I beg to move, That the Clause be read a Second time.

This Amendment has been asked for by the Government of Northern Ireland to enable the Parliament of Northern Ireland to legislate for purposes similar to those contained in Clause 1 of the Bill. It has been suggested that the Parliament of Northern Ireland might be unable to do this without express provision in that behalf because of a possible contravention of Section 5 of the Government of Ireland Act, 1920. That Act precludes that Parliament from making laws the effect of which is to take any property without compensation.

I beg to second the Motion.

I do so with some difficulty because, although I am not a Scottish lawyer, I cannot see any reason why the Bill as drawn should not apply to Scotland. However, I am informed that the Scottish Law Officers say that the law in Scotland is so complicated that it would not work. Therefore, I think that we must leave the matter as it is.

I beg to move, in page 1, line 8, to leave out "assent" and to insert "approve".

I wonder, Mr. Speaker, whether, for convenience and economy of time, we can discuss with this Amendment the Amendments in page 2, lines 1 and 9?

indicated assent.

The drafting of subsection I was criticised in Committee and at other times on the ground that it might be held to restrict the powers of the court to the case in which the arrangement is proposed independently of a person on whose behalf the court's assent is asked for. On this view, it would not be possible for the proposed arrangement to be brought forward on behalf of an infant or any other person under disability. The argument is that the word "assent" in page 1, line 8, suggests that the initiative is elsewhere and that, as a man cannot be said to assent to his own proposal, the court, which is doing for the infant what he would do for himself if he were of full age, cannot assent to a proposal brought forward on his behalf.

I am sure that the House will agree that it is clearly desirable that there should be no doubt that the court should have power to approve an arrangement in a proper case irrespective of whether it is brought before the court by the trustees, by a beneficiary of full age or, indeed, on behalf of a person under disability.

I beg to second the Amendment.

On Second Reading, I ventured to say that I considered that various drafting Amendments were necessary. In Committee, I put down a number of Amendments, two of which seem to be dealt with by the Amendments now proposed by my hon. Friend.

I welcome the Amendment. On Second Reading, the intention of the House was quite clear: namely, that infants should be put in precisely the same position as people who are sui juris in applications contemplated by the Bill. The difficulties arising from the drafting of the Bill were two. The first was that it did not cover the case where the proceedings was initiated by an infant. The second was that by the reference to the word "arrangement" and the way it was used in the original form of drafting, it might be held to indicate that the arrangement had to be brought before the court independently of the court's participation in its making.

For that reason, this matter was considered by the Committee of the Chancery Bar Association. That Association was anxious that the matter should be put right, obviously in accordance with the Parliamentary intention. In accordance with its wish and my own conviction, I was asked, as Chairman of that Association, to further its views upon the matter. I accordingly put down an Amendment, which stands in my name, in page 2, line 34, at end insert:

(7) An application to the Court under this section may be made by the trustees, or by any of them, or by or on behalf of any person beneficially interested under the trusts (whether or not such person is sui juris) and the Court may on any such application make an order assenting on behalf of any person (including a person not sui juris on whose behalf the application is made) to an arrangement proposed by the applicant, and whether or not there is any other person beneficially interested under the trusts who is of full age and capable of assenting thereto.

I am satisfied that the Amendment of the hon. Member for Ruislip—Northwood (Mr. F. P. Crowder) completely covers the purpose of my own Amendment and, therefore, I very much welcome it.

There is one small point about which I feel a little difficulty, because I have seen the Amendments of the hon. Member for Ruislip—Northwood only this morning for the first time. I refer to the Amendment in page 2, line 9. I do not quite follow exactly what is in the hon. Member's mind. As I interpret them, the words of the Amendment seem a little startling and I should be grateful for an explanation.

Strictly speaking, that Amendment might well be said not to be necessary. It is meant to be purely consequential upon the Amendments in page 1, line 8, and page 2, line 1.

I beg to move, in page 2, line 19, at the end to insert:

(4) Subject as hereinafter provided the jurisdiction conferred by subsections (1) and (2) of this section shall be exercisable by the High Court, except that the question whether the carrying out of any arrangement would be for the benefit of a person falling within paragraph (a) of the said subsection (1) shall be determined by order of the Judge or Master in Lunacy if a committee has been appointed of that person's estate or a receiver has been appointed of his income.

The purpose of the Amendment is to ensure that on application to the High Court for approval of any arrangement affecting the interests of a person who is of unsound mind for whom either a committee or a receiver has been appointed, the Judge or Master in Lunacy should have to be satisfied that the arrangement is for the benefit of the patient, while at the same time—this is the differentiation—leaving to the High Court, which in practice will be the Chancery Division, the wider question of whether in all the circumstances the arrangement is one which should be approved.

As the House knows, the Judge in Lunacy already has an inherent jurisdiction to approve of a variation of any trust in which a person of unsound mind is interested if he considers it to be for the patient's benefit. It would be undesirable that on an application to the Chancery Division under the Bill, a receiver should in effect be able to bind his patient's interests without reference to the Court of Protection under whose jurisdiction or directions he normally acts.

I beg to second the Amendment.

This is a complicated Amendment and I have had only half an hour in which to consider it, but it seems to me to be right. It also seems to me, from what I know of lunacy practice, to be exactly the same as the existing law. There is, however, no harm in making the position quite clear.

I beg to move, in page 2, line 34, at the end to insert:

"or the powers of the Judge in Lunacy".

I wonder if I may remind the House of the jurisdiction in lunacy. This was formerly vested in the Lord Chancellor and the Lords Justice of Appeal. It was not transferred to the Supreme Court when that was set up in 1873. It is still an independent jurisdiction, and is now exercised by judges of the Chancery Division. Much of the jurisdiction is exercised in the first instance by the Master in Lunacy, from whom, of course, appeal lies to a judge. Since 1947 the office of the Master in Lunacy has been known generally as the Court of Protection.

The purpose of this Amendment is to preserve the inherent jurisdiction which enables the Judge in Lunacy to approve of any variation or rearrangement of trusts in the interests of persons being of unsound mind. In a case in which such a person is the only beneficiary under disability the application for the variation of a trust or settlement will no doubt continue to be made to the Judge in Lunacy rather than to the High Court under the new powers provided by this Bill.

I beg to second the Amendment.

I would venture to say that the Amendment leaves the law exactly as it is and is, therefore, unnecessary, but if it makes for any clarification of the point, so far as the Judge in Lunacy is concerned, it gives me pleasure to second it.

I beg to move, in page 2, line 37, to leave out subsection (2).

This Amendment is consequential on the new Clause relating to the extent and provisions as to Northern Ireland.

I beg to second the Amendment.

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time.

There is now every prospect that the decision in Chapman and Chapman will no longer hang heavily, as it has done in the past, upon infants, in particular, and other persons suffering from disability. For that I have to thank the co-operation I have received from all quarters in the House.

In such deliberations as we have had upon this Bill, the speeches have been confined, in the main, to lawyers, and I think the House would agree they have been very much the better for that, because they have been practical and to the point. There has been no political friction or seeking of political publicity or paying off of scores whatsoever. Throughout the proceedings on this Bill we have seen the House perhaps at its best, dealing with something which ought to be put right, dealing with it efficiently, practically, sensibly, with the arguments directed to the point at issue throughout.

As I say, for that I have not only to thank my learned Friends on this side of the House, but the advice and co-operation which I have in particular received from the hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for Leicester, North-East (Sir L. Ungoed-Thomas) and his hon. Friends who have also assisted in this matter. We shall now, or very shortly, perhaps, be able to say that the court, whose main and fundamental interest must be able to help the infant in such matters, now for the first time, because of this Bill, will be able to do so.

It was somewhat picturesquely said at one stage that the position which now exists was this, that the child was being throttled by the straps which bound it to the infant's chair. One hopes that very soon now those straps will be released. It is hardly necessary for me to remind the House that, with penal taxation and penal death duties, conditions are very different today from what they were when many trusts were originally written out, possibly with quill pens in dusty Victorian offices some fifty or sixty years ago.

There is perhaps only one unhappy feature about this Bill, and that is that one cannot make it retrospective. Of course, those who have had to suffer as a result of this situation unfortunately cannot through this Bill, unless the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who appears to be somewhat retrospectively minded, should see fit to help, be benefited.

As I say, I should like to thank all concerned who have assisted me in this matter.

I beg to second the Motion.

I am sure I speak for all hon. Members when I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip-Northwood (Mr. F. P. Crowder) upon the way he has presented and conducted the Bill, and upon the practical, quiet, efficient way in which he has carried the Bill through.

As I did on Second Reading, it would probably be proper for me to declare an interest, in that I am a member of a firm which does a considerable amount of trust and Chancery work. Although I fully agreed with the objects of the Bill, I had grave doubts about some of its provisions and wondered whether there were a number of errors. Some of these I sought to deal with by putting down Amendments, and I talked over others with my hon. Friend, and his co-operation and assistance have been most useful, and I now feel that the general public will be extremely grateful to him. This Bill has aroused a very considerable amount of interest in legal circles. I have had a number of letters about it.

I think there has been only one matter about which any difference of opinion has arisen in the House. That was a matter raised in Committee by the hon. and learned Member for Northampton (Mr. Paget) and dealt with by my right hon. and learned Friend the Solicitor-General. It was the question whether applications under this Bill should be made in open court, as opposed to Chambers, where they are made at the present time.

As a practitioner who has had to advise people at the early stages before learned members of the Bar have been called in, who has had to advise people whether an application would be likely to be successful or not, I found the proposition made by the hon. and learned Member for Northampton extremely attractive, the proposal that the applications should be in open court in matters such as this. Very often one has found oneself in difficulty in saying what would be the likelihood of the success of an application, because one could not find on the record what had happened in a similar case.

Therefore, I thought the proposition attractive, but since then I have given the matter very considerable thought, and I have consulted a number of my colleagues who are members of the lower branch, as it is called, of the profession, and I have come to the conclusion, with considerable reluctance, I may say, that I do not think it would have been practical to have implemented any such proposition as that. Great difficulty would undoubtedly have arisen for a number of people when the interests of infants were being considered. Having given the matter my very careful consideration, I think my hon. Friend is quite right in having resisted this proposal, although, as I say, as a practitioner it very much appeals to me.

I join in the congratulations offered to the hon. Member for Ruislip—Northwood (Mr. F. P. Crowder) upon the way in which he has handled the Bill throughout. For a mere common lawyer to handle Chancery matters with the command and clarity which he has shown is astonishing and enviable to one who himself comes from the Chancery side.

The hon. Member was kind enough to make reference to my hon. Friends and myself. I would make it clear that it is not only members of the profession in this House who have been active about the Bill but also members of the profession outside the House, including, in particular, those with whom I am concerned, the members of the Chancery Bar. It was a member of the Chancery Bar who saw the difficulty which occasioned the Amendment which the hon. Member introduced this morning. After consideration had been given to it by the committee of the Chancery Bar Association, I tabled the Amendment in my name, in the fear that the Government might not adopt the hon. Member's suggestion. I am glad that the Government have adopted the suggestion and made it clear that infants are to be on the same footing as others within the ambit of the Bill.

With regard to publicity, on Second Reading I indicated that I did not consider that one could support a sweeping provision that all cases within the Bill should be heard in open court, but that it certainly was desirable that the general practice, subject to the judges' discretion, should be that the hearing should be in open court. That is my personal view. There is a division of view in the profession about this. It is certainly a matter which should be considered, as I suggested on Second Reading, by such a committee as has so effectively been presided over recently by Lord Justice Jenkins.

On Second Reading the Solicitor-General indicated that the Government would give consideration to the matter. I do not know whether he is in a position to make any statement about it now, but we certainly hope that this important aspect of this type of litigation will be given consideration by the Government with a view to having a proper inquiry into the best course to be adopted in the general interest.

I would not think it right to detain the House, but I desired to say at this stage what a pleasure it has been to listen to the fair wind which from all sides of the House has propelled my hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip—Northwood (Mr. F. P. Crowder) forward and to observe the skill of his navigation under such propulsion. He has been fortunate, and we are all glad to congratulate him again at this stage.

I also want to thank the members of the Chancery Bar, the hon. and learned Member for Leicester. North-East (Sir L. Ungoed-Thomas) not excepted, for their help in trying to get the terms of this wholly non-controversial Bill right. The hon. and learned Member talked about the Government accepting an Amendment. This is not a Government Bill, and what he had to do was to apply his persuasion, as he has successfully done, to my hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip—Northwood. I do not mind saying that I am very glad to think that he accepts the view that very common lawyers have actually ventured to improve on his own original shot at the wording. I am obliged to all the members of the Chancery Bar who have helped.

On the topic of open court or not open court, I am not in a position to make any kind of statement. I do not think the House would expect me to do so. We have had a full discussion about this. I doubt whether anybody is really suggesting that the Bill is defective because it does not contain some sweeping provision on these lines. The real issue—the Bar is indeed divided about it—is whether the matter with regard to discretion left with the judges should be loaded one way or the other or whether it is just fairly left at their discretion. In these matters what will count is that attention will be given to what has been said in the House by Her Majesty's judges who are concerned with the matter whether any governmental pronouncement about it is made or not. I can only say at this stage that I am not in a position to make one, and I know the House will understand that. I am glad that we are now ready, I hope, to send my hon. Friend's Bill further on its way.

Surely the Solicitor-General does not suggest that the judges should alter their practice in view of observations made in the House. Clearly, they will not. The only method by which the matter can be dealt with is by the Government taking the initiative and referring the matter to some committee for consideration, and then, in the light of a proper investigation of that kind, the matter could be considered with a view to the general practice of the court being altered.

I do not say that what is said in this House would alter the practice of Her Majesty's judges. It would be a sorry day for the administration of justice when that happened. However, I say that in considering what their practice should be they would be attentive to the kind of considerations which were urged here. I have no doubt about it. It seems right and sensible. That is all that I can say at the moment.

Although I was unable to take part in the Committee stage of the Bill, perhaps I might be allowed to say a word and particularly to congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip-Northwood (Mr. F. P. Crowder) on the great success of his endeavour, with which I was very glad to be associated in the early stages.

I think my hon. Friend will remember that it was said at the very beginning of the enterprise that he was being rather bold about it and that certain people were not very optimistic about the result. The Bill is a great example of what can be done by a Private Member's Bill. But for my hon. Friend's determination and persistence in getting the Bill on the stocks originally, it is very doubtful whether anything would have been done, at any rate for some considerable time. I feel it desirable, as a House of Commons matter, to record that we have here a very practical and concrete example which contradicts the statement sometimes made by people, who are really very ignorant about it, that Private Members' Bills do not achieve any useful results. I hope that the Bill will be only one of many such Bills which will have the result of improving the rather difficult and dark corners of the law. I have the greatest possible pleasure in supporting it.

I beg to move, in page 2, line 6, to leave out "conclusive" and to insert "prima facie".

The Amendment raises a point on a matter which is perhaps technical in form but in which there is a good deal of practical substance, particularly from the point of view of the liberty of the subject and the way in which the subject should be treated.

The matter was put extremely concisely by the hon. Member for Ashford (Mr. Deedes) when moving the Second Reading of the Bill, and I cannot do better than quote his words. He referred to one matter to which the Royal Commission gave attention, and went on:

"As the law now exists, the spouse of a person serving in Her Majesty's Forces can be at a disadvantage compared with the spouse of a civilian. The short point is that at present a wife whose husband is in the Services and who is petitioning for divorce on grounds of her husband's insanity cannot rely on any period during which he has been receiving care and treatment in a military or naval hospital. Only care and treatment pursuant to an order or warrant under the Army Act falls within Section 1 (2) of the Matrimonial Causes Act, and such an order is not issued until the man is about to be transferred to a civilian hospital. Clause 1 (2) provides that a certificate from the Admiralty or the Secretary of State shall henceforth be conclusive evidence of the facts certified, and this will mean that mental treatment in a military hospital will qualify under Clause 1 (1, a)."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 6th December, 1957; Vol. 579, c. 810.]

I am all in favour of the substance of the whole of that quotation, except the short reference to the certificate from the Admiralty or Secretary of State being conclusive evidence of the facts certified. The Amendment is to substitute

"prima facie evidence of the facts certified"

in place of

"conclusive evidence of the facts certified."

This kind of matter has been raised before on different Bills. I personally have always taken the view that certificates of this kind should be prima facie evidence rather than conclusive evidence, and I will briefly explain my attitude. I agree at once that there are categories of cases in which a certificate of the Secretary of State must be conclusive; for instance, matters dealing with international relations, Government decisions, policy matters, matters in which the Government must decide and in which inevitably the certificate of the Secretary of State should be accepted as conclusive evidence.

We are here dealing with an entirely different category of case. We are dealing with a case not of policy but of fact. The certificate of a Secretary of State on a matter of fact in civil litigation between two citizens is to be taken as conclusive evidence as the Bill now stands. I ask why.

