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

This Bill, which I think is one of considerable interest to hon. Members of the House, has the particular merit of being an entirely non-party Measure. I suspect that some hon. Members have come here today with more obstetric than traumatic interest in the business and might well speak on the Second Reading debates of the first two Bills on the Order Paper. Nevertheless, I think that we ought to have a fruitful discussion.

I should first declare some sort of interest in this Bill for, like most surgeons, particularly those who deal with injuries to bones and joints, I sometimes get referred to me people who have sustained accidents. It is possible, therefore, that if the Bill reaches the Statute Book, a few more cases might be sent my way. I think that hon. Members will accept from me, however, that my advocacy of the Bill will not be specially strident for that reason.

I turn from specific interests to more general interests. I received a good deal of help in the preparation of the Bill from a former Member of the House, Mr. Niall MacDermot, who was Member for Lewisham, North before the last General Election and who contributed weightily to and helped in our discussions in the past.

Before describing the object of the Bill, I cannot do better than refer to the present state of the law. The present situation is that under the Road Traffic Act, 1960, all owners of motor vehicles are obliged to be insured against third party risks. I refer to Part VI of the Road Traffic Act, 1960. I say "all", but there are certain exceptions which are listed in Section 203 (4). The exceptions are in subsection (4, b) which concerns those persons who are in employment—one does not have to be insured for them; and subsection (4, c), which concerns those persons who are injured in the course of a contractual liability. Neither of these categories is affected by the Bill.

In subsection (4, a), we read:

"The policy shall not, by virtue of paragraph (a) of the last foregoing subsection, be required to cover—

(a) liability in respect of the death of, or bodily injury to, persons being carried in or upon, or entering or getting on to or alighting from, the vehicle at the time of the occurrence of the event out of which the claims arise; "

In other words, that means passengers. Further, there is a proviso:

"Provided that paragraph (a) of this subsection shall not have effect in the case of a vehicle in which passengers are carried for hire or reward or by reason of or in pursuance of a contract of employment."

It is clear that the Bill which I have the honour to commend to the House simply seeks to enact that subsection (4, a) and the proviso, both of which I have read, shall cease to have effect. In other words, if the Bill reaches the Statute Book passengers from then onwards will be compulsorily insured by the owners of motor cars.

Does the hon. Member include all kinds of motor vehicles?

I mean motor vehicles as defined in the Act—motor cars, motor cycles and motor scooters.

Hon. Members who have had legal training are no doubt aware that a wife cannot take action for damages against her husband and vice versa, with certain exceptions which do not arise under the Bill. The legal position of spouses will be completely unaffected by the Bill.

I think that we ought next to turn our attention to the mischief which the Bill purports to redress. Exact figures about insurance are lost in the bosoms of the executives of insurance companies. Perhaps the Joint Parliamentary Secretary has some precise figures, but as far as I know there have been no precise figures issued in any authoritative volume to indicate the proportion of motorists, motor cyclists or owners of motor scooters who have insurance to cover their passengers.

I approached the insurance offices associations about this, but, very properly, they felt some delicacy about being involved in any way in a Bill which would increase the scope of their business. It was a very proper sentiment. If the Bill is given a Second Reading, without doubt they will be as helpful as possible, but it is appropriate that they should keep out of the picture at this stage.

From inquiries which I have made, I understand that from 5 per cent. to a half of motor car owners do not have comprehensive insurance policies to cover their passengers. The estimate is between those figures. We must also bear in mind that even where motor car owners have comprehensive insurance policies, quite a few of those policies are not fully comprehensive. Some so-called comprehensive policies restrict liability for injury to the passenger to an arbitrary figure, say £1,000 or £2,000, and it is possible for an injured person to claim damages for more than that. The Bill would, therefore, affect only a proportion of motor car owners, varying between 5 per cent. and a third, who do not have policies which cover their passengers. It will also affect those car owners who do not have fully comprehensive policies.

The picture in respect of motor cyclists and the owners of motor scooters is rather simpler, because it is not the custom for the insurance market to extend any cover at all to pillion riders on motor cycles and motor scooters. We can assume for all practical purposes that the number of motor cyclists or motor scooter owners who have cover in respect of their personal liability for their pillion passengers is negligible. A certain proportion of motor cycle owners have cover for their sidecar passengers, but these represent a very small proportion of the total number of motor cycle passengers, for only a very small proportion of motor cycles have sidecars.

What is the difficulty? I think that most hon. Members are familiar with the position. Let us assume that there has been an accident—it may be a one-car or a two-car accident—and a motorist who has a comprehensive insurance policy is found to be negligent. If his passenger has been insured, then, provided that the passenger is not his wife—or husband, if the wife is driving—the passenger can take an action for damages and can recover damages for any personal injuries sustained.

Next, let us consider where a passenger is travelling with a motorist who has not a comprehensive policy covering the passenger. Assume that the motorist is involved in an accident with another motorist who has a comprehensive policy, and the other motorist is at fault. The uninsured passenger can claim against the other motorist who has been negligent and can receive damages in full if he can establish his case.

The next example is where a passenber is travelling with a motorist who has economised and has not taken out a fully comprehensive policy covering his passengers; in other words, he has merely the statutory third party insurance which covers persons other than his passengers. If the motorist driving that passenger is negligent, then the passenger can recover damages from him, provided that the motorist has the means with which to pay those damages.

Hon. Gentlemen who have had legal training know that there is one very complete and perfect protection from actions for damages, namely, having no money. In law, a man who has no money to pay damages is referred to as "a man of straw". If someone has the misfortune to be injured when driving with what the law calls "a man of straw" who has not got a policy covering his passengers, there is no redress whatsoever. There is no way of obtaining damages.

I will mention some figures to give some idea of the extent to which this mischief is nation-wide. According to the census on 31st August, 1960, there were 5,448,000 motor cars in existence. Assuming that only 5 per cent. had no cover in respect of passengers, it would mean that about: 275,000 motorists are driving on the roads without any cover for their passengers. However, taking the larger figure I suggested, namely, that one-third of all motorists have no cover for their passengers, a little mental arith- metic forces us to the conclusion that 1,800,000 motorists are driving on the roads without cover for their passengers. These are very substantial figures. Even then, they do not include those cases where policies are not fully comprehensive—in other words, where the damages which can be paid in respect of a passenger's injuries are limited.

According to the same source, on 31st August, 1960, there were 1,791,000 motor cycles. It can be assumed that almost every one of those motor cycles was equipped with a pillion seat to take passengers. A very small proportion of that number have sidecars, and only a proportion of the sidecar passengers are insured. Therefore, at least 1½ million drivers of motor cycles are driving on the roads without any insurance for their passengers. The numbers involved, therefore, total about 3 million drivers of motor cars, motor cycles and motor scooters.

To arrive at the number of victims per year we have to use some deduction and conjecture, because the actual figures are known only to the insurance companies, if they are known to anyone. We know from page 3 of the Ministry of Transport publication "Road Traffic Accidents, 1959" that there were 54,300 passenger casualties in motor cars. We know from page 5 that 12,487 of these were injured in one-vehicle accidents. One has to presume, at least in the vast majority of one-vehicle accidents, that the driver can be proved to be negligent in law.

Taking motor cars only and deducting those cases where the cars were driven for hire, where the passengers are spouses of the drivers, and where the passengers can recover compensation from the driver of the other car, we are still left with the position that several thousands of motor car passengers are injured yearly who are unable to obtain any compensation or redress for their injuries.

From the same source—"Road Traffic Accidents, 1959"—we learn that, in 1959, 14,283 passengers on motor cycles and 4,158 passengers on motor scooters were injured, making a total of 18,441. Again, we must deduct from that total a proportion to cover the spouses of the drivers, a proportion who have been able to obtain damages because of the liabilty of the other driver in two-vehicle accidents, and again a very small proportion to cover those cases where insurance has been taken out by the driver. Nevertheless, we must arrive at the conclusion that between 5,000 and 10,000 passengers on motor scooters and motor cycles are injured yearly without any insurance cover and without any form of redress.

That represents roughly the extent of the mischief which the Bill is intended to redress. I am sure that the Parliamentary Secretary and other hon. Gentlemen will accept that the mischief is very substantial and widespread.

I appreciate that the Bill as drafted presents a few difficulties. I thought it best for the Bill to be drafted in the simplest way so that, if it receives a Second Reading, it can be amended as necessary in Committee. It will obviously require substantial amendment if it receives a Second Reading. I thought it best if today we merely debated whether the principle of the Bill is a just one and whether it is desirable that the principle should be made the basis of law.

Nevertheless, I think I should refer to the difficulties. An obvious difficulty is the cost to the motorist. It is the common experience of all hon. Members who drive cars that to obtain a comprehensive policy covering passengers costs roughly double the economy policy which merely gives third-party cover for everyone except passengers. However, it obviously will not be a severe burden, because the vast majority of motorists as a matter of prudence and common sense have insurance cover in respect of passengers.

The double cost which the hon. Members spoke of covers other risks apart from passenger insurance—for example, damage to the car. It is not right to say that an insurance policy would cost double because of the Bill.

I am obliged to the hon. and learned Member. I want to be as fair as possible in presenting the matter from the motorist's point of view.

The normal practice is that there is a 5 per cent. to 10 per cent. rebate if pas- senger cover is excluded. The difference is as small as that.

That is extremely helpful. I am content to leave it to the House to decide what is likely to be the increase involved for the motorist. I understand that it is not very substantial and the majority of motor car owners accept the extra financial burden very willingly. There is no great problem.

The cost to motor cycle drivers and scooter drivers presents some difficulty. It is not the custom for the insurance market to give any cover at all to pillion riders. People sometimes refer to pillion riders as being uninsurable, but that is rather an unfortunate word. It conveys the impression that it is impossible to insure them at all, but that is not so. Almost everything and anyone can be insured—at a price. Nevertheless, it is obviously important that we should have some idea of what would be the extra cost to motor cyclists.

The estimates I have had vary between £4 and £10 extra on the ordinary cost of the present-day motor cycle insurance—

I cannot agree with that figure—unless someone is to make quite a profit. I always had a supplementary insurance for my pillion passenger, and it was nothing like as much as that.

My own impression of the hon. and gallant Gentleman is that his discretion and prudence are such that I would insure him for nothing—

I, too, have made inquiries, and find that it depends very much on age. For the person between 20 years of age and 30 years of age the hon. Member's figures of between £4 and £10 are very apt.

One does not know for certain what the figure would be, and I have given rather wide figures. I deliberately erred on the generous side so that no one will get the impression that I am trying to introduce this Bill without full consideration of the cost to those concerned.

If this Measure is given a Second Reading it will obviously have to be amended to exclude certain classes of vehicle. I have in mind such things as agricultural and engineering machinery—which does not take passengers—milk floats, and, of course, solo motor cycles, as they do not have pillion seats. There are a number of categories of vehicle that would properly be excluded. Then there will be the motorist who will say, "I never carry passengers, and I never intend to carry passengers." He may feel that he should be allowed to contract out of the provisions of the Bill, but my view is that the Measure should be so amended as to ensure that no one is allowed to contract out, otherwise the difficulties of enforcement will be enormous.

Then there are the bad-risk cases—sports-car driven;, young drivers, very old drivers, those who drive very old cars, those who have frequent accidents, and those who have been convicted of being drunk when in charge of a vehicle. Many of those people are at present driving with only the statutory third-party insurance cover. They would have to pay very substantial additional sums to get comprehensive insurance for their passengers, but in many cases they are not objects of any particular sympathy. Some of us might feel that it would be better if some of them were not on the road at all. It seems fair and just that they should pay proper sums to ensure that other people are properly covered against their driving.

The Bill should also be amended to cover passengers entering, getting on to or alighting from a vehicle, as, apparently, they are legally a class of people separate from other passengers. In addition, the date of the coming into force of the Bill would have to be very carefully considered in Committee.

That covers the main points for amendment, but one additional criticism of the Bill might be that there has been no public demand for it. I do not think that the House would seriously regard that as being any kind of test for legislation. Masses of Bills go through this House of which the public have not been aware, but are yet desirable and very important reformations of the law.

We must consider carefully the principles which make it desirable for a passenger to receive full cover. The majority of passengers entering a motor car or getting on to a motor cycle do not contemplate being involved in an accident, and have no way of knowing whether or not they are insured. For that reason, they should be adequately covered. I do not think that it has ever been accepted as a principle of law that the fact that a person knows that he is undergoing a certain risk excludes him from recovering damages, and there is no question of passengers willingly taking part in the circumstances in which they are injured. Those hon. Members with legal training will agree that the principle of volenti non fit injuria cannot apply here.

I suggest that passengers do not differ materially from pedestrians or from passengers in other cars who may be involved. They are equally innocent and dissociated from the accident. They are victims in exactly the same way as are those whom the law insists should have full statutory cover. If two vehicles having passengers collide, it is obviously inequitable that the passenger of one vehicle should get full compensation for injuries simply because his driver is covered in that respect, while the passenger in the other vehicle gets no compensation because his driver has economised on the insurance policy.

Hon. Members will undoubtedly be aware that there are many anomalies in the present law. For example, if a motor cycle collides with a motor car and, in the subsequent court action, it is found that the motor cyclist is 95 per cent. to blame and the driver of the car only 5 per cent. to blame, the motorist has to pay the full damages for injuries to the motor cycle pillion rider merely because there is no one else to pay them. That is an absurdly inequitable position.

Another argument in favour of the Bill is that it would save a certain amount of public money. It is at present customary for hospitals to make a claim for the expenses incurred in treating road accident cases. Where there is cover, they recover the money, but where there is no cover for the injured passenger there is no recovery of funds, and, as a result of the present state of the law, hospitals annually lose appreciable amounts of money.

Another aspect is that here, to use a rather hackneyed phrase, it is a case of one law for the rich and another law for the poor. In the generality of cases, passengers travelling with impecunious drivers are themselves impecunious, while wall-to-do passengers travel with well-to-do drivers. The well-to-do-driver is usually the man with the comprehensive cover, but the impecunious person is the one who does not have it. That means that it is the members of the low-income groups who receive the greatest injustice as the law now stands.

I have spoken briefly about the general principles of the Bill. I hope that hon. Members will bear in mind what happens at present and to what extent people suffer who have the misfortune to be travelling as passengers in vehicles the owners of which have not comprehensive cover. For instance, a young man can take a girl out on his motor cycle and, through his negligent driving, cause her to be hideously disfigured for the rest of her life. It is possible for a working man who is a passenger in a vehicle involved in an accident to be seriously disabled and have his earnings severely reduced for the rest of his life and for his wife and children to live in poverty.

It is possible for a woman to become a widow for the rest of her life because her husband has travelled as a passenger in the car of a person who has not full comprehensive cover. This sort of thing happens in thousands of cases every year. We in the House have a real duty to do what we can to protect these unfortunate people who suffer completely undeserved misfortune.

We are all familiar with the frightful carnage on the roads year after year. If hon. Members had my experience of the frightful tale of death, mutilation, maiming and disgurement which can be seen in hospitals, they would probably be much more appalled than they are at present. We must do all we can to help the unfortunate victims of our present social system which permits motor vehicle traffic to cause such carnage on our rather inadequate roads. Here is a clear-cut way to be of real assistance to the victims of this yearly carnage. I suggest that the Bill should be given very careful consideration by hon. Members on both sides of the House.

I wish to intervene only briefly and to speak entirely from the point of view of motor cyclists.

As the hon. Member for Loughborough (Mr. Cronin) said, it is motor cyclists who are primarily affected by the Bill. Although I have certain criticisms to make of the Measure, I may say at the outset that the hon. Gentleman has done a service by bringing the Bill forward, because it is right that we should discuss a problem which is of great import to a large number of people.

I entirely support the proposition that all vehicle users who carry passengers should be required to insure them up to a reasonable limit. There are sometimes court cases in which enormous damages are awarded and a lot of "sob stuff" is talked about the condition of the person who has been injured. If one is liable to damages of £20,000 or more, it is obvious that insurance will be an expensive business. I do not agree with the hon. Gentleman that the passenger, particularly the pillion passenger, is in quite the same position as the pedestrian. People may think that some motor cyclists are rather scatter-brained, but I assure the House that they are not so foolish not to realise that there is a considerable risk involved in motor cycling. The person who rides as pillion undertakes this risk voluntarily, and I do not think that he should expect to receive unlimited reimbursement for the consequences. I would say that, up to £5,000, insurance should be compulsory, but I would be inclined to make that figure the ceiling.

I am entirely opposed to the amendment which the hon. Gentleman indicated he proposed to make, namely, that it should be compulsory for everyone who possesses a vehicle to insure in anticipation of carrying a passenger. That may be quite justifiable in the case of a motor car, but the majority of motor cycles are insured for one rider only. I have always understood that the average motor car insurance covers the car for any driver. The average motor cycle insurance covers it for the owner only. It is an expensive business to amplify one's policy for a second rider. It is a very expensive business to amplify one's policy for any rider. That is why most motor cycles on the road are insured only when they are being ridden by the proud owner.

I am glad that the hon. and gallant Gentleman raised that point, because it needs amplifying. I indicated that probably it would be desirable to have an Amendment to exclude motor cyclists who have no pillion seat on the motor cycle. That would probably cover the hon. and gallant Gentleman's point.

With great respect, I do not think that I agree with that, because most modern motor cycles are bought with a double seat. It is asking too much to ask people to have the bicycle modified in some way when they purchase it.

I was about to say that there is a sizeable number of motor cyclists, even more moped riders, and a certain number of scooter riders who never take a passenger as a matter of principle. I was not one of those. I always took passengers if the circumstances were favourable, but many people never do that. It would be quite unreasonable to put them to the expense of additional insurance.

I now turn to the question of what that expense would be. I can only quote from my own motor cycling experience. About eight years ago I decided that I would take out a supplementary insurance to cover pillion passengers. When riding one's motor cycle in fine weather it is surprising the number of unexpected people who thumb a lift. The curious thing is that most of them are quite indifferent about where one is going. All that they want is the ride. When they get to the other end, they stand on the other side of the road trying to find a motor cyclist who is going back again. It therefore struck me that it would be as well if I were covered by insurance.

As the hon. Gentleman indicated, there is no future—at least, this is so in my experience—in trying to persuade an insurance company to cover this risk. I never succeeded in doing so. What I did eventually was to get insurance through ordinary Lloyds brokers. I cannot remember the exact premium, but it was between £2 10s. and £3 for a limit of £5,000. I had that insurance for years. If an unknown person asked me for a lift, I said, "Are you worth more than £5,000? If you are, you cannot have a lift." That, I think, is a practical compromise and not an unduly expensive one.

When I interrupted the hon. Gentleman as he was quoting some figures, several of my hon. Friends murmured something about age. A criticism which I have of insurance companies is that they have this extraordinary illusion that a young rider is more dangerous than an older rider. Despite the elaborate figures which my hon. Friend the Joint Parliamentary Secretary was kind enough to obtain in connection with my Road Traffic (Driving of Motor Cycles) Bill in the last Session which completely dispelled the illusion that age as such has any bearing on accidents, this myth still persists. If the hon. Gentleman's Measure became law, it would be a very expensive myth for the average youngster starting his motor cycling career.

As a veteran pillion rider, I infinitely prefer travelling on the back of a motor cycle driven by a young person than on one driven by somebody of my own age, because I find that the young are quicker and more alert. This was borne out to some extent in the statistical analysis of accidents that was produced in the Committee stage of my Measure last Session. I think that my hon. Friend the Joint Parliamentary Secretary will bear that out.

I would simply ask the hon. Member for Loughborough whether he would consider amending his Bill in such a way that it would make it quite clear that motor cyclists would be required to insure only if they intended to carry passengers. I do not see that that would be more difficult to enforce than the existing law on insurance.

One cannot tell simply by looking at a driver whether he is insured or not. One can only tell if he is stopped and the police ask to see his insurance certificate. The same would apply exactly to a motor cyclist carrying a pillion passenger. I cannot see that such a provision would make any difference to enforcement, because enforcement depends upon a demand by a police officer to see the insurance certificate and its subsequent examination. I support the Bill in principle—

Is the hon. and gallant Member's suggestion that the passenger insurance for a motor cyclist should be indicated on, his insurance certificate and that if he gives a lift to somebody without having that insurance he should be subject to all the penalties of the law for driving uninsured?

Yes, that is precisely what I am suggesting. If the Bill were amended in that way I would certainly support it, but I would not support any general requirement to compel all motor cyclists to insure in anticipation of carrying a passenger.

