HC Deb 19 January 1944 vol 396 cc322-32

Motion made, and Question proposed, "That this House do now adjourn." [Mr. Boulton].

Mr. Quintin Hogg (Oxford)

After a Debate on such wide national issues the Adjournment must seem something of an anti-climax, especially when it deals with a matter which at any rate apparently affects one constituency in this House. But I have this on my side, that what affects Oxford now will certainly affect the country at a later period, since the scheme to which I wish to draw the attention of the House has been initiated by the President of the Board of Trade with the intention of applying it hereafter to every constituency in the country to which it is applicable. I desire to draw the attention of the House to the provisions and working of the laundry zoning scheme in the City of Oxford. That scheme was introduced somewhere about April last year. It was an extension of the milk zoning scheme which was introduced for the benefit of the Ministry of Food and the Ministry of War Transport. The object of the scheme was the laudable object of saving petrol and rubber, and the method proposed was to tie the housewife to a particular concern for laundering her clothes, just as the milk zoning scheme had confined her to a particular concern for the delivery of milk. But there was this difference between milk and laundry. Milk is or ought to be a fairly standard commodity. Laundry is essentially a personal service and the laundry working for one district is often quite unsuitable in terms, in plant and in prices for another type of customer.

The scheme was introduced in Oxford compulsorily in April, frankly as an experiment, with a view to seeing how it would work for the rest of the country. There were numerous complaints that Oxford should not be experimented upon in this way, but for the most part I think the people did think that in the noble desire to save petrol and rubber it was fitting that Oxford should for the time being be made the home of lost blouses. But it was obvious from the first that the principle of the scheme was somewhat vicious. There may be some hon. Members opposite who believe in the laundrying of clothes by bright municipal laundries all over the country; there are on this side hon. Members who would like the housewife to be able to choose the laundry she desires to patronise; but no one on either side of the House would desire the housewife to be adscriptus glebae—tied to the washer of her husband's soiled linen: That is a principle that has been introduced into laundrying by the President of the Board of Trade. However, in time of war one was willing to give the thing a try out. I only desire to say that from its inception to the present time it has been a great deal more trouble than it was worth.

In its inception it was a very great nuisance. The Board of Trade or the Ministry of War Transport, both Ministries being concerned, took the existing laundries away from their customers but omitted to tell the customers what new laundries they were to be given. Having told them what the new laundries were they omitted to arrange that the laundries should call and there was a long period in which, in Oxford, no clothes were washed at all, except at home. Ultimately that was got over, but another series of difficulties arose. Under the zoning scheme laundries which had been primarily concerned with the laundering of clothes for working-class districts were given to those who had nothing but the finest hand-made linen and were accustomed to paying the highest prices, while the working-class districts were given to laundries who had been accustomed to deal with the finest hand-made linen, and charging accordingly, so that their new customers were quite unable to pay the prices.

That also has to some extent been modified, but even worse difficulties were to arise for the Ministry by another arrangement independent of this. The compensation which is payable for clothes lost in the laundry is 20 times the washing cost whatever might be the value of the article washed. In time of war no coupons are payable in compensation, and in the black market, of course, the value of the articles is many times 20 times the washing cost, in almost every instance. The Ministry compelled housewives to patronise these laundries, their clothes were lost, and