It is inconceivable that any certificate in a similar case, if it were given not by a Secretary of State but by any organisation, however reputable, should be accepted as conclusive evidence. If provision were made for it being accepted as evidence at all, it would be prima facie evidence. It sounds very grand to refer to a certificate of the Secretary of State, but it is a certificate issued on information provided by civil servants who are as human and as subject to error as anybody else. There might conceivably arise difficulties of fact, and this is a certificate dealing exclusively with facts. There might be some kind of slip or some kind of mistaken identity—a difficulty of that sort obviously could arise. In those circumstances, why should the certificate be accepted as conclusive?

I agree at once that it is reasonable and administratively convenient that it should be accepted as prima facie evidence, but why should it not be possible for the person against whom the certificate is invoked to establish that there is some mistake about it, that there is something wrong about it and that the certificate is not correct? Why is it not sufficient for it to be accepted as prima facie evidence?

I appreciate the administrative convenience from the point of view of the Department of State concerned, because there can be no question of inquiry or of cross-examination. All the Department has to do is to issue the certificate and not be bothered about it any more. But why should it not be bothered about it any more? This is a matter in which a slip might occur and in which some mistake of fact might be made. Why should it not be possible for the certificate to be treated otherwise than as conclusive?

It seems to me utterly wrong in principle and impinging on what would normally be regarded as the liberty of the subject, and to be done for no other reason than administrative convenience. When an issue of this kind arises, we should come down quite firmly against administrative convenience. To accept the certificate as prima facie evidence is reasonable, but to provide that it should be conclusive evidence and that whatever mistakes may be made—and there is liability to mistake, of course—the certificate should be conclusive, is intolerable. While appreciating the strength of the administrative argument, I fail to see that there is any other argument, and on an issue of this kind the administrative argument should not prevail.

:I support the Amendment. Apart from the reasons already given, there is another matter which I want to raise. The Bill does not interfere with the basic requirement that the person concerned shall be incurably of unsound mind. It merely deals with the question as to what is meant by the words "being under care and treatment". I am a little worried about the words.

"shall he conclusive evidence of the facts certified".

In subsection (2), the words used are:

"… a certificate by the Admiralty or Secretary of State that a person was receiving treatment for a mental illness during any period … shall be conclusive evidence of the facts certified."

Supposing that the certificate stated that he was receiving treatment for a disease which rendered him incurably of unsound mind. Would the court have to accept that as conclusive evidence of his being incurably of unsound mind? As the matter stands, it may well be argued that that is the case because the words are

"shall be conclusive evidence of the facts certified".

It very much depends on what facts are certified. What is the court to say in the case if the facts are certified in that way?

I appreciate the administrative difficulty which the subsection seeks to surmount, and I can well understand that from the administrative point of view such a certificate should certainly be prima facie evidence. However, I agree strongly with the Amendment that it is far too much to say that the certificate is conclusive evidence. In some cases, that would obviously rule out any possibility of error or slip which occurred being rectified by evidence adduced in the court at a later stage.

We do not burn with fervour about this one way or the other, but I am not sure whether the reason why the word "conclusive" is there is fully appreciated. The position under the Matrimonial Causes Act, 1950, as it stands would be that if a serving man were detained under an order or warrant under the appropriate Service Act, he would be deemed to be under care and treatment for the purpose of the Act as it stands.

The difficulty which the subsection in the Bill was designed to meet was that it is not Service practice to issue such an order or warrant until the moment comes to transfer the Service man from the Service hospital to a civilian mental hospital, and so the other party is robbed, as it were, for the purpose of her case, of the period of detention in the Service hospital.

The only point I am seeking to make for this purpose is that supposing the requisite certificate, order or warrant had been issued at the beginning of the term of incarceration in the Service hospital, that, for the purpose of these proceedings, would be conclusive evidence. All we are doing in the Bill is to enact that it should be possible to certify conclusively and in an exactly parallel way in relation to the time spent in the mental hospital. That is why it is not quite right to say that this is a matter of purely administrative convenience. It is merely to catch up on time that it is suggested that this should be regarded as conclusive evidence. I do not wish to say any more; I merely lay the foundations for any further discussion that might arise.

As for the point mentioned by the hon. and learned Member for Stoke Newington and Hackney, North (Mr. Weitzman), I venture to submit that that is not a very great difficulty. The subsection enables a certificate to be used for certain evidential purposes only, and if it purports to contain evidential propositions outside the empowering of the subsection the court will not be entitled to treat it as admissible evidence. That is my view, but I would not run away from saying that if hon. and learned Members opposite or others feel some anxiety about the matter there will be an opportunity to consider it again later, and we shall do that. I cannot undertake to make any Amendment, because I believe that the present wording is right, but if there should be the slightest doubt about it perhaps the matter could be dealt with in that way.

I appreciate the force of what the learned Solicitor-General has said about the warrant being conclusive and a certificate having the effect of, as it were, antedating the mental illness to a period before the date of the warrant, and that there might therefore be some discrepancy if the certificate, too, were not treated as conclusive. I am not satisfied with that argument. It seems to suggest that, although the regarding of the certificate as conclusive evidence may be said to be black, nevertheless, because there is also a warrant which is black, the two blacks make a white. That is hardly an acceptable line of reasoning.

I am not sure that the position in connection with the warrant would not be rather different from that of the certificate. If the warrant were issued as conclusive. I am not at all sure that the only thing with which the court would be concerned would be the identification of the man with the person referred to in the warrant. That, at any rate, might be susceptible to investigation in the court, but I am not sure that the certificate would not go rather further and be conclusive on matters on which the warrant would not be conclusive.

This is a matter which requires consideration, and I mention the point to show that I do not feel happy about the Solicitor-General's reply. I welcome his indication that, in some tentative sort of way, he is not completely opposed to the principle of the argument that I put forward, and I very much hope that he will reconsider the matter before the Bill is completely disposed of.

In those circumstances I beg to ask leave to withdraw the Amendment.

I beg to move. That the Bill be now read the Third time.

When we first considered the Bill four and a half months ago, I said that I thought it was a short and very limited Bill, the objects of which I hoped the House would find generally acceptable. I also said that it was a simple Bill, and up to a few minutes ago I sincerely believed that to be so. Now I am not so sure.

I acknowledge with gratitude the help received from hon. Members on both sides of the House, not least from hon. and learned Members, without whose assistance I should have been in some difficulty. Admittedly the Bill is a very small contribution—it is only a leaf or two out of the voluminous Report of the Royal Commission—but among the categories of marital misfortune there are none more worthy of compassion than those involving insanity. Mercifully, the numbers affected are few, and the Measure therefore affects only a few people. But such as they are, the burdens for them are very great, and even the smallest injustice can greatly add to them. Even this very narrow Measure lifts one or two of those burdens, and I hope that on that account the Bill will be thought worth while, and that the House will agree to give it a Third Reading.

I beg to second the Motion.

I welcome the Bill. It is a very good one, and deals with cases of very real hardship. I rise to speak now because I want to raise a point which has struck me in connection with Clause 2, which has caused me some little difficulty. I appreciate the intention behind it, which is a good one, but as it is at present worded the court has to consider whether it can infer that if the respondent had been capable of continuing the necessary intention he would have done so.

That seems to me to give rise to a number of difficult problems. I want to instance one, in the hope that if it is a point of real substance it can be put right in another place. I will take what is by no means in unusual case. A wife may be deserted by her husband, and after a period of years she may begin to live with someone else—the two persons living together as husband and wife. Shortly afterwards the true husband may become insane and the wife presents a petition on the ground of desertion. As I understand the law at the moment, the normal rule is that the deserted spouse who subsequently commits adultery is put to the burden of proving that the adultery she has committed has not affected the mind of the deserting spouse. If the petitioner cannot show that, it may well be held that the desertion has been terminated by the adultery, and her petition will fail.

How is the court to deal with a situation arising in that way? If the husband is insane and has not the mind to form any continuing intention, it is quite impossible to say that he can bring his mind in any way to bear upon the question of his wife's adultery. In those circumstances it seems to me that the wife's petition would fail as Clause 2 is at present worded, and that might well be a very real hardship.

I recognise that the intention behind the Clause is very good; it seeks to remove the difficulty which now arises and to provide that because a spouse is insane and unable to form an intention the period of insanity is disregarded and the court decides upon the basis that the desertion continues. I have given an example to show that the difficulty may well continue. Therefore, while I welcome the Bill and the intention of Clause 2, I hope that the matter which I have raised will be considered, in order to see if something can be done to put the matter beyond doubt.

I beg to move, That the Clause be read a Second time.

The hon. Member also has on the Order Paper two Amendments to Clause 25, in page 20; one is line 16, at end insert:

Provided that the Council shall first be satisfied that high standards of professional conduct are being generally applied by opticians in fixing charges to the general public for optical appliances or parts of optical appliances.

and the other in line 34, at end insert "and their prices".

The two Amendments seem to provide an alternative method of effecting the same purpose as that of the proposed new Clause. Perhaps we can have one discussion covering the Clause and the two Amendments.

That would be very convenient, Mr. Speaker, I understand from what you have just said that at a later stage I may be given the opportunity formally to move the Amendments and to call a vote on them if need be. At this stage we can discuss the Amendments and the proposed new Clause together. I shall be as brief as I can in explaining the situation covered, but perhaps I may be allowed to go into at least some of the history of the origins of the proposals. This matter is, perhaps, apart from the Amendment in the name of the hon. Member for Kirkdale (Mr. N. Pannell), the most controversial matter, and, therefore, perhaps I may take a little time in order to justify my proposals.

12 noon.

The effect of the new Clause, if I may take that first, would be that the General Optical Council, following its constitution, would have the duty of looking at the way in which opticians charge for privately supplied spectacles and the duty of publishing guidance to opticians about the system which they should follow in fixing those charges. Many of us believe that the high standard of professional conduct needed here is that of having a system of charging whereby a charge is made to the patient for doing the actual work of dispensing the spectacles and then of adding the cost price of the frames and lenses, as compared with the prevalent and almost wholly universal method today of simply charging, say, five or six guineas for a pair of spectacles.

The new Clause would give the Optical Council the duty of guiding the profession, once it is constituted as a regulated profession under the Bill, and of telling the profession how best in its own professional good interest it should proceed in fixing these charges. It would not, and I would repeat this time and again if I may, have the job of seeing that the charge was so many shillings or pounds for doing the work; it would only outline the system which should be followed and would leave the actual cost to be regulated either by the individual optician or on the recommendation of his professional association. The Council would be doing this job in order to get a change in the system.

Having done this, the Council would put pressure on the opticians to carry out this system by publicity, merely by saying, "This is the professional way of doing it. If you want a good reputation, this is the way to do it." The Council would not be able to force opticians to do it. There would be no penal clause. But I believe that if the profession is to live up to its own reputation it will want to carry out the sort of thing recommended by its Optical Council.

The first Amendment which we are discussing with the new Clause is that which would come into operation with Clause 25. Clause 25 was exhaustively discussed in Committee. The contentious paragraph of Clause 25 is paragraph (a) which gives the Optical Council power to prohibit advertising by opticians. I am saying that the alternative way of carrying out what I have in mind, which is to get a professional system of charging in the profession, is to say that this ban on advertising cannot come into force until the Optical Council has satisfied itself that the profession has put its house in order in this respect—until, in fact, the professional bodies have recommended to the individual optician that there should be a professional system of charging and opticians generally have put that system into practice. That is the effect of the Amendment. It is, as it were, an alternative way of carrying out what I have in mind.

The advantage derived from the new Clause would be that the Optical Council would not have the job of doing any investigating, of drawing up codes of conduct or of making recommendations and publishing them. It would simply have to be satisfied that the profession was doing the thing for itself and was being successful in securing acceptance of the system by opticians generally. To that extent, therefore, the Amendment is perhaps more acceptable than the new Clause to those who, so to speak, are not generally in sympathy with what I am doing. I will come to the Amendment a little later.

Let me take the two and try to give the history of and justification for them. There were great discussions on the matter in Committee upstairs. Throughout the passage of the Bill I have pointed to the grave danger that exists in the way that the profession at the moment overcharges for privately supplied spectacles and lenses. I am interested in protecting the patient—in consumer protection. What I have said throughout the passage of the Bill—and I repeat it now—is that this profession, which, so to speak, is to some of us a borderline profession, is to some extent a mixture of a profession and a trading function. In the profession there is the simple job of selling a manufactured product, a spectacle frame.

At the risk of tedious repetition I must repeat what I said upstairs, that all this talk about individually manufactured frames tailored to individual requirements is, generally speaking, a lot of nonsense. This happens only in a small minority of cases. Over 90 per cent. of spectacle frames are manufactured by simple manufacturers and sold in different sizes, with different styles of bridges and side pieces and measurements. To that extent, they are manufactured products generally sold, so to speak, in a trading fashion.

I would not go so far as simply to call them merchandise, as one optician who has written to me does. I have had a mountain of correspondence on the matter and some opticians support me to the extent of going much further and saying that these things are simply merchandise and that we should face that fact. I do not go so far as that. I am saying that here is a varied commodity which, with the skill of the optician, can be dispensed to fit the individual face, eye and taste. Nevertheless, it remains largely a trading function of things which can be bought at so much a gross or so much a dozen. That is how spectacle frames are normally sold.

What I have said throughout our deliberations on the Bill is that I do not want members of the profession to be placed in the position of using their apparent disinterestedness as professional men as a cloak for overcharging for a fairly standardised product. That is all I am saying. I am making no reckless allegations of widespread abuse, although I am prepared to give some figures in a minute. All I am saying is that the Bill as drafted gives a greater opportunity for abuse in that direction.

The Bill gives the Optical Council a power, which it will no doubt carry out, of banning all advertising and price display. That means that the public will never know the real worth of spectacle frames, and I will give some figures of what they are worth in a minute. The public will never know. People will be merely, as now, ushered into a consulting room, and then they will say, perhaps, as so many of them do now, that the frames available under the National Health Service are too plain for them, and that they would prefer something more fancy and attractive. They will then be told, "We can give you this pair of spectacles for 5 guineas, instead of the 30s.—" or whatever the figure is—"under the National Health Service." Nobody will be able to display any prices of goods, and there will be no advertising. Nobody will know what is the real worth of the frames or the cost of the lenses, or, in fact, whether or not they are being over-charged.

What we are doing in the Bill as it now stands is to take away consumer protection, and we are taking it away quite deliberately by putting in a ban on advertising and price display. We are putting in its place nothing at all to protect the consumer, who will be entirely in the hands of the profession and will just have to hope that the profession will not overcharge him and will live up to some professional reputation which—and I say this deliberately—it has not shown so far in this matter.

Let me quote what my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, North-East (Mr. Coldrick) said in Committee, upstairs, because I thought he put it very well, when he said, in justification of my view about not trusting these people too far, that we want them to have a sense of status. Do not let us pretend, however, that they are paragons among men. In a reference to my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, North-East (Mr. Baird), my hon. Friend said:

"My hon. Friend is quite mistaken if he assumes that some of us are so innocent as to imagine that just because people belong to a profession they are actuated by motives distinct and different from those of ordinary wage earners. It seems to me that behind a facade of providing for the public, or the consumer, we are really conferring upon a professional body powers which we should not dream of conferring on the ordinary trade union in this country."

He added:

"The assumption is that because persons have trained in a profession for a period of time in order to administer to the needs of a certain section of the community they should have conferred upon them, not in consequence of their ability to organise themselves, but by legislation, great powers to regulate the whole of the profession as it affects the consumer."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, Standing Committee C, 5th February, 1958; cc. 65–66.]

My hon. Friend is quite right. We are handing over to people the power to sell spectacles behind closed doors, with no price display and no guarantee at all that the general public will not be overcharged. That is precisely what the Bill is doing.

Let me now come to the figures. My source of information, for which people have asked me, are the opticians who are friendly to my cause in this matter. They are reputable men who have had no reason to keep from me or anyone else the costs of buying and selling in their trade. The figures I propose to give are from no secret source, and with no personal interest in the industry. They are given to me by reputable professional men.

The cost of spectacle frames is measured not in pounds but in shillings. The National Health Service frames cost about 10s., but the fancy frames which people buy in the shops usually cost something between 10s. and 25s., but nearer 10s. more often than not. On top of that, we get lenses worth about 15s. I think that is general. Therefore, we have spectacles which, privately supplied, are worth in a trading sense about 30s. What should a professional man charge, and what does he charge? Under the National Health Service he gets a dispensing fee for providing spectacles, which the State fixes, I think, at 24s. At any rate, let us take the figure of 24s., because the optician has freely negotiated that figure himself inside the National Health Service. Let us add that to the 30s. cost of the frame and lenses, and the spectacles would then cost about 54s., privately supplied.