I support the Motion to give the Bill a Second Reading. The proposition has been admirably explained in a very lucid speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough (Mr. Cronin). The fact that he has indicated that if the Bill is given a Second Reading he is conscious that it will require certain Amendments in Committee is no reason for deterring the House from giving it a Second Reading. He has been wise to draft the Bill in a sample form, and it is convenient, on Second Reading, that we should ventilate some of the details that will obviously require consideration in Committee. But in principle it seams to me right that compulsory insurance by the driver of a motor cycle should be extended to his passengers.

As far as I can recall, compulsory insurance for motor vehicles was adopted under an Act of 1929. Even then the theory of compulsory insurance was not a novelty in our law. For example, it had been applied for a long time to employees. It seems to me that in principle if a person is enaged in some occupation which is likely to cause danger and injury to third parties it is not enough that he should be liable at law.

It is necessary and desirable in the public interest that he should be insured against that risk, so that if he turns out to be impecunious or unable to satisfy his common law liability, the victim will have the added satisfaction of knowing that full compensation will be paid by an insurance company. The main question here is whether there is any good reason why that which applies to the driver of a motor vehicle should not be extended to the passenger. I can see no good reason.

My hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough referred to the dreadful carnage on the roads, a problem which appals a great many of us. I believe that it was argued in 1929 against the principle of compulsory insurance that that in itself might tend to make drivers more careless. As a result of knowing that they would be relieved of financial burden if there were an accident, drivers would tend to conduct themselves in such a way as to increase road casualties. There may or may not have been something in that argument. At any rate, it was not regarded as valid for depriving the public of the benefit of compulsory insurance.

My hon. Friend did not deal with that matter, but I do not think that it could possibly be argued today that the driver of a motor car is likely to be more careless or less careful in driving his car if he is compelled to insure his passengers as well as third parties. I should have thought that to be axiomatic, but it is a relevant point for consideration. The only reason why anyone could object to the Bill would be if they thought it might do anything to increase the appalling fatalities and injuries that result from motor accidents. I do not think that it can.

If there are accidents, passengers in a car driven by a motorist are just as likely to be victims as third parties, and the whole object of the Bill is to give victims of such accidents this protection. The principle is intended to apply not only to the passengers whom a motorist ordinarily carries, but also to motorists who respond to appeals by hitch-hikers for lifts. Therefore, today we find ourselves in the curious position that, whereas I suppose the majority of motorists have their own protection under a full comprehensive cover that protects passengers, a minority do not and they are content with the bare minimum statutory insurance protection. The result is that if one is a passenger qua passenger one does not know whether one is protected by the driver's complete comprehensive cover or not, because the ordinary person does not ask.

I am from time to time a passenger in a motor car. I have been a hitchhiker in the past, but it never occurs to me or I suppose to anybody else to inquire whether the driver of the motor car has full comprehensive cover or not, although I suppose that a prudent person would ask that question. Since it never is asked, members of the public qua passengers ought not to suffer from that hazard of not knowing whether or not the driver his full cover. On principle, therefore, I hope that the Bill will be given a Second Reading.

As for the details, my hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough has pointed out that if the principle of the Bill is accepted it will not extend to the husband or wife of the driver, as the case may be, for the reason that if one drives a motor car and one's wife is passenger and she is injured, one is under no legal liability to pay. Therefore, it is not a risk that one can insure against. I do not think that that need deter us from accepting the principle of the Bill. It seems to me that the risk which the wife or husband takes is a fair matrimonial risk.

Would my hon. Friend also agree that it is necessary that the contract of insurance should be plainly described in the insurance document, and that those taking out insurance should not have to take legal proceedings to compel an insurance company to pay according to the contract? Is my hon. Friend aware that some of my friends have complained to me about insurance companies who would not pay in full?

I am obliged to my hon. Friend. I was aware of that point. With great respect to him, it is an important point, but hardly relevant on a Second Reading debate. It is the sort of point which, I would very much hope, would be taken in Committee.

There are two other appropriate observations I wish to make. In considering what possible objections there could be to this Bill, there is the question whether it would impose an unreasonable additional burden on the motorist. We have heard various figures quoted. Leaving aside motor cyclists for the moment, the differential between the statutory cover and comprehensive cover is not very great. Therefore, in the case of the motorist I do not think that there would be any hardship.

In the case of the bad risk or dangerous driver there may be a more substantial differential if the Bill is adopted. I should not think that that would be a disadvantage. If one result of the Bill is to make it more difficult for the dangerous driver to get insurance coverage, or if the additional premium that he has to pay is high, that is not a disadvantage. I have always taken the view that the best method of reducing the number of road accidents is to inflict more severe penalties of all kinds on motorists who cause accidents. That goes for penalties if they are found guilty in a court of law and, equally, for financial penalties in respect of additional premiums which they would be required to pay to obtain the statutory cover, without which they could not drive again.

I appreciate the difficulty with regard to motor cyclists. They are in a different category. It seems to me quite reasonable that a motor cyclist who is prepared to say that in no circumstances would he carry a passenger on his pillion—whether he has provision for a pillion or not—should be able to contract out and to say, "As I shall not take any pillion passengers I should not have to insure against injuries to pillion passengers." I think that a motor cyclist should have that option. If he wants to take a pillion passenger he should be insured, but if he prefers to say he will not I cannot see any necessity for him to insure against the possibility of an accident. Such details can be considered in Committee.

I congratulate my hon. Friend in introducing the Bill and I hope that it will have a Second Reading.

I must begin by disclosing my interest in this matter. I am a director of an insurance company and perhaps I should say I am deputy chairman of a very big insurance company which handles a very large volume of accident insurance of this type.

The insurance world is certainly not against the principle of the Bill. There are, however, some practical difficulties which I think the House should know, and to which it should give careful consideration.

Anyone who is a good and safe driver can get comprehensive cover at normal rates and the only time it is not given is when the person concerned has a bad driving record.

I was most interested in what the hon. Member for Islington, East (Mr. Fletcher) said about loading the premiums of bad drivers. I believe—and I think that the insurance world as a whole will accept this—that insurance companies have a very important duty in this respect. They should be quite relentless in loading the premiums of bad and dangerous drivers. It is a responsibility which they should receive every encouragement from the Government to accept.

Having said that, I wish to dwell on the practical side and the chief question, that is that of expense. I think that will be accepted on both sides of the House that it is a fact—and it is the pride of the insurance world—that motor car insurance premiums in this country today are around the lowest in the world. We regard that as an achievement which we want to maintain. If this increased cover is to be given in compulsory insurance, particularly to motor cyclists, there will be a very big increase indeed in the amount of the premiums.

Does the hon. Gentleman suggest that if these premiums were applied to motor cyclists, the premium paid by motor car drivers would necessarily be increased pro ratal

Clearly, I am now replying in only my own capacity. In my view, there would have to be a very substantial increase as far as motor cyclists, but as far as cars I do not think there would be. As I said, any good driver can get a comprehensive policy without any difficulty at all.

Following the argument of the hon. Member for Islington, East if the insurance companies are encouraged to keep bad drivers off the road I do not think that there would be a large increase in premiums covering motor cars owned by good drivers, but those covering motor cycles would be substantially increased. We have not the figures available and I want to be quite open about it. As the hon. Member for Loughborough (Mr. Cronin) said, one cannot give comprehensive figures to the House on that particular subject.

What concerns me is the price. Generally, I am inclined to the view— and I am not speaking for the insurance world—that from a practical point of view motor cycles and scooters should be excluded from the Bill. Otherwise, young motor cyclists may be driven off the road by the big increase in premiums which will be necessary. I am not in favour of doing that. Many of us rode motor cycles and I do not think that motor cyclists as a class, although they are rather apt to be maligned, need to be criticised as much as they are. I should not like to see motor cyclists with reasonable records, out of the market, if I may so express it, by the implementation of the Bill.

From the practical point of view I feel that the exclusion of motor cyclists from the Bill is worthy of consideration by hon. Members. Subject to that, I would not oppose the Bill being given a Second Reading. There is a lot that needs to be gone into and I think the hon. Member will have quite a number of Amendments to deal with in Committee. I certainly wish the hon. Member for Loughborough the best of luck. He has played a very useful part in our discussions here in bringing this matter forward, because it has been under consideration by insurance companies for a number of years. As I said earlier, the insurance world is not against the principle of the Bill and if it can be put into practical terms I am certain that it would welcome it.

Hon. Members will agree that the hon. Member for Loughborough (Mr. Cronin) has brought an important matter forward and has done a public service.

As I understand the existing law, it makes insurance compulsory for passengers in buses and taxis and for those in employment such as chauffeurs, but for no one else. So many passengers in motor vehicles are thus excluded from compulsory insurance altogether that it is quite impossible to oppose the principle of this Bill. I certainly do not.

By the same token, this will, in practice, make compulsory insurance rather more expensive for the ordinary motorist, and much more expensive for the motor cyclist. The risks run by pillion passengers on motor cycles have hitherto always been regarded as so great that I thought they were very nearly uninsurable at a reasonable premium. Therefore, we ought to be quite clear what we are doing if we give the Bill a Second Reading. I hope we shall give it a Second Reading, but we ought to do it with our eyes open.

We shall be doing something—it is right to do it, and probably necessary—that will be very unpopular with some motorists and with almost all motor cyclists. We shall be forcing motor cyclists, particularly, to pay the sort of premium which, as my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Major Hicks Beach) indicated, may actually force them off the road.

I think it is agreed that the maximum premium for motor cyclists would probably be about £10 a year. That sum can be paid quarterly. Therefore, it is a little unrealistic to say that motor cyclists are likely to be forced off the road.

That is all very well, but £10 a year may represent a heavy increase for a young motor cyclist. The hon. Gentleman admitted that there is no public demand for the Bill, and one of the reasons may be that people do not usually ask to pay a great deal more than they have hitherto had to pay.

My hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Cheltenham said that the cost of our motor insurance today is about the lowest in the world. The Bill goes much further, I believe, than any other foreign country has ever gone in its legislation for compulsory insurance, and I do not know what effect it will have. It may well have the effect of making our motoring insurance the most expensive in the world, certainly for motor cyclists.

I do not agree with what my hon. and gallant Friend says about leaving motor cyclists out of the Bill. I should have thought that that would be to leave out the very category of people who most need insurance. At any rate, that is what has been said today, and I cannot support his suggestion. I appreciate that there are difficulties about the premium, but it is unrealistic to suggest that we should leave out the people for whom, as far as I can gather from the initial speeches, the Bill is principally devised.

There are relatively very few car owners who do not insure their passengers anyway, and most of those who do not insure the risk are, I suppose, people who do not normally carry passengers at all. I am not clear whether such people are to be allowed to opt out of the Bill. Whatever people may say, I should have thought that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred people who say, "I intend never to carry a passenger. Why should I pay the extra premium?" would, sooner or later, pick someone up.

Such a person would be committing a very serious offence.

He would, but I am not concerned so much about the large proportion who will not be discovered. I am concerned about what happens when people escape this liability by saying that they will never carry a passenger but then do carry a passenger and are involved in an accident and make an insurance claim.

Is not that precisely the position with regard to compulsory insurance at the moment? Back in 1929 the question was asked, "How does one enforce it? "In point of fact, one enforces it because if somebody is found to be driving uninsured he is automatically suspended for twelve months and may go to jail. The motor cyclist with a pillion passenger may be stopped at traffic lights or stopped for exceeding the speed limit and may be asked to produce his insurance policy. If he has not got his passenger covered, he is then automatically suspended for twelve months and may be heavily fined and may find himself in jail. Surely the situation is exactly the same as at present.

Perhaps I might point out that one cannot get a Road Fund licence without disclosing one's certificate of insurance. This point could easily be covered by those opting out having a different coloured licence for their motor cycle.

Order. We are liable to get into confusion if we have several simultaneous interventions.

I think that the answer given by my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Surrey, East (Mr. Doughty) is a fair one. One has, after all, to produce a certificate of insurance when one asks for a motor vehicle licence, and it is surely a safeguard that one would have to produce the certificate of insurance in this instance.

Various other anomalies have been mentioned—less important ones, I admit. There are commercial vehicles, which do not normally carry passengers but may do so sometimes. Are they to be within the Bill or outside the Bill? I imagine that the road hauliers would object if they had to pay passenger insurance when they do not want their drivers to pick up passengers anyway. There are also agricultural vehicles, farm tractors, caravans and all sorts of other types of vehicles. It seems to me that during the Committee stage of the Bill a good many exceptions will have to be considered, and it may be rather difficult in some cases to draw the line between vehicles which are used for carrying passengers and those which are not.

I have heard no mention this morning of the possibility of collusive claims being made. I do not think that this can be ruled out. People do some very strange things in order to get money, and they do so especially when the source of the money is something rather impersonal, like an insurance company. We cannot rule out the possibility that a driver may positively incite his passenger to make a claim.

Is there not also the possibility that a driver may arrange collusively with his passenger to be run over by his motor cycle?

I do not quite follow that intervention. However, I appreciate that my hon. Friend comes from Ireland.

Although the Bill is, apparently, a short and simple one, it seems quite certain that it will entail a long, rather complicated and difficult Committee stage. I certainly shall not oppose its Second Reading, and I do not imagine that any hon. Members would do so. However, it is no use thinking that if we pass the Bill it will be either easy to operate or particularly popular with motor cyclists, who will be asked to pay much more as a result of it.

Perhaps it would be for the convenience of the House if I intervened in the debate at this unusual stage, because I feel that hon. Members may care at this moment to hear what the Government feel about the Bill. I should like to give what other information I can on some of the points that have already been touched upon to enable the House to come to a decision in due course.

I should like to classify what I have to say under four headings. First, I should like to say something about the present law. Next, I should like to turn to the changes that the Bill would make. Thirdly, I should like to discuss the need for the changes. Finally, I should like to say something about the scope of the changes and their consequences.

The hon. Member for Loughborough (Mr. Cronin), whom I congratulate on utilising the opportunity which the Ballot has given him by introducing a useful Measure of this kind, has already described in broad terms what the present law is. It is contained in Part VI of the Road Traffic Act, 1960, which repeats certain provisions of the Road Traffic Act, 1930, on motor insurance. Those provisions have since remained unaltered.

Section 201 of the 1960 Act requires users of motor vehicles to be insured or to have security against third-party risk. Section 202 contains certain exceptions from those requirements, and for the purpose of our discussion today these are not relevant. But Section 203—the Section with which this Bill is concerned—sets out the requirements that there must be in respect of policies of insurance.

Subsection 4 of Section 203 is the important one. It states the liabilities which a policy is not required to cover. Section 203 (4, a) says that the policy of insurance is not required to cover liability to passengers, but there is a proviso stating that passengers carried for hire or reward—for example, in a bus—or in pursuance of a contract of employment must be covered.

I have tried to paraphrase the somewhat technical language of the statutory provisions. Put more simply, it means that the motorist or motor cyclist is not obliged to have third party insurance for his passengers, unless they are being carried for hire or reward or under contract of employment. That is the situation with which this Bill seeks to deal.

The effect of Clause 1, as the hon. Member for Loughborough has said, would be to repeal Section 203 (4, a) and the proviso to the subsection. One query which I should like to put to him is why he has chosen, in Clause 1, to use the expression

"… so far as they relate to the carrying of persons in or upon a motor vehicle … "

It seems to me that the circumstances described in Section 203 (4) of the 1960 Act would be far more likely to give rise to the risk of injury to a passenger than actual carriage—for instance, getting into or alighting from a vehicle. There is greater risk, in many ways, of people being hurt while getting into or alighting from a vehicle than if they are actually inside it

I can give the hon. Gentleman the explanation quite simply. I bear absolute culpability in this respect. It is, to some extent, the fault of our procedure that a private Member must produce at: short notice a Short and a Long Title of his Bill, and can then draft the rest of the Bill at leisure.

I subsequently learnt that the Long Title of my Bill, which refers to passengers in a vehicle, did not cover passengers entering or getting out of a vehicle. It will, therefore, be necessary to change the Long Title of the Bill in Committee in order to cover that point.

We are obliged to the hon. Gentleman for his explanation. He was in a difficulty that all of us who have tried to promote Private Members' Bills have met.

It is clear, broadly speaking, that the consequences of the Bill would be that motorists and motor cyclists would have to extend the scope of their compulsory third party insurance in order to cover passenger risk. It may be convenient if I refer to these passengers, who are not at present covered by statutory provisions, as free passengers—that is to say, passengers carried for nothing.

The House might like to know why this distinction between free and other passengers was made in the 1930 Act. It was apparently considered by Parliament that a distinction should be drawn between a person who voluntarily became a passenger in or upon a vehicle and an innocent bystander not in or on it. It was assumed that the passenger, because he chose to ride with the driver, must be taken to have voluntarily accepted the risks in so doing. I think, as the hon. Member for Loughborough said, that lawyers will recognise the well-known principle volenti non fit injuria.

Ever since then, that has remained the reason why no action has been taken to change the position. The House might well think—and this is a matter for the House to decide—that in the entirely changed traffic conditions which predominate today, thirty years later, this is no longer a realistic standpoint to take, though I think that the logic of the distinction is quite unimpeachable.

Before leaving the legal technicalities, I must add that the provisions of the 1960 Act do not affect the Common Law liabilities of the driver to his passengers for any negligence of which he may be guilty. The effect of the Bill would simply be to make it a statutory requirement that that liability should be compulsorily insurable.

The consequence would be that if a motorist or motor cyclist did not have in force a policy of insurance covering him against passenger risk of this kind, and then carried passengers—for however short a time and for whatever good reason—he would be committing an offence and, under Section 201 of the 1960 Act, would be liable to conviction and penalties which would include, as the hon. and learned Member for Northampton (Mr. Paget) said, disqualification from driving under Section 194.

I have tried to deal with the present law and to summarise what I understand to be the changes which the Bill would make. I now come to the question of whether there is need for such changes. The Ministry of Transport, I must tell the House at once, has absolutely no information available which would show that there is an overwhelming need for such changes.

We just do not know how many people have suffered injury as passengers without being able to obtain compensation simply because a negligent driver did not insure against this risk. The hon. Member for Loughborough said he thought there had been probably hundreds and thousands of cases a year. We have no evidence whatever to show that that is so. It is true that from time to time we read reports in the newspapers of very hard cases, with which one entirely sympathises—cases in which people are injured but cannot recover damages because the driver is, as the hon. Member for Loughborough said, a man of straw. But we have no evidence that there is, in this matter, a grave social problem which needs urgent attention by Parliament.

I do not say this in any unsympathetic frame of mind, but I consider that this is a relevant factor which the House should take into account when deciding whether the need for legislation is proved.

The hon. Gentleman will, I know, be anxious to ensure that the House has a fair picture of the situation. He says that the Ministry of Transport has no evidence of the mischief to be redressed here, but he must also make it clear that this does not indicate in any way that the mischief does not exist. From the figures which I gave, drawn from the Ministry's tables, it must be clear that thousands of people are suffering injury without any compensation as a result of the present law.

I certainly want to be fair, and I thought it would be only fair to say to the House that we have no information on this point. Speaking for myself, however, it seems to me that the figures which he gave were a little exaggerated. But this really is a matter for a personal viewpoint. I may be wrong. There may be a large number of cases. What is clear is that there is no statistical information upon which one can say: "This is why Parliament should take this step."

Of course, we have some figures. In 1959, 1,680 motor cyclists were killed and about 130,000 injured. Can the hon. Gentleman tell us if he has any estimate of how many pillion riders were included in these figures? They are the motor cyclists who are not insured. If we could have those figures they might provide us with the information we are looking for.

I have the casualty figures for 1959. Among moped riders there were 5,431, motor scooter riders 18,129, motor scooter passengers 4,158, motor cycle riders 54,669, and motor cycle passengers, 14,283.

These are big figures, but they cover all types of accident and all types of injury, and I have no information about how many of the passengers injured on motor cycles, mopeds or scooters were unable, because of the absence of cover, to recover damages. We just do not know. That is what the argument is about, and I must tell the House that we do not have this information.

Would it not be a fair comment to say that every one of those seriously injured would have a case for compensation?

No, that is where the hon. Member is wrong. They would have a claim for compensation, but in the present situation, since this type of liability to passengers is not in practice covered by the insurance companies for motor cyclists, they would not have the right of recourse to the insurance companies. They would be able to go against the driver or rider behind whom they were seated when the accident took place, if he was negligent, but they would not have the right to go to the insurance companies and automatically obtain damages.

