I have great difficulty in making up my mind with regard to this amendment. The weight of evidence is against accepting this amendment because if we accept it, it means if an examination is held, the person who gets the highest number of marks and who should, by right, be appointed, may not be appointed. If three names are sent to the local authority, someone with a local pull may get the position, thereby doing injustice to the person with the highest marks. I supported the Bill on the Second Reading because undoubtedly the passing of this Bill will mean that something in the nature of a local Civil Service wil be set up in the country to fill those appointments. If the Bill is worked as it is intended to be worked, the question of appointments other than for professional men will not arise in a very short time because, if we start with a lower clerical staff and have a system of examination, I hope in a few years' time the highest posts will be filled by promotion because the men who have passed into the Civil Service will have qualified then for the filling of the higher posts. I would imagine that in any test that would be held of a competitive nature for the filling of professional posts the degrees and experience of the candidates would be taken into consideration and that it would not be merely a schoolboy examination. In the case of the appointment of medical men, there will, I suppose, be a medical man on the Board of Examiners, and experience will be taken into consideration to a greater extent than if it were a boy copyist that was being examined. On the whole, I think it would be a bad principle to submit three names to the local authority.
I have fought for the rights of local authorities in this House harder than anybody else, but at the same time I recognise from experience the difficulties with regard to appointments to these higher posts. I hear people talking about corruption and all that sort of thing. In many cases the fault was not with the poor man or the poor woman on the board, but with others. Anything we can do to remove the taint of corruption from local boards we should do. If we accept the principle of this Bill, I think we cannot accept the amendment. If we accepted the amendment we would stultify ourselves, because we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that if a local man were third on the list and the names of three or four candidates were sent down to a board in any part of the country, the local man would have sufficient pull to get the position as against the better qualified candidates. We all must recognise that. For that reason, I think it would vitiate the principle embodied in this Bill if we accepted the amendment.
A question has been raised as regards the right of the Minister to withhold sanction to appointments. Under every Local Government Act that I know of the Minister has power to refuse sanction to appointments made by any local authority. Every appointment was subject to the sanction of the Minister. I think that is right. But does anybody imagine for a moment that if the Commissioners held an examination and made a recommendation, which recommendation was acted on by the local authority, that any Minister would have the audacity to refuse sanction to such an appointment? It would be impossible for a Minister to take up such a position as that. That argument, I think, is absurd. The object of the clause in the Local Government Act providing for sanction of the Minister to appointments was, I think, to prevent people being appointed who were not qualified for the position. The whole weight of argument is against the amendment and I propose to vote against it.
