I beg to move in page 2, line 22, after the word "instituted" to insert the words after the passing of this Act in respect of any claim not made before the thirty-first day of August, nineteen hundred and twenty-two. I make no apology for having put down this Amendment and the other Amendments which stand in my name, which substantially involve the same point The question is from what date should the Bill operate. According to the speech of the Minister on the Second Reading, it was intended to operate as from the moment when the Court of Appeal decided the milk case in favour of the plaintiffs and against the Crown. The Minister said again and again that if the case was not reversed by the House of Lords, he was prepared to introduce a Bill to nullify the effect of that decision.

I will not argue as to the unconstitutional nature of this legislation. All I am concerned with is that I am anxious that the Crown should not go on adding to unconstitutional legislation by limiting such claims as might survive in a way which means taking advantage of their own wrong. I say that deliberately, and as I stated yesterday before the Standing Committee, times have come to a strange pass when the House of Commons is told that they are to take a thing or leave it, and on this occasion that they have to take this Bill just as and when and in such terms as the Government are pleased to propose. The position of the Government is stronger since they can quote the present occupants of the Front Opposition Bench as having promoted the same kind of legislation in a previous Parliament. It is unfortunate that a Coalition, a most unwholesome method of government, should have set an unwholesome example which has had to be followed by its successors.

My Amendment proposes to raise the vital question which is the one question, above all others, upon this Committee stage, what is the date from which claims should be barred? The Courts said it should be March, 1922, and an Indemnity Act was passed in 1922 or the latter part of the Session 1921, which provided that no claim should be made against the Crown after the conclusion of the War, that is to say, after the 31st day of August, 1922. That is the date which I wish to insert in the Bill. The Committee will recollect that the Minister spoke about £18,000,000 being involved. He was challenged as to that amount, and it is in fact true that when you examine the White Paper it shows that the number of claims which have been put forward are infinitely less.

In respect of claims arising from the Ministry of Shipping with which I am particularly concerned they do not amount to any more than £81,020. Those claims were put in before the date which I am suggesting should be inserted in this Clause. It is true that there are other claims arising from other Departments, but for the most part they are barred. It will be recollected that a case was cited in which it was held that no claims after the expiration of 31st August, 1922, could succeed, and in the Bristol steamship case the action was dismissed under the Indemnity Act. Therefore no action can arise in respect of any matter in which a claim was not made before the 31st August, 1922. The words are: No proceedings whatever shall be instituted. There are three methods of putting forward a claim against the Crown. There was before the War a compensation case that was taken as early as February, 1922, well within the period of the Indemnity Act. Not being content with these proceedings the claimants issued a writ on the 5th of July, 1922, well within the period, and finally they presented a Petition of Right on the 14th of July. It has been held, and I do not suppose that it will be challenged in this House, that there is a technical meaning to the word "institute" in relation to legal proceedings. It means sealing the writ and the sealing of the Petition of Right Application for a fiat to the Home Office has to be made before a Petition of Right can be sealed by the Central Office of the High Court of Justice in a suit against the Crown. On the 7th of July, 1922, the advisers of the Marshal Shipping Company asked the Home Office for the usual fiat "let right be done" to be fixed to enable them to institute these proceedings.

Will the Committee really believe that notwithstanding all the efforts that could possibly be made in order to get that fiat issued and the petition sealed, it was not given until February, 1924, for an application which was dated the 7th of July, 1922? I am sorry to say there are too many of these cases arising out of the War claims in which the authorities, I care not which Departments, have played with these applicants very much in the same way as a cat plays with a mouse, and in many cases they have not succeeded in getting their case before the proper tribunal which has jurisdiction.

Take the case of the Marshal Shipping Company in relation to their writ. They issued their writ. I may remind hon. Members that the Board of Trade consists of a number of conglomerated people of whom the Archbishop of Canterbury is one. Of course, the solicitors shuddered at having to serve the Archbishop of Canterbury with a writ, and consequently they served the only person whom they reasonably could serve, and that was the Permanent Secretary to the Board of Trade.