I am sorry to interrupt the hon. Gentleman again, but this is extremely important, and, indeed, it is the crux of the whole Bill. I am a little hurt that he should suggest that my figures are exaggerated. I refer him to page 5 of his Ministry's own publication, when he will see from the tables that in 1959 in one-vehicle accidents—and he will agree that a one-vehicle accident must mean that the driver would have been found negligent in law in the vast majority of cases—there were 1,491 passengers on motor scooters killed, seriously or slightly injured, and 4,400 passengers on motor cycles, killed, seriously or slightly injured, giving a figure of 6,000 people who were killed, seriously or slightly injured as a result of one-vehicle accidents, in which in the vast majority of cases the driver must have been negligent and, in the vast majority of cases, could not have been covered by insurance.

The difference between the hon. Member and me is whether in fact in the vast majority of these accident cases the driver was necessarily negligent. I think that it is true that the majority probably were—but not necessarily, because there are all sorts of other reasons why accidents take place. They occur because of bad road conditions, defects in vehicles not due to the immediate negligence of the driver, and so on. One would have to work out the figures very carefully even to reach an estimate, because the Ministry's accident figures are based on reports from the police and those do not, and cannot in the nature of things, say what the reason for or cause of the accident was. All they do is report the circumstances in which an accident took place. However, we do not want to take up a lot of time on this subject. I have said the principal thing I wanted to say—that we have no concrete evidence to show that there is any need for a major change of this kind, and that I cannot point to figures to show the need.

It is important to look at the consequences and repercussions of the Bill and the amendments and modifications which would have to be considered if the Bill received a Second Reading. It has already been said that about 70 per cent. of all motorists have passenger cover. That leaves about 30 per cent.—this is private cars, of course—without this type of cover. As has been said, the majority of owners of commercial vehicles, which are equally covered by the Bill, do not insure against passenger liability, because their vehicles rarely carry passengers. Many firms have strict rules against the drivers of their commercial vehicles taking passengers at all.

I then come to the motor cyclist, and, as we know, this is the class of motorist most likely to be affected by the Bill. It has been said, and I confirm from my own inquiries, that as a matter of practice the motor insurers do not offer cover for passengers of motor cycles and scooters, because they regard the risk element as too high to make it a commercial proposition. I am told that passenger insurance cover is available for motor cycle combinations but is rarely asked for. That brings me to the major dilemma which the House has to decide.

Should the Bill as drafted cover motor cyclists, or should they be excluded?

On the one hand, the fact is that the numbers of motor cycles, scooters and mopeds are rising very fast, and all the accident statistics—and at any rate there is no argument about this—show Chat the risk of death or injury as a passenger of a motor vehicle is greatest if one is a passenger on a motor cycle, and particularly a pillion rider. By and large, passengers of motor cycles are young people, whom we ought to be particularly anxious to help. The owners and the riders of motor cycles are often themselves young people without very much money to meet claims of this kind.

It might therefore be said that motor cycles ought to remain included because this is where the risk is greatest and the need for cover is greatest, too. On the other hand, there is no doubt that premiums would have to be charged at a high rate for this type of cover. I understand that there is literally no underwriting experience by the companies which enables them to assess the extent of the risk. The premium would depend on a number of factors. For example, it would depend on the type of the machine, its size, its cubic capacity, the age of the driver, the area of intended use. All those things are normally taken into account, as my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Major Hicks Beach) knows, in assessing premiums.

I would have liked to have been able to give the House an authoritative measure of the likely increase, but I am afraid that in the time available I have not been able to obtain firm views on this subject from the insurance interests, but I have reason to believe, from conversations I have had and from inquiries I have made—and it is also commonsense—that motor cyclists' premiums would rise substantially. I was interested to hear what my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Cheltenham, with his experience in the matter, had to say about this subject. It is a matter for decision by the House whether motor cyclists in those circumstances should be included or excluded.

My hon. Friend has evaded the most practical solution, which is to allow motor cyclists to contract out. I think that a large number would contract out and the man who wants to take only his wife as a passenger would not be affected.

My hon. and gallant Friend has interrupted as I was coming to what he has in mind.

I turn to the consequences of the Bill. We have to consider how in practice insurers would deal with the case of the motorist who wanted to carry a passenger only occasionally. As drafted, the Bill would require insurance cover only while the passenger was actually being carried. I am advised that it would be quite impossible for the insurance companies to make cover available to meet such occasional or "on demand" cases. It would be necessary for each vehicle owner to decide at the outset of his policy period whether or not he ever intended to carry passengers, and he would have to secure his cover for it accordingly. The probable result would be that many owners, and particularly motor cyclists, would decide at the outset not to carry passengers at all and so avoid the need to pay higher premiums.

However, later on, perhaps on the spur of the moment, perhaps deliberately, perhaps in an emergency, perhaps in temporary forgetfulness of the law and the terms of their policy, they might carry a passenger. If an accident then happened which involved the passenger, no insurance would cover the driver's liability The driver would be liable to conviction and disqualification from driving. At present, if a liability arises which ought to have been covered by compulsory third-party insurance but is not in fact covered, it is met by the Motor Insurance Bureau under the terms of an agreement with a previous Minister of Transport.

If a new class of compulsorily insured passengers were to be created, in our view it would be necessary to consider carefully whether they could be brought within the scope of this or some similar arrangement, and what the total effect of this might be on insurance arrangements and premiums generally.

All this, I think, leads to the conclusion that if the Bill is given a Second Reading it must be amended—as I think the hon. Gentleman intimated he was prepared to do—to prevent contracting out of this kind.

indicated dissent.

I think that that is an inescapable conclusion. I think that one is bound to say that this would have to come out, but perhaps that is a matter for debate in Committee.

If one accepts that contracting out should not be allowed, it raises another problem which I must put to the House. If the Bill is amended to require every vehicle to be covered for the risks to free passengers, what do we do about the owners of motor vehicles who quite genuinely do not carry passengers, or, what is more important, those vehicles which are not designed to carry passengers? I have in mind the vehicles that have been mentioned such as certain industrial plant, dumpers, and scrapers. Also, agricultural plant, such as balers, combine harvesters and things of that kind, and vehicles such as tractors, milk floats, and other vehicles which are clearly not designed to carry passengers but which on occasions might well be doing so.

It will be difficult to draw up a comprehensive list of which vehicles ought to be included and which ought not to be. The difficulty to which this situation may give rise will have to be carefully examined. Unless a solution to it can be found by amendment—and I think that it will be an extremely difficult and onerous task to work out such a list, a list which would have the effect of excluding the possibility of contracting out without unduly penalising the owners of vehicles which ought not to be brought within its scope—I must frankly tell the House that the Government would be bound later to oppose the Bill.

I am not terribly optimistic about the possibilities of finding such a list, but we will do our best if the House decides to give the Bill a Second Reading. We will try to draft appropriate Amendments, but we must be clear at the outset that there are bound to be a great many anomalies and differences of opinion as to which vehicles should be covered and which should be exempt. I think hon. Members on the Standing Committee might well find that they have a great deal of work in front of them.

I pass to some of the further consequences. Reference has already been made to the possibility of collusive claims, that is to say, where the driver who is not strictly speaking negligent in law nevertheless admits liability to the insured passenger and the insurer would be bound to meet that.

Next I come to the level of premiums. It is clear that premiums have to rise for all types of motor vehicles. I cannot at this stage give any precise estimate of the extent to which premiums would rise, except this, that the present minimum cover given to satisfy the requirements of the Road Traffic Act range from about £9 to £15 by way of annual premiums according to the size of the car. I am told that if the Bill becomes law the additional premium to cover passengers' risks would amount to between £2 and £3 a year.

As regards motor cycles, the premiums vary widely according to the size of the vehicle, and so on, but they range between £3 10s. and £5 10s. But this is for the minimum Act cover only, the ordinary insurance against third party risks, and one cannot gauge what the rise in premiums would have to be to cover passenger risks because there is no underwriting experience of this.

I hope that gives the House an idea of the figures involved. As my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Cheltenham said, it is one of the prides of our insurance world that British motor insurance premiums are about the lowest that one can find anywhere. I am sure that none of us, by what we do in connection with this Bill, would want to put motoring out of the reach of the average person by so arranging things that insurance premiums would have to rise to such a level that it makes it virtually impossible. These problems may not be very severe, but I must come quickly to some important considerations.

One point which probably concerns all hon. Members is the question of contracting out. Could not that be got over in a simple way? As has been said, to get a Road Fund licence one has to produce one's certificate of insurance. In the Road Fund licence which has to be stuck to one's car or motor cycle, could not there be a statement about whether one could carry passengers or not? That would seem to cover it.

That might be so. One could probably work out all sorts of machinery for doing this, but I think it avoids the point. The point is that the object of the Bill is to ensure, in the interests of the passenger, that he is covered by insurance. If that is one's objective, I do not consider that the sort of machinery which would ensure enforcement of this is terribly relevant. As I see it, what one has to do, if one accepts the principle, is to say that everybody must be covered, subject to certain exceptions, namely, vehicles that cannot carry passengers, and we have to work out such a list.

rose —

I am putting my point of view and, no doubt, the hon. and learned Gentleman will elaborate his point of view if he catches the eye of the Chair. Perhaps this is a matter for investigation in Committee, but I have made clear our attitude.

The insurance companies fix premiums and the amount of cover by reference to the driver's record. If he has a number of accidents and claims, the premium can be progressively increased or cover reduced. This helps in the campaign for greater road safety. My hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham mentioned the necessity to support what the insurance companies do in this regard, and my right hon. Friend has already asked insurers to keep this point very much in mind.

If this power of the insurance companies to withdraw cover for free passengers were no longer available as a consequence of passing the Bill, I think it would be debatable to what extent the insurers would be restricted in their efforts to encourage better driving by penalising bad or careless motorists.

I think that the House would like to know the practice of other European countries. My hon. Friend the Member for Surbiton (Mr. Fisher) asked about this. To our knowledge, in only three countries is insurance cover required for all free passengers. These countries are Denmark, the German Federal Republic, and Sweden. In Denmark, a liability limit of £1,500 is set. In Germany the limit is £10,000. In Sweden the maximum is £45,000, but with a limit of £15,000 for any one passenger. In the Benelux countries, Czechoslovakia, France and Switzerland, a free passenger must be covered, but members of the family of the owner, or the driver, are excluded, and the extent and degree of relationship is defined in different legislation in various complicated ways. France excludes free passengers on motor cycles, whether they are riding on the pillion or in a sidecar.

Countries that follow our pattern are Austria, the Irish Republic, Finland and Norway, and all these countries exclude free passengers from the scope of compulsory insurance. If the House decides to pass the Bill, it will be for consideration whether some of these qualifications that I have mentioned in foreign legislation, like the position of members of the family, and the maximum limit of liability, should or should not be incorporated. Again, this might lead to longish arguments in Committee.

I have sought to give the House as clear a picture as I could of the problems the Bill raises and the consequences that would have to be considered from the Government's viewpoint. I do not think that they are all Committee points, but points of substance which are fundamental to the decision which the House has to take today. We now have to decide whether, after thirty years, there is a sufficiently strong case to extend compulsory insurance to cover the free passenger; whether that case, if it exists, is met by the Bill as presented and, if so, whether the foreseeable results of the Bill are acceptable. That is a matter for the House.

This is not a Bill which the Government would have sought to introduce. We are not convinced that there is a sufficient weight of evidence to make out an overwhelming case for an alteration of the existing law, or that a large number of members of the public suffer hardship because the present law is defective. That is the Government's view, but if, after this full debate, the House decides that the case for the Bill is made out, the Government will not seek to oppose it, although we must reserve our right to propose what Amendments appear practicable and possible to deal with the undoubted defects that I have mentioned.

Our attitude may reasonably be described as one of open-minded neutrality. Although we have considerable doubts, we are nevertheless prepared to leave the decision to the House.

One point which surprises me about the Bill is the Government's attitude towards contracting out. I can appreciate their having a case for saying, "This will be difficult to enforce", but when they say, "Apart from the difficulty of enforcement, it is wrong in principle," I find their argument utterly incomprehensible. What principle makes it wrong to say that a gentleman who is not carrying passengers need not be insured against injuries to the passengers he is not carrying, does not intend to carry, and is not allowed to carry?

I am sorry to interrupt the hon. and learned Gentleman so early in his speech, but I did point out that it might be that, by inadvertence or design, forgetfulness or even in an emergency, a man might at some stage—perhaps only for a short distance—carry a passenger. If he does so he is at once in breach of the terms of his policy, and he is also liable to conviction and disqualification. That is why we think that it would be better to have a blanket cover for everybody rather than the possible risk which I have referred to.

We come back, then, to the point of enforcement. As the hon. Member says, doubtless there will be cases of persons breaking the law. But I do not suppose that we have ever made a law which somebody has not broken. What will be the consequence of someone breaking this law? The passenger will be in no way worse off than he would be if we did not pass it. He will be in exactly the same position. It seems a very odd argument to say that we should not pass this Bill because of the conceivable circumstances that by reason of a breach of the law a passenger would find himself in the same position as he is now. It seems the most curious Alice-in-Wonderland argument.

There seems to be a very simple method of making enforcement very effective. In order to obtain a Road Fund licence a person has to produce his insurance certificate. If that certificate provides that he can carry passengers a licence disc of one colour can be given, and if it does not, a disc of another colour. If a policeman sees a man on a bicycle with a pillion passenger behind him and with a disc of the wrong colour on his vehicle, he can pull that person in very quickly Motor cyclists will soon become aware of the consequences of such action.

This is a very great problem. I have lived in country districts, as I am sure has the hon. and learned Member. At 6 o'clock at night a young fellow may decide that he will take his girl friend to the public house, which is only half a mile away. He may think that in the dark a policeman will never see that his licence is of the wrong colour. There may be an accident in which the girl is injured, and she will not be covered by insurance. That is the case for everybody being covered, and that is the difficulty we have to face.

What is the difficulty? She will not be covered if we do not pass the Bill. In what way will she be worse off?

I may be wrong, but is not this an obvious matter for Motor Insurance Bureau cover in the future? Is not this a case where it will have to be decided whether the injured person should be covered in that way?

I quite agree that we may have the Bureau system. On the other hand, we may not. All I am saying is that it seems a very odd reason for voting against the Bill to say, "How ghastly if, at night, when somebody is going to a public house, his wretched passenger should be put into a position in which he is now, and in which all passengers will be if we do not pass the Bill." It is a grotesque argument.

The passenger will think she is covered.

Does the hon. Member think that a girl friend who goes on a motor bicycle to a public house at night even thinks of the question whether or not she is covered? Let us be realistic about this. It seems hypocritical nonsense to me.

Another very odd and curious argument is to say that the risks here are so large that they are uninsurable and we therefore ought not to pass the Bill—because if we did it would make it too expensive for people to submit passengers to the risk of injury and maiming. If that is to be the result, I welcome it.

I have practised at the Bar for many years, and I should think that I have taken part in many thousands of actions in which I have seen the physical and financial results of lives ruined by accidents. If the driver of a motor car makes a mistake he may bend the wing of his car, but if a motor cyclist makes a similar mistake he will probably bend his leg, or his passenger's leg. That is the grim consequence we find in this matter. I am not in the slightest bit loth to make this operation a little more expensive, if the result is to exclude some people from the roads.

If people are going to take this sort of risk with their lives—and it is not entirely a private risk; we have recently been talking quite a lot about the cost of the National Health Service and of the education service, and this risk involves an appalling wastage of public money, apart from anything else—they will be taking a greater risk, generally speaking, relative to the oldness and cheapness of the machine in which they are travelling. If a person has to carry this sort of insurance he will be subject to pressure from the insurance companies to make his machine safe—perhaps to fit the kind of fender which I have seen fitted to some bicycles, which take the first force of a collision and provide something to hit before the rider's leg is hit.

One is, in fact, creating a financial interest in favour of greater safety which may get highly effective results. I really hope that the Government will be a little more co-operative, a little more imaginative, and will apply their mind during the Committee stage to trying to make a success of the Bill rather than trying to find reasons why it should not work. I feel that from every point of view it is a Measure which merits the co-operation of the Government.

I, too, wish to congratulate the hon. Member for Loughborough (Mr. Cronin) on bringing forward this very interesting Bill, dealing with a principle which we all have at heart, and for the interesting way in which he has done so. We have all had experience of this kind of problem when there has been a bus strike or a railway strike and when we have given lifts. On those occasions we have been asked by the Government to give lifts and to display inside the car a notice saying that the passenger travels at his own risk. Of course, in the case of a certain number of motorists and motor cyclists that is true, although a large number of motorists are insured for this risk.

Speaking as one who, in one way or another, has been connected with motor legislation for a quarter of a century, I think that any Bill connected with motor vehicles is one of the most complicated that one can possibly have. Many people think that all vehicles running on the roads are motor cars. Of course, there are all kinds of other vehicles, buses, lorries, commercial vehicles, agricultural vehicles, and so on, which have to be taken into account. Therefore, one question which I wish to pose is whether as yet we have sufficient information to enable us to legislate on this complicated subject.

First, we must not assume that every passenger would be insured if the Bill became law and that he would automatically recover from an insurance company if he were involved in an accident. All sorts of accidents take place. A motor cyclist riding along the road may be driven into a ditch by a vehicle which runs away. It would not be the motor cyclists's fault. There would be no negligence. In such a case I do not think that the passenger would be able to recover from the insurance company. I shall be interested to hear what the lawyers have to say on that point, but I believe that to be the case.

The real difficulty in this matter is not the motor car, but the motor cycle. It really comes down to the question of the premium and what the working boy would have to pay to cover his girl friend who rides on the back of his motor cycle. A day or two ago I made a perfectly innocent inquiry from my own insurance company asking what my son, who is 21, would have to pay in London for insurance cover when riding a 250 c.c. motor cycle. I was rather horrified to learn the high premiums that have to be paid by motor cyclists even at 21 years of age.

The figures were as follows. If he took out only a third-party policy and was an experienced motor cyclist with two years' experience he would pay only £4. That is all right. But if he wanted a comprehensive policy the premium would be £15. I imagine that the great majority of working boy motor cyclists do not take out comprehensive policies but only insure for third-party risk, costing £4 or £5.

If the motor cyclist is under 21 years of age the premium goes up by 50 per cent. and if he is under 18 years of age it goes up by another 100 per cent. Therefore, we are getting into figures around £30 for an 18-year-old motor cyclist, which is a very serious matter indeed. The insurance company went on to say that it would not, of course, automatically insure all passengers or even any passenger. It might cover a named passenger. I asked what the rate would be for a named passenger and I was given the astounding figure of 45s. for every £250 covered. That is a premium of £9 for every £1,000 cover for a passenger. On this basis my hon. Friend's figure of £5,000 cover would cost a motor cyclist £45, so obviously there would have to be a very severe limit.

The hon. and learned Member for Kettering (Mr. Mitchison) shakes his head. I agree that this is an individual case, that companies are very loth to insure passengers and that, therefore, if such insurance were compulsory for everyone the premium would be lower.

I think that the hon. Gentleman will agree that we cannot arrive at the higher premium by simple multiplication.

That was the rate, £9 for £1,000 cover.

It seems to me that the figures which my hon. Friend has quoted bear no comparison with the figures in the sum which, in fact, I did myself when I insured for this purpose. Perhaps my hon. Friend's insurance company was consulted at the wrong time. It obviously did not want the business.

My hon. and gallant Friend is a very well-known motor cyclist and known to be a really responsible person. He would get the lowest possible premium. But the lad of 18 or 21 with, perhaps, no motor cycling record at all and with not very much experience, or with even a bad record, would, I am afraid, be very heavily loaded if he carried a passenger. That is the difficulty which we are up against.

It is perfectly obvious that if the Bill is to get its Committee stage there would have to be a very low limit on passenger cover, and if what is suggested is to be a working proposition. I should like the hon. Member for Bermondsey (Mr. Mellish), when he speaks, to deal with the point of how the working boy will react to this proposition. A lad of 18 would have to pay £10 or even £15 to get such cover.

Another snag, as I see it, is the case of the middle-aged man, a very responsible type, who buys a small motor cycle or a scooter on which to go to work and who never intends to carry a passenger. He again, presumably, would not be allowed to contract out. If that is so, then he would have to pay an extra £5 or £10. If such a man is allowed to contract out, then everybody must be allowed to contract out. We are then up against the difficulty of the large number of people who would contract out, but who would yet be tempted to carry, say, a brother, a sister or a girl friend on the back of a motor cycle for a few hundred yards, and, possibly, have an accident.