What, in fact, do they cost? The customer does not pay 54s., more often than not, except for the very cheapest kinds, which are not worth that sort of figure, because I have taken the highest total cost. He usually pays five or six guineas, and sometimes perhaps a little less; perhaps four guineas, but generally five or six.

12.15 p.m.

I had a look the other day at some spectacles supplied to one of my constituents. She came to me and said "These cost me five guineas." I had a look at them, and found that they were supplied by one of the biggest multiple firms, which does not do any advertising and which is all nicely protected by the British Optical Association—very good boys in the profession. I told my constituent quite frankly that these spectacles were worth about 35s. to 40s., and that, on top of that, she should have paid only the dispensing fee of about 25s. Instead, she paid not £3 5s., but £5 5s., and this is the sort of thing that is going on in this profession.

I am not saying that all opticians are disreputable. I am saying only that I am not willing to write into legislation the power for a profession to go on doing this without any public scrutiny or public regulation. In this Bill, we are taking away a form of consumer protection by removing the display of prices. In the light of the knowledge which we have of what is going on in that industry and profession, I say that we have no right to do this without writing into the Bill an alternative form of consumer protection, which is the way in which my proposals are intended to act. My new Clause and Amendments propose that an alternative form of consumer protection shall be written into the Bill.

May I now give the House some quotations from a letter sent to me by a manufacturer's representative? Here is a man who knows what he is saying. This man works for an old-established firm in the Midlands which has a reputation for high quality goods, and, I think, a concentration on high quality goods. He signs his letter anonymously, because he does not want to lose his job. He writes:

"As a manufacturer's representative, with a reputation for quality work, I see many a case of price cutting that is positively disgusting, particularly when one considers that it is the spectacle-wearing public who suffer. My firm's products are time and time again turned down, not because of some fault in the workmanship, nor yet because the design is not suitable, but because we are too dear."

"Too dear", he says, with a great big exclamation mark.

"Not by a pound, or several shillings, but very often by a single shilling, or even 6d.! And yet the opticians' average profit is 300 per cent. For instance, a frame we may offer at 15s. they will sell at 45s. or 50s., and so on in proportion.

"Then a cheap-jack comes along and produces an inferior imitation at say 14s., and we have lost a customer. Does the optician cut his price accordingly? Not on your life! His retail price will remain the same even if he can purchase a similar article at 13s. or even 12s. Quality does not matter, shillings do. Do you wonder that the industry has some of the lowest-paid skilled workers in the country, and that we are losing more and more of them each week? The above remarks apply to lenses just as much as frames, and that of course is the greater tragedy. I feel certain that we in the industry should all like to see what you suggest come about."

He goes on to talk about the proposition which I have been making during the discussions on this Bill. This is from a man who knows what he is talking about and confirms what I said. This is what is at issue. Spectacle frames, plus lenses, plus dispensing, should cost £2 or £3, but the average charge is £5. We are taking away the protection of the consumer and his ability to know what all this is about and we are writing nothing into the Bill to replace it.

After the discussions we had during the Committee stage, I entered into negotiations; again with the profession to see whether we could discover a generally agreed Amendment which could be moved at this stage. Under pressure from a number of opticians who are among the more reputable and idealistic members of their profession—I have in mind one gentleman in particular who took great trouble to write to me on this matter—I moved my position. So far, I had said that if the profession wanted to get what it could charge for spectacles, it must give the consumer the protection of advertising. But I moved from that position and said, "Well, if you will not have that, if you do not want advertising because you do not want to lower the tone of the profession by advertising, then you must take this whole thing right out of the commercial arena and make it into a professionally regulated system with a fee and a cost price of the thing you are selling." That is much more reputable and would have a much better smell about it than this business of quoting total charges.

Before I come to that, may I make this protest about the misrepresentation of my activities in this matter? I think the British Optical Association should be thoroughly ashamed of itself. I made clear throughout the Committee stage discussions that I never wanted widespread and scurrilous advertising. I said:

"To keep saying that the making of my Amendment would open the door to advertising of the kind carried on by the manufacturers of Daz and other detergents, or to advertise on a grand scale, as one hon. Member said, is a most unfair way of trying to distort its object. The Council will retain full powers to prohibit and regulate these advertisements and ensure that they are modest, while still allowing reasonable competition."—[OFFICIAL REPORT. Standing Committee C. 5th February, 1958: c. 79.]

I said precisely the same thing on other occasions.

What did I find? This industry, this profession, which wishes us to believe in its reputation and standards, has been carrying out a scurrilous attack on me in its journal, saying that I want to open the door to cheap-jack advertising and that I want the old days back again, with cut-throat competition, and all that sort of thing. People in the industry were able to read and even to hear the words I said during the Committee stage discussions when I made clear that I wanted nothing of the sort. But, in order to discredit me, this sort of scurrilous attack has been made in the journal of the profession. It does not fill me with much confidence about its sense of professional conduct when this sort of thing is carried on as soon as a Member of Parliament speaks in the House of Commons. The profession could very well have published an apology. But let me come to the precise proposals in this new Clause——

As my hon. Friend is complaining about the way in which he was treated in a professional journal, may I ask whether he requested an apology or wrote to the journal?

Yes, I wrote to the journal, which published my letter without any comment at all, but with no withdrawal.

They do not agree with my hon. Friend.

If they do not agree with what I am saying, it means they do not believe what I said during the Committee stage discussions. Either that, or they are telling me that I am not telling the truth——

The House of Commons is——

If my hon. Friend wishes to interrupt me, I shall be happy to give way.

Let me come to the final justification for this new Clause or, alternatively, for the Amendment. I have put it to the hon. Gentleman who is in charge of this Bill, and the sponsor of the Bill, that the right way of proceeding from now is to take the whole matter of spectacle charges out of the commercial arena and make it a regulated service. In this I have, I think, the support of the Socialist Medical Association——

indicated dissent.

My hon. Friend does not seem to agree. I can only read what the Association published:

"Under the National Health Service, the ophthalmic optician is rewarded by fees. The principle has now become acceptable for something like 90 per cent. of his work. It is illogical when supplying a private frame this should be subject to a profit mark up; this procedure has led to criticism and to the suggestion that private frames are merchandise and N.H.S. ones are not! This Association therefore considers that the principle of fees as developed above should be applied universally to private practice as well as to the National Health Service."

As my hon. Friend has talked about being unfairly treated, as he thinks, I consider that he should make clear that the Socialist Medical Association takes the view that the Bill ought to go through more or less in its present form.

I am not saying that it should not. I am saying that the Association clearly is in favour of the principle of what I am trying to do.

I have been a member of the Socialist Medical Association since it started, and the Association is in favour of a National Health Service staffed by full-time individuals, and among them should be ophthalmic opticians.

My hon. Friend does not realise that what I have read out is an interim statement by the Association of what it wants to see happen before the ideal state comes about. In the interim before it gets what it is aiming at the Association thinks that this principle of fees should be applied in the private sector of the present system. It is as clear and obvious as that, if my hon. Friend would care to read it.

We started negotiations on this point and I said, "Let us see whether we can reach an agreement on some such Amendment." I wrote to the Minister and to the sponsors of the Bill and to the British Medical Association, or rather the committee of ophthalmic opticians which covers all the professional associations. Roughly speaking, the response has been—I do not think I am misinterpreting anyone in saying this—"We are thoroughly in agreement with you about the object of your Amendment, but we do not think it should be written into the Bill." I think that a fair summary. I received a letter from the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Health and I do not think he would object to my saying that that is roughly what he said.

The committee of ophthalmic opticians says that while it is prepared to consider the question of introducing payment by fees on the lines of the National Health Service to people in private practice in future, it feels this is a matter which must be left to the profession. In other words, it says, "We agree with you, but we do not want it written into the Bill." Why do I insist upon this being written into the Bill? It is because we are taking out of the Bill the only alternative form of consumer protection, advertising. When we take out one form of consumer protection we have a duty to make sure that we put another in its place. If the profession agrees so much with what I say, why is it afraid to put it into the Bill? I will tell the House.

12.30 p.m.

The reason is that this point is a contentious one, as yet, inside the profession. The members of the profession do not want it forced upon them and made to come about by force of law rather than by a recommendation of the Optical Council. They are afraid that such a provision will upset too many members if we force the pace along these lines. That is why they oppose its being written into the Bill.

They tell me that another reason why this should not be written into the Bill is that no provision of this kind has ever been written into an Act of Parliament governing any of the other professions. Let us examine that statement with care. The pharmaceutical profession is usually advanced in this case. They say, "We do not try to prevent pharmacists from over-charging, so we should not try to prevent opticians from over-charging." But look at the difference.

In the selling of medicines, and particularly of patent medicines, there is great advertisement of price. The worth of medicines and medicinal products is roughly generally known. I agree that, even so, prices may be too high, but there are rough and ready standards of public comparison by which the pharmacist who makes high charges can be detected. In the case of the optical industry, nobody knows the worth of spectacle frames. When I go to people and say, "From what my optician friends tell me, I should think your spectacle frame is worth about 13s.", they nearly drop dead, especially if they have been kidded into believing that it is worth £3 or £4. In this profession there is a history of standard prices being unknown. That is why the optical profession is so different from the pharmaceutical profession and why we should write into the Bill the sort of consumer protection which I have in mind.

That is broadly my case. I have taken up some time in presenting it, but I make no apology for that. This is the most contentious point in the Bill. I repeat that I am not making widespread allegations of over-charging by opticians; but, on the information available to us and taking as a standard the sort of dispensing fee which opticians expect under the National Health Service, I suggest that spectacle frames sold privately should cost about 50s. or 60s., instead of in the region of £4, £5 or £6. There is a gap and we ought to legislate to protect the consumer rather than to take all consumer protection right out of the Bill.

I beg to second the Motion.

The proposed new Clause and the two Amendments, all of which are being considered together, are a further attempt by the hon. Member for Northfield (Mr. Chapman) to write into the Bill wording which will encourage either some form of advertising, which is not viewed with approval by any profession of this kind, or some form of control of prices.

My fellow sponsors and I are most grateful to the hon. Gentleman for the trouble he has taken to reach agreement with us on these matters, and I am only sorry that I find myself unable to accept either the proposed new Clause or the Amendments. The trouble with the proposed new Clause is that it still raises the difficulty of compelling the General Optical Council to consider fees. As the hon. Gentleman himself pointed out, there is no similar Act, such as those governing the medical profession and the pharmaceutical profession, in which that is done. That is also true of industry, as distinct from the professions.

The first of the hon. Gentleman's Amendments would prevent the General Optical Council from making rules under Clause 25 for the prevention of publicity or advertising unless it were satisfied

"that high standards of professional conduct are being generally applied by opticians in fixing charges to the general public for optical appliances or parts of optical appliances."

The second of the Amendments goes back to the free competition which the hon. Gentleman advocated when we discussed the Bill in Committee.

I have tried to make it clear that I was not proposing to move the second Amendment if the new Clause were accepted.

The hon. Gentleman has said that he would leave the matter entirely in the hands of the profession, but he is not in fact doing that. The profession will be governed by the General Optical Council, on which are representatives of other bodies. For example, there are doctors. A later Amendment proposes to increase their number from five to six. There are Privy Councillors. The General Optical Council is charged, under Clause 1, with the function of promoting high standards of professional conduct among opticians. Therefore, in the very first Clause of the Bill is a general instruction covering standards of conduct. No doubt the hon. Gentleman would agree that excessive charging would come under that heading, so that his intentions are already covered by the Bill as it stands.

In any case, the hon. Gentleman is pushing at an open door, as he said in Committee. The profession has the same objects as he has in regard to the prevention of overcharging. I have no doubt that he has received, as have most of us, a booklet called "Professional Conduct," issued recently by the British Optical Association. It brings up to date previous instructions, given as long ago as 1946 and 1951, on the subject of professional conduct. If the hon. Gentleman reads the booklet, he will see that it covers the points he has raised and that the profession feels as he does about excessive charging and wants an arrangement that will prevent it. Doing this upon a voluntary basis within the profession is very different from having it written into an Act of Parliament.

It is for those reasons that we feel unable to accept the suggestions which have been put forward by the hon. Member. They would conflict, also, with the provisions governing the supply of spectacles under the National Health Service. That is merely another reason for not being able to accept the hon. Member's proposals.

The hon. Member quoted letters he has received in support of his proposals. I could quote from one I received this morning. I am sure he has received a similar letter. It is from the National Optical Advisory Committee of the Association of Scientific Workers. It comes down heavily against his proposals and hopes the Bill will go forward in its present form. It is a very long letter and I shall not attempt to read it, but I think the hon. Member will agree that that is the gist of it.

No, I would not agree. The letter is about advertising and is nothing to do with a professionally regulated fee structure. If that suggestion were put to those learned gentlemen, I think they would support me.

At any rate, this letter comes down against the proposal of the hon. Member in regard to advertising. I do not want to detain the House longer, because others can speak on the technical aspects of the matter far better than I can. I am afraid I cannot accept the proposed new Clause or the Amendments which we have been discussing with it.

I have listened carefully to the discussion. I oppose what my hon. Friend the Member for Northfield (Mr. Chapman) has said, not because I do not appreciate the point of view he has expressed and what is behind it, but because I think he is wrong in the conclusions he has formed.

For some considerable time, indirectly and directly, I have had the opportunity of ascertaining what the professional bodies concerned want. They have been anxious to see that this profession is put on to a proper and thoroughly responsible basis and treated as such by all concerned in the exercise of their particular craft. I think that a very commendable thing. The main body concerned with this matter, the Joint Committee of Ophthalmic Opticians, has done everything it could to try to put and keep the people engaged in this profession on a proper professional basis. The object of this Bill—a very worthy one, in my view—is to see that that is done.

My hon. Friend says, be that as it may, what about some kind of discipline being imposed on the question of prices? He compared this with the imposition of regulations in some of the other professions. The matter is not so simple as he puts it. Millions of people are involved. It is different from the profession of the law, for example. An ordinary man does not know the first thing about that, and the people who go to the law are really a small minority. A question of protection in regard to charges there is a very different matter. Here we are dealing with a commodity which is very extensively used. Therefore, people are in a position to compare prices easily.

indicated dissent——

I am prepared to give way if my hon. Friend disagrees, but I consider that that is the position. If an optician were making exorbitant charges in a particular district it would soon be discovered. Those who had occasion to go to other opticians would immediately change their custom from one man to the other. The position would be, and in fact is, that there is not really a blind sale but an opprotunity of comparing prices.

If there is something to be put in order in respect of prices, the profession ought to have the opportunity to put its own house in order. The proposal is that advice should be given by the Council. Why cannot the professional bodies themselves give that advice? I believe they will see that advice is given in the same way as they have seen fit to have this Bill introduced. They would see that something was done within the profession to put the position right in regard to prices where there is an abuse.

If the profession is so anxious to clear things up, as apparently is the case, why has it not done anything about the matter in past years?

It has taken a very long time for this Bill to be brought before the House. If my hon. Friend the Member for Brixton (Mr. Lipton) had followed the matter closely, he would have seen that it has taken many years to get some advance in respect of a Bill of this nature. Now it comes to us as a Private Member's Bill on a Friday. My hon. Friend will appreciate that it was not easy for the profession to get this Bill introduced in order to protect the public against those who are not acting professionally or ethically. At various times I have asked why this Bill was not brought forward earlier.

The profession has done a very useful service to the public as a whole in pushing this Bill up to its present stage. Ordinary advice on the part of the Council would be nothing more or less than advice which the profession could very easily exercise in respect of those who are abusing the situation. I am quite satisfied that if an abuse continues the profession will see to it that no slur could be cast against it. I believe that already it is considering the introduction of a fee structure similar to that of the National Health Service. That is already the view of some of the bodies which have been discussing this matter. We would be justified in leaving this matter as it stands, to the professional judgment of those who hitherto have shown that they are keen and interested in placing the ophthalmic opticians profession on a proper basis.

When the Bill was in Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Northfield (Mr. Chapman) made a very strong case from his point of view. Nothing has since happened to persuade me that he is wrong. The difficulty arises from the fact that here we have a profession which is not only a profession but also a business. What my hon. Friend the Member for Northfield is trying to do is to ensure that there shall be some protection for the consumer on the business side.

No one will persuade me that the spectacle frame industry will be as easily controlled by the professional opticians as the opponents of the suggested new Clause and other Amendments have made out. If there were all this anxiety and readiness to ensure that there would be no overcharging, there would have been some little evidence of that in years gone by.

The hon. Member is rather overlooking the difficulties of assessing the separate qualities of the frames and accessories which are used. Like most hon. and right hon. Gentlemen, the hon. Gentleman has no doubt had sent to him a pair of magnifying spectacles from a wholesaler, spectacles which obviously sell very cheaply. I do not want to use the word "inferior," but the quality of the frame is obviously lower than that of many others, although in their price range these spectacles may be very good value. It is extremely difficult to lay down hard and fast standards and to ask that a body should be set up to judge——

Order. This is a very long intervention. The hon. Member should make a separate speech if he wants to occupy the time of the House for so long.

