ABSTRACT
Private legislation is probably as old as Parliament itself. It is possible to say that the House of Commons elected a Committee of Grievances and the House of Lords Receivers of Petitions from the earliest times. Private Bills provided a mixture of court and Parliamentary proceedings. Thus, the procedure involved the examination of witnesses by Counsel during the same stages of proceedings as were undertaken for a public Bill: it must come before the Houses of Parliament for a First Reading, a Second Reading and a Third Reading. Importantly, an Act of Parliament whether private or public had the full power of Parliamentary sovereignty. Before the development of the modern classification of Bill as private, local or public there was ambiguity over whether a particular Bill should be properly seen as private or public. A person seeking a private Bill in the House of Commons would need to find an individual member to propose it.