The other kind of provisos which would have to be inserted in the Bill would probably cover the lorry driver who is not permitted to carry passengers. British Road Services do not permit passengers to be carried. Presumably, B.R.S. would not be forced to take out cover for passengers when to do so is against the law or against their own rules. A further complication, of course, is that there is no legal claim as between a husband and wife. These are the sort of points that would have to be dealt with.

I suggest to the hon. Member for Loughborough that a great deal more thought must be given to the matter and a great deal more information obtained before the Bill can have a successful passage through Committee. I am not opposing the Bill, but, as I have said, I have had some experience of the matter. A great many interests are involved. Even the motor cycle industry may be affected, because its production might go down very considerably if it were made difficult for a boy to afford to ride a motor cycle.

All these interests will come into the matter. Hon. Members will be lobbied by the various interests. I foresee that the Bill will have a very difficult Committee stage unless its provisions are drawn in very moderate terms with very severe limitations and unless a great many provisos are inserted in it to let out all the legitimate cases which ought not to be covered by the Bill at all.

I should like to add my congratulations to those of other hon. Members to the hon. Member for Loughborough (Mr. Cronin) on introducing the Bill. I have on many occasions read his reports in particular cases from a professional point of view, and I congratulate him on those as well.

I gather that the attitude of the Government is one of benevolent neutrality towards the Bill. I ask them to go further and give some benevolent assistance in the matter. The Government have the information, the figures and the technical advisers who can say what would be the consequences of any particular Amendment. I ask the Government to put that assistance at the disposal of the promoters of the Bill so that during the Committee stage discussions Amendments may be made which will make this a really worthwhile and workable Measure.

Perhaps my hon. and learned Friend did not hear me when I said that that would be the case if the House decided to give the Bill a Second Reading. We shall do what we can, by proposing Amendments, to see that improvements are made and to deal with the problems which I mentioned in my speech.

Does the hon. Gentleman mean that that would include giving drafting help? That would be very useful.

I am sure that the hon. and learned Member for Kettering (Mr. Mitchison) could himself assist in that way. I am glad to hear what has been said by my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary about assisting the passage of this excellent Bill.

Several points have been raised in the discussion with which I should like to deal. It is said that nearly all car owners are insured in respect of their passengers, so that the provisions of the Bill concern motor cyclists almost exclusively. I do not believe that that is true for the reason that there is growing up, I am glad to say, a very large business in car hires. Anyone who has not a bad record can hire a car to drive himself. This is a highly respectable business which is increasing, especially in the provision of self-drive cars for tourists.

I do not wish to be unfair to any company or business, but I do not think that I should be wrong in saying that the vast majority of people who hire cars in this way, although they pay some insurance premium, would find that their insurance amounts only to the minimum third party insurance required by Statute and did not cover a passenger.

People who hire cars in this way may be wholly ignorant of the fact that, should their passenger be injured through their fault, they remain liable in law and with no insurance cover to indemnify them against the damages for which they may be liable. That is a matter which should be a little more widely known. With regard to the small increase in the premium in respect of those who hitherto, very unwisely, have taken out only the minimum amount of insurance, the few extra pounds that they would have to pay is as nothing compared with the good that such premiums would do for those who might be the victims of accidents and become maimed for life.

Motor cyclists have been mentioned frequently in the debate. The difficult question arises whether they should be allowed to contract out. Powerful arguments were advanced by the Parliamentary Secretary, but there is one way which I suggested earlier in an intervention—I am glad that it was followed up by the hon. and learned Member for Northampton (Mr. Paget)—by which it could be overcome. Anyone who applies for a Road Fund licence must produce a certificate of insurance upon which it would be clearly stated that cover does not include a passenger. For such people a Road Fund licence of a different colour—or bearing a distinctive mark, such as a purple band— could be issued. This would be exhibited on the motor cycle where it could be seen by any potential passenger. And any policeman would be able to see whether, at one end of the vehicle, there was exhibited one of these licences, but, at the other, a passenger was clinging on.

I agree with what was said by the hon. and learned Member for Northampton, that these are the very people who suffer severe injuries. If, when driving a car, one is involved in a collision, usually all that is damaged is bits of metal and it may be that no one is hurt. But if a person is unfortunate enough to be a motor cycle rider or a pillion passenger—neither position have I the slightest intention of occupying—what gets hit is that person's knee or leg and he is lucky if he is able to retain the limb. People ought to remember that.

I cannot follow the argument that when people are allowed to drive such lethal weapons, and expose themselves and others to terrible risks, they should not be asked or forced to insure against those risks because it may cost them a few extra pounds. One cannot compare that with the thousands of pounds of which victims of accidents may be deprived because the person at fault did not insure, in order to save a few pounds.

Is a pillion passenger to hobble about with one leg for the rest of his life because of a lack of insurance? That is an argument with which I fundamentally disagree, and if the too youthful or the too reckless motor cyclists are put off the road, I should not regret their departure.

Mr. Stratton Mills.

rose —

I have not yet finished my speech.

I certainly welcome the Bill. I do not agree with the reason which originally resulted in this insurance exception in other legislation—that it is open to persons to refuse to go on a motor cycle, or ride in a motor car, whereas a bystander has no compensation if he is run into by a car. How many people who become passengers in a motor car ask whether the driver is property insured? I may do because I am a cautious person, but, even so, how do I know that I have been given the right answer, or that the person who has taken out the policy knows and understands the full terms of it? Although that argument is a legal one, I think that any lawyer would very quickly reject it on the grounds of common sense.

I am glad that this loophole in the law may at last be closed. I certainly hope that it will be. The question whether excavators or combine-harvesters should be included is one which we can decide in Committee.

I apologise to my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Surrey, East (Mr. Doughty) for the mistake about his peroration and the fact that I rose somewhat prematurely to make my speech.

I join with other hon. Members in congratulating the hon. Member for Loughborough (Mr. Cronin) on the Bill, and also on the excellent way in which he introduced it. The Measure will certainly have my support. It has been made clear that the principle, envisaged in original legislation, confining compulsory insurance merely to someone in another vehicle or to some other road user, and excluded the passenger in the insured vehicle, is an anomaly which ought to be and must be rectified.

The question has arisen whether there is a need in this case. I should have thought that the need was clear beyond any reasonable doubt and that even on the figures given by my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary a prima facie need had been shown, as well as from the very reasonable figures given by the hon. Member for Loughborough. Speaking from personal experience—I must disclose my interest as a solicitor—I think that the cases one comes across seem to be increasing because of the growing number of motor cyclists on the roads.

I recently had a case in which a girl of 18, just fourteen days before her marriage, was a pillion passenger on a motor cycle ridden by someone who was not her fiance. They were involved in an accident and she sustained very serious injuries; I should estimate the damages at between £4,000 and £5,000. It would be difficult to establish liability on the pant of the driver of the car with which the motor cyclist was in collision. The motor cyclist, a boy of 18, earning £5 a week is obviously no mark for that claim. I could give a score of such examples. They would not necessarily prove anything, but I think that they add colour to the problem.

A point brought out by other hon. Members—I do not want to weary the House with it—is that it is clear that the effect on motor cars would obviously be small, perhaps 10 per cent., or even less. Perhaps we ought not to over-concern ourselves with the additional premium if there is to be some recourse for the person injured in a motor crash.

The real turning point in the debate, on which the whole hub of the problem depends, is that of the motor cyclist, and whether or not he should be entitled to contract out. There is no doubt—it has been admitted on both sides of the House—that a substantial increase in premiums would arise for motor cyclists, but, as has been well said, there is no individual right to contract out of the wider principle of insurance.

I certainly disagree in degree with the hon. Member for Loughborough on the question of contracting out. The question is whether we can devise machinery which would be workable. It would seem that if we made definite provisions the first should be that in a case where contracting out was allowed there must be no pillion seat on the motor cycle. That, I suggest, would remove some of the elements of temptation to take someone as a passenger on a short journey. That is very important and quite essential if the principle of contracting out is to be accepted.

Another point put by several hon. Members is that a special form of disc should be provided, perhaps of a specially distinctive colour. One might also consider increasing penalties for a criminal offence in order to make a further detraction. Another measure which obviously would follow is that the claim must be clearly understood. Where someone does not obey the law, but takes the chance of carrying a passenger to a "pub" in the evening, or taking a friend to work and is involved in an accident and not covered although he should have been, that must come within the Motor Insurance Bureau. I think that my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary brought that out clearly. I hope that I am not incorrectly stating the case he put forward and that he will correct me if I am wrong. His argument was that this would throw an additional burden on the Motor Insurance Bureau, which might indirectly place additional burdens on motor insurance companies.

Beyond the whole range of motor vehicle users who insure.

That is a valid argument as far as it goes, but it is not necessarily a full argument. If we have adequate measures to deal with people who break the law—such as the employment of a coloured disc, severer penalties and removal of the pillion seat—those to a large extent would remove the possibility of widespread and expensive claims on the Bureau. Those seem to be the main points which have arisen in the debate.

I hope that the Bill will be given a Second Reading and that the Ministry will co-operate with the hon. Member for Loughborough in devising adequate machinery for contracting out.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Loughborough (Mr. Cronin) who, I thought, drew attention very clearly to the difficulties which the absence of such a Measure as this causes. The hon. and learned Member for Northampton (Mr. Paget) did the same.

We all know the tragedy which can arise when people who are uninsured are involved in accidents and suffer mutilation for life. One does not have to go into that. I suggest that as a question of equity there can be no doubt that compulsory insurance of passengers is right. In 1929, arguments were advanced against any form of insurance on the ground that if people were insured and protected by insurance companies the degree of care they would exercise would be reduced. That has been shown to be incorrect. If a person drives carelessly or dangerously, and is involved in an accident, he knows perfectly well that his insurance cover will be withdrawn.

One of the problems is the entire ignorance of the general public about insurance. Not one in twenty realises that when he gets into a motor car it may well be that he is not insured and that if there is an accident, whether it is due to the negligence of the driver or not, he may not be able to recover damages. How many people take the risk and danger of taking a passenger in those circumstances? The damage to a passenger in an accident is a very different thing from the damage to a motor car, not only from the human but from the financial point of view. The most expensive car on the market costs roughly £8,000 or £9,000, but the average claim for damage for write-off is probably £700 or £800. Compensation for injury is very much larger than that and often can run into many thousands of pounds.

As many hon. Members have said, the question of compulsory insurance falls into two categories, that for motor cars and that for motor cycles. Although I am not an expert on insurance, I agree that it is very much easier in the case of cars than of motor cycles. Many hon. Members have suggested that motor cyclists should be able to opt out of insurance, but that should depend on whether the motor cycle is fitted with an appliance for taking a passenger. If it is a solo machine not designed for taking passengers, it should be excluded, but if it is fitted with a device for taking passengers I do not think there can be any question of excluding it except on the grounds of cost, which would extend throughout the whole range of insurance.

The premiums may be affected particularly in the case of the inexperienced driver wishing for the first time to own a motor cycle, or for a person who has had a series of very 'bad accidents. I am not so much concerned about the second category. Such a person should pay the premium. It may be a good thing if it acts as a deterrent and keeps such people off the road altogether, but I think that there is a case for a young man who, perfectly reasonably, wants to start using a motor cycle. In his case, the premium might be increased very considerably because of the risk the insurance company is taking.

Another important point raised in the debate has been about passengers entering or alighting from vehicles. That, also, deserves attention. When the hon. Member for Loughborough drew up the Bill he left it very wide, and I think that it is possible that this provision could be included.

Hon. Members have raised the question of the total sum to be covered. Two serious dangers arise here. The courts are apt, in assessing damages, where an insurance company is paying, to feel that the individual is not paying; or, if there is a ceiling of £10,000, they feel that they can award up to that amount. I am not sure whether we should fix a ceiling to the amount of cover which a passenger can obtain. In my view, it should be a liability measured entirely by the extent of damage which the unfortunate person has sustained and should not be limited to a stated sum.

Another suggestion was that the driver of the vehicle should have the right to contract out. Many excellent devices have been suggested, particularly by the hon. and learned Member for Northampton, one being that the colour of the licence could be varied, but I am not sure whether it would be a good thing to introduce these into the Bill. The average person would believe that he was protected. I am not sure that it would be a good thing to include in the Bill provision for a differently coloured licence or some other device.

Mention has been made of the special risks which insurance companies have to bear, such as those arising from the age of the driver, his youthfulness, his experience, the type of machine, and so on, and I am sure that to a large extent these will influence the premiums. There is no doubt that this will result in increased premium payments, and it is for the House to decide whether the results achieved are worth the price in increased premiums.

I pay tribute to the work done through the Motor Insurance Bureau. My right hon. Friend or his predecessor had some negotiations on this subject, and a large number of unfortunate accidents have been covered by this agreement, so well made between my hon. Friend's Department and the Motor Insurance Bureau. Nevertheless, I do not agree that this is the extent to which liability should be limited and I am sure that ethically we ought to include the unfortunate passenger in the insurance.

The hon. and learned Member for Northampton mentioned the question of enforcement. The colour of the licence, if we had a dual type of insurance, could well indicate whether the person was insured, but it has been suggested that on a dark night a passenger getting into a vehicle might not see the colour of the licence. May I point out that the passenger runs an equal risk when he gets into a car through not knowing whether the driver is insured at all. The risk is identical in the two cases.

The main point of the coloured disc would be to make it easier for the police to detect a driver who is carrying a passenger when he is not properly insured. That is the main value of it, rather than to give knowledge to the passenger.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, because that is an important point. The differently coloured disc obviously would serve a dual purpose. It would give the passenger an indication whether the vehicle was insured and it would be a ready reckoner whereby the police could see whether the vehicle was insured for carrying passengers.

I do not think that there is an insuperable difficulty about having two types of licence, but I believe that if one produces a quarterly insurance and, at the same time, applies for an annual licence, one can get an annual licence. This means that there is a defect in the checking of insurances. If I paid £12 10s. for an annual licence and produced an insurance which was valid at the time that I paid for the licence, I believe that an annual licence would be granted, although the insurance might well run only for another three months. That will have to be remedied in Committee if we are to have this dual form of licence. If a person produces an insurance which covers passengers for only the next few months, we must ensure that a licence is not granted for a time exceeding the cover of the insurance.

I hope that when the Bill is sent to Committee one point which will be included is that no passenger or driver of a motor cycle should get any compensation if he is foolish enough not to wear a helmet. This is a protective step which any sensible person ought to take, and if anyone suffers head injuries as a result of his own negligence when not taking it, I feel that he is not entitled to the court's protection.

I hope that the House agrees that the compulsory insurance of passengers is desirable, but a great deal of work will have to be done in Committee on exactly how the machinery will be carried out. The effect, which my hon. Friend the Joint Parliamentary Secretary brought out, over the whole range of insurance will obviously be very great. Most of the difficulties will be among elderly drivers and inexperienced drivers, because their premiums will obviously be increased substantially. It is for the House to decide whether the increase in insurance premiums all over the range of motor vehicles is a worth-while payment to protect the innocent passenger who is being driven in a motor vehicle, and who sustains severe injuries for which no compensation can possibly be recovered from the driver, from any third party or from the insurance company.

We should give earnest consideration to the Bill today, but should go into very much more detail about the cost in Committee.

I have complied with what I think are the general wishes of the House and kept my speech to the last of the speeches in the debate. This has an advantage, because the last three or four hon. Members who have spoken, since the Joint Parliamentary Secretary intervened, have been very illuminating.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough (Mr. Cronin), first, on his luck in the Ballot, and, secondly, on his initiative in the presentation of the Bill. The Bill is certain to be given a Second Reading, but whatever happens to it subsequently, what he has done above all else is to set in train a machinery which must lead to an investigation into this matter in much more detail and which at the end of the day must produce a result, unless the Government are very difficult about it and are determined to turn their back on any amending Bill of this kind. My hon. Friend must be thanked by the House for that.

When he promoted the Bill it meant that many people such as myself had to do some research and to go into the Library and to find out about the subject. The Joint Parliamentary Secretary is lucky; he has people to do the work for him. They have provided him with a first-class brief, as they invariably do, and he has been able, in his most efficient and courteous manner, to present it to the House in such a way that we believe that he did it all himself.

In my researches I discovered that there has been no amendment to the Road Traffic Act on this subject since 1930. It is incredible that we have to go back all those years to see the attempts which were made to try to alter the situation. I discovered that a Committee was set up in 1937 known as the Cassel Committee, which went into the whole question of compulsory insurance. It was set up by the Board of Trade, and it took into account the question of compulsory insurance of motor vehicles, considering many aspects, including passenger injuries.

The Committee made a great many recommendations. Unfortunately, the war held everything up, and not until 1945 were arrangements made between the insurance companies and the then Minister of Transport by which the Motor Insurance Bureau was established and an agreement was reached between the insurance companies and the Ministry on this matter. It is an interesting reflection that the institution for the Motor Insurance Bureau is the only recommendation of the Cassel Committee to be implemented, although the Committee concluded its work in 1937.

I put this point to the Parliamentary Secretary, but not for any reply. One day when he and his Department are not doing anything, they might look again at the whole question of compulsory insurance and the recommendations made by that excellent body, the Cassel Committee. As the hon. Member for Clapham (Dr. Alan Glyn) so rightly said, in the early days of compulsory insurance all sorts of profound reasons were advanced against it. There was always the great argument about cost. It was said that the cost would be prohibitive. It was argued that it would be an infringement of the liberty of the citizen. It was said that people should have a choice.

All these arguments have been advanced so often before, but Parliament has decreed through the years—both Conservative and Labour Governments—that there are certain things in which the public have lost any rights. It has been accepted that they should not have the freedom to kill or injure without insurance at the end of the day for the dependants of those who are killed or for the injured. It is as straightforward as that. Within that orbit, by introducing the Bill my hon. Friend has high-lighted a complete anomaly in the present law.

The Parliamentary Secretary told us that it is estimated that about 80 per cent. of those who drive cars have comprehensive insurance.

indicated dissent.

I do not want to argue about figures. Seventy per cent. or 80 per cent. of those who drive cars have comprehensive insurance and are covered. If nothing else resulted from the Bill other than that the remaining 30 per cent. or 20 per cent. had to insure against the risk of passengers being injured or killed, my hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough will have rendered the country a very great service.

There can be no justification for people who drive a car and can afford to do so not having this insurance. I assume that all those who drive cars can afford to. They must understand that they must pay insurance to cover the risk of any damage they might do to passengers. There may be a minority who will object to paying. We all know that some motorists try to get their motoring just about as cheaply as possible. Those who do that are often those who can afford to pay much more for their motoring.

It should be stated publicly that we cannot, on the one hand, talk about motoring being made cheaper and, on the other, talk of measures to deal with parking, etc., which will result in motoring being more expensive. The Joint Parliamentary Secretary said that we must be careful about this, because the resulting increased premiums will make it very difficult indeed for motorists. The hon. Member for Twickenham (Mr. Gresham Cooke) spoke of a lad having to pay £10 a year extra for a special premium to be insured against these risks.

What are the Government doing, with the support of the Labour Party? They are making motoring very expensive. We have no alternative. If motorists want to park their cars, they have to pay extra for it now. There are parking meters. The public must make up their minds on this issue. To enable traffic to move, it will now be very expensive to own a car. It is fair to say that with more cars and motor cycles on the roads the danger to others is immense. We must face the fact that premiums will rise and people will have to pay more in insurance.

There is no political point in this. It is an obvious fact. I do not believe that the argument advanced by the hon. Member for Twickenham on cost should be a deterrent. I, too, have been in touch with insurance companies. I will not name them, but I have been in touch with one or two. The hon. and gallant Member for Cheltenham (Major Hicks Beach) knows much about these subjects, and the insurance companies with which I have been in touch confirm exactly what he says. There are no hard and fast figures. The companies would not even quote them to me. A "character" the hon. Member for Twickenham met gave him specific figures which suited his arguments, so he quoted them. The reputable people I spoke to told me that they just did not know as regards the argument about motor cycles.

It is obvious that, if there were a law and motor cyclists were compelled to pay a premium such as this, pro rata the premium would be much lower for everybody. I may be wrong about that, but it seems to be an obvious point of view. If several million motor cyclists were paying, it would not be terribly expensive.

The Parliamentary Secretary said that the cost to the motorist for the type of insurance we are talking about would be about another £2 or £3 a year. I do not believe that any person who is driving a car could not afford to find that. Indeed, he would have to if I had my way. I should make it part of the luxury of having a car. Having a car today is a luxury, although sometimes when I am driving mine down the Old Kent Road I find it a terrible hardship, in spite of the Minister's great efforts to improve our roads.