I am obliged to the hon. Member for not making his intervention longer than he did.

Spectacle frames are manufactured products; they are manufactured by the hundreds of thousands. In those circumstances, the difficulty suggested by the hon. Member for Gillingham (Mr. Burden) is not a problem of very great magnitude. I ask the House to consider the genuineness of the argument of my hon. Friend the Member for Northfield. The public is entitled to some protection on the manufacturing side of this business.

In those circumstances, I am very disappointed with the reaction of the hon. Member for Wembley, South (Mr. Russell). I had hoped, after all the efforts that had been made by my hon. Friend the Member for Northfield to arrive at an agreed Amendment, that the hon. Member for Wembley, South would have allowed a little more merit in the argument of my hon. Friend. I am sure that if the new Clause and the Amendments were accepted, the profession would find some reasonable way of operating the Bill with those additions.

I want to underline my intervention, and I am sorry that it took so long. The hon. Member for Brixton (Mr. Lipton) exposed the complete weakness of this case when he rested on the fact that spectacles are manufactured articles and that because they are manufactured articles—he was including the frames and accessories—their price should be determined by the Council.

If his argument is correct, then what he is proposing is that for all manufactured articles, covering the whole range of consumer goods, there should be a committee to determine the retail price. That, obviously, would not be practicable in the case of everything, but if that is the policy of the Labour Party, I hope that we shall hear it said and that it will be made known as soon as possible.

That is not what we are proposing. We are not proposing that the General Optical Council shall fix prices in terms of pounds, shillings and pence. We are proposing that the Council shall advise the industry, or profession, on the system of fixing prices. What we have in mind is what some of the professional bodies clearly want, namely, that the price shall be the dispensing fee and the cost of the frame, without mentioning pounds, shillings and pence.

If the hon. Member is proposing that this body shall fix the dispensing fee, or ratio of profit on that, plus the cost of the spectacles——

No.

—that would have to be written into the Bill, and I have no doubt that the people engaged in the optical industry, particularly on the retail side, would very strongly object. It would also involve the poorest possible quality of service to the public. The suggestion is not at all practicable, and in that I support the view of the hon. Member for Leicester, North-West (Mr. Janner).

I very much regret that I cannot agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Northfield (Mr. Chapman). I appreciate that he does not want the public to be overcharged, but the method which he has suggested is entirely impracticable, because it is impossible to value professional services in general. Those are determined either by collective bargaining, or by a Royal Commission—such as that which is sitting at the moment to determine fees in the National Health Service.

It is very difficult to say in an individual case what the reward should be. Some years ago, I had a friend who was a surgeon. His colleagues complained that he charged very low fees. He asked me, "Why do they complain? I am sure that no operation which I do is ever worth more than twenty guineas." Knowing the quality of his work, I had to agree with him entirely.

The same argument applies to ophthalmic opticians. Not only the quality but the difficulty of the work varies. In some cases, it may be easy to determine the type of lenses required. In other cases, there may be great difficulty. The same applies to spectacle frames. Some people have a standardised nose and it is easy to fix spectacles. Others, like me, have an awkward-shaped nose, and it is very much more difficult to fix spectacles.

The determination of the right fee is difficult and involves considerations other than those I have raised. In some areas prices are low while in others they are high, but rents may be high and overheads may be high so that the optician has to recoup himself by charging higher fees. I agree with my hon. Friend that it would be desirable if it were possible to do something of this sort, but it seems to me that in practice it would be entirely impossible.

May I reply to some of the things that have been said? I think that my hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Mr. Hastings) has finished speaking. Perhaps I can first turn to what he said. He said that it would be very difficult to operate this proposal, because a dispensing fee, or whatever it may be, would be very difficult to determine. Of course it is. But we know that it has not been so difficult as to be impossible. For all kinds of noses, faces and measurements a dispensing fee has been happily agreed inside the National Health Service.

Therefore, I see no reason why we cannot have a dispensing fee happily agreed outside the National Health Service and one which the professional bodies could easily regulate and suggest to their members. I would not go so far as to want the General Optical Council or the professional bodies to fix the fee. What should happen is that when we go to buy a pair of spectacles the optician should present us with a bill showing that his dispensing fee for providing the spectacles is two guineas or 30s., or whatever he thinks is appropriate, and the cost of the frame is 13s. In that way the consumer would be properly protected. That would be fully in accord with the standards that we expect of a professional.

My hon. Friend's argument falls to the ground—and I say this in all friendliness to him—because it has been so practicable to do precisely what I am proposing inside the National Health Service. Therefore, no one can say that it is impossible to extend the procedure.

Turning from the speech of my hon. Friend to what the sponsor of the Bill, the hon. Member for Wembley, South (Mr. Russell), said, he has not a very strong argument. He said that this proposal has never been operated before. That is all he said, and indeed I think that is all he claimed to say. He said that because this has never been done in any other profession or professional legislation it should not be done in this Bill.

My argument is that if the professional bodies had done something before now we would feel that there was no reason to legislate for it. But it is precisely because they have done nothing so far that it is now proposed to write the proposal into the Bill. I would go so far as to say this. It is only because of the fuss that I created upstairs in Committee that there is a move on now to do it. It is only because of that that it is going on quickly. This is all the more reason for my expressing my distrust of the professional bodies and saying that the consumer is entitled to some sort of safeguard inside the terms of the Bill.

I shall not force a Division on the new Clause, but I shall on the Amendment, which is very innocent. The Clause which is to be amended says that the Council shall be able to prohibit advertising, but this ban shall not come into force until the profession has put its house in order. What is wrong with that? I am not forcing the pace and saying that the Optical Council has to take positive action to see that things are done. It has not to publish anything or express an opinion on standards of conduct, and it has not to say what the dispensing fee should be or anything else. I am simply saying that it cannot take away consumer protection of advertising until the profession has put its house in order. If the Council comes to this House and says, "Please do not write anything into the Bill that we will do ourselves," I have every right to say, "Right. When you have done it yourselves, then is the time when you can have restrictions on advertising." That seems to me to be eminently fair and reasonable, and I am at a loss to know why the sponsor of the Bill refuses to do it.

If the Bill goes through unamended, I shall take my battle to the General Optical Council, the privy council which has jurisdiction in these matters. Matters cannot be left in their present state. It would be wrong if the General Optical Council, without specified instruction about the system of charges, nevertheless refuses under Clause 1, which gives it the job of promoting a high professional standard of conduct, to do anything about the system of charges. It may well be that in the event I shall beat the hon. Gentleman at his own game, because what he will not have in legislation I may force through under Clause 1 in the General Optical Council. I have the right, as any of us has, to say to the Council, "This is a piece of unprofessional conduct which is going on. Are you going to do nothing about it? Will you continue to flout the law of the land?"

The Council is charged with doing something about it in Clause 1.

That is the first time the hon. Gentleman has admitted that he intends that.

I said it just now in my speech.

I did not understand the hon. Gentleman to go so far as that. We are making progress. I beg his pardon if I misunderstood him. He is agreeing with me now that if I fail in the House of Commons I can go to the General Optical Council and say: "A system of charges which leaves the consumer at the mercy of people who charge an inclusive fee for a pair of spectacles and therefore at the mercy of overcharging is unprofessional conduct and I want you to take action about it". This may well be much worse for opticians than my own way of doing things.

If the hon. Gentleman would only accept my view—which is that the General Optical Council cannot ban advertising until they are satisfied on this point—things would be much easier. I shall be able to say, "Mr. So-and-So charges five guineas for a pair of spectacles which is worth 30s.", and I shall challenge the Council to do something about it. If that is so, I am prepared to accept the hon. Gentleman's challenge. He will find that I shall get the General Optical Council to have to put on the carpet individual opticians, which will be a wrong way of going about this problem. The right way is to state what we believe are high codes of professional conduct, and not to start going by the back door and bringing in every optician to do it individually. That is a very wrong way of doing it. I return to my statement that the right method is by my proposal, which allows the ban on advertising and the taking away of this consumer protection once the consumer has been given the protection of a professional system of charges.

My hon. Friend the Member for Leicester, North-West (Mr. Janner), who is not at the moment present, said that people would not go to the man who overcharges. He implied that there is enough general knowledge about what is going on for people to be able to sort out those who overcharge. That simply is not the case, for the reason that everybody is charging an inclusive fee of so many guineas for private spectacles. To that extent, without saying that they are all in the scurrilous racket—I do not say that for one moment—they are all in the game together, because they are not allowed to show their prices.

I believe that to some extent I should carry with me my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Exchange (Mr. W. Griffiths), who is an optician, in saying that what is happening inside the private range of spectacle selling today is that the National Health Service is being subsidised, in effect, by the profits that opticians make in private sales. In other words, it may well be the case that opticians are not getting proper remuneration from the National Health Service and, to that extent, must rely on extra and, perhaps, even exorbitant profits made on private sales. I notice that my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Exchange does not dissent.

If that is the case, there is all the more reason for my proposal. This matter needs to be brought into the open. If the National Health Service is not being run on economic charges, if they should be greater and opticians should have better remuneration out of the National Health Service, that ought to be known. It ought not to be that anybody is having to rook people outside the National Health Service to make his work under the Health Service an economic proposition to him. I strongly suspect that that is what is happening. If my new Clause were accepted and an optician had to start charging a reasonable dispensing fee for private spectacles, it might well throw into relief the whole situation inside the National Health Service and force reconsideration of it.

That brings to an end what I want to say. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Wembley, South for what he said about the way in which I have tried to meet opposition and get an agreed solution. Throughout this long controversy, I have had intense arguments both ways on my proposals. I have gone stage by stage in steps to placate my opponents. When they did not want me to end the ban on advertising, I said, "Let us leave the ban on advertising but enforce reasonable competition." They would not have that.

I then said, "Now, let us take it right out of the commercial arena and make it a fee system, which the profession can regulate for itself without our interfering and without the Optical Council interfering, simply saying that there ought to be some sort of system without mentioning £ s. d." I moved to that stage and put the ball at the feet of the profession.

Having got to that stage and suggested that the Optical Council should issue guidance, I have gone a stage further in my attempts to meet my opponents. I have said, "Let us even withdraw the suggestion that the General Optical Council should publish, guide and advise. Let us simply say that it can have all the bans it wants on advertising once the Optical Council is satisfied that it has put its own house in order."

1.15 p.m.

That is as far as I am prepared to go. I do not believe that the hon. Member for Wembley, South will claim that I have been unreasonable. I have moved stage after stage. I have spotlighted what I know to be an abuse. I know that it goes on. I know that people are overcharged. I know that these facts and figures ought to be brought into the public limelight. I shall keep fighting all the way through the stages of the Bill and, if it becomes law, with the General Optical Council, because I believe that the consumer is having legitimate protection taken away from him in the Bill and the sponsor of the Bill is refusing point blank to write in any form of protection for him. I consider this totally reactionary and unwarranted.

For all the reasons I have given, the hon. Member's arguments about the other professions fall to the ground because they are not comparable. I hope that there are at least some people who will stand up for the consumer and support me in the Division Lobby.

This is a Private Members' Bill, although I would have been much happier if this important Measure had been taken over officially by the Government. If it had, we might have had more time in some of the earlier stages of the Bill and some of these fair and proper points which have been raised might have been disposed of earlier. We have, however, reached what seems to me to be a fairly satisfactory position.

I think it is highly desirable that the General Optical Council which is to be set up should consider these matters. My hon. Friend the Member for Northfield (Mr. Chapman) and others who have raised these questions have done a service in directing this matter to the attention not only of the General Optical Council, but of the general public. I do not doubt that there are abuses that we want to overcome. It is simply a question of how best we can tackle the problem of overcoming them.

Some of us would have liked to see an extension of the field of National Health Service spectacles and the problem tackled in that way; there would have been full control of the prices of that widened range. That is a matter which we shall have to consider when, before long, we on this side will be in charge and will be carrying out our pledges concerning prescription charges. These are all matters which will come up again for consideration in that way.

As for this particular proposal. I think that all sides are anxious to see that professional status is awarded. I recognise that it must be difficult for the bodies concerned to establish really effective codes of conduct until the general statutory powers have been provided through a Measure of this sort. It is, therefore, a little difficult to attack the established professional bodies at this moment before the wider statutory provisions have been made.

Although, for my part, I hope that the Bill goes through broadly in its present form, I believe that my hon. Friend the Member for Northfield has been right to direct attention to what, I think, has been an abuse. My hon. Friend and, no doubt, others will be right in taking what action they can to ensure that the Optical Council, when set up, considers this matter, together with other matters of professional conduct which arise. I hope that now that my hon. Friend has said that he will not press his proposal to a Division, we can, on both sides, try to ensure a reasonably speedy passage of these broad proposals, which can be of real benefit to the general public.

I beg to ask leave to withdraw the Motion.

I beg to move, in page 2, line 16, to leave out "before" and to insert "not later than".

This is a purely drafting Amendment. The wording as it stands at the moment covers all applications made for enrolment before the appointed day but possibly not those which might be made on the appointed day itself. If this Amendment is accepted an application made on the appointed day would be given the same treatment as those made before the appointed day. There will probably be very few of these cases but I am advised that it is necessary to make provision for this.

I beg to second the Amendment.

I beg to move, in page 3, line 28, after "name" to insert:

"or a name under which it carried on business".

I think the hon. Member's next Amendment, and his Amendment in page 3, line 41, after "existence", insert:

"or a name under which it or any such body carried on business".

can be taken with this one.

The Amendment deals with the question of bodies corporate. There have been occasions when a body corporate has been included in the National Health Service not under its corporate name but under a business name. These Amendments are to enable such a body to enrol under subsection (2, b) of the Clause in the same way as it would have been included to carry out its business under a corporate name.

I beg to second the Amendment.

I beg to move, in page 3, line 33, after "lists," to insert:

(c) if it satisfies the Council that the greater part of its business consists of activities other than the testing of sight and the fitting and supply of optical appliances and that so much of its business as consists of the testing of sight is carried on under the management of a registered ophthalmic optician and that so much thereof as consists of the fitting and supply of optical appliances is carried on under the management of a registered optician.

With this Amendment can be taken the hon. Member's next Amendment, in page 3, line 37, and also his Amendment in Clause 11, page 9, line 21.

This Amendment is proposed as a result of representations made by a number of my hon. Friends and of hon. Members on the other side of the House. It replaces an Amendment which was down on the Paper until yesterday in their name to deal with this question of bodies corporate and co-operative societies. The Bill in its present form might create difficulties for firms or societies which are formed in future and whose main business is not that of opticians but something quite different. It was never intended to prevent such societies or bodies from being enrolled subject to the required conditions. This new paragraph (c) covers corporate bodies other than co-operative societies and the next Amendment, in line 37, is intended to cover co-operative societies in the same way.

I beg to second the Amendment.

As the Bill stands it would make it quite impossible for any firm of general storekeepers, unless they already had an ophthalmic department, to open one. It would create difficulties for certain co-operative bodies. It is felt that this would be a desirable Amendment. It ensures that the public are fully protected by insisting that the department shall be under the operation of a fully qualified optician.

I think the hon. Member for Gillingham (Mr. Burden) was probably mistaken on one point. The Bill as it stands would not prevent a co-operative society, if it wished, from providing an ophthalmic service. The point was that the Amendment as originally drawn, which was intended to be in place of the present sub-section (c), would have prevented a society registered under the Industrial and Provident Societies Acts from starting to offer an optical service to its members if it so happened that it was a specialist service and not dealing mainly with services or with goods other than an optical service.

I should like to express my appreciation to the sponsors of the Bill for substituting this Amendment, which gives them what they require, and against which I am not arguing, but which at the same time does not inhibit in any way the growth of a co-operative service of the type originally envisaged.

I would add that I support the intention in the second of these Amendments proposed by the hon. Member for Wembley, South (Mr. Russell) relating to the industrial and provident societies. I should not have thought that it was necessary, because all optical services now provided by co-operative societies are managed by or under the supervision of qualified opticians. It was always intended that these services should be under that kind of management. However, if it is required to place this on the Statute Book, then certainly those hon. Friends of mine for whom I speak and the Co-operative movement generally will be happy to see it on the Statute Book.

Although the Amendment has been moved and seconded in the most reasonable way, and although I am sure we all understand the objects behind it, I think the attention of the House should be drawn to the fact that it does appear to depart from the recommendations of the Crook Report, on which this Bill is very largely based. I think I am right in saying that paragraphs 94 to 96 are the relevant ones and that they made it clear that the Committee, at the time when it was considering this matter, felt that optics were something which ought not to be mixed up with some other kind of business and that the corporate bodies, if they were to be recognised, ought to have registered opticians on their boards of directors.