One would have thought that if the Government of the day or the Board of Trade were anxious to get this question decided upon its merits they would not have raised a purely technical point of law, but nevertheless they raised the question that the writ was not properly served, and that the whole proceedings fell to the ground on that account, and they succeeded. Here I would like to quote the satirical observations made in this connection by Lord Justice Scrutton in relation to the discharge of the action and the dismissal of the proceedings because the writ was held to be improperly served. He said: This appeal from the judgment of Mr. Justice Rowlatt raises a question in my view of very considerable difficulty on the language of some not very clearly worded Acts of Parliament and Orders in Council. I personally feel that the whole question of proceedings against Government Departments is in a very unsatisfactory state. I feel that it is of great public importance that there should be prompt and efficient means of calling in question the legality of the action of Government Departments who, owing to the great national urgencies of the War, have been inclined to take, and I think are still inclined to take, prompt action which they consider necessary in the interests of the State without any nice consideration of whether it is legal or not, and I hope that the Committee which is considering the question of proceedings against the Crown will be able soon to do something to give the subject more effective remedies against Government Departments than he has at present. But, of course, this Court is not here to settle what the law ought to be, this Court is here to settle what the law is, if it can. Then the learned Judge goes on to say: The third question, which is one of service, I have already dealt with. I only wish to say this more, that in view of the extreme difficulty of this case, and of the importance that Government Departments should not put unnecessary obstacles in the way of subjects who may have good claims, I should very much regret if any obstacle was put in the way of a Petition of Right of this nature; that you shall only have a Petition of Right if you abandon all alternative claims. And yet the granting of the fiat was held up upon the excuse put forward that they must first withdraw the claim which was pending before the War Compensation Court. Lord Justice Scrutton proceeded to say: I think that is a very regrettable position for a Government Department, or for the Government, to take up. For these reasons the appeal failed, and that shows the difficulty this particular company have had, and I am only giving one instance which I know can be multiplied in regard to the difficulty these claimants have in getting before the proper tribunal to determine their case, and they were prevented by a number of questions of that sort. Eight days ago, on the 13th of this month, an application was made to the Law Courts in the matter of this claim of the Marshal Shipping Company, founded upon the petition of right in connection with which the fiat was so tardily given, to expedite the hearing of the case in order that judgment might be obtained. I will not, because I recognise that there are others who are to follow me, attempt to read the shorthand notes of the application and the observations of the learned Judge, except that, so fine were the arguments put forward by the junior counsel representing the Crown, that the Judge was at last, I might almost say betrayed, or at any rate induced, to make the following statement: Your point is that all your tactical steps taken on behalf of what I call the defendants occurred before the launching of this petition?"— to which Counsel replied— I respectfully dissent from the word 'tactical.' I am not here to defend the Home Secretary and what he does in advising the Crown. I also submit that your Lordship cannot decide on that point. Later on, counsel was obliged again to say: I am not here to defend other Departments I do not know. No doubt that course seemed best to them in advising the Crown. I am not here to defend them. Ultimately, the learned Judge suggested that the Attorney-General should be approached in order to fix an early date. At the conclusion of the hearing, Counsel for the Crown asked for the costs of the application, but he did not get them. I could multiply these instances, and even in this particular case I could, by referring to correspondence, show how this company has struggled for upwards of two years to get their cause before the tribunal that was able to hear it. I am not suggesting that the present Attorney-General, who has only come recently into office, had anything to do with it, but the truth is that the Attorney-General's alleged convenience was made again and again the ground for not agreeing a day upon which these cases should be heard. As I have said, I exclude the present Attorney-General, but they are all the same. Whether Governments or individuals, they are all tarred with the same brush. The Attorney-General's predecessors are the persons against whom I make this particular charge that, over and over again, these causes stood over because of the alleged convenience of the counsel for the Crown, and, in the end, these people have not been able to get any redress at all.

The burden of my Amendment is this: I am speaking of when the claim was made, not of when it was instituted, because, as I have pointed out to the Committee, and have, I hope, established, the institution of the claim means the sealing either of the writ or of the petition, and where the petitioner was wholly at the mercy of a public Department, and that public Department has wantonly and deliberately prevented him from qualifying and putting in his writ, it ought not to be permitted to take advantage of its own wrong. This Amendment, if it be agreed to, will preserve the claims in so far as they are within the Indemnity Act, and will lay it down that any claim made—not instituted—before the 31st August, 1922, is a claim which ought to be permitted to go forward for trial, and, when the trial has taken place, ought to be admitted as a bona fide claim to be discharged by the Government. I desire to say only one word more. A case has already been tried which was commenced later than the case of the Marshal Shipping Company, and I hold in my hand particulars furnished by the Board of Trade of the dates when the petition was lodged and when the fiat was granted. In the case of the Marshal Shipping Company, the petition was received by the Law Officers' Department on the 2nd August, 1922, and it is stated here that— The fiat which was first produced on the 6th October, 1922, was granted on an undertaking by the suppliants to abandon proceedings in respect of the same claim before the War Compensation Court on the 17th January, 1924. That was the very thing upon which Lord Justice Scrutton said they ought not to insist. But in the case of Messrs. T. and J. Brocklebank, Limited, the petition was lodged on the 19th September, and the claim was made long before that, namely, according to the White Paper, on the 14th July. The petition was actually received by the Law Officers' Department on the 19th September, and the fiat was granted on the 2nd September—a very substantial lapse of time. The Brocklebank case has gone through for trial, and the result has been against the Crown. The Crown are appealing. I aim informed that an undertaking was given by a letter of the 16th January, 1924, sent by the solicitor of the Board of Trade to the solicitors of the Equinox Steamship Company, Limited, that they would be bound by the decision given in the Brocklebank case; so that that is another case which is well within the limit proposed to be inserted in this Clause. I am also informed that a like letter was given by the solicitor of the Board of Trade to the liquidator of the Marshal Shipping Company; so there has been, apparently, a deliberate promise that the case of the Brocklebank Company should bind the cases of the Marshal Shipping Company and of the Equinox Steamship Company. If that be so, one might ask for a pro forma attachment for the petitioners in both those cases. I ask, for the honour of the House of Commons and of this country, that, when retrospective legislation of an unconstitutional character has to be accepted by the House, the House should be very slow in extending it beyond what is absolutely necessary, and, inasmuch as a period has been fixed by the Indemnity Act, I venture to hope that this Committee will take a strong view of the case, and will say that, in so far as the claims were made—not instituted—before the 31st August, 1922, those claims shall be treated as valid, and the Government shall discharge their obligations with regard to them.