My hon. Friend was very fair and admitted that this is a one-Clause Bill which, in effect, throws up ideas. If there is good will and if the Parliamentary Secretary accepts that we on this side will work with him and his Department, we shall not get bogged down in Committee. We have some good lawyers on this side who are expert at drafting Measures of this kind. I understand that the proposals contained in the Bill have been considered by a number of people outside the House who are experts in this field. I am certain that we shall not be bogged down and find ourselves in too much difficulty in Committee. If there is good will in the Ministry of Transport, in the sense of direction being given, the Department will find the answers, and will produce Amendments in Committee to implement the principle behind the Bill.

I do not deny that motor cyclists in themselves are a very great problem. There is no question about it. My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Northampton (Mr. Paget) got involved in an argument in this respect. I am one of those who believe that if there is to be compulsory insurance, so be it. I do not believe in working out methods by which everybody can contract out, and I put that on record immediately. There are some obvious examples of those who would not be covered by such legislation as this. That is a different matter. I take my stand on the principle that, if there is compulsory insurance, it should be so. It is wrong in principle to try to find legal arguments as to how people could avoid compulsory insurance, and I shall oppose any such arguments in Committee.

For what reasons would the hon. Gentleman oppose it if a scheme could be evolved?

I should oppose those who wanted to contract out of such a scheme. Compulsory insurance is right in principle, and it should apply to all. One argument which was advanced was that there are some vehicles which are not manufactured to take a passenger. It was said that one motor cycle is not manufactured to take a pillion rider and the rider of such a machine obviously should not pay this insurance. Once efforts are made to try to find such exemptions, one gets bogged down. It would be most impracticable to work the scheme.

If a vehicle is essentially a one-person vehicle, it is most unreasonable to expect the owner to insure for a risk which he cannot possibly take.

It may well be that such vehicles as tractors and milk floats could be exempted. I was trying to answer the argument which has been advanced that some persons will never carry passengers and therefore should not pay this insurance. This argument was advanced on the freedom-of-the-individual principle.

It may be possible to devise a scheme to cater for people who take a chance, are injured in an accident, and then find that they have no redress. If a scheme can be found through the Motor Insurance Bureau to avoid such persons being placed at a disadvantage through having no insurance, would the hon. Gentleman support a system of contracting out?

I shall not depart from the principle. I believe in compulsory insurance. If it is brought in, it should be for all, with the few exceptions of milk floats, etc. However, I do not want to become involved any deeper in this argument on Second Reading. It would be difficult in Committee on such a Bill to implement what the House desires. I concede all that.

With good will shown by the Parliamentary draftsmen, the intention of the House being known, we can find a solution. It is as straight as that. But, if I may say so, I thought that the Parliamentary Secretary rather gave the impression to hon. Members—he certainly conveyed it to me—that there was not a lot of good will in the Ministry of Transport for the Bill. He said that there was a sort of benevolent neutrality on the part of the Ministry.

My experience has been that a Private Member's Bill has little chance of success unless it deals with the welfare of wild fowl or some other bird or animal. In that case, the Government smile, and say, "That will be no trouble at all." Those who are very fond of wild fowl, or whatever it may be, then give the Bill their pontifical blessing, there is a Committee stage lasting about a quarter of an hour—and a Private Bill is on the way to the Statute Book. There are, of course, rare exceptions, like Sir Alan Herbert's Measure, but they deal with great issues of the day.

A Bill like this has no hope at all without good will on the part of the Ministry. Hon. Members can think what they like, but private Members' time and Private Members' Bills become myths unless the Ministries concerned back them for all they are worth. I therefore ask for a little more enthusiasm from the Parliamentary Secretary than he has so far shown, with his talk of benevolent neutrality—

I went a little further than benevolent neutrality. I said that our attitude was one of open-minded neutrality, and I went on to say that we would assist in any way we could if the Bill was given a Second Reading, but that we were prepared to leave the decision entirely to the House. That, surely, is pretty good, coming from any Ministry.

I have been here long enough to know that unless Ministers say that they will support a Private Member's Bill in its entirety, and will support it in Committee, it has little chance of going through. I quoted the Parliamentary Secretary as speaking of "benevolent neutrality," but I gather that he used the expression "open-minded neutrality"—and that is even worse. Unless the Parliamentary Secretary is enthusiastic about it, this Bill has "had it," and that would be a great pity.

If the Bill's principle became law, every motor car driver would be compelled to have compulsory insurance cover for the passengers at an additional cost, probably, of about £2 a year; and every motor cyclist who had a pillion rider would be compelled to pay—I will accept the figure quoted by the hon. Member for Twickenham—an extra £8 or £10 a year. If the principle is right, that is money that ought to be spent.

I believe that the figures given in the debate have been overstated, and that they may prove to be much lower, but, in Committee, the Parliamentary Secretary should be in a position to give firm figures. They can be obtained. Those insurance companies to whom I have spoken—and the hon. and gallant Member for Cheltenham had the same experi- ence—had not done any real research and were in no position to give figures. We have all had a letter from the R.A.C. and the A.A. saying, in effect, that, while not opposing the Bill as such, they have no real information about the additional cost involved, and that that is what is worrying them—

The hon. Gentleman moved rather quickly from the very contentious point of contracting out. It is clear from the course of the debate that several hon. Members on both sides would, if the hon. Gentleman had his way and motor cyclists were left in the Bill, vote against it on Third Reading. Would the hon. Member still press for that even then?

I have been brought up in a world of compromise—in the trade union movement. There one goes in for as much as one can get and comes out with what one finally gets. What we do on Third Reading is quite another matter; I have made my point on Second Reading that compulsory insurance is just that. If we are to find lots of reasons why people cannot or should not be compelled to 'take out this form of insurance, we ruin the whole thing. In all the earlier Acts, reasons were always advanced why one section or another should not be included. I do not admit the validity of that.

The Parliamentary Secretary said that as far as the Ministry knew there was no great need for this Measure. It is extraordinary how these Ministers of the Crown can change when the reverse position obtains. In the proceedings of the Standing Committee on the Licensing Bill I asked why the Government were introducing such legislation when there seemed to be no great public need. The Government replied, "Ah, this is not a question of need—there is honesty and justice in the case, and this should be done."

I suggest that the Parliamentary Secretary should have a chat with his colleagues in the Home Office, when he will see that here, too, there is something to be done that is honest and right. Let the Ministry of Transport do it.

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

I am happy to have a little more time to discuss this subject than had my predecessor who tried in 1952 to change the law on the termination of pregnancy. He was slightly less successful than I in the Ballot, and I think that the House permitted him only one and a half minutes, just before 4 o'clock on a Friday, to deploy his case.

This is a subject of considerable importance. I appreciate that it is also a subject that is distasteful to many people, which makes it all the more necessary that we should think about it clearly and dispassionately. I hope that the House will keep an open mind on the matter, because from some quarters there have been certain reactions to the publication of this Bill that I can only describe as hysterical. That being so, it is desirable that I should very carefully explain just what it seeks to do and also what it does not seek to do.

It is, in fact, a modest and a moderate Measure. Personally, I should have liked to have gone a great deal further, but I have so designed the Bill as to make it, I hope, acceptable to a reasonable House of Commons. Its primary purpose—and I emphasise and re-emphasise that it is its primary purpose—is to put into statutory form what is now the common law, or the established case law on the subject of abortion. Admittedly, as printed, it provides one or two additional grounds for the lawful termination of pregnancy, but I shall deal with that in detail a little later.

I turn now to what this Measure does not seek to do. It has been described as a Bill to legalise abortion. That is not strictly accurate because, in certain circumstances, abortion is already legal. This is not a Measure that could deprive a mother of her unborn child against her will—which is another suggestion that has been made. There is no question whatever of compulsory abortion. It does not seek to impose any obligations upon anybody; it is a purely permissive—and, perhaps, declaratory—Measure. It simply allows doctors, within certain defined limits, in certain circumstances to exercise their medical judgment in good faith, unfettered by the threat, however remote, of criminal sanctions.

I appreciate that the subject of abortion is a very emotive one, and that every kind of attitude is taken to it. Perhaps I could describe the two extremes as I understand them. On the one hand, there are those who say that every facility should be available to avoid bringing into the world a genuinely unwanted child and that in no circumstances should a woman be forced to give birth to a child she does not want. The Bill does not go any significant way towards that objective.

The other point of view is that, once conception has taken place, once the ovum has been fertilised in the womb, any induced termination of the pregnancy amounts morally to murder of human life. I appreciate that this is the view taken by the Roman Catholic Church. It opposes the Bill. I was perfectly well aware that it would do so when I decided to introduce it. The views of the Roman Catholic Church are sincerely held. But, in my view, they are based, not on any logical premise, but on theological dogma. Nevertheless, one respects views which are sincerely held even if one profoundly disagrees with them. I ask only for a tiny bit of respect on the part of Roman Catholics for the motives and sincerity of those of us who are seeking to amend the law and, perhaps, a little recognition of the fact that our reasons are humanitarian, however misguided they may be in their eyes.

I think that the view of the Roman Catholic Church can best be described by a quotation from an address by Pope Pius XII less than ten years ago. He said:

"… to save the life of the mother is a most noble end, but the direct killing of the child as a means to this end is not licit."

That doctrine lays down perfectly clearly that, if it is a question of choice between the life of a child and the life of a mother, then, unfortunately, the mother must die. I think that is not a view which would commend itself to the rest of the people of this country.

I have gone very closely into the question of what constitutes a human life before birth. I have read a good deal about it. I have come to the conclusion that the best case which can be made out on logical grounds is that a human life begins at the point at which the foetus becomes viable—in other words, at the point at which the foetus is capable of an independent life apart from its mother. I am told that normally that point is reached in the 28th week of pregnancy. Except for the saving of the life of the mother in an emergency, the Bill limits the lawful grounds for termination of pregnancy to the 13th week of pregnancy.

The present law and practice in this country can be described in two ways. One might charitably say that it is the good old typical British compromise. One could also say—I am not sure that this is not more accurate—that it is a rather unpleasant example of that hypnotic element which dominated the attitude to sexual matters in Victorian England and which has not been completely eradicated.

The statute law derives from the Offences Against the Person Act, 1861—exactly one hundred years ago—which made it clear that it was a felony to administer drugs or to use instruments to procure an abortion. This Act placed that operation in a unique position, and it remains to this day in a unique position. It is the only surgical operation which is interfered with by the law in any way. It may be a surprise to some hon. Members that sterilisation, both of the male and of the female, is regarded as a perfectly legal operation. Leucotomy which can have the effect of totally changing a patient's personality is legal, although it is a serious thing. The law does not seek to interfere with this type of operation.

The case law is a very different matter. For a very long time it has been generally regarded as legal to terminate pregnancy to save the life of the mother. But only about 20 years ago that case law was extended to cover the mother's health as well as her life. This arose from the case of Rex v. Bourne in 1939. It is a sordid case, but I will tell the House briefly the details of it.

A girl of 14 years of age was "picked up" in Hyde Park by four soldiers and was taken to a stable in Knightsbridge Barracks on the pretext that she was to be shown a horse with a green tail. When she was taken to the barracks she was raped by each of the four soldiers in succession and she became pregnant. Her medical advisers called into consultation Mr. Aleck Bourne who was—I think that he has retired now—one of our most distinguished gynaecologists and obstetric surgeons. Mr. Bourne said, "I will terminate this pregnancy and advise the authorities that I have done so." He did terminate it, and I believe that he wrote to the Attorney-General or to Scotland Yard to that effect. At any rate, he made it clear that he had taken this action well knowing that, according to statute law, he was committing a felony.

Mr. Bourne was duly charged and his case was heard before Mr. Justice McNaghten. The defence was one of necessity. Mr. Justice McNaghten in examining the Statute, seized on the word "unlawfully". The Statute says that the felon is one who unlawfully administers drugs or uses instruments. He suggested that that word carried with it the implication that there might be circumstances in which abortion was lawful. In his direction to the jury he indicated that in his view preservation of the mother's health or longevity, even where there was no immediate threat to the mother's life, should be regarded as lawful grounds for termination. The jury accepted his view. Mr. Bourne was acquitted, and this became the established case law.

Since that time the judgment in the Bourne case has been reinforced by subsequent cases, notably Rex v. Bergmann and Ferguson in 1948. I think that it was during the last Parliament, when Questions were asked about this subject, that the Home Secretary, in answer to one of my hon. Friends who asked whether the Government would introduce legislation to amend the law, replied that he was content to rely on the Bourne judgment.

That may be satisfactory from the Home Secretary's point of view. Lawyers may think that, because this is the case law and the existing common law, it is fine. But the doctors do not always take that view. They take very different views about the law on this subject. Case law does not mean the same to a layman. Some doctors believe that the Bourne judgment may be overthrown by a higher court. I am told that this is most improbable, but, nevertheless, it does not carry anything like the force of statute law.

This gave rise to a situation which I submit is far from satisfactory. Some doctors take the view that all therapeutical abortions carried out in good faith are legal and they perform these operations quite openly in hospital on the basis of their medical judgment. Others are frankly frightened by the legal situation and prefer to have nothing whatever to do with it even though on their medical judgment alone in many cases they would either perform the operation or make arrangements for it to be performed.

I have a rather interesting letter from a psychiatrist who is head of the psychiatric department of a London teaching hospital. Talking about the times when his opinion is asked in cases where termination is suggested by another medical consultant, he wrote to me:

"Same of my associates at one hospital have shown a complete lack of understanding of the considerations involved and of my attitude to such recommendations and this has prompted me to refuse to recommend termination of pregnancy in any case until the law is altered."

This is a very common attitude on the part of the medical profession. It therefore means that we have pregnant mothers treated quite differently in a capricious sort of way according to who the general practitioner is, what town the mothers live in and what hospital they axe sent to. There is no suggestion of uniformity of practice at all in this matter.

This is the present situation. Two consequences of great importance flow from it. First, of course, is the flourishing trade of the unskilled so-called back-street abortionists. These are people, mostly women, who perform the operation often in totally unhygienic surroundings and with unsterilised instruments. These are circumstances which give rise to a number of cases of septicaemia which ultimately find their way to hospital gynaecological beds, and it is certainly a trade which involves a significant number of deaths from these causes.

This is a curious trade, because women who are relieved of their preg- nancy are very reluctant to lay information against the abortionist and, therefore, it is very difficult to obtain any accurate statistics about the number of unskilled operations. In 1939 an official Government committee accepted an estimate of between 44,000 and 65,000 a year. Subsequent information suggests that that is an under-estimate. While freely admitting that one is doing little more than guessing here, I suggest that the current figure in this country is probably between 50,000 and 100,000, although it could be very much larger than even that upper figure.

The second consequence of the present state of the law is the existence of the skilled, fully qualified professional abortionist who is known, I believe, as the Harley Street abortionist. We should be quite frank about this situation. Because of the possibly criminal aspect of the work that these men do, they are able to demand and to receive very large fees for the work. Their fees, no doubt, are regarded as danger money and, of course, it is a perfectly simple matter for anyone who has sufficient money to get a pregnancy terminated today by a qualified medical practitioner on the flimsiest of medical grounds. All that it requires is a cheque book and a slick verbal formula which offers some theoretical protection for the professional abortionist.

This leads in the simplest possible terms to a situation in which there is one law for the rich and one law for the poor. If there were no other arguments for amending the law, I submit that that is a very powerful one. There has been for many years dissatisfaction with the present state of the law in many quarters, but the nature of this subject and the sort of miasma that surrounds it have precluded any widespread campaign. But the Government appointed an inter-Departmental Committee under the then Mr. Norman Birkett which reported in 1939.

The Committee was set up about 1936, or at least long before the Rex v. Bourne case. The Committee's Report is not a very satisfactory document. It is buried in the Departments and is now out of print. I am grateful to the Ministry of Health because when I wanted a copy I was provided with one from the Ministry's own library. It was no doubt surplus to the Ministry's requirements, but it could not be obtained elsewhere.

In paragraph 13 on page 122 of its Report, the Committee makes this recommendation:

"The present law leaves a medical practitioner who is contemplating the induction of a therapeutic abortion in an ill-defined position which must be regarded as unsatisfactory. The law should therefore be amended to make it unmistakably clear that a medical practitioner is acting legally when in good faith he procures the abortion of a pregnant woman in circumstances which satisfy him that continuance of the pregnancy is likely to endanger her life or seriously imperil her health."

No action was taken on that recommendation but nevertheless the subject was by now getting an airing.

The opponents of this reform are apt to quote the experience of other countries, because in many countries the termination of pregnancy on far wider grounds than anything I propose in this Bill is permissible and one is apt to hear scarifying stories about the decline in morals following these measures. The country most frequently mentioned is Sweden which about ten years ago introduced a Bill which make abortion permissible on a wide variety of grounds, including social grounds, which, of course, is not suggested in my Measure.

I have heard it said that the introduction of this Measure in Sweden resulted in a vast increase in legal abortions and certainly no reduction—indeed, some suggest there has been an increase—in illegal abortions. I therefore went to the trouble of getting some official Swedish Government figures. I found that in the ten years during which the Act has been in operation in Sweden the number of applications for legal abortions and the number of applications granted have fallen by a half.

I asked also whether there was any evidence whatever as to an increase in the number of illegal unskilled abortions. The answer I received was that they have no official evidence one way or the other. I do not think one can draw from the experience of Sweden any arguments against the modest advance I am suggesting in the Bill. I am told by statisticians that in its present form the Bill would permit only about 40 per cent. of the therapeutic abortions which are today regarded as legal in Sweden.

There is no reason to imagine, if we were to take this step, that the experience of this country would be any more disastrous than that of Sweden. Therapeutic abortions undoubtedly would rise in number, but they would be done openly. I am not suggesting that the Bill would eliminate the unskilled back-street abortions, but I do say that the rise in the number of properly carried out therapeutic legal abortions would be at the expense of the trade of both unskilled back-street abortionists and the professional Harley Street abortionists.

Although the bulk of illegal abortions are probably carried out for reasons which are not included in my Bill, there are, nevertheless, some—and nobody knows how many—pregnant women who have to go to one or other of these classes of abortionists because the doctor to which they have gone is unwilling, in the present unsatisfactory state of the law, to take a chance, even though his medical judgment indicates the pregnancy should be terminated. Surely it is infinitely better, whatever fraction of the total number of abortions this would represent, that they be performed by skilled doctors in the full light of day, preferably in hospital, with proper hygienic surroundings and as part of the National Health Service. If the Bill achieves no more than that it will still have been worth putting on the Statute Book.

I come now to the terms of the Bill. It is a short Bill and the grounds are contained in Clause 1. I suggest that there will be no argument about Clause 1 (a), that it is proper and should be declared lawful to terminate pregnancy for the purpose of preserving the life of the mother.

Clause 1 (b) is intended to give statutory form to the judgment in Rex v. Bourne. It lays down that it should be lawful for a registered practitioner, acting in good faith, to terminate

"in the belief that there would be grave risk of serious injury to the patient's physical or mental health if she were left to give birth to and care for the child."

Clause 1 (c) has received a good deal of criticism from some quarters and my correspondence has included expressions of misgiving by a number of people. I want to tell the House how I approach this matter. The Bill is based on a draft Bill which is included in a book called A Law for the Rich. It was drafted by the Council of the Abortion Law Reform Association, but as it stands the Bill contains some considerable changes from that draft. When I first considered Clause 1 (c) my inclination was to omit it. I said to myself, "The Bill limits termination to the thirteenth week of pregnancy. Is it possible in the first thirteen weeks of pregnancy to say that there is a grave risk of the child being born grossly deformed or with physical or mental abnormalities which would require constant hospital treatment or special care throughout its life?".

I decided to take the best advice I could and discussed the matter with a professor of genetics, who is possibly the greatest geneticist in the country and, possibly, in the world. It is as a result of my conversations with him, and the memorandum he gave me subsequently, that I decided that there were cases under this heading which formed a proper ground for lawful termination of pregnancy.

I will cite some of the types of cases which would come within the ambit of this Clause. There are certain virus infections of the mother during early pregnancy which can have disastrous results. The most common of these—and for the sake of my argument possibly the only one worth considering—is German measles, which doctors call rubella. I believe this was discovered by an Australian during the war. The original figures have been challenged and it was originally said that the incidence of mental and physical abnormality was exaggerated. More studies were then carried out.