I understand furthermore that in the multiple stores—I am not talking of the co-operative stores but the ordinary commercial multiple stores—which run optical departments the ordinary practice is for them to be run on an agency basis at present by a large number of multiple firms of ophthalmic opticians. In that case those departments really satisfy the requirements of the existing subsection (2, b) of Clause 4.

I am not entirely clear why that arrangement cannot be allowed to continue, why it is necessary to widen the conditions under which the department can be set up. Of course it is true that there is some safeguard inasmuch as the professional man in charge of the department will presumably be in trouble with the Optical Council if he departs from professional standards in any way. That much I can see. At the same time I feel that the apparent departure from the recommendations of the Crook Report, which would be introduced by the Amendment, should be brought to the notice of the House.

If I may, by leave of the House, reply very briefly to my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Croydon, North-East (Vice-Admiral Hughes Hallett), I think I can give him the assurance that the number of cases which will arise out of this will be comparatively small. It is, I agree, a slight departure from the Crook Report in that respect. It is really to cover, in the case of bodies corporate, not co-operative societies, but a large store, for example, which might open a branch in another city under another name. We were advised that if that did happen the ophthalmic department of that branch would not be covered by the Bill in its present form. It is purely to guard against probably very few instances of that kind that this Amendment is proposed.

I think it is true that, as the hon. and gallant Member for Croydon, North-East (Vice-Admiral Hughes Hallett) has said, this small departure from the Report of the Crook Committee is one which aroused certain apprehensions among ophthalmic opticians. However, we feel that the Bill has safeguards for their professional status. We have had some experience of interference by lay people in a field which we think is one for professional responsibility and decision. Nevertheless, having made that observation, I think that the Bill as drafted gives protection to the profession.

I beg to move, in page 9, line 31, at the end to insert:

Where a registered optician dies while he is either a director of an enrolled body corporate or the manager of that part of the business of an enrolled body corporate which consists of the testing of sight or the fitting and supply of optical appliances, he shall be deemed, for the purposes of this subsection, to have continued to be a director of that body or a manager of that part of its business, as the case may be, until the expiration of the three months beginning with the date of his death or until a director or manager is appointed in his place, whichever occurs first.

The Amendment is partly consequential upon the Amendments to lines 33 and 37, in page 3. The effect is to transfer subsection (4) of Clause 23 to what we consider to be a more appropriate place in the Bill. The Amendment extends the subsection to cover the replacing of a manager of a company or co-operative society as well as a director.

I beg to second the Amendment.

I beg to move, in page 14, line 4, after "list", to insert:

"or for the revocation of a direction under subsection (6) of section eleven of this Act".

During the Committee stage we introduced several Amendments designed to ensure that if an offence was committed by one branch of a large firm the Disciplinary Committee could take action concerning that branch only, such as by striking it off the register, without disqualifying the firm as a whole. The Amendment is consequential upon those Amendments. It covers an application for restoration to the register of a single branch.

I beg to second the Amendment.

I beg to move, in page 15, line 41, to leave out "a" and to insert "at least one".

It seems to me to be for the convenience of the House to consider at the same time the Amendment in the name of the hon. Member for Uxbridge (Mr. Beswick), in page 15, line 41 leave out "a person" and insert "three persons", and the second Amendment in the name of the hon. and gallant Member for Croydon, North-East (Vice-Admiral Hughes Hallett), in page 15, line 43, leave out "a" and insert "at least one".

Clause 18 provides for the establishment of a Companies Committee to advise the General Optical Council on matters relating to bodies corporate carrying on businesses both as ophthalmic opticians or as dispensing opticians. The Council is required to co-operate by naming a representative of the ophthalmic bodies corporate and another representative of the dispensing bodies corporate.

According to the Amendment in the name of the hon. Member for Uxbridge (Mr. Beswick), three representatives, instead of one representative, are to be named from the ophthalmic bodies. I am not clear what the object of the Amendment is, but no doubt the hon. Member will explain it later. It occurred to me that it would overweight the Companies Committee with representatives of ophthalmic bodies, not only in relation to dispensing bodies but in relation to the representation from the Optical Council itself, unless one visualises a very large Committee.

Accordingly, I tabled my Amendment as an alternative so that it would make it possible to consider this matter when the rules governing the constitution of the Companies Committee are made. It can then be considered in the light of the competing claims to representation and of the size proposed for the Committee as a whole. My Amendment is very much more flexible than that of the hon. Member.

My second Amendment makes a similar provision to increase the representatives of the dispensing opticians on the Committee. It is true that the dispensing bodies are very much less varied in type than the ophthalmic bodies, but it seems to me that they are of comparable importance and that they ought to have equal representation. I understand that the form of the Amendments which I have tabled is acceptable to the promoters of the Bill.

I beg to second the Amendment.

I should like to explain the purpose of my Amendment. There is no intention in it to stress the importance of one branch of the profession as against another. The Clause calls for the inclusion of a person—I would say that it should be more than one person—who can represent the interests of bodies corporate. My reason for thinking one person inadequate is that there is a variety of interests of bodies corporate. This was so previously, but it is now more so in view of the acceptance of one of the Amendments in the names of the hon. Member for Gillingham (Mr. Burden) and other hon. Members.

I am not here arguing for direct representation of various interests, but perhaps I might refer to the fact that there are three types of body corporate which will, under the terms of the Bill, be enabled to offer an ophthalmic service. There are the co-operative societies, the multiple specialists and the department stores. There are, indeed, a number of other interests involved.

It is required that the Companies Committee should be enabled to give advice to the Optical Council. That being so, presumably there must be people on the Committee who can give advice and who are familiar with the workings of the type of bodies corporate on which they are advising. Therefore, it seemed to me proper to make a provision for three representatives—I might, more properly, have said "at least three"—of bodies corporate who are engaged in the business of ophthalmic opticians. I cannot understand why there should be an insistence on the inclusion of the number "one". In my opinion, one person alone will not be in a position to offer advice about the whole range of these bodies corporate.

We are dealing here with an advisory body, not a committee which will be in a position to give out privileges or licences. We are asking for nothing except an opportunity to give advice. I hope that the hon. Member for Wembley, South (Mr. Russell), if he is not in a position to accept the Amendment, will at least tell us that it is hoped that the General Optical Council will include in the Companies Committee a sufficient number of people as will adequately represent the varying types of bodies corporate which will now be in a position to engage in this business.

I beg to move, page 15, in line 41, to leave out "a person" and to insert "three persons".

I had hoped that the hon. Member for Wembley, South would be able to respond to the invitation which I gave a moment ago to clarify what he thinks ought to be the number of people on this Committee.

I beg to second the Amendment.

I can give the hon. Member for Uxbridge (Mr. Beswick) the assurance for which he asks. He will agree that the Amendment in the name of my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Croydon, North-East (Vice-Admiral Hughes Hallett) is broader than his Amendment. "At least one" could be two or three or four or even six and need not be only three. As my hon. and gallant Friend pointed out, his Amendment covers both ophthalmic and dispensing opticians. I am sure that the General Optical Council will take note of the remarks made by the hon. Member for Uxbridge.

I accept what has been said, although it seems to me that had my Amendment not been, put down we probably should not have had the Amendment in the name of the hon. and gallant Member for Croydon, North-East (Vice-Admiral Hughes Hallett). I beg to ask leave to withdraw the Amendment.

I beg to move, in page 18, line 4, at the end to insert—

(f) containing simple magnifying lenses of equal strength for reading purposes by adults only and so described.

The purpose of the Amendment is to permit the continued sale in chain stores of spectacles containing

"magnifying lenses of equal strength for reading purposes … only."

The Clause is all-exclusive and, by its wording, it would prevent the sale of any spectacles except under the direction of a qualified optician. I am in sympathy with the main object of the Clause, which I understand is designed to prevent the sale by quacks and charlatans of spectacles to unsuspecting and ignorant members of the public whose sight might be damaged thereby.

In so far as the Clause provides for that abuse to be ended, I am in favour of it, but the spectacles of which I am speaking, and of which I have a pair in my hand, come in a different category. Most hon. Members will have received a pair of these spectacles in the last few days. Their cosmetic quality might perhaps be criticised, although I think they compare favourably, price for price, with others which are very much more expensive. It is also likely that the lenses themselves were not suited to the degree of deficiency from which the individual recipients suffer.

Nevertheless, I guarantee that amongst the range of the spectacles of this kind which are sold there is a pair which would be quite suitable for any persons suffering only from lengthening of the sight, for which the technical term is presbyopia. These spectacles are manufactured, as far as I know, by one company only—a company in Birmingham, which employs 400 or 500 people engaged not only in the manufacture of these spectacles but on precision instruments of different kinds.

If the Clause were approved unamended and the sale of these spectacles were prohibited, a great many people would be thrown out of work, but it is not on those grounds that I have moved my Amendment. These spectacles are sold by a reputable chain store. There is a range of fourteen different types. They are separately numbered from eight upwards, No. 8 containing lenses of the strongest type and the highest number containing lenses of the weakest type. A card is supplied to the intending purchaser, containing various types of print, from very large print to the very smallest, and the object is that the intending purchaser shall choose from the range of spectacles before him a pair most suited to his condition. The reading card itself contains matter which indicates clearly that the spectacles are intended for adults and for reading purposes. The purchase of the spectacles is left at the entire discretion of the purchaser. No pressure is exerted and no advice is given by the assistant in the store.

I should like to refer to some remarks made on Second Reading by the hon. Member for Manchester, Exchange (Mr. W. Griffiths), which may have given rise to a misconception on this point. He said:

"I think that it was Lord Crook … who recorded that he presented himself at a chain store and asked for a pair of spectacles. A girl assistant provided him with a pair marked No. 10. He returned to the same store two hours later and saw another girl assistant who presented him with a pair marked No. 11. That is the alarming experience which the noble Lord underwent and it was of the greatest use to him in presiding over the Committee and agreeing with the rest of his colleagues that State registration was desirable."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 6th December. 1957: Vol. 579, c. 837.]

That is a distortion of the position. The assistant has no qualifications and no right or ability to advise the customer on what type of spectacles he or she should choose. It is left entirely to the discretion of the customer, without any pressure whatever being exerted. I emphasise that in order to remove any misconception which may have arisen in the minds of hon. Members on that point.

Most hon. Members will be aware that in middle life there is a lengthening of vision, the technical name for which is presbyopia, which may come on as early as the age of 35 or be deferred until the age of 50. This defect manifests itself in an inability to read small print except in the clearest light, and as the defect develops it necessitates some remedial measure, such as magnifying spectacles which will bring the print nearer. It has been stated as a criticism of the spectacles that they contain two lenses of the same strength, but that is an essential feature of the spectacles. They are designed only for people who otherwise have perfect vision and suffer simply from this defect of the lengthening of vision in later years.

They would be quite useless for people suffering from a defect of one eye only. There are two arguments in support of that contention. If people are suffering from a defect of one eye only, they would presumably have had treatment long before the onset of this defect of lengthening vision, and therefore would not use the spectacles which form the subject of my Amendment. If such people were to try on a pair of spectacles with magnifying lenses both of the same strength they would improve the vision of one eye only by distorting that of the other. It is quite clear that they would reject the spectacles as quite unsuitable for their condition.

The criticism has also been advanced that they might be used by children. That is a very unsubstantial criticism, because children's sight is regularly tested when they are very young, and they would be fitted with glasses under the National Health Service.

Nevertheless, I want to make it quite clear that I do not recommend that all persons suffering from lengthening of vision should buy chain store spectacles. It is advisable that they should go to an optician or ophthalmologist—an experienced professional man who can advise them as to the type of spectacles they require. The point that I wish to emphasise is that the vast majority of people who use spectacles have perfect vision except for this lengthening of sight. Only a small minority have eye defects which need spectacles supplied by an optician because of the different measure of defect in each eye.

Those persons who have perfect vision except for this lengthening of sight in later years tend to mislay their spectacles. They are used only for reading, and there is a tendency to put them on one side at other times, and they often get mislaid in that manner. They might be lost, or even broken. What is a sufferer from this complaint to do if his glasses are mislaid, lost or broken? It may be that during the course of a journey that he is undertaking, or at the end of it, he finds that he has not got his spectacles with him. Today he has no alternative but to go to a chain store and purchase a temporary pair which will enable him to read and carry on until he has access to his own pair or can obtain a new pair recommended by an optician or ophthalmologist.

He would suffer a very grave handicap if that facility were not available to him. He would perhaps have to strain his eyesight in endeavouring to read, and cause damage to his eyes in consequence. He might borrow from a friend, but that would generally be agreed to be a very unfortunate thing to do because he would be wearing spectacles prescribed for another eye condition and they would certainly cause much more damage to his sight than a temporary pair purchased from a chain store.

In this connection I should like to quote a quite impartial view advanced by the Economist in its issue of 14th December, 1957, when the following appeared in reference to the Second Reading debate:

"It was clear from the Second Reading debate that an attempt will be made in Committee to prohibit the sale of spectacles in chain stores and the like. This must be resisted, It is right and proper that everyone should have the opportunity through the National Health Service to have his eyes tested and examined by a qualified person. The sensible person, if his eyes are troubling him, will take the opportunity, but he should not be forced to do so when it may be much more convenient for him to take a pair of spectacles that will suit his purpose off the peg. No one has attempted to ban self-medication, even though people may he harming themselves by swallowing aspirin, laxatives and cough mixtures instead of consulting a doctor first. Similarly, anyone who wants a pair of spectacles immediately and urgently should be allowed to buy them."

That sums up the matter very cogently. I very much doubt whether any hon.

Member would suggest that restrictions should be placed upon the sale of medicaments generally, and that no person should be able to buy a medicament from a chemist without a medical prescription.

My hon. Friend will be aware that restrictions are placed upon all drugs which are considered to be dangerous. If it is proved that the use of these spectacles endangers the eyesight, surely my hon. Friend will agree that some restriction should be imposed upon their sale.

I do not think that that argument is valid. I agree that dangerous drugs are subject to restrictions, but ordinary medicaments are not. A man may have a stomach ulcer which is causing him great pain, and he may obtain relief by buying a stomach powder, as a result of which he may accelerate the course of the disease and suffer very great discomfort later. There is no law to prevent him doing so, and no suggestion that there should be.

Is the hon. Member really suggesting that he approves of that kind of thing?

I approve of the liberty of the subject and object to any infringement of that liberty.

The hon. Member is in favour of ulcers.

I strongly recommend that anyone suffering from such a complaint should consult a medical man, but it would be quite wrong to penalise the vast majority of sensible people who buy medicaments according to their own judgment because a foolish minority might be damaging their own health by not taking medical advice. The same argument applies in the case of the spectacles that I have mentioned.

Even the Crook Report was not definite about this matter. It said:

"It would seem to follow, therefore, that the proper limits of legislation should be the prohibition of the use of recognised titles by unqualified people and the prevention of such people from holding themselves out as qualified practitioners."

The limits of such registration should be those, with which I entirely agree, and the Bill amply provides for such registration.

2.0 p.m.

Another objection has been advanced. It has been stated—and I must say that I took very careful note of the objection—that there may be people who are suffering from a disease of the eye such as glaucoma or cataract which will also occur later in life. It is possible that they are suffering concurrently from glaucoma and from presbyopia or lengthening of vision, and that in order to improve their sight in the short term and to overcome this lengthening of vision they would have recourse to spectacles of a simple magnifying character, and that, as a result of buying such glasses from a chain store they would not have the advantage of the advice of a qualified optician.

I took that argument very much into account in my consideration of the problem and I had expected in Committee that an array of facts and figures could be put forward in substantiation of that criticism. To my surprise, however—and I was willing to be influenced by such figures and facts—there were only generalisations to the effect that medical opinion generally is in favour of banning these spectacles, and other specious arguments of that character.

Having no knowledge of the subject myself, I have examined what medical books have been available to me on the care of the eye. I have never seen in any of the books to which I have referred any criticism of the deleterious effects of spectacles sold in chain stores. I am not speaking as a medical man or as an optician, and I must defer to others on technical matters. I am merely speaking on behalf of the general public. The vast majority of people in middle and later life have recourse to glasses for the first time in their lives. Apart from lengthening vision, they have perfectly normal sight. The lengthening vision causes them to have recourse to reading glasses of exactly the type sold in the chain stores, consisting of simple magnifying lenses and lenses of equal strength. They form, as I have said, the vast majority of people who wear glasses at all. It is their rights which will be infringed by the Clause unless my Amendment is accepted.

These people will be in the extremely difficult position of being unable to read unless they are able to obtain a pair of spectacles at short notice should they mislay or break their own. If the Clause goes through unamended, many thousands of people will be put to great inconvenience and very great expense merely in order to defend a problematical and certainly a tiny minority of the public.

