmatise. The hon. Member for Dundee has quoted a number of legal papers, but he has an advantage over me in that respect. He was good enough to lend me a proof of the leading article in one journal, to which I am not able to refer at the moment because I have handed it back, but it was a proof, and these legal papers are only delivered to ordinary persons by post on Saturday morning. Therefore, the hon. Gentleman has an advantage over me—

The Attorney-General is completely wrong; here is to-day's issue of the "Solicitors Journal."

I am referring to the "Law Times," a proof from which the hon. Gentleman lent to me. The duty of persons to make answers to inquiries by the police is one which may well engage the attention of the Committee for a moment. It is quite obvious that the Director of Public Prosecutions has a duty to make inquiries in matters committed to him. His duty is to institute proceedings, and he cannot institute proceedings until he has made inquiries. The duty to make inquiries must, as everybody agrees, be exercised with discretion. No one denies that. But, if he has to make inquiries, it is essential that the public shall cooperate with him in those inquiries. It it quite obvious that you cannot make inquiries if everyone is to decline in any circumstances to give the police or the Director of Public Prosecutions an answer to their inquiries. The fact is that, just as the Director must exercise his duties with discretion, or the police must exercise their duties with discretion, so members of the public must perform their duty to the community with equal discretion and with equal public spirit.

The right hon. Gentleman speaks about citizenship. I cannot understand a higher duty of citizenship than that individual citizens should give such information to the police as is necessary to ascertain offenders and to lead in due course to their conviction if they be guilty. Then, of course, as in so many matters connected with our English habits, there are rights on the one side and duties on the other. Everyone knows that a man may decline to answer ques- tions that may tend to incriminate himself, and many persons would decline to answer questions because they do not wish to be mixed up in criminal proceedings. Such persons must make up their minds whether it is a higher duty to give information or to protect themselves against inconvenience and trouble. I am not suggesting for a moment that either the Director of Public Prosecutions or the police have any right to go to Sir Leo Money and demand, as a legal duty, with sanction behind it, that he should make a statement upon this or any other matter. What I am saying is that when he went to Sir Leo Money it was a perfectly proper request to ask him to make a statement, and it was a request which Sir Leo Money might assent to or decline, for such reasons as seemed good to himself. I cannot help saying that when a man refuses to make a statement which is required in order that justice may be done, the Director of Public Prosecutions has a right to call the attention of the person who refuses it to what he conceives to be his public duty to assist the police in making proper inquiries, and it would be simply impossible for the administration of justice to be carried out if the public got it into their minds, whenever the police came to them and asked them for information, that they were entitled, having regard to the duties of citizenship, to decline to give the police information which was within their power. Certain cases, as I have said, justify a refusal, and one of those cases is that mentioned in the report of the majority, in which the character, the reputation or the credit of the person whose evidence is asked for is involved. But instead of giving my own opinion let me give the opinion of a Lord Chancellor expressed in a case before the House of Lords some 60 years ago in which he used the words: character or reputation or credit is at stake. I do not claim any higher right for the Director nor does the Director claim any higher right for himself. I have stated the public duty and I have stated the exceptions as briefly as is possible.

Let me now deal with the letter. I think the last sentence of the letter has been misunderstood. I am allowed to say by the Director of Public Prosecutions that if he had sat down with greater consideration to draft a letter appropriate to the occasion he has no doubt there are words and sentencecs in it which would have been differently phrased, and that is a confession which no man need be ashamed of. It is a confession which will, I think, elicit public sympathy even with the Director when you realise the multifarious and increasing duties I have described. I do not wish to paraphrase the right hon. Gentleman's paraphrase of the letter, therefore I will not repeat it, but in substance it is something like this, that the Director wrote and said, "If you will not allow your client to give you the evidence I will take steps to see that he must," or something to that effect. Let me read the last sentence: Interruption. ] I am sug- gesting to the Committee an interpretation, which it is quite obvious, does not occur to hon. Members opposite, or they would not be so surprised at it. If they will only clear their minds of a little prejudice in this matter and for once assume that even the Director of Public Prosecutions, against whom their hand is turned for the moment, is entitled to be regarded as innocent until he is convicted, they will not read this sentence necessarily with the interpretation which they have sought to place upon it. [An HON. MEMBER: "Say what it means then!"] I have told the hon. Member. I will now leave it as I only have a few moments left. The letter, as I have said, was framed by the Director of Public Prosecutions with a view to the performance of his duty. There was one sentence from the "Law Times" which the hon. Member for Dundee did not read. It is one of the material parts: him, and I am sure that the Committee is not going to convict him on the flimsy grounds suggested by the right hon. Gentleman and his Friends.

Question put, "That a sum, not exceeding £3,536,160, be granted for the said Service."

The Committee divided: Ayes, 63; Noes, 211.

Original Question again proposed.

rose —

It being after Four of the Clock, The CHAIRMAN, and objection being taken to further Proceeding, left the Chair to make his Report to the House.

Committee report Progress; to sit again upon Monday next, 23rd July.

I object.

This is purely a formal stage to the introduction of a Bill, and it has been agreed with the Leader of the Opposition to have a discussion on the Committee stage.

Question put.

proceeded to collect the voices and stated that he thought that the "Ayes" had it.

No.

I think the Ayes have it.

On a point of Order. Have I not the right, after Four o'clock, to object to this Resolution being reported?

I took the voices and I thought that the Ayes had it, and I still think that they have it.

That is very clever, but I think I am entitled, after Four o'clock, to object, and that a simple objection is sufficient to stop a Motion.

The objection was not maintained until the Question was put from the Chair.

Bill ordered to be brought in upon the said Resolution by Sir William Mitchell-Thomson, Mr. Arthur Michael Samuel and Viscount Wolmer.