I am supported in what I am about to tell the House by a Report of the Ministry of Health about maternal deaths, which places the risk of serious abnormality from German measles in the first three months of pregnancy at something like 25 per cent. I am more concerned with the first month of pregnancy, because it is a steeply descending curve. I am told that if a woman suffers from rubella within the first month of pregnancy the risk that the child will suffer from deafness, blindness, heart disease or mental deficiency is very high —from 50 per cent. to 85 per cent. being affected. In the second month the risk goes down to between 25 per cent. and 50 per cent. and in the third month it goes substantially lower.

I suggest that if a woman suffers from German measles in the first month of pregnancy and is faced with a risk of up to 85 per cent. that her child will be seriously deformed or mentally defective, and asks that the pregnancy be terminated, the doctor should be permitted by the law to exercise his unfettered judgment in the matter.

The other category which comes under this Clause is that of genetical danger to the fotetus itself. It is possible to state with some accuracy with certain diseases the chances of the disease being carried on to the foetus. The memorandum says that one parent—either the father or the mother—may suffer from a disease which is inherited as a dominant trait. In that case the risk that the child will have the same disease is exactly 50 per cent. The best known of these conditions—and fortunately they are rare—is Huntington's chorea, which is a progressive nervous disease. There is also a malignant tumour of the eye called retinoblastoma. There is then the situation where both parents are normal and yet they can be carriers of a recessive disease, in which case 25 per cent. of the children will suffer from recessive abnormality. There is one form of mental deficiency, phenylketonuria, fairly rare, which comes into this category, and there are others. I mention this only to suggest that this is a field where one ought to allow the doctor to exercise his judgment.

It may be that the wording of this provision can be improved; I do not know. I included it in the Bill because I believed it was right to ask the House to consider it, but if the Bill gets a Second Reading—this applies to other parts of the Bill as well, to everything except the absolute nub of the Bill, which is contained in paragraphs (a) and (b)—I am perfectly prepared to hear arguments from hon. Members and Government spokesmen in Committee, and I can assure the House that I shall be very flexible indeed.

Paragraph (d) provides additional grounds for termination if the pregnancy is the result of offences under four sections of the Sexual Offences Act, 1956.

In other words, if the pregnancy results from rape or incest, or if a girl of 13 years or under is pregnant, I suggest that those circumstances ought themselves to provide lawful grounds for termination in good faith.

I see difficulties about this provision. I will be perfectly frank with the House. I know that it is difficult to prove rape and to prove incest. All I am saying is that it ought to be lawful to terminate in cases where this can be established. If we can find a form of words which will provide 'the necessary safeguards, I shall be prepared to substitute them. If we cannot find a form of words which will achieve this satisfactorily, then I should be prepared, with the greatest reluctance, to drop the provision so far as rape and incest are concerned, although I feel that we should certainly retain it in respect of the pregnancy of girls under 13.

I should also be prepared to compromise on the question of the person of unsound mind, because here again I appreciate that there are difficulties. The case that I have in mind is a woman suffering from a very serious mental disease who becomes pregnant—a disease of such a nature that would make it totally impossible for her ever to give that child any kind of home life or mother's love, quite apart from any risks of the disease being transmitted to the child. I should have thought that in those circumstances it would have been proper to permit termination, but, again, I know that it is not an easy thing, and if we ever get to Committee I shall be prepared to discuss this. So much for the grounds.

Clause 2 lays down that there shall always be a second opinion, that any termination requires the concurring opinion of another registered medical practitioner. I have added words which I took out of the Report of the Departmental Committee, the Birkett Committee, that this opinion or advice must be based upon a personal examination of the patient.

The other proviso in the Clause is that the operation shall not be performed after the end of the thirteenth week of pregnancy. Some people have suggested to me that the Bill is too restrictive here. Indeed, I rather gathered that that was the view of the Church of England Moral Welfare Council, which rather surprised me. Again, I can only tell the House that I have taken the best possible professional medical advice that I can find, and I am told that this operation is perfectly safe in the first thirteen weeks of pregnancy—no operation is absolutely without risk, but, so far as one can say, it is a perfectly safe operation—but that after thirteen weeks risks begin to appear. Because I wanted to make this a reasonable Measure, I decided that we should take no chances at all, and so I limited it to the first thirteen weeks of pregnancy.

Clause 3 places the burden of proof that the operation was not performed in good faith upon the prosecution. The Clause is inserted because a similar Clause exists in the only analogous Measure on the Statute Book, the Infanticide Act—in that Act, where the circumstances are really very similar, the burden of proof is on the prosecution—and also because Mr. Justice McNaghten in the case of Rex v. Bourne made it perfectly clear that in his view the burden of proof rests on the prosecution.

Clause 4 is little more than formal, making it perfectly clear that the normal requirement of consent to surgical operations shall be required in the case of terminations under the Bill. So much for the Bill itself.

I have had very considerable correspondence since I announced my intention to introduce the Bill. I think I can say with honesty that the only opposition that I have had has come from Roman Catholics. There may have been two or three letters from non-Catholics who objected to the Bill, but the overwhelming majority of the other letters have been in favour of the Bill. I was talking a moment ago about German measles. I had a letter from a woman who acts as the secretary of a little group of parents who have formed themselves together. They are parents of deaf-blind children, children who are both deaf and blind as a result of the mother contracting German measles during the first six weeks of pregnancy. They welcome the Bill, of course.

The Press reaction, apart from the Catholic Press, has, on the whole, been favourable. The Economist, the Guardian and the Spectator are in favour of the Bill. I believe that, on the whole, public opinion is ready for a modest advance on this front. It is true, of course, that the Church of England Moral Welfare Council late last night decided against the Bill. I do not want to argue the finding that it published about the Bill, and will only say that it contains certain errors of fact. The Council is perfectly entitled to its view, but I think it should be made perfectly clear to the House that it does not speak for the Church of England as a whole, nor would it for a moment claim to do so.

I would end with one plea to the House, and I make it with sincerity. I hope the House will permit a decision to be taken on this Bill. There is an impression abroad that this House is becoming apt to sidestep or shy away from issues of a socially controversial nature, particularly any subject that has sexual implications, and this impression is not doing the reputation of Parliament any good, because there are issues which touch the deepest springs of human happiness, and they are, in my view, most properly subjects which should be discussed and considered by the House.

I would just repeat the assurance that I gave earlier, that if the House decides to give the Bill a Second Reading, as I hope it will, and the Bill goes to Committee, so long as the one basic principle of the Bill is not infringed, hon. Members will find me extremely flexible in Committee and very ready to listen to all the arguments. I trust that the Bill will receive a Second Reading.

I am glad that the debate can continue, because I share with the hon. Member for St. Pancras, North (Mr. K. Robinson) the view that, on such matters as this, Parliament should take a decision. He is quite right in saying that those who either approve or disapprove of the Bill should be prepared to say so, and to discuss and argue the matter and to vote on it.

The hon. Member complained that he did not feel that the hon. Members who introduce Bills like his received public respect from those who do not agree with them. For my part, I have the greatest respect for him and for the sincere and humanitarian reasons which have driven him to introduce the Bill.

I think of him recently as becoming, of course, very much a political Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—very much Dr. Jekyll on the back benches and very much the reactionary Mr. Hyde when speaking from the Front Bench.

I am always immensely impressed by the clarity of the hon. Member's argument and the presentation of his case. But I cannot see the purpose of this Bill. I do not quite understand the objection to case law, or to what he understood case law to be.

The hon. Member must appreciate that case law means the interpretation which the judges have put upon law passed by this House. When what Parliament has decided and set out in a Statute is interpreted by the judges, what he calls common law, or case law, becomes instituted. The fact that the courts insist that a jury must be told that the burden of proof rests upon the Crown in criminal matters is not embodied in a Statute, but that does not make it any less the law of the land.

The law in this case seems to be perfectly satisfactory. I want to refer to Section 58 of the Offences Against the Person Act, 1861. I cannot think that the hon. Gentleman will say that just because a Statute is ancient it is bad. Some of the Trade Disputes Acts and some of the Acts which started the trade unions are both old and good. The fact that the 1861 Act has been in existence for 100 years is not, by itself, a reason for saying that it should now be changed. Section 58 reads:

"Whosoever, with intent to procure the miscarriage of any woman, whether she be or be not with child, shall unlawfully "—

that is the key word—

"… administer to her or cause to be taken by her any poison or other noxious thing, or shall use any instrument or other means whatsoever with like intent … shall be guilty of felony."

That is the Section upon which this felony is found—if somebody unlawfully administers a poison or a drug, or unlawfully uses an instrument. It says "unlawfully" and, therefore, it is implicit that it can be done lawfully.

Thus, when judges interpret as they do the Act of 1861—the leading case, as the hon. Member said, is Rex v. Bourne—they make it clear that there are circumstances when it may be lawfully done or unlawfully done.

The case of Rex v. Bourne involved circumstances which I shall refer to. It was the case, as the hon. Member said, of a young girl who had been raped in circumstances which would be terrifying for any woman, let alone a young girl. She was, however, perfectly healthy. Mr. Bourne, when he examined her, said that she was not a person suffering from venereal disease and that if she had been, he would not have operated. He said that she was not of a prostitute's mind; if she had been he would not have operated. He operated after consultation with a colleague, and terminated her pregnancy.

It was the test case. The then Attorney-General, the late Lord Somervell, prosecuted. It was tried at the Central Criminal Court, and it fell there to be determined by a jury whether Mr. Bourne's action was, in the circumstances, lawful or unlawful. The jury acquitted him. In his summing up the judge explained what the effect of the law was, because a jury is not simply left to interpret a Statute passed by the House of Commons. He said that this distinguished and reputable surgeon had determined that what he was doing was right and, therefore, acted in good faith, and that the Crown must prove that the act was not done in good faith for the purpose only of preserving the life of the mother.

It is important to understand what the law is and to remember the words used by the judge when he charged the jury. These are the words which the members of the jury took with them to the secrecy of their retiring room:

"In a case where a doctor is of opinion that a child cannot be delivered without the death of the mother, he is entitled—indeed, it is his duty—to perform an operation with a view to saving the life of the mother"

Later, he went on:

"If pregnancy is likely to make a woman a physical or mental wreck, the jury is entitled to take the view that a doctor who, in these circumstances, and led by his belief, operates, is operating for the purpose of preserving the life of the mother."

The jury, having heard those words, acquitted Mr. Bourne. The House should take into account that here was the case of a girl who had suffered violent rape, who was pregnant in consequence of rape, and would have, for a period of nine months, to carry a constant reminder of the way in which she suffered. That was considered by the jury as being an interpretation of the law of the land entitling a doctor to terminate pregnancies. That case was the leading case in interpreting the law as it stood in 1939, and as it stands today.

The hon. Member referred to the Birkett Committee. This Committee wanted to amend and to extend Section 58 of the 1861 Act to make it clear that a doctor acts legally if, in good faith, he procures an abortion in circumstances which satisfy him that the continuance of the pregnancy is likely to endanger her life, or seriously to impair her life. That, as it were, was the extra emphasis which had already been emphasised in the case of Rex v. Bourne, in the view that continuation of the pregnancy would seriously impair the mother's health.

But that Committee acknowledged the lack of precision in the words,

"seriously to impair her health".

It admitted that this would be of assistance to unscrupulous doctors who wished to make fat fees which would be offered to them for saying that in their view an unwanted pregnancy would seriously impair a woman's health. The Committee could not and did not formulate any details to try and turn into legislation what it had suggested. It accepted that the words were not capable of exact definition, which is what the hon. Member today has tried to give them because he is not satisfied with the interpretation of the law as it appears to me to be. He wants to put into words this added or extra safeguard but which is, in fact, acted upon today and which, with the greatest respect to him, he has not succeeded in defining in his Bill.

I think it unlikely that anybody can draft words to give these words the exact meaning and that precision which the criminal law demands. Presumably because of that difficulty, there was no legislation following the Birkett Committee of 1939 and perhaps because it was accepted that the evil which broad or loose terminology would introduce and would permit would outbalance the good which would be done. Moreover, the Committee found also that there was no great increase in the amount of abortion in 1939—and that there were grave difficulties over the methods of requiring a second opinion—and so it seemed that legislation was not to be and could not be introduced.

Following that incident, in 1958, in the case of the Queen against Newton and Stungo, Mr. Justice Ashworth, in his charge to the jury, insisted that the onus of proof on showing that a doctor was acting in bad faith lay upon the Crown—upon which the hon. Member includes in his Bill but which I believe to be the law today. Again, this judge said that the use of an instrument to procure an abortion was unlawful unless it was made in good faith to preserve the life or mental or physical health of the woman. Is not that exactly the position that the hon. Member wants? Why does he think it necessary to introduce the Bill which appears to open up evils leading to the difficulties, which he frankly faced, but which can or will tend to assist those people who want to exercise an unscrupulous use of the powers which will be given?

To turn to some other comments, it is clear that pregnancy rarely develops with rape victims. In the only country in which the matter has had any particular examination, Sweden, there were only two such cases in ten years and in both it was doubtful whether the pregnancy was a consequence of the rape.

I am following the hon. and learned Gentleman's case most carefully. With respect, it is a very good case. Is it part of his argument that the law as it stands is so clear, or should be so clear, to the medical profession that there should be no doubt about what a doctor's duty is?

In my view, yes. Of course, there will always be individuals who will say, "I am not going to take any risks". Whether that is a reflection upon their moral or medical courage I know not, but it appears to me that the law says that a doctor may lawfully carry out a termination of pregnancy if, in his opinion, the mental or physical health of the mother-to-be will be seriously impaired.

What more does society want in those circumstances? Rex v. Bourne was the example of the woman or young girl who is raped and who is then carrying a child and who has no particular physical disability, but of whom it was said that the very fact of that pregnancy has a sufficient mental effect, or might have a mental effect, for the doctor lawfully to operate.

That is what the law appears to me to be, and I now turn to the position of what is legalised abortion. I accept that the hon. Member considers that this is a modest approach towards a position which would tend towards complete legal abortion. Legal abortion has been tried in Russia, but it was quickly abandoned, was it not?

To bring the hon. and learned Gentleman up to date; it has now been reinstated and abortion on purely social grounds—on almost any ground—is obtainable in the Soviet Union today.

I think that that is a regrettable, reactionary return. Abortion is legal in Sweden, but I understand that its incidence is negligible.

There have been two interesting inquiries, one in Norway by Koldstad of some 968 women. It brings out an important argument which hon. Members should carefully consider. About 84 per cent. of those women who were refused abortion were afterwards glad, without reserve. It is a remarkable responsibility to impose upon doctors, faced by the application from women who at the time are pregnant when their judgment may be impaired, and who might not be in a condition to form sensible rational decisions because of the incidence of their pregnancy. If the doctors in those cases had operated and had terminated the pregnancy at that time, would not that have been taking on to a human being a decision which he ought not to be asked to make?

It is not the case that these women had large families. Six out of every seven had only one or two children. It is interesting that the report said that towards the end of the period investigated the number of medical applications declined while the psychiatric applications enormously increased.

I think that that report contained the remarkable fact that many applicants applied because of housing shortages and some because of the alcoholic habits of the father.

That is not covered by the Bill.

I am obliged to my hon. Friend the Member for Yarmouth (Mr. Fell).

In the Swedish report, the Ekblad Report, 479 women were the subject of the inquiry, and it was found that none had active mental disease. Where a person had become pregnant, not because of rape but because she wanted to, and then wanted the pregnancy terminated, the result rested on her judgment and on the decision of the two doctors.

Where pregnancy has come about because of incest, there again grave difficulties are encountered. It usually arises in cases where there has been the greatest affection between the persons concerned. As regards the children of such unions, I do not believe—though I shall be corrected if I am wrong—that there has been any real research to show the quantity or the extent of the mental impairment of or the handicap to Children of unions that have been proved to be incestuous.

In my view, the Bill must widen and loosen the safeguards which a State or community is entitled to demand in the care which must be devoted to living but unborn children. I do not see how the termination of pregnancy and the killing of the living unborn child could be a solution to some of the social problems and hard cases to which the hon. Gentleman referred.

The Bill must appear to encourage, though I well appreciate that the hon. Gentleman has not used this in any form in his argument, a more irresponsible attitude towards sex, and a looseness in behaviour which may be particularly rife at this particular time. It must also appear, as was said by Canon Bentley in his letter to The Times, to sanction the killing of the unborn child for fear that it will later become a burden to the mother.

It is because I do not think that the Bill achieves what the hon. Gentleman wants it to achieve; because I think the law is at present perfectly satisfactory; and because I think that the introduction of a Measure such as this would amount to a lowering of the standards which I feel must be maintained at the present time, that I will vote against it.

I intervene briefly because, should the Bill unfortunately go to a Division, I shall feel constrained to support it. It is because I think the matter ought to be aired and discussed properly that I shall do so, though I reserve the right to reconsider my position after I have heard evidence that might come before the Committee.

I believe that there is possibly one weakness in my hon. Friend's argument, and that is that I do not consider that the terrible toll of illegal abortions is a matter which is likely to be rectified by the Bill. I consider that it is unlikely substantially to affect it. What is much more important in the context of my argument is to make crystal clear to the medical practitioner where his duty lies.

I do not believe that the hon. and learned Member for Epsom (Mr. Rawlinson) is correct in his reply to my intervention, that the ordinary medical practitioner is clear about the situation. For all I know, that may be the fault of his professional organisation, or the fault of his training in medical school, but I think that the case law is not a very good method of so instructing the medical profession. It is for that reason that this matter ought to be discussed by Parliament.

The Roman Catholic Church is uneasy, to put it mildly, at this matter even being discussed. I hope that the hierarchy will take a different view if the Bill takes its course through Parliament, because I do not think that there is any good moral right in concealing the facts which lead up to a socially undesirable situation such as we know exists.

I hope that this will be considered about the right time, bearing in mind that this is rather a short debate, for me to present briefly the Government's view on the matter.

To the extent that the Bill would make statutory the present case law and practice which has grown up round it, we do not consider it necessary to have a Bill for that limited purpose for it would make no substantial change in the law. To the extent that it would make a change, it would be restrictive, as is Clause 2, which says that the operation

"shall not be performed after the end of the thirteenth week of pregnancy."

As the hon. Gentleman knows, there is no limit under the present law.

If the best medical opinion says that this is a dangerous operation after thirteen weeks, does not the hon. and learned Gentleman consider that that would be a desirable limitation? Why does he dismiss it as being an undesirable limitation?

That may be so, but I was pointing out for the sake of accuracy that, in so far as the hon. Gentleman purports not to change the present law, the only change he makes within the framework of the present law is the change in Clause 2. I am not criticising it. I am merely saying that for the sake of accuracy.

Nevertheless, we would have no objection in principle to the Bill's limited purpose of putting into statutory form the present case law and practice. But the Bill make various important and controversial changes in the law, extending the opportunities for legal termination of pregnancy, and in doing so it gives rise to some serious practical and legal difficulties, to which my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Epsom (Mr. Rawlinson) has referred, and to which I shall have to draw attention further.

If the House gives the Bill a Second Reading—which, I suppose, really depends upon no hon. Member trying to procure its abortion in the course of the afternoon—the Government hope to see it amended in Committee, to eliminate or overcome some of the difficulties. We would have a good deal of advice to give in Committee. If the Bill were not amended satisfactorily in Committee, we would have to consider what advice to give the House on Third Reading. On that point, I must reserve the Government's position.

I am getting a little muddled. I understood from what the Minister said at the beginning of his speech that the Government are not in favour of the Bill. I now understand him to say that if it is given a Second Reading he hopes that some Amendments will be made in Committee. I should like to know what Amendments would be required to make the Bill acceptable to the Government.

Our attitude towards the question whether the Bill should have a Second Reading—which does not commit the House to any of its details—is one of neutrality. We are prepared to accept the decision of the House. I have tried to explain that to the extent that the Bill merely intends to make statutory the existing case law and the practice which has grown up around it the Government have no objection to it, although we do not consider it necessary to introduce a Bill for this purpose. I know that the hon. Member for St. Pancras, North (Mr. K. Robinson) said that statute law carries more weight than case law, but this House would have its work cut out if it tried to make statutory all the well-established case law.

To the extent that the Bill purports to extend the existing opportunities for procuring abortion legally, however, I must point out the practical and legal difficulties to which these proposals give rise. After hearing all the speeches, including my own, it will be for the House to decide whether the Bill should have a Second Reading—and to that extent we will accept the verdict of the House. I hope that I have made myself clear to my hon. Friend the Member for Yarmouth (Mr. Fell).

rose —

No. I am sorry. I have given way a good deal. I still have a good deal to say, and I do not want to occupy too much of the attention of the House in the limited time available.