I quite understand that the opticians' profession would be in favour of the Clause. I do not wish to accuse members of that profession of unworthy motives, but it is quite clear that if 250,000 pairs of spectacles of this kind are at present being sold every year in general stores, and if their sale is going to be prohibited under the Bill, there will be 250,000 more pairs of spectacles sold by opticians to their profit. It is also clear that the National Health Service will bear a very heavy extra charge as a result.

The extra charge to the National Health Service might run into millions of £s, because we must consider not only the 250,000 people who purchase these spectacles annually, but must take into account the fact that if a person knows that he cannot buy a pair of spectacles at short notice, a person who is suffering only from the defect of lengthening vision, he will not risk the danger of losing his spectacles and being unable to replace them straight away. He will, therefore, be compelled to buy a number of pairs of spectacles and plant them in different places. [Laughter.] That may cause hilarity among certain hon. Members, but what is the alternative? If, for example, I travel from Liverpool to London and find on the train that I have left my glasses behind, what recourse have I except to go to a chain store to replace them? If I go to an optician I have to have my eyes tested before I can get another pair of spectacles. Even if as a Member of Parliament an exception were to be made in my favour, that would not influence me, because we are not legislating for ourselves but for the general public.

What the hon. Gentleman is saying is really not quite true. Let us take, first of all, the example which he has cited. He would not be charged at all for the examination of his eyes because that cost is borne by the National Health Service. I know from my own experience that it is common practice for opticians to provide at very short notice to a patient a pair of glasses which will enable him to carry on for a day or two until the new pair is obtained.

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention and for what he says. However, I am not entirely reassured, because I spoke to someone very highly placed in the profession and he said that it was not the function of opticians to supply such glasses to ordinary members of the public and that they would not be able to do so. If there were a Clause in the Bill which provided that opticians should be under an obligation to do that, my objection would almost entirely disappear.

I am urging that the Committee should not have regard only for a tiny and even problematical minority of the general public who might conceivably be benefited if the Clause remained unaltered. I ask that we should consider the advantage and benefit of the vast majority of the reading public who have passed middle age, and that we should not impose an intolerable restriction on the liberty of the subject by means of the Clause. I hope that the Committee will be influenced by what I have said, will consider the points I have raised and will accept the Amendment.

I beg to second the Amendment.

I am sure that the hon. Member for Kirkdale (Mr. N. Pannell) appreciates that I second the Amendment so as to enable a proper discussion of his views to take place, and that I must not be thought, by seconding the Amendment, to be agreeing with all he says. I think there should be discussion on what the hon. Gentleman has said for four reasons. The first is a very simple reason. It is that I think it important that those hon. Members competent to do so should he enabled to answer what the hon. Gentleman has said about the correction of sight and about the dangers that may be involved by the wrong use of simple magnifying glasses. The hon. Gentleman has said a great deal about that and I want the matter properly discussed.

I would go so far as to say that if a quarter of a million of these spectacles are being sold every year, then clearly a large section of the general public is willing to use this service. We as Members of Parliament must be very careful about telling a quarter of a million people that instead of paying 7s. for a pair of spectacles they must go to a qualified optician and pay at least 30s. a pair under the National Health Service.

But my hon. Friend was in favour of putting on charges in 1951.

I do not know what my hon. Friend means. He says I was in favour of putting on charges in 1951, but I was not in Parliament in 1951.

My hon. Friend was in favour of it, all the same.

I will deal with my hon. Friend if he cares to interrupt me properly.

At the moment, there is clearly a market, and the 250,000 people who buy these spectacles ought to be told quite distinctly by my hon. Friends and others why they think that it is medically dangerous for them to buy these spectacles.

The second reason why I think there should be discussion of this matter is that the firm which lives largely on this trade is near my constituency. It is, in fact, just over the border, and I believe some of its directors live in my constituency. I want to know, and I have asked the sponsors of the Bill this question before, when this firm is likely to go out of business. It is only fair—I see the hon. Gentleman nodding his head—that the firm, which has had a perfectly reputable business up to this moment, should be given some idea when these provisions of the Bill are likely to come into operation.

I have said before that perhaps we do not need so much the actual date of coming into operation as a negative indication that it will not come into operation, say, before 1st January, 1959. If that sort of indication could be given it would give a firm of this magnitude some opportunity of calculating how quickly it must reorganise itself or be prepared to go out of existence.

Will the hon. Gentleman allow me? I am advised that it will be at least two or three years before this Clause can be brought into operation. It will have to wait until the first register has been completed, so that there is plenty of time before it can operate.

I am much obliged to the hon. Gentleman. That certainly does answer my second point, and the information will be of considerable assistance to these people, who have quite legitimately sunk a great deal of money in their business.

The third reason why I think we should discuss this matter is that perhaps some indication could be given by my hon. Friends and others as to the kind of lenses that will still be allowed to be sold in Woolworths and other multiple stores if this Clause is passed unamended. Clearly, there may be people who leave their spectacles behind when they make a journey, as the hon. Gentleman opposite suggested quite rightly, and I think we should be able to say that simple magnifying glasses not in spectacle frames might still be allowed for sale in the chain stores. If so, I think it should be stated. It is important to make it absolutely clear that there is at least something that can be done in order to help the sort of "hard luck" case which the hon. Gentleman mentioned, apart from the actual purchase of spectacles.

My fourth and final reason why I second the Amendment is this. The letter which we have all had from the makers of these spectacles underlines a very great deal of what I have been saying throughout the discussion on this Bill. That was that people can buy these spectacles for 7s. a pair retail. Within that price, there is, presumably, a retailer's profit and a manufacturer's profit. I am not suggesting that privately-supplied spectacles can be sold for 7s. a pair. I am suggesting that the frames are not all that bad. I know that the lenses are simple ones, not curved, and I know, and I want to make it quite clear that I accept, that a professional fee must be added in the case of privately-supplied spectacles to compensate the optician for his training and skill and for the overheads which he carries in having a consulting room. But when all that is added, I still do not see where the difference comes in between 7s. a pair for these glasses and the five guineas which is the sort of price one pays for privately purchased spectacles. That differentiation seems to me to be much too big to be justified.

Is my hon. Friend really suggesting that the mass-produced, inferior article which he holds in his hand is in any way comparable, not only with the spectacle frames sold privately, but the ones supplied under the National Health Service? Will he allow me to tell him that it is a fact that there are standards which have been laid down by the Ministry of Health as to the quality of the lenses and frames, and that in no particular does the article which he is holding in his hand or to which he has referred measure up to the National Health Service standard?

I must not be taken as opposing my hon. Friend on this. I am only saying a simple thing, which is that 7s. is so vitally different from 5 guineas that, given all the considerations which my hon. Friend wants to bring in, and I accept them all, because before he interrupted me I was outlining them——

rose——

No, I will not give way again. I must be allowed to finish one answer to my hon. Friend before he interrupts again.

On a point of order. Is it not the custom of this House that when an hon. Member refers to another hon. Member he should give way?

It is the custom, but that is not a point of order.

I agree that it is customary, but I think I ought to be allowed to give my answer to one point before my hon. Friend brings up another.

What I am saying is that there is so vast a difference between 7s. and 5 guineas, that, given all the considerations which my hon. Friend wants to bring in, I do not see the justification for so great a differential. All I am saying is that it underlines my point that the public need to know what is the worth of spectacle frames, and that, on top of that, they should be quite willing, and naturally accept, to pay for skilled work by the optician. Given all that, I am still left rather aghast when I see that these simple spectacles, and rudimentary things like them, can be sold for 7s.

On a point of order. Have we not already had, on a previous Amendment which the hon. Gentleman withdrew, all this discussion about the prices of frames and prices charged?

We seem to be having it again.

I am much obliged to you, Mr. Deputy-Speaker. I was trying to be relevant, and the one consideration which impels me to think that this matter should be discussed is that people can buy these things so cheaply, which is one of the main points advanced by the manufacturers in support of the Amendment proposed by the hon. Gentleman.

However, the hon. Gentleman, in interrupting me, was only prolonging the proceedings, because I was bringing my remarks to an end. I said I had four reasons for seconding this Amendment in order that we might have a discussion. I have given my four reasons. I hope that we shall now have some justification from my hon. Friends who are opticians and others to correct the idea among a quarter of a million people that they are buying good spectacles when they are buying these things at 7s. a pair.

I am neither an ophthalmologist nor an ophthalmic optician. I never have been and never hope to be one, but, for all that, I would most strongly oppose this Amendment.

We shall never be able to prevent people using spectacles without having their eyes properly tested. There will always be people who will use the spectacles of their deceased grandparents or great-aunts, and we want to prevent these people wearing spectacles without having their eyes tested, because of the great risks that they are running. Because a person past middle age is getting a little blind in one or both eyes, it does not follow that that person in suffering from presbyopia which could be put right with glasses. The trouble could be caused by a host of other things which could be detected only if the eyes were properly tested.

A dear friend and relation of mine, who had trouble with one eye, tried different types of spectacles with no avail, and eventually came to me. I took him to an ophthalmic surgeon, or an ophthalmologist, which is the term used in the Bill, and at once he recognised that my friend had a cancer on his retina. But it was far advanced. The eye was taken out at once, but unfortunately my friend died from recurrences of this cancer of the eye.

It is things like that which we want to avoid. Every ophthalmic optician has been trained, not to treat such cases but to recognise them, or at any rate to recognise that there is something wrong which is beyond his ken and send the patient to an ophthalmic surgeon. Because such dangers as that actually occur, I strongly oppose this Amendment.

I wish to support what has been said by my hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Mr. Hastings) and to mention what was said by the hon. and gallant Gentleman the Member for Croydon, North-East (Vice-Admiral Hughes Hallett) during the Committee stage discussions. The hon. and gallant Gentleman referred to a recent report of Professor Sorsby who, among other things, noted that 80 per cent. of cataract cases which came to his notice had not previously been seen either by an ophthalmic optician or an ophthalmologist. It so happens that the onset of cataract is insidious and without pain. If it progresses rapidly and completely obscures the interior of the eye it is sometimes difficult for a surgeon to be satisfied that he is able to operate under the best conditions because he is unable to see what is the general condition of the interior of the eye. Nothing will happen to the vast majority of the people who buy the 250,000 pairs of spectacles sold in chain stores each year, but I am satisfied that there is a residual content which suffers the most disastrous consequences to eyesight and health.

It was the overwhelming desire of hon. Members from both sides of the House that something should be written into the Bill to prevent these sales, and during the Committee stage discussions Amendments were made prohibiting the sale of spectacles in chain stores. The hon. Member for Kirkdale (Mr. N. Pannell), who spoke to the Committee as sincerely as he has spoken today, was unable during the Committee stage to get any- body to support him. I do not think hon. Members would today wish to reverse the decision of the Committee and to accept this Amendment.

My hon. Friend the Member for Northfield (Mr. Chapman) used the example of the chain store spectacles which cost 7s. as an illustration when he returned to his theme of the enormous gap between the cost of those spectacles and some appliances which are sold to people for five guineas and so on. I interrupted him, when he allowed me, and put it to him that these articles were vastly different. I understand that my hon. Friend is in the hotel business and I imagine that there are boarding houses surrounding his hotel. There are also 4-star, 3-star and 2-star hotels of varying quality, and I have no doubt that his hotel charges are not controlled by statute. Nevertheless, there is a different quality of service in his own industry, if I may so call it, and he would regard it as outrageous to compare some types of boarding houses with a 4-star hotel.

May I interrupt my hon. Friend in return to say that I thoroughly agree with him? But I should be staggered to find that, in the general run of hotel prices, those of one hotel were fifteen times more than those of another. That is the differential in the figures which I have been quoting. The very example quoted by my hon. Friend has undone what he said. We might compare the average hotel with the average privately-supplied spectacle frames, but if I found that there was a difference of fifteen times in the costs of ordinary and rather poor hotels I should feel I was in wonderland.

I feel that it would be disastrous to prohibit the sale of these cheap spectacles in chain stores. I agree that in cases of short-sightedness and ailments it is necessary for the sufferer at some time to appear before a proper professional person for an examination, but I consider that on occasion these cheap spectacles can perform a useful purpose. I should like to give an example which happened on election day, on Wednesday, when my wife beat her Conservative opponent by nearly twenty votes to one. The Conservative candidate admitted that their organisation had fallen to pieces and that they had received no support from anyone except the wives.

My wife lost her glasses during the day, probably while examining what was happening at the polling station or when doing something of that sort. She immediately rang up her ophthalmic consultant and the secretary said that nearly all the leading people in the profession were absent at an important conference and there was no chance of my wife having her eyes re-examined this week. My own two pairs of glasses were useless to her. She could not read the election results or anything else. At the psychological moment, a 7s. pair of spectacles turned up in my post. My wife put them on and said, "This is not a desirable pair to use continuously but compared with a magnifying glass"—that was the alternative which she had borrowed from a leading medical person—"I find it very much less of a strain to use them."

My wife had no chance to get her glasses replaced for the best part of a week. She has not been able to make an appointment before Monday and then the glasses will have to be made. Meanwhile, she has important council work to do and in the interval the 7s. glasses will serve a useful temporary purpose. I give that as an example of something which happened in the last two days which I think justifies a state of affairs in which citizens can get this sort of temporary help when permanent glasses which are safe to wear are not available.

May I ask my hon. Friend whether his wife had had her eyes tested previously by a competent ophthalmologist or ophthalmic optician to be quite sure that no serious defect was present?

My wife rang a professional man, who happened to be absent at a conference. He has an address in Harley Street which I should think would justify most people in assuming that he was completely competent. Having lost her glasses, my wife rang this gentleman in the first instance to see whether any modification was desired.

I hope that the House will resist the Amendment. It is clear that danger exists not for people who have had the good sense to go to a competent ophthalmologist to get their eyes tested, but for people who buy spectacles from stores instead of going for ophthalmic advice. If they are now forced to go to well-trained specialists in the optical profession they will have an opportunity of knowing whether their bad sight is something merely to be regulated by glasses or whether they need immediate medical attention.

That is the important point, and is why the Amendment should be resisted. If spectacles disappear from the chain stores many people will have to go to an ophthalmic surgery for treatment. The hon. Member for Barking (Mr. Hastings) described how death can ultimately be caused when serious eye defects are neglected. With proper treatment such people might be able to enjoy their sight for many years.

I would add one or two words to what has been so well said by those who oppose the Amendment. I can quite understand why my hon. Friend the Member for Northfield (Mr. Chapman) seconded the Amendment. He omitted to give as his reason for doing so, that he wishes to protract the proceedings on the Bill for as long as possible so that eventually there might be no decision on it. He did not mention that reason, but possibly it was there.

The Amendment raises an extremely important matter. We have been told that 250,000 people purchase glasses from chain stores. Many of them imagine that because the lenses they have bought enable them to see more clearly, they are suitable for their eyes, but they may have bought something which is worse than useless. That is the basis of the argument against permitting the sale of glasses in this way. The purpose of the Bill is to protect the public and not the opticians. The public should be safeguarded against people who fiddle about with one of the most precious of our senses.

A person who buys glasses in this way may risk permanent disability, because his eyes might need treatment for something which is very serious. Whatever may be the advantages, I am sure that no responsible firm of chain stores would wish to place any member of the public in that position. If the hon. Member for Kirkdale (Mr. N. Pannell) has considered what it might mean to some people, even if they are only few, he might reconsider his opinion and withdraw his Amendment. Is it not a fact that many of the 250,000 people who buy these spectacles continue to use them without bothering any more about the matter? It is all very well to say that to borrow glasses from a friend is objectionable and that to use glasses which are bought in a shop is better, but I cannot see the logic of that argument. This kind of person will go into a shop to buy glasses with stronger magnifiers or will adjust what he wishes to read nearer or further from the glasses until he can see properly. Out of the 250,000 people it may be that 40,000 or 50,000 ought to be medically treated and ought not to be left to judge for themselves what is good or bad for their eyes. If the mover of the Amendment had made that point his argument would have been stronger.

Chain stores sell a large number of commodities which are useful, and perhaps the prices are lower than on the ordinary market, but when they concern human sight we have to protect consumers against themselves. I therefore hope that the House will reject the Amendment.

A good many arguments were brought forward in support of the Amendment by my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Kirkdale (Mr. N. Pannell) but there are one or two points I should like to make. The subject was discussed very fully in Committee upon a similar Amendment.

I have not altered my opinion on the matter since the Committee stage, and nothing that my hon. Friend has now said has made me change it. The Clause which he wishes to amend was inserted to protect the public. I hope my hon. Friend will think over what has been said, particularly by my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Exchange (Mr. W. Griffiths), when he quoted the Sorsby Report to the effect that 80 per cent. of the people registered as blind by reason of cataract had had no treatment whatever. Presumably they had never consulted at any time an ophthalmic optician or an ophthalmologist.

It should be part of the object of the Bill to try to reduce the number of those cases. By passing this Clause without amendment I think we shall do that. My hon. Friend said that we suggested that these spectacles were harmful. No one suggests that in themselves they are harmful, but they give a false sense of security by making people who wear them think they are not suffering from any disease and are quite safe.

I am sorry that the wife of the hon. Member for Bethnal Green (Mr. Holman) lost her spectacles. It is important that if spectacles are lost or broken every assistance should be given by the optical profession to provide substitute ones, either by temporary loan or more speedy supply of a permanent pair. That point, I am sure, will be taken note of by the profession.

My hon. Friend the Member for Kirkdale said that this matter was not dealt with clearly in the Crook Report, but that Report said quite definitely in paragraph 88:

"…legislation, similar perhaps to Section 1 of the Dentists Act, 1921, should provide that no unregistered person shall practise or hold himself out to practise ophthalmic or dispensing optics."

Would my hon. Friend claim that a chain store selling glasses of the description mentioned in my Amendment is dispensing optics?

Yes, it is dispensing optics by selling glasses which are not prescribed. I think the intention of the Crook Report is quite clear and in this Clause we were carrying out the recommendation of the Report. For those reasons, I hope the House will reject the Amendment.

I am grateful to hon. Members on both sides of the House for expressing their views so clearly on this matter. I have tried to marshal and array all the arguments in favour of my Amendment that I could muster. I have to admit that I have not carried the House with me. However, I should like to reply to one or two points made by those who oppose the Amendment.

The hon. Member for Barking (Mr. Hastings) mentioned a person suffering a defect in one eye. That is no argument against my Amendment because these spectacles contain lenses of equal strength, they would be quite unsuitable for such a person, who could improve his sight in one eye only by distorting the vision of the other. The hon. Member referred to the grave danger of a person buying these glasses instead of going to an optician following treatment for a disease. I tried to deal with that point. This Bill deals with opticians, ophthalmic or dispensing, but does not deal with ophthalmologists or surgeons, who alone can deal with the diseases mentioned by the hon. Member. It is in a sense irrelevant to bring in that argument because the Bill does not deal with it. If it is asserted that a person who goes to an optician—a man without any medical training—for glasses would be automatically referred to an ophthalmologist, there would be no need for the Amendment to Clause 25 which appears later on the Notice Paper, in page 20, line 37, at the end to insert:

(3) The General Optical Council shall as soon as practicable after the day appointed for the coming into operation of this section make and submit to the Privy Council rules providing that where is appears to a registered optician that a person consulting him is suffering from an injury or disease of the eye, the optician shall, except in an emergency or where that person is consulting him for the purpose of being given treatment in accordance with rules under paragraph (d) of subsection (1) of this section or in such other cases as may be prescribed, being cases in which it is, owing to special circumstances, impracticable or inexpedient to do so, take the prescribed steps to refer that person to a registered medical practitioner for advice and treatment.

The hon. Member for Manchester, Exchange (Mr. W. Griffiths) mentioned the Sorsby Report, which said that 80 per cent. of those suffering from cataract have not had previous treatment. I do not know the date of that Report. It would be most useful if I could know the date.

1954.

That is a very important point, because quite clearly those people could have had recourse to the National Health Service. If the hon. Member had gone further and said that the Sorsby Report stated that those people had not had treatment because they had recourse to chain store glasses, he would have made a valid point against the Amendment, but he did not do that.

Neither has any hon. Member quoted a specific case in which the use of these glasses has caused actual damage to eyesight. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Northfield (Mr. Chapman) for pointing out the great disparity in price between those glasses and glasses obtained from other sources. The cosmetic quality may not be very high but they are reasonably presentable. The lenses are spheres and are not curved, I think the additional cost for curved lenses would not be very high. I would categorically assert that glasses like these, tested for the sight of a person who suffers only from lengthening of sight, would not cost more than 15s. I think the public will suffer by having to pay high prices when they have to get a substitute pair in case of emergency.

I wish to take up the point made by the hon. Member for Leicester, North-West (Mr. Janner). He referred to the disparity between a person who borrows a pair of glasses from a friend and a person who buys a pair from a chain store. I have no hesitation in saying that a person suffering only from lengthening of sight—that is the gravamen of my case—who chooses a pair from a chain store where they are graded according to the the needs of people of different ages and different development of the defect, would be much better served by a 7s. pair from a chain store than by borrowing a pair from a friend who may or may not have the same degree of disability.

Is the hon. Member saying that if I borrowed a pair of spectacles from another hon. Member and said "I can see through these", that is not the same as buying a pair from a chain store and saying, "I can see through these"?

It is most unlikely that the hon. Member would be able to see through the borrowed pair of spectacles because there are fourteen different types of glasses. There is a range of fourteen available in the chain store. If he had fourteen friends and borrowed from each of them he might get as much satisfaction from one of the borrowed pairs as from a pair he could buy in a chain store.

My hon. Friend the Member for Wembley, South (Mr. Russell) said there was no objection to these spectacles as such. He added that they gave a false sense of security, but no one has met the point I made about a person who might mislay his glasses and be unable to obtain a substitute pair except through a chain store. I took note of the half promise made by my hon. Friend that this matter will be considered by the Optical Council to be set up under the Bill, and that the Council will consider the position of people placed at a disadvantage through losing their glasses and arrange with opticians, dispensing or otherwise, to provide glasses for them at a small fee.

I recognise that I have not carried the House with me in my arguments. I do not propose to go through the futile exercise of dividing the House for the satisfaction of doing so and for the purpose of delaying proceedings. I still hold strongly to my main argument that this Clause would put at grave disadvantage thousands of people who would have to incur great expense and suffer inconvenience if the Clause went through unamended. I hope the points I have made will be considered in another place and that perhaps an Amendment can be introduced which will meet them. In view of the temper of the House on this question, reluctantly and without abandoning any of my principles or convictions in this matter, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the Amendment.

I beg to move, in page 19, line 9, after "death", to insert:

"or such longer period as the General Optical Council may in any particular case allow "

The Amendment deals with the position which arises in an optical practice where the optician dies. The Bill as drafted gives the widow or children or personal representatives or trustees the opportunity of using the title for three years. The Amendment proposes that the General Optical Council shall have discretionary powers here, and the object is to enable the Council to assist a widow or a son or a daughter who, on the basis of his or her age and academic background, is within striking distance of qualifying in his or her own right and therefore succeeding to the title and carrying on the practice.

It would be undesirable to extend the term without discretion because a widow or a son or a daughter might seek to carry on the practice, employing a registered optician, by saying that he or she wished to qualify and yet make no serious attempt to do so. Three years is clearly inadequate because the minimum period within which a student commencing now could expect to qualify would be four years. If he failed some parts of the examination and had to take them again, it might well be five years.

This matter was referred to the Committee and the proposal won general approval. I hope the House will agree that this form of words shall be inserted to give the General Optical Council the discretionary powers to which I referred, bearing in mind the object for which it should exercise the discretion.

I beg to second the Amendment.

Does the hon. Member for Northfield (Mr. Chapman) wish to move his Amendment in line 16?

I beg to move, in page 20, line 16, at the end to insert:

Provided that the Council shall first be satisfied that high standards of professional conduct are being generally applied by opticians in fixing charges to the general public for optical appliances or parts of optical appliances.

I have already discussed this at great length and I now move the Amendment formally.

Is the Amendment seconded? There being no seconder, the Amendment falls.

I beg to move, in line 37, at the end to insert:

(3) The General Optical Council shall as soon as practicable after the day appointed for the coming into operation of this section make and submit to the Privy Council rules providing that where it appears to a registered optician that a person consulting him is suffering from an injury or disease of the eye, the optician shall, except in an emergency or where that person is consulting him for the purpose of being given treatment in accordance with rules under paragraph (d) of subsection (1) of this section or in such other cases as may be prescribed, being cases in which it is, owing to special circumstances, impracticable or inexpedient to do so, take the prescribed steps to refer that person to a registered medical practitioner for advice and treatment.

This Amendment is designed to emphasise, at the behest of the medical profession, that opticians accept certain limitations on their functions. It states that it is the duty of the optician, if he detects any indication of disease when he is treating a patient, to refer that patient immediately to a medical practitioner. It is to emphasise that this is the accepted fact in the profession that I have moved the Amendment.

I beg to second the Amendment.

I want to thank the promoters of the Bill for adding this subsection. I am sure that all members of the medical profession, who feel very strongly about it, will be grateful to them. We cannot cut the body into little pieces, as it were, and treat each part separately. Each part is associated with the remainder. A drug given for treatment of an eye may influence the rest of the body. It therefore seems to me that treatment should be carried out by an individual who has made a study of the whole body and who knows at any rate something of the action of various forms of treatment upon it.

I, too, should like to express my gratitude to my hon. Friend the Member for Wembley, South (Mr. Russell). In Committee I moved three separate Amendments on this subject but they were not entirely satisfactory in drafting and I withdrew them on an undertaking being given that some attempt would be made to secure a satisfactory form of words to meet the point. I think that this has been done in a most handsome manner by those responsible for the Bill.

The position is not changed here. This is exactly what opticians have always been charged with doing under the National Health Service Act. A definition is given in the Bill.

I beg to move, in page 21, line 14, to leave out from "accounts" to "and" in line 16, and to insert:

"for each financial year of the Council shall be audited by auditors to be appointed by them and shall as soon as may be after they have been audited be published".

It seems to me that this Amendment and the following Amendment in line 16 deal with auditors. Can they be discussed together?

I should be grateful if you would so rule, Mr. Speaker, because the second Amendment is complementary to the first.

I should first declare an interest in these matters, as I am a member of one of the first of the learned bodies listed in the second Amendment. By Clause 27 (2) of the Bill the General Optical Council is required to

"keep accounts of all sums received and paid"

and also to have those accounts audited, but there is no qualification indicated on the type of person who is to be qualified to audit those accounts. The auditor is to be appointed by Regulations made by the Privy Council, and I am sure that the Privy Council will do its best to select a suitable person to audit these accounts.

At the same time, the auditing profession has been trying to improve its standards for over a hundred years. There are certain bodies which have established and constantly improved their standards. These are bodies which have previously been recognised by the House as suitable for duties of this kind. Since the war, going back to 1947, the House has passed twelve Acts, including the Electricity Act, 1947, the Iron and Steel Act, 1953, and the Sugar Act as recently as 1956, in which these bodies which have established certain professional standards have been specified in the appropriate audit Clause.

This is already an excellent Bill, and I take this opportunity of congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Wembley, South (Mr. Russell) on introducing it, but I think it would be improved if it laid down that the accounts of the General Optical Council shall be audited by properly qualified auditors. I should like to express my thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Wembley, South for allowing his name to be associated with these two Amendments.

I beg to second the Amendment.

Both Amendments are in keeping with the principles of the Bill. In a Bill which tries to lay down qualifications for opticians, it is only fair that they should employ qualified auditors.

I beg to move, in page 21, line 31, to leave out from "under" to end of line 33, and insert:

"subsection (2) of section fifteen as respects such proceedings as are mentioned in the proviso to that subsection".

This Amendment is consequential on the Amendment to page 14, line 4.

I beg to second the Amendment.

I beg to move, in page 22,to leave out lines 39 to 44.

This is a drafting Amendment. It means that the definition of the word "party" as laid down in the Bill at present is not particularly necessary. Therefore, I think that it is best to take it out of the Bill. It shortens the Bill by five lines.

I beg to second the Amendment.

I beg to move, in page 23, line 16, to leave out "optical appliances" and insert "an optical appliance".

This also is a drafting Amendment. I am advised that the words "optical appliances" mean a complete object, such as a monocle or a pair of glasses. The plural might suggest that each lens separately was an optical appliance. The words as at present drafted are apparently inconsistent with the wording of Clause 21, which has been discussed already.

I beg to second the Amendment.

I should like to ask the hon. Member for Wembley, South (Mr. Russell) to enlarge upon what he has told us. Many of us are compelled to use a number of optical appliances. I have four in my possession at the present time. They were all ordered by the same ophthalmologist. They are for helping my sight on different occasions—when I am outside, for reading ordinary print, and for when I am reading very small print. The pair that I have on at the moment are bi-focals, because I sometimes want to look at you, Mr. Speaker, and sometimes at my notes. I cannot see why an ophthalmic optician or ophthalmologist should not at the same time order more than one type of ophthalmic appliance, which I understand to be the name for glasses.

I do not think there is much that I can add to what I have already said. The object of the Amendment is to avoid confusion being caused by the wording in Clause 21. I am certainly advised that the words "ophthalmic appliance" in the singular means a complete object. The hon. Gentleman gave as an example bi-focal spectacles. I take it that that is an ophthalmic appliance and does not mean only one lens or one part of the bi-focal lens. I hope that that explanation goes some way towards reassuring the hon. Gentleman.

I beg to move, in page 24, line 11, to leave out "five" and insert "six".

This Amendment is the first of a series which have the effect of adding a fourth ophthalmic specialist to the General Optical Council. I put down a similar series of Amendments in Committee, but I withdrew them because I found at that time that no agreement had been reached between the British Medical Association and the ophthalmic opticians concerning this matter and it appeared that there was danger that if the Amendments were carried, the ophthalmic opticians would then move for a corresponding addition of their representation and we would have an ever-growing Council.

The point was raised on Second Reading by my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeenshire, East (Sir R. Boothby), who pointed out that the medical representation on the General Optical Council ought really to be strengthened. I understand also that the British Medical Association has made the point that if there are to be only three ophthalmic specialists, as at present provided in the Bill, one of whom has to come from Scotland, there might be difficulties in ensuring that medical questions were adequately covered. I am not entirely clear about the relevance of the point concerning one of them coming from Scotland, but the point has been made.

Be that as it may, since the Committee stage I am informed that agreement has been reached on this matter between the doctors and the ophthalmic opticians, for which I am grateful. I therefore move the Amendment.

I beg to second the Amendment.

I should like to emphasise that the Amendment has been accepted by the ophthalmic opticians only with considerable reluctance. They hope that as a result of its acceptance and there being an extra doctor on the General Optical Council when it is formed, there will be no further opposition to the Bill, at least from the B.M.A., when it reaches another place.

Naturally, one cannot prevent possibly unofficial opposition, but at least, one hopes that there will be no official opposition by the B.M.A. It is on that understanding, or at least in that hope, that we accept the Amendment.

I should like in a word or two to say how grateful I am that the Amendment has been accepted. Although I am a member of the British Medical Association, I do not suggest that I agree with it on everything, but I feel that this is a useful Amendment. We as doctors are watching with great interest and enthusiasm the development of the ophthalmic opticians as a learned profession. We feel that in this development members of my profession can be of assistance to them and give them some help.

We have developed from pharmacists and barber-surgeons in the last 200 years and our experience may be of value to others. Because of that and because of the help that ophthalmologists are able to give to, if I may so put it, their younger sisters, I am particularly glad that the Amendment is being accepted by the promoter of the Bill.

I recall the discussions we had about this matter in Committee, and I recall how the hon. and gallant Member for Croydon, North-East (Vice-Admiral Hughes Hallett) withdrew——

There was no discussion because I did not move the Amendments.

I beg the hon. and gallant Gentleman's pardon. Perhaps it was a private conversation with the hon. and gallant Gentleman that I recall, when he was talking to me about this pressure by the British Medical Association.

I want to ask the hon. Member for Wembley, South (Mr. Russell) why we are now going so far from what the Crook Report recommended and why, having gone so far, we do not go even farther. I think there has to be some justification for what is being done compared with what was recommended.

I recall from paragraph 59 of the Crook Report that the members of that Interdepartmental Committee laid down three specific recommendations about the balance of members inside the General Optical Council, and this Amendment seems to me to be upsetting that balance quite substantially. I have done my best to get my figures right in this matter, and I believe I am right in saying, although I am subject to correction, that the Crook Report recommended that there should be three members of the Privy Council, the Chairman and two members. The Bill has now put this total up from three to four. So we have there first of all the balance against the practical men of the profession increased by that much.

Then we come to the category which we can most conveniently call the optical examining bodies. The Crook Report recommended there should be six representatives of those, and the Bill faithfully follows that recommendation. Then we come to the ophthalmic opticians. The Crook Report recommended that there should be four from England and one from Scotland, making five. The Bill agrees and makes that number five.

Then we come to the dispensing opticians. Here the Bill differs from the Crook Report. The Crook Report recommended only one representative on the Council. The hon. Gentleman the Member for Wembley, South, in his Bill makes it two. Am I wrong?

I think the hon. Gentleman has overlooked that one was to represent dispensing opticians in England and Wales and one those in Scotland.

I am much obliged. That leaves us with two.

Yes.

So up to now we have been following the balance recommended in the Crook Report, except in the case of the Privy Council nominees.