The hon. Member for St. Pancras, North put his point of view in a very temperate way on a matter on which we know he feels very strongly and to which he has given a great deal of study. He bases his case, both for achieving greater clarity in the present law—as he thinks—and for extending it in the way the Bill does in Clause 1, paragraphs (c) and (d), largely on what he considers to be a desirable and necessary object, and we would not disagree with it as an object, namely, to get rid of the backstreet abortionist; the person who can menace the life of the mother as well as of the child if, eventually, the abortion is unsuccessfully procured.

Of course, if that were so we should have to advise the House that a Measure of this kind was perhaps necessary. But is it really so? Surely the difficulty is that if we take those cases which are covered, in the first instance, by paragraphs (a) and (b) of Clause 1, their enactment would make scarcely any difference at all to the number of illegal abortions now carried out either by registered practitioners or by unqualified practitioners.

By far the greater number of illegal abortions are performed not because the woman fears danger to her life or health, but simply because, for one reason or another, she does not want a child. That is, perhaps, the principal cause of illegal operations. Neither this Bill nor any extension of it which would have any chance of being accepted by Parliament and public opinion would legalise abortion in those cases, and it is right that the House should face that fundamental fact. The contribution which a Measure of the kind now before the House can make to the elimination of the back-street abortionist and the prevention of criminal abortion is, therefore, rather small.

The next thing that I should do, I think, is to draw attention to Clause 3 of the Bill before I deal in detail with paragraphs (c) and (d) of Clause 1. As the hon. Gentleman said in his speech, Clause 3, which deals with the burden of proof, follows the present law as laid down in the 1929 Act and the direction for the jury in Rex v. Bourne. But if abortion were to be made legal in the wider circumstances set out in paragraphs (c) and (d) of Clause 1, we feel that the onus of proof should not always throughout every case remain on the prosecution. It would be an onus, in the terms of the Bill, to prove good faith, and the reason why we have some doubt about this is that the facts necessary to establish that issue will so often be entirely within the knowledge of the defence. That is a point which needs to be examined very carefully in Committee, but, of course, it could not be examined until it had been decided exactly how Clause 1 as a whole should read.

I wish to say a word or two about Clause 4—I know that the hon. Gentleman will not take it amiss when I say this—as it is, unintentionally no doubt, rather misleading, because, in fact, there is no statute law at present relating to consent to surgical operations. The only relevant law is the common law relating to defences to prosecutions or civil actions for assault. However, a well-understood practice has grown up in the medical profession, about which the hon. Gentleman and I both know something because both our fathers were doctors.

I now come to paragraphs (c) and (d) of Clause 1. As to paragraph (c)—the question of the risk of the child being born grossly deformed or subject to abnormality—my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Health has asked me to say that she does not accept some of the figures which the hon. Gentleman has given. I will not weary the House with the details. My hon. Friend also asks me to say that she was very interested by some of the evidence of a medical character produced by 'the hon. Gentleman and that she will, of course, be interested and glad to consider it.

Broadly speaking, the view of my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary and of the Minister is that although medical science has made considerable strides since 1938, when the Departmental Committee sat, it is still not possible to predict with any confidence in any particular case whether a child will exhibit some form of abnormality or how severe that abnormality will be. Where the transmission of abnormality is most probable and the degree of severity greatest it is the general experience that the state of mind of the expectant mother is such as justifies the termination of her pregnancy on the grounds of her health, and we do not believe, with the discretion which the present law allows that responsible doctors feel there is an unreasonable restriction by the absence of any provision relating specifically to the circumstances provided for in this Clause.

The Clause is drafted in such wide terms—and in the present state of medical knowledge it is difficult to see how this could be otherwise—as to permit of considerable abuse, and if it were to be enacted as it stands my hon. Friend feels that it would be liable to do more harm than good.

Clause 1 (d) gives rise—as the Departmental Committee found and as the hon. Gentleman and my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Epsom have mentioned—to various practical difficulties. For example, should termination of pregnancy be allowed only when an offence has been proved and the offender convicted? That is the first question we have to consider. What would happen where an offender either was not identified or, if identified and charged, was found either not guilty or guilty of a lesser offence—for example, indecent assault—than the offence which would justify an abortion? Even if none of those difficulties arose, what assurance can we have that the pregnancy resulted from the offence?

If, on the other hand, the legalisation of abortion is not to depend on the identification of the offender, how is the doctor to decide whether an offence has been committed? And, of course, from the doctor's point of view, there will frequently be difficulties caused by the delay between the trial of the offender and the knowledge of the possibility of an offence having been committed. It is in the light of that restrictive provision that Clause 2 would have to be carefully considered in Committee.

It does state, in paragraph (d),

"in the belief that … "

so presumably no one has to be tried. It is whether a doctor is convinced that it was as a result of rape.

My hon. Friend is quite right. On the Bill as it stands, it depends on the doctor's belief, and there would, therefore, be occasions in which a doctor would be placed in the position of having to consider whether an offence had been committed; and that is not a position in which many doctors would like to find themselves.

With regard to both rape and incest, we have the complication that there would be many cases in which a woman who had behaved indiscreetly, and found she was pregnant, would try to get out of her difficulty by saying that this was the result of one of those two criminal offences. It is possible, of course, that there could be abuse. We would have to make sure, if we had such a provision, that there were safeguards against such abuse. That again was. I think, a problem to which the Departmental Committee confessed it was unable to find a practical answer.

With regard to the other offence, unlawful carnal knowledge of a girl under the age of 13, I confess that the position is somewhat less difficult because the mere fact that a girl is under 13 and is pregnant is in itself evidence that someone, whether identified and convicted or not, has committed a criminal offence. It is only right and fair that I should place that on record, but, of course, the number of cases of that kind is very small indeed. Clause 1 (d) also deals with the question of the patient being of unsound mind. That, as the hon. Member for St. Pancras, North has acknowledged, is a very vague expression and one which I do not think could possibly be allowed to remain in the Bill.

The general conclusions we have reached, therefore, are these. The existing law already allows termination of pregnancy where it is necessary to avoid serious damage to the health of the mother and regardless of the circumstances in which the pregnancy came about. Therefore, the enactment of these provisions in (a) and (b) of the Clause would have little practical effect and the provisions in (c) and (d) represent proposals which many people would support in principle, but which many others would oppose very strongly and they would in practice, as the Bill stands, not provide a satisfactory solution to the problems which, according to the declared intention of the hon. Member, the Bill is designed to meet.

I feel, having pointed out some of these difficulties, that the House will wish to bear them in mind. As I say, they are difficulties which the Standing Committee would resolutely have to try to overcome. If the Standing Committee could not find practical answers to some of these points, then to extend abortion under those various heads would not be the right thing to do and Clause I would have to be very considerably cut down in its scope.

I listened with great interest to the Joint Under-Secretary. My name is added as a sponsor to this Bill, and his argument in the last few sentences is one which I most wholeheartedly endorse. The Bill must be carefully examined and answers found to some of the misgivings which the hon. and learned Gentleman found it his duty to put before the House.

It has been made clear by the hon. and learned Member for Epsom (Mr. Rawlinson) and the Joint Under-Secretary that this Bill in the main does not extend very far the provisions which actually exist for taking action in cases in which I think all of us think action should be taken. I am not quite certain that the hon. and learned Member for Epsom would agree with me in that, for he seemed at the beginning of his speech to agree but at the end he came down against the Bill in principle. That I understand. I take up one or two minor points, and I speak only from personal experience as a medical practitioner in an industrial area over many years, a quarter of a century in a very large practice, and can tell the House of the sort of abortions carried out by the back-street abortioner. They are divided into two types. First, there are the single women, who never admit that they are aborting or, indeed, that they have ever been pregnant. Secondly, there are the married women, who have no hesitation in saying that they thought they were pregnant, but, lo and behold, they have stumbled and had a fall. Many are infected.

Whatever one's suspicions, one cannot discuss the case with them. One knows very well that in many of the cases they have been to a back-street abortion-monger and have been infected by filthy people who have used dubious methods of terminating pregnancy. One sends them to hospital, and in nearly all cases these days they survive, although often they are seriously ill. In the earlier days of which I speak, many expectant mothers lost their lives because of infection. In an industrial area such as that of which I speak we have no Harley Street practitioners, or, if there are, I do not know them.

I ask the Under-Secretary of State to believe me when I tell him that among those who went into the back streets to have their pregnancies terminated were some who, if this Bill had been passed, however modified, would have been saved from that, although by no means all. It is true that, by and large, as the Bill stands—my hon. Friend the Member for Lichfield and Tamworth (Mr. Snow) has pointed this out—it does not "have a go" at these people. But a percentage of these women, how large I do not know, would be saved from that sort of back-street treatment, for they would qualify for consideration under the sort of Bill which ultimately will emerge, by agreement, from the Committee. If that is the case, then it is a strong argument for making clearly legal that which can be done today but sometimes is not done, either because doctors are nervous or frightened or, as happens much more often, because patients are ignorant of their rights and do not seek advice.

May I comment on the problem of the transmission of abnormality to the child? I remember a significant case, on which I took the advice of the Home Office and of the Minister of Health. It concerned a young man, one of three children. The other two children had been in an institution for mental deficiency all their lives. This young man had been borne with a specific deformity, otherwise he was normal. He was in love, and the girl was in love with him. He was a very handsome boy. His deformity was that he had no ears, although he had hearing.

He wanted to be sterilised—an awful thing to contemplate—in order that he could marry; for in view of the circumstances, he felt that this was what he ought to do. His girl did not want this to happen to him. She was prepared to take the risk, to see that they had no children and to adopt children when they wanted them.

I discovered—and this is where my hon. Friend the Member for St. Pancras, Noth (Mr. K. Robinson) was wrong in his statement—that although there is perhaps nothing to prevent a surgeon from operating to sterilise someone, no one can give that surgeon cover against action at common law afterwards. I discovered that no one could give cover in any circumstances.

My hon. Friend is giving a very good illustration. May I put a question to him for him to answer as a doctor? It does not necessarily follow, does it, that a child born of that marriage would be abnormal?

I will give my hon. Friend a rapid assurance on that point and then finish the story. This couple married, and they did their best to see that there were no babies. But these things cannot always be controlled, and a child was born. Having known these people so well, I was delighted that the child was quite normal.

I will give only one other illustration to show why I think my hon. Friend's Bill is desirable. This is an important example. I shall never forget the case. It has been engraved on my mind. I blame myself for not being wiser and more subtle than I was. It goes back to the winter of 1927, when a man came into my surgery and asked me if I would advise him because he wished to get married. He told me that he wanted to know from me what would be the effect on his children if he married. Then the facts came out that his father was, and had been for many years, incurably mentally afflicted and was in a mental hospital. Both the father and mother of the girl he wished to marry were in a mental hospital, and had been for half a generation.

I did not want to answer that question and protested that the man should not ask me this. I told him that no one could tell him for certain. I said that there was no certainty about it. He pressed me very harshly. In the end, rightly or wrongly, I went so far as to use just one guarded sentence. I said: "I have to admit that they would not be as well placed if you think in terms of chance as if there were a different history in both your families." Those were my words. Within an hour that man was dead. He had gone away and killed himself. I had pleaded with him that he need not have children. I said that if he loved his fiancé e why should they not get married and adopt children. He told me that he was of a religious persuasion which prevented this.

Perhaps I should not have mentioned this case, but I would not have been able to get it out of my mind. If I had been wiser or cleverer and if I had held on to the roan, he would not have died. I am sure that no harm will come from the Bill. I shall esteem it a privilege if I am selected to serve on the Standing Committee which will consider the Bill.

One of the most important considerations in the minds of ail of us is whether the Bill will put the abortionist in the back streets out of business. That is what we are examining. I wonder whether it will. We have been told very clearly that the statute law lays down a code of conduct.

Who does the hon. Gentleman mean when he speaks of the abortionist in the back streets? What about the main streets?

I am grateful to the hon. Member for Hackney, Central (Mr. H. Butler) for mentioning that.

There are three kinds of abortions. One is the legal abortion, which is carried out under the proper rules and the law of the land. The second type of abortion, which is carried out by someone who can afford to do so, is in Harley Street. The third type is carried out in the back streets. I wonder whether the Bill will change it in the very least. That is my worry about the Bill as it stands at present.

We all wish to remove from our social system the ghastly tragedies of the type the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, Central (Dr. Stross) mentioned, where damage is done to the woman. Today, she does not die from peritonitis, because of the wonder drugs, but irreparable damage may be done to her interior. That is what we want to stamp out. I am not sure that the Bill will achieve that objective. The 1939 Birkett recommendations were never put into effect—I imagine, as my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Epsom (Mr. Rawlinson) said, because they were too difficult to define.

I do not think that Clause 4 is necessary. Hospitals normally get patients to sign a form, which prevents them subsequently being faced with actions for criminal assault. Clause 1 (d) is also rather difficult as regards the provision dealing with persons of unsound mind, but I do not wish to throw the Bill away. A great deal of thought has been put into it. It will be extraordinarily difficult to adapt a Bill in Committee to cover the defects in the law and, at the same time, give the doctor protection. I do not agree that there is any difference between statute law and case law—the result is the same—and the doctor already has a great measure of protection afforded him by case law. Every doctor has a good idea of what his position is.

I am, however, prepared to go this far. If, in Committee, we can improve this Bill, I would be prepared to support it, but my fear is that the Bill's main purpose will not be achieved, and that the persistent backroom or backstreet abortionist will continue to perform.

I should like, first, to thank the hon. and learned Gentleman the Under-Secretary of State for his approach to the Bill. On this type of Bill, all Ministers are neutral, but some are more neutral than others. He was more neutral than Ministers I have known because, although he deployed a powerful case against some parts of the Bill, he always did so in the terms that we should discuss it in Committee, and we can only get the Bill to a Standing Committee if we give it a Second Reading. It seems to me that this is a Bill that should be given a Second Reading. I agree with the hon. Member for Clapham (Dr. Alan Glyn) that it raises very difficult points, and those points can be properly discussed only in the quick, intimate and penetrating discussion one can have in Committee.

One reason for my wish that this Bill should have a Second Reading is that it is important—I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for St. Pancras, North (Mr. K. Robinson)—that the law should be here declared. I listened very carefully to the, if I may say so, very able and persuasive speech of the hon. and learned Member for Epsom (Mr. Rawlinson), but it still left me with the feeling that there is a very strong case, which should be examined in Committee, for a declaration of the law to be clearly made. There is no doubt that many doctors and other people are in a state of dubiety about the law on the subject. Whether they should be or not, they are.

The Birkett inter-departmental Committee made its recommendations after the great case of Rex v. Bourne, and under a recent Act it is possible that the facts of that sort of case might go through the Divisional Court to the House of Lords. There is, therefore, some doubt about the whole thing. One is not sure whether it might reach a court that was not bound by the decision that has been made—if I am not speaking like a stupid layman—in Rex v. Bourne. I therefore think that there is a strong case for arguing among ourselves in Committee whether or not the law should be declared.

I agree with the hon. Member for Clapham that one aim must be to get rid of these dirty, back-street abortionists—or most of them. I do not think that any law we could provide would get rid of all of them, any more than we can legislate to get rid of all prostitutes, and so on. Nevertheless, my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent, Central (Dr. Stross) very persuasively made the point that by passing this Bill in some form we would be able considerably to reduce the numbers of these abortionists, and that seems to be an end we should pursue.

I admit that I dislike all laws that give the rich a great advantage over the poor, and there is no doubt that here there is this distinction at present. Rich people will always, as they do now, find it easy to get abortions in proper, hygienic conditions that poor people—

I have had discussions on this subject with gynaecologists, and perhaps my right hon. Friend will take it from me that they assure me that in their experience the back-street abortionists are almost entirely used by the single girl who is to have a baby she does not want and by married women who already have large families and are worried about housing, or have other similar anxieties.

That is a point which we should argue in Committee. Even if what my hon. Friend says is true, the rich get much better treatment and abortion under proper circumstances, which poorer people would be entitled to get only if the law were clear.

My right hon. Friend made an important point when he backed up what was said by my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent, Central. The back-street abortionist, whom all of us detest, loath and think is the most terrible person in the world, will still thrive. The Bill would make not the slightest difference to him. It should not go out from this House that the Bill would remedy that situation.

My hon. Friend, I think, is suffering from a misapprehension. If it is argued that, because we cannot stamp out an evil we must not make any attempt to reduce it, then that is an argument which would destroy the whole of our criminal law. We cannot stop manslaughter by motor car on the road, but we try to pass laws which will reduce it.

I do not think that my right hon. Friend should overlay that argument or convey the impression that one of the great things of the Bill is that it will stamp out something that we want to stamp out.

If my hon. Friend reads in HANSARD what I said, he will find that I said that we cannot stamp it out but I think that the Bill will probably reduce it. If that is so, then it is a strong argument for the Bill. That applies equally to the position between the rich and the poor. We will not be able to Obliterate this distinction, but we can reduce it.

There are points which I am not entirely happy about in the Bill. The Joint Under-Secretary of State put forward some arguments with which I agreed. I think that there are very grave difficulties in this matter, but it seems to me that it is beyond doubt that the Bill raises a very powerful point which we should discuss in Committee. I will listen with a very open mind to arguments about whether the provisions of the Bill are exactly right, whether they ought to be in the Bill and whether there should not be others. This seems to me a convincing argument for taking the Bill to Committee.

It would be a great pity if the Bill were stifled before we were able to deploy the machinery of the House for a detailed and careful argument on it. Many hon. Members are opposed to the Bill. They can kill it in Committee or on Third Reading if they are not satisfied with it, but it ought to have the run which will enable it to be discussed and argued in detail. For that reason I support what I think was the underlying and implicit view of the Joint Under-Secretary of State's speech, namely, that the Bill ought to go to Committee.

I was considerably confused by the intervention of my hon. and learned Friend the Joint Under-Secretary of State. He seemed to support the principle of the Bill and to say that it should be carried a further stage. Then he proceeded to analyse the Bill Clause by Clause, and it seemed that there was not anything right with it.

As the right hon. Member for Smeth-wick (Mr. Gordon Walker) said, it may be proper to declare, define and elucidate the existing law. If that is the object of the Bill, all that I can say is that the existing law which it is sought to define, declare and elucidate is bad law and that it might be more proper to introduce a Bill to define the law in a different direction.

My objection to the Bill is one not of mere detail, but of principle. It is one of religious principle, and I can do no other than oppose the Second Reading. Perhaps I can put my positon in one sentence by suggesting an alternative title to the Bill, namely, a Bill to amend the Ten Commandments. I think that is a rather weighty matter to discuss on a Friday afternoon with such a small attendance in the House.

The hon. Member for St. Pancras, North (Mr. K. Robinson) introduced the Bill moderately, eloquently and persuasively. I do not know who among my co-religionists—I am a Roman Catholic—impugned the hon. Member's good faith in introducing the Bill. If they did so I regret that very much. I certainly do not impugn his good faith or his humanitarian intention.

Certainly none of the hon. Member's hon. Friends. I was referring solely to certain elements of the Catholic Press and to many of my correspondents.

I rather suspect the same organ of the Catholic Press that implicitly attacked me for not doing sufficient in another direction recently.

I think that we all admired the agreeable way in which the hon. Member started his course as official spokesman of the Labour Party on health matters. I am only sorry that it should be an official spokesman of the Labour Party who gives his name to this Bill. I greatly admire what the hon. Member has done in the sphere of mental health. I belong to some of the same organisations as he does, though I regret that I do not do as much as he does.

To turn to the Bill, one of my five children comes, or could have come in certain circumstances, within the purview of Clause 1 (c) which refers to a child with

"… mental abnormality which would be of a degree to require … special care throughout life."

Clearly, it would have been repugnant to my wife and myself that that child should not have been born. I regret very much that that child is a burden on the community, but the point which I wish to make is that it would be a terrible thing if, in a Bill of this kind, we opened any kind of door to what we rightly condemned in Nazi Germany where a civil authority—the State—decided that human beings should not exist because those human beings were of no value to the national economy, could not serve the war machine or required "special care throughout life."

I am not suggesting that anything of the kind is in the minds of the sponsors of the Bill. The trouble is that in all these matters we proceed from one position to the next and we are scarcely aware sometimes of what is happening to us.

The hon. Member for St. Pancras, North rightly and fairly stated part of the Roman Catholic position in this matter, but I wish that he had not suggested that that was a sectarian position confined to the Roman Catholics. He almost suggested that the debate on the Bill was a case of Roman Catholics v. the Rest. The position I hold is the position held by many Christian denominations and many religions other than Christianity.

I read with great admiration the letter to The Times from Canon Bentley, of Windsor, in which he deplored "making the law of England explicitly sanction the killing of an unborn child for fear that if it were permitted to live it would become a burden to the mother and the state". To deplore that, as Canon Bentley deplored it, is not to take up a Roman Catholic position. As far as I can see, it is part of the common theology of Western Christendom. It goes back. I suppose, before Christianity. It goes back to the natural law.

We are up against the same dilemma as we encounter in so many fields. It is the old question of means and end. The motives of the sponsors of the Bill are of the highest. What they wish to do is for humanitarian reasons. They want to do good, but one should not do evil in the belief that good may follow.

I profoundly hope that the House will give the Bill a Second Reading. My name is on the Bill and I support it strongly. My name was on the previous Bill and I supported that strongly. I sat beside Mr. Joseph Reeves, who had a minute or two only in which to develop his argument in favour of the Bill at that time.

I wish to express my appreciation of the fact that hon. Members did not unduly prolong the debate on the first Measure on the Order Paper today, as was done in 1952 to prevent the counterpart of the present Bill receiving a proper airing.

On that subject, we should express our disapproval of the hon. Member for Nantwich (Mr. Grant-Ferris), who tried prematurely to end this debate by calling for a count immediately on the conclusion of the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for St. Pancras, North (Mr. K. Robinson). That is not done in the House on Fridays. The hon. Gentleman, who, I know, is a declared opponent of the Bill, should at least give the House a proper opportunity to discuss the matter, however controversial it may be.

I wish to congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for St. Pancras, North not only on his luck in the Ballot, but on his courage in deciding to introduce a Bill on this contentious problem. Also, I congratulate him upon the temperate way in which he introduced the Bill and the great competence which he displayed in doing so. This is not a party matter but there are differing opinions on both sides of the House. Whatever certain hon. Members may feel, I am sure that the House as a whole is grateful to my hon. Friend for having given us the opportunity to discuss this subject.

My wife is a member of the Committee of the Abortion Law Reform Association, so that is where our family stands. I wish that my wife could be in my place this afternoon, because the House would have had a much more passionate speech from her than it will get even from me. I am sure that we have heard enough about the Bill to justify giving this matter further consideration, a close examination and keen debate in Committee. Nothing will be lost by it and I hope that something would be gained.

I know that there are hon. Members—and I could identify them by name—who are not only against the Bill, but are against the law as it stands at present. They do not believe in the termination of pregnancy under any circumstances whatsoever. They do not believe that a pregnancy should be terminated even to save the life of a mother. Hon. Members on both sides who hold a different view are willing to consider some reasonable reform of the law as it now stands.

In reply to my hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey (Mr. Mellish), the Bill will not put the backstreet abortionist out of business. We realise that it will not, and there is only one thing which will—to make all abortions legal. None of us in the House this afternoon would wish to do that. We know that that evil will persist, but we want to reduce it. The Bill would certainly turn some deserving people away from the wiles of the backstreet abortionist or away from the clutches of the Harley Street abortionist, and they would be able to get their trouble dealt with in a proper manner under the law and with a minimum of risk to themselves.

I thought that the hon. and learned Member for Epsom (Mr. Rawlinson), in his most persuasive speech, began as a lawyer and ended as a moralist. On the question of morals, I would say that those of us who believe in the Bill, and who, like my hon. Friend, believe in going furtther than the Bill, do so because we believe in certain basic human rights. That is why we believe in it, and that, from my point of view, takes precedence over any other convictions in regard to this matter.

There is no doubt that there is suffering and terrible distress and that horrible stories are told in the courts and elsewhere because of the uncertainty of the present law. Doctors are afraid of this. I know it may be said—the hon. Member for Clapham (Dr. Alan Glyn) said this—that doctors generally know where they stand. They do not; we know that they do not. Obviously, a doctor, a perfectly respectable practitioner who is a busy man having to go about his daily task of curing sickness, and so on, naturally hesitates to get involved in something which may land him in the dock.

We have not in all doctors the courage of Mr. Bourne, and in any case they have their practices to look after and their ordinary work to do. If we could give the doctors the greatest assurance of statute law, that would be of great help and would fortify them in their own judgment on these matters.

rose —

It is getting very close to four o'clock, and, if the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I will not give way because I wish to sit down in a moment or two.

I feel sure that to change the law even only to give statutory effect to case law would be an advantage in present circumstances, and I dissent from the view that there is no need to have a Bill for that purpose alone. I think that for that purpose alone the Bill would be worth consideration and worth giving a Second Reading. But the Bill goes further than that.

I thank the Joint Under-Secretary for the great care and ability with which he explained to the House some of the difficulties about the Bill. Of course, there will be difficulties in trying to limit the extent to which the termination of pregnancy can be done lawfully, and, again, we must not shrink from the difficulties, because if we do, we are driven to one or other of two extremes, either that there shall be no abortion at all in any circumstances or that all abortions shall be legal. Those are the two extremes, and in between there is bound to be the problem of definition. But we must face the difficulties and we must try to overcome them if we are to rid our society of this great evil.

Let us have these things debated publicly now. Let us examine this matter in the light of present social conditions. I sincerely hope that the House will overcome prejudice, religious convictions and other attitudes of opposition to the Bill. Let it go to Standing Committee and be subject to critical examination; if we fail to make a job of it in Committee, the House can throw the Bill out when it comes back here again.

rose in Ms place, and claimed to move, That the Question be now put; but Mr. SPEAKER withheld his assent and declined then to put that Question.

The hon. Member for Sowerby (Mr. Houghton) is the only person throughout the whole course of the debate who has sounded a discordant note. I felt that the hon. Member for St. Pancras, North (Mr. K. Robinson), though I could not be in the Chamber all the time he was speaking, was reasonable in the extreme in moving the Second Reading of the Bill.

The attack made by the hon. Member for Sowerby upon my hon. Friend the Member for Nantwich (Mr. Grant-Ferris) was not only unjustified, but completely and absolutely inaccurate. He said that the procedure which my hon. Friend adopted is never done on Friday. It is done. It has often been done when I have been here on Fridays. I suppose that one's condemnation depends purely upon one's own particular views on the subject which is being debated.

rose in his place, and claimed to move, That the Question be now put; but Mr. SPEAKER withheld his assent and declined then to put that Question.

I found myself in great difficulty. I am a great supporter of the Government—as everybody knows—[HON. MEMBERS: "Oh."]—when listening to my hon. and learned Friend the Under-Secretary. However, he was kind enough, in the end, to resolve my difficulty, because, though he seemed to give the impression that he would not mind if the Bill went forward—

I desire to raise the question of the proposed bypass for the Borough of Tamworth in the Lichfield and Tamworth constituency. In the ordinary course of events I would apologise for raising this issue, because it seems largely to be a question of the adequacy or inadequacy of local consultation. In mentioning the Borough of Tamworth, I feel that I am in duty bound to point out that, from everybody's point of view, it is a very ancient borough, indeed. Readers of Coningsby will recall the significance of the Tamworth Manifesto, and I need not apologise to Conservatives for the significance in history of Sir Robert Peel, of whom I am one of the Parliamentary successors.

This bypass would, on the face of it, appear not to be a matter for Parliamentary consideration. It is largely a technical matter. The reason that I have felt it important to raise it in this House is that there have been signs that unless it is brought to the immediate attention of the Minister of Transport a serious mistake may be made. There is another reason. I desire to express, in some form, my dissatisfaction with the way in which the Ministry of Transport has handled this case. I do not want to make heavy weather about this, but I refer the Joint Parliamentary Secretary to his letter to me of 18th November which, I think, was badly drafted, largely irrelevant and, to some extent, caused offence in certain quarters in Tamworth. The letter, apparently, picked up a chance remark by the Town Clerk that, as two adjacent towns, which also happen to be in my constituency, had had bypasses, the Borough of Tamworth also apparently thought that they ought to receive consideration. This was, if not an irrelevancy, at least a very minor matter compared with the major matter of seeing that in due course a proper bypass was authorised which would not interfere with the amenities of the town or the safety of the public, especially the children.

In the letter it was stated:

"The Tamworth Borough Council seem to be perturbed because Stamford and Lichfield are likely to get bypasses before one is provided for Tamworth."

That is quite untrue and not worthy of the seriousness with which the Parliamentary Secretary always considers these problems. However, I do not want to labour that point too much.

The Ministry has been advised on a road, which I will call the present proposed bypass. In a letter on 31st August, last year, the Minister admitted that this road was "suspect". This is not an easy problem, and I am concerned to find out whether adequate consultation has taken place, especially with the local education authority.

The proposed bypass will make use of entry into the town by the road A.543, locally and commonly known as the Ashby road. This bypass, which will carry extremely heavy traffic from Nottingham and outlying areas, will start bypassing right outside a new boys' secondary school and will then intersect with other local roads at a spot locally known as the Fountain, the fountain itself being immediately outside a grammar school. It then proceeds to pass a girls' school and is very near to two more schools, so that five schools are directly or indirectly affected by road safety and noise considerations.

Two alternative suggestions have been made locally. I am not particularly enthusiastic about either. I will call one the eastern line proposal and the other the western line proposal. I believe that the eastern proposal is the subject of a further survey by the authorities to ascertain from trial borings whether it will be possible to take the road by a more circuitous route, but a route which would avoid the disadvantages of the proposed bypass. There is another suggestion to which I am rather more closely attached, that is to say, the western line bypass. Incidentally, although I am sure that he had something like it before, I have given the hon. Gentleman a map outlining these proposals. The western line road will go through a relatively undeveloped area which I will describe as the Browns Lane, Gillway and Coton Lane route.

I would have thought that the sensible thing would have been to re-examine the proposed building developments in that area to see whether the new bypass should not go on the northern part of the area to which I have referred and then rejoin on the Lichfield road the proposed bypass now put forward by the authorities.

There is another important factor to be considered. The Minister will be aware that proceedings are under way for the taking over by the Borough of Tamworth of the area known as Staffordshire Moor for industrial purposes. Indeed, the proposed bypass touches the eastern extremity of Staffordshire Moor.

If the Browns Lane area was taken in as part of a Western line bypass, it would be desirable to reconsider the point at which the bypass should cross Staffordshire Moor. Staffordshire Moor is due for industrial development, and there is this over-riding anxiety on the part of the local authority that it is a receiving overspill area. It is duty bound under an agreement with the Staffordshire County Council, Birmingham, and the borough itself to create both housing and industry for the reception of overspill from Birmingham. It is expected that before many years have passed the population of Tamworth will be about 20,000. I therefore think that there ought to be a completely new survey as to how this road should proceed, and what line it should take.

I desire to stress another factor. The representations that I have received have not come only from the local authority. Indeed, some months ago I received a considered memorandum on this subject from a solicitor in Tamworth. He wrote to me about the anxiety shared by many responsible persons about the proposal now under consideration by the Ministry, namely, the line which will take it, broadly speaking, through the main academic centre of the town.

He said in his letter:

"I write to you as a private individual, as a resident in Tamworth, a motorist, and a father of children who, I hope, will in due course be pupils of the Grammar School. I am as well a Governor of the School, and it will be patent to you that the Board of Governors are very concerned."

He then lists the schools which I have described to the Minister which will be affected.

There are serious disadvantages in a high noise level in the vicinity of schools.

Pupils simply could not work. Quite apart from the safety factor, which at present is bad enough in Tamworth, the position will be made immeasurably worse if the proposed line of the bypass is finally adopted.

It is very easy for me to talk about these things. It is very much more difficult to find the right alternative. Was the Road Advisory Committee of the Staffordshire County Council at any time invited to carry out an on-the-spot survey? This is important, because I have heard that it might have been better had that taken place. Perhaps I am misinformed, but I would like to know.

I cannot over-emphasise that there are the following factors to consider. First, the proposed housing and road development at the northern end in what I will call the Browns Lane area. Secondly, whether the local education authority ever expressed a view agreeing to the proposed route. If it was not consulted, I suggest that that was a serious omission. Thirdly, the proposed industrialisation of Staffordshire Moor, a proposal which I think has tended to become a prominent matter of local economic interest divorced from this question of the bypass.

Some people say that we have to take a broad view and realise that something has to be done about the huge volume of traffic from the East Midlands through Tamworth. This is a problem with which the small towns in my constituency, Rugely, Lichfield and Tamworth are all concerned. These are towns on the radial roads from Birmingham and Wolverhampton out towards the East Midlands. They tend to be old historical towns where over the years the main street has become the main artery for traffic between the East and West Midlands. Therefore, in my judgment, it is an anachronism even to consider taking traffic on part of those old radial roads. We must find money for an alternative.

Considering those factors, I ask the Minister at any rate to cause new inquiries to be made, bearing in mind that the greatest importance is attached by the local authority in this case to a quick decision so that other plans regarding the Ministry can be finalised.

I must begin by thanking the hon. Member for Lichfield and Tamworth (Mr. Snow) for having been kind enough to give me notice of some of the points he wished to raise. I am sorry—and I tell him this quite openly—if the letter that I wrote to him on 18th November has given any offence in his constituency. It was certainly not written with any intention of being discourteous. If I had to write it again, in the light of what he has said, I think I might change the wording, but I was trying briefly to paraphrase what I understood to be the main trouble involved here.

I can probably best help the hon. Member by giving some of the background of the Tamworth bypass proposals and then trying to answer the two questions with which I imagine his constituents are most concerned—first, where will the bypass come, and, secondly, when will it be built? The Birmingham-Nottingham trunk road, A.453, traverses Tamworth and is for part of its length the main street of Tamworth. The approach to the town is over a humpbacked bridge and a narrow river bridge. The town streets are narrow and tortuous and the main junction is signal-controlled. Delays are frequent, congestion is acute, and it is obvious to anybody, including the Ministry, that the bypass must be built.

The first question is: where should it be built? As the hon. Member has said, there are a number of possibilities. The Staffordshire county development plan, which was approved in 1958, included the route which is now referred to as the bypass route, in a very diagrammatic form. This road runs fairly close to the western boundary of the town. It starts on the A.4091 and then, swinging away to the west, it traverses successively at right-angles the trunk road, A.453, a classified road, A.51, and the railway line. It ends at the junction of the A.453 with another classified road, A.513, to the north of the town. It would therefore take traffic not only for the trunk road A.453, but also three other roads, A.51, A.513, and the Class I road, A.4091—which, according to our information, carries a slightly larger volume of traffic than does the trunk road.

It therefore has the advantage that it serves a number of roads, but it has some consequential disadvantages. First, as the hon. Member said, it is clear that it would sever the existing town from the new residential and industrial areas being developed and planned to the west and, in particular, the Staffordshire Moor area, to which the hon. Member referred. I understand that a Private Bill is being promoted in the present Session to enable the acquisition of the Staffordshire Moor area to be made.

That has been withdrawn, but other methods are being considered.

I was not informed that the Bill had been withdrawn, but in any event it would not have been appropriate to discuss that matter in any detail now, nor would I have the time to do so. The second disadvantage is that in the vicinity of the grammar school what is called the campus area is being cleared, for all senior education, and it is at this point that the bypass line would terminate, in a five-armed junction. I agree, as do the officials of the Ministry—and, I am sure, the county council—that this would be undesirable. In any event, whatever happens this will have to be looked at again.

There has also been mention of another route. I am told that in 1957 the borough council asked for another line to be considered, even further west. This is probably the one that the hon. Member was talking about, which he said he preferred.

I said I preferred part of it.

Part of it. This is the line which sweeps well away to the west. We have considerable doubts about it There are several defects, which I will mention briefly. To begin with, it would have a total length of about 7,000 yards, as compared with the 2,750' yards of the present line. Next it. would make use of existing roads whch already have quite considerable frontage development. Thirdly, it would not. connect with the A.4091 which, as I said, is the road that carries more traffic than the trunk road. It has the advantage that it would be beyond the residential and industrial development, but this may be irrelevant because I am told that the local borough council has now dropped the proposal for this far-flung west bypass.

To try to meet the objections to the present line, that is to say the inner West line, we and the county council—

I should like to emphasise that what I said was that I thought advantage might be taken of part of that outlying western line, not the whole of it, which I agreed was far too long.

I think that we are both agreed that this is a matter difficult to debate. One needs to have all the plans spread out and to wield pencils so that one can point out what one means. However, I think that if the hon. Gentleman studies in HANSARD what I have said he will understand our point of view.

To try to meet the objections to the present inner west line, we and the county council are now considering another line, part of which in the past has also been canvassed. This will run from the junction between the A.453 and the A.4091 in the south-eastwards to the railway. It would then cross the railway line and run northwards, parallel with and to the east of the railway. It would join the A.453 trunk road north of Tarn worth again, about half a mile east of the point where that road crosses the railway.

I must say with all the sincerity that I can command—and I hope that if my remarks in the House are to be reported in the local Press at Tamworth that this qualification will also be highlighted—that what I have just said is only a reference to a possible line that is being looked at tentatively at the moment. No one in Tamworth owning property or land along or in the vicinity of the line which I have mentioned should imagine that we have come to any firm or final decision about it. There would be a long statutory process to be gone through even if we decided that it was a better one than the existing line. I hope, therefore, that neither the hon. Gentleman nor I will be bombarded with correspondence from anxious constituents because I have mentioned that there is this possible line. In any event, no firm opinion could be given on the line until a great deal more survey work has been done.

The hon. Gentleman asked about a survey. We think that this should be put in hand as soon as staff and resources are available. The first step would be to take trial bore holes for a survey on this line. We think that a survey ought also to be conducted on the present line, the one I mentioned and which is immediately to the west of Tamworth. This has not yet been done. I think that that answers the point.

So far as my information goes there has been the fullest consultation on the normal basis with all the local authorities involved in this matter, including the county council which is, of course, not only my right hon. Friend's agent and a highway authority for the county but also, as far as I understand, the education authority. Presumably, therefore, in connection with the campus area, the county council would be equally seized of the highway aspects and of the educational aspects with the termination of the present bypass line at that point. We certainly know of no case for complaint on the ground of lack of consultations, but if there is any complaint I will certainly have it investigated if the details are sent to me through the hon. Gentleman.

I hope it is clear that we recognise that there is a need for a bypass at Tamworth, but the fact is that up to the present no line has been finally settled. The one line which has gone farthest in the process of being fixed is the inner west line, but that is only very sketchily drawn in, as it were, on the development plan. The matter has not gone beyond that. Much more investigation will be needed before we finally fix the line.

That brings me to the second question—when could we expect to build a bypass at Tamworth. I think that the House knows that in the allocation of funds for trunk road improvement we give priority to those trunk roads where the improvement will give the highest economic return and which will bring the greatest benefit to national traffic. After all, trunk roads are national roads as opposed to classified roads which in the main are serving local districts. Tamworth does not lie on one of these roads. To use the A.453 going through Tamworth as a main road from the Black Country to Derby and Nottingham and to reconstruct it accordingly would, I am told, present some physical difficulties in the actual process of construction. Moreover, it is not so well placed or so convenient for that traffic as the A.38 via Lichfield and Burton-on-Trent.

This road has been selected for comprehensive improvement throughout. For example, the Lichfield bypass, or one of them, has been planned for early inclusion in our programme. Nevertheless, we do not deny that there is need for the Tamworth bypass, I must make that absolutely clear. But in all the circumstances, much as I should like to announce a date when we could start, I cannot forecast when it will be possible to include it in the programme. The first step is to settle the route, and what I have said and the references I have made to no less than four different lines will show that we are a long way from settling the route yet. But we will certainly settle it as soon as we can. We shall persevere with the task of carrying out the survey and going through the statutory process of starting the work to the best of our ability.

The hon. Gentleman has undertaken to press on with the survey of what I have described as the eastern line route. Would he undertake to ask his advisers also to examine my suggestion about using part of the outer western line route? I think that a matter Which ought to be looked into in a little more detail.

I have told the hon Gentleman that so far as resources are available we will press on with the survey of the eastern road and also of the inner western road, that is to say, the present line we were talking about. Regarding the line further west, I will certainly ask my advisers to consider that suggestion, and if there is anything useful which we can adduce from it we shall give the credit where it is due.

I am obliged to the hon. Gentleman.