Now we come to the medical men. The balance that was originally recommended in the Crook Report was five, and the hon. Gentleman is accepting an Amendment which raises that number to six. There is now a new complication in Northern Ireland, but I do not think that that matters in considering these comparisons I am trying to make between what is in the Bill and what was recommended by the Crook Report.

3.15 p.m.

If we accept the Amendment, we shall have reached the stage where the General Optical Council, in its small total of about twenty, already has two extra non-medical men, men not engaged in the profession, compared with the recommendations of the Crook Report. This seems to me to be to some extent flouting—I do not want to make too much of it—or gainsaying what the Crook Report recommended. It is a significant difference in view of the total membership of about twenty.

I will point to the more practical results of what I have been saying. I should like to know why the hon. Member has gone as far as he has and also why he did not widen the breach once he had made it. I have stated several times that I would expect the General Optical Council to do largely what opticians wanted it to do. I remember my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield. Attercliffe (Mr. J. Hynd) asking me how one proved it from the figures, and I replied that it was because they had, roughly, generally a majority on the General Optical Council.

Am I correct? Let us look at the figures. We have now got six members from the optical examining bodies, five ophthalmic opticians and two dispensing opticians, which makes a total of thirteen. We have left the four members of the Privy Council and, under the present proposal, six medical men and one from Northern Ireland, which amounts to eleven. What the hon. Gentleman has done is to swing the balance entirely inside the General Optical Council. I believe he has not gone far enough, however. He has got towards the prevention of a majority of opticians and optical views generally on the Council, but he has not gone far enough. He has made it thirteen-eleven instead of the Crook proposals of thirteen-eight. I should like him to go a little further than is now proposed.

Throughout the stages of the Bill I have contended that it would be very salutary if this profession, which incorporates in it a trading function, were on trial for a little time to enable it to attain the very high standards that we expect of professional men in our community. That is a legitimate thing to say. It is not one of the top-ranker professions. We want to make it so, and that is why the Bill has been introduced. I think I am entitled to say that, for various reasons which I pointed out in some detail in Committee, the profession cannot be said to have been applying the best professional standards so far.

I feel that we ought to have gone further than the Amendment and that for the time being at least the majority of the optical men on the Council should have been taken away. There should have been more than six medical men and more than four members nominated by the Privy Council. If we could have got near a balance or perhaps tipped it the other way to a majority of non-optical men, I should have been much happier.

After ail, what is the contentious point in the profession which the Council will have to decide fairly soon? It will be necessary for the Council to decide fairly soon whether to give effect to the provisions of this contentious Clause 25, when it will be possible, by a simple rule of the Council, not merely to regulate but to prohibit all forms of advertising. I am only guessing, but I presume that price display is included in the word "advertising." The Council will have to decide whether to bring this into operation.

When that problem comes to be decided, what will be the constitution of the Council? There will be five ophthalmic opticians and two dispensing opticians. I admit that there will be a bit of dispute between those groups, but there will be six members of the ophthalmic examining bodies and I would say that by and large they will be hand-in-glove with the ophthalmic opticians. The fair chance is that the people putting forward the professional point of view will be able to carry a majority inside the General Optical Council and to that extent will be able to force their view through.

What would I have liked to see as an alternative? I say quite bluntly that before the profession becomes fully fledged and is acknowledged by all of us to be in the highest bracket of our professions, I would like to have seen more medical men and more nominees of the Privy Council who, so to speak, could have applied this corrective. They could have said to the optical men, "We are not going to take all these things that you have put into practice in the past in the system of charging or anything else. We are wanting to see you put your house in order. We want to begin to apply the sort of standards observed by the higher professions, which have been established longer and have been fully safeguarded by legislation longer than you have." Had the Privy Council nominees and the medical men had a majority on the General Optical Council, if there was a fight within the Council at the outset they would have been able to urge this higher professional point of view upon the Council and prevent the majority of opticians from carrying through their views.

How automatic is it that this arrangement will go through? Given the present constitution, I said that they have virtually a numerical majority. I want to remind the hon. Member for Wembley, South of the provisions in relation to membership of the British Optical Association. As I stated in Committee, that Association takes the most extreme view of advertising and wants to get it stopped. It carries this principle so far as to delete from its membership employees of firms which advertise. I have pointed to this injustice before and have said that the better way to proceed is by example and by blacklisting the firms and not the employees.

This principle is so essential, in its view, that it will move quickly, decisively and strongly in the matter, and I fully expect it to try to put into the rules of the General Optical Council the sort of restrictions which appear in the rules of the British Optical Association. If the members of the Association want to do this, given the constitution of the Council as laid down in the Bill—and which is not satisfactorily corrected by the Amendment—we shall have no power to prevent their doing so, before putting their own house in order.

What shall we end up with? We now have a situation in which merely the Association blacklists refractionists and employees of firms which carry on advertising and price display, but if this constitution is accepted the medical men on the Council will not be able to prevent the Association members using their majority to carry through a provision, virtually with the force of an Act of Parliament, proscribing refractionists and other quite guiltless people who happen to work for employers who advertise.

That is going a long way. I have with me correspondence from persons who have been in this situation. These innocent men, who work daily for their living by testing sight, happen to work for firms blacklisted by the Association and have been thrown out of membership—and now they will be blacklisted by the Council.

The sponsor of the Bill has already gone a considerable way to make a break with the Cook Report. He has half accepted my contention by allowing an increase in the number of medical men and the number of members nominated by the Privy Council. He should now go the rest of the way and provide that the Council should have a majority of non-professional and non-trading members. This would put the profession on its mettle, and persuade it to put its house in order and adopt a high professional outlook. If the hon. Member would agree to go a stage further than is proposed by his hon. and gallant Friend I should be very pleased, for all the reasons that I have tried to outline.

I beg to move, in page 25, line 3, to leave out "three" and to insert "four".

This Amendment provides that the doctor to be added to the Council shall be an ophthalmologist.

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time.

In moving the Third Reading of the Bill, I wish very briefly to thank my supporters on both sides of the House for the help they have given and also my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary and his advisers for all the work they have put into the preparation of the Bill. I also wish to thank the ophthalmic and dispensing opticians, who are the real promoters of the Bill, and the medical profession for the co-operation they have shown.

My interest as the sponsor of the Bill has been to try to reach the greatest common measure of agreement between the various interests, and I think that, at any rate to a very large extent, we have succeeded in doing that. A number of changes have been made in the Bill since Second Reading, most of which, I think, I undertook to make during Second Reading. I think that they have improved the Bill, although I know that the hon. Member for Kirkdale (Mr. N. Pannell) would not agree with some that have been made.

The hon. Member for Northfield (Mr. Chapman) said earlier that he hoped I did not think him unreasonable. I did not think him unreasonable for having raised the points about which he is particularly keen during the Committee stage or, again, today. We have had a very long discussion on the topic, both in Committee and on the Floor of the House, and in view of the fact that the hon. Member for Northfield is in a small minority and as the profession has already given attention to the points he raised, and will continue to do so, I think I am entitled to say that I think he would be unreasonable if he now took any action to prevent the Bill being given its Third Reading this afternoon, particularly as he has attempted to do that today by twice drawing your attention, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, to the number of Members in the House. Therefore, I hope that he will not press his opposition any longer.

My hon. Friend the Member for Kirkdale, who feels equally strongly about the points he raised, has accepted the position that he is in a minority, and he did not press the Amendment on the Notice Paper in his name. I realise, of course, that the hon. Member for Northfield also withdrew his Amendment. I hope that he will also accept the position that he is in a minority in taking the line which he has taken this afternoon, especially in view of the fact that the points which he has raised are already being considered. I think he can be definitely assured that they will be taken into consideration by the General Optical Council when it is formed. In view of that, I hope he will not press further any objections.

In reply to two points, one of which I think the hon. Gentleman raised a short time ago on my hon. Friend's Amendment, to which I did not reply, may I say that he asked me whether magnifying glasses would be allowed under Clause 21. I made it clear in Committee that they were allowed, and I am only too glad to make it still more clear now that, under Clause 21, magnifying glasses—though not, of course, spectacles—are allowed to be sold in chain stores, or by any other unqualified person.

The only other point which the hon. Gentleman made which I should like to take up is the one about the firm now supplying spectacles to the chain stores being put out of business. The hon. Member asked me how long I thought it would be before that happened, and I said it would be about two or three years. The reason for that is that it will be about that time before it will be possible to bring into operation the prohibition Clause, which cannot be done until the first register has come into operation. That is what I am advised. Therefore, I think there is plenty of time for any redundancy caused by this provision to be taken into consideration. In any case, I understand that the firm concerned makes other optical appliances besides spectacles, and I therefore hope that the disturbance caused will be the minimum possible.

With those few observations, I invite the House to give the Bill a Third Reading.

I think the majority of hon. Members in the House hope that the Bill will receive its Third Reading and go on the Statute Book fairly soon. This is a matter which has been discussed for a number of years, and I think, quite frankly, that it has been unconscionably delayed in coming before us in this House.

As I said earlier, I am rather sorry that the Bill was not introduced as a Government Measure, but I take the opportunity to congratulate most sincerely the hon. Member for Wembley, South (Mr. Russell) on steering a Bill of this sort this far, and I hope very much that it will reach its final stage. It is a highly complicated and detailed Measure, and there cannot be many comparable examples of a Measure of this kind and complexity going on its way through the House under the auspices of a private Member. It says a great deal for the hon. Member's work and that of others who I know have helped him in it, and certainly it shows the hon. Gentleman's ability.

We have high hopes that once the Bill reaches the Statute Book there will be a great advance in the profession, and that this will inure to the benefit of the general public. There have been many criticisms, some valid and some perhaps not so valid, of the optical profession generally, and there is no doubt that it can make a very great contribution in our National Health Service. We hope that this Measure will enable them to give even better service to the public than has been possible in the past. We shall watch with interest to see in what way they are able to exercise the new responsibilities which they undertake as a result of the Bill.

I think it appropriate if I say a few words during the Third Reading debate on this Bill which has occupied a great deal of the time of many hon. Members. It has reached a stage where, although different in some respects from its original form, it provides a good example of a Measure about to leave this House in much better shape than when it was introduced. It was clear during the Second Reading debate that important modifications were necessary particularly regarding the testing of sight and the sale of glasses by unregistered persons. There was unanimity of opinion that in its original form the Bill did not provide what was wanted and that a clear distinction between the professional and technical functions of opticians on the one hand and the medical care and treatment which only a doctor can carry out on the other needed emphasising and underlining.

The promoters have accepted Amendments to meet the views of the House. A major Amendment was made during the Committee stage to Clause 1 and the Bill now provides that the register of ophthalmic opticians be in two parts, those proposing to test sight only and those proposing to test sight and to dispense glasses. This Amendment implements what the Crook Committee had in mind and the promise given by my hon. Friend the Member for Wembley, South (Mr. Russell) during the Second Reading debate.

In Clause 20 Amendments were accepted which prohibit the testing of sight except by a registered medical practitioner or a registered ophthalmic optician. Exceptions were provided for medical students and opticians under instruction, which was only sensible in the circumstances. In Clause 21 there is a prohibition on the sale of optical appliances except by or under the supervision of a registered medical practitioner or a registered optician, again with exceptions for wholesaling and sales to hospitals, clinics and matters of that kind. I am sure that the Amendments which have been made reflect the opinion of the House.

I was very pleased to hear the welcoming remarks which the hon. Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, East (Mr. Blenkinsop) made a few minutes ago about the Bill. If it becomes law the Bill will confer a new, highly responsible and more secure status upon opticians. As the only people other than doctors who are allowed to test sight, they will have a heavy responsibility to maintain the highest professional and training standards.

Judging by the standards which they have maintained on the whole in the past, I have no doubt that they will live up to the new responsibilities which are laid upon them by the Bill. In the past, they have shown as a body a high regard for ethical standards, and I am sure that they will continue to do so in the future.

Today's debate upon Report produced one or two important changes. Of these I would mention the Amendment to Clause 25, which now defines the scope of the optician's work in relation to the work of the medical practitioner. This is a point with which my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Croydon, North-East (Vice-Admiral Hughes Hallett) was concerned in Committee. I am glad that it has been found possible to introduce wording into the Bill which defines in a satisfactory manner those responsibilities. It is vitally important that the optician should not overstep the boundary between his functions and those of the doctor.

I accept absolutely what was said by the hon. Member for Manchester, Exchange (Mr. W. Griffiths) about opticians always having fully understood this, and that they did not object at all that the Bill should define their respective functions beyond a peradventure. I am glad that, as a profession, opticians are entirely in agreement with this provision. The Amendment has been most carefully considered, and should provide an excellent basis upon which the General Optical Council can work. I am glad that it has been found possible to add the Amendment to the Bill.

The work of sight-testing opticians is closely connected with that of doctors whose medical advice should be of help to the optical profession. The hon. Member for Barking (Mr. Hastings) made an appreciative reference to the scope of this co-operation, which will no doubt be of great assistance in optical training and practice. We can look forward to a constructive partnership between opticians and doctors in the future as the result of the Bill, and of the setting up of the General Optical Council.

There are some 8,000 ophthalmic opticians and 800 dispensing opticians in the United Kingdom at the present time. Opticians give over 5½ million sight tests a year and dispense just under 5 million pairs of glasses under the Health Service alone in England, Wales and Scotland. The opticians' own representative bodies have already established high standards both in training new entrants and in devising and enforcing rules of conduct among their members in regard to the testing of sight and dispensing of glasses. The Government are, however, satisfied that the time has come when the training and disciplinary machinery of opticians should be put upon a formally regulated footing.

The Bill sets out to achieve this object through the establishment of the General Optical Council which, with its carefully devised and balanced constitution, will be in a position to rise above any differing interests which might seem, superficially, to exist among those most closely concerned with the future development of opticians. It is of the greatest importance that the General Optical Council should be master in its own house and should be able to give guidance as appropriate on all aspects of the conduct of opticians work.

That brings me back to one of the discussions we had earlier today. It seems to me that to attempt to define too closely every aspect of its functions might well be to deprive it of the essential authority and independence it ought to bring to its labours. For this reason, certain Amendments, if I might say so, admirable in their general intention—I am thinking particularly of the debates we had this afternoon when the hon. Member for Northfield (Mr. Chapman) took a leading part—Amendments, for example, designed——

I am sorry to interrupt the hon. Gentleman, but I think he is now dealing with Amendments we have rejected and are not in the Bill.

I was about to say, Mr. Speaker, that I felt the independence of the General Optical Council, which by any standard seems to me a desirable and necessary thing, should not be impaired—as it ran the risk of being impaired—by some of the Amendments we successfully resisted this afternoon. Nevertheless, we should expect the General Optical Council to give a lead to the best professional and trading standards and do it more effectively by being allowed a reasonable latitude in the process.

Finally, I say a word of commendation of my hon. Friend the Member for Wembley, South. I think he has done a great service in introducing this Bill and piloting it through long and complicated Committee and Report stages. It is no easy task to take a Bill as technical and complicated as this and to do justice to all the people who want to see it become an Act. My hon. Friend has done that with tact, firmness and good humour which is always so necessary when trying to bring a number of varying bodies of different opinions into some kind of harmony. In this he has been admirably assisted by the hon. Member for Manchester, Exchange. With these words, I commend the Bill to the House and hope it will receive its Third Reading.

I have no intention of talking the Bill out, but after the speech of the Parliamentary Secretary I am tempted to do so, because he seemed to be padding out the last half-hour, when we could have been exchanging final remarks on the Bill, with many remarks which might have been made on another occasion.

I am grateful to the hon. Member for Wembley, South (Mr. Russell) for the tolerant way in which he has treated me on my Amendments. I hope that the way in which I have made him run the gauntlet today will be taken as an indication by the profession that there are many shots in the Parliamentary locker which can be used even now if they do not put their own house in order in the matters which I have raised.

Under Clause 25 the rules about advertising will not come into force until they have been approved by the Privy Council, and they will be exercisable by Statutory Instrument, which will be subject to annulment by the House. I serve notice that when the time comes, if the abuses to which I have referred have not been put right and if the better professional approach has not been adopted, I shall move a Motion in the House to annul the Statutory Instrument which the opticians will want. They now have a period in which they are on trial and in which they can put right some of the things which I have been raising continually in the House and in Committee.

I wish the Bill every success. I have taken as much part in it as anybody and I may therefore be allowed to wish it success after my attempts today. I say again to the profession that the Parliamentary gauntlet is not finally run, even with the passage of the Bill, on the matters which I have been raising, and I hope that the time will not come when I shall have to raise them again. They have a wonderful opportunity of professional status ahead of them. If they will put the whole matter on a professional basis I shall be glad, I shall not have had to sit here in vain from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. with nothing to eat and I shall at least have one reason for being very satisfied and pleased. With those words I wish the Bill every good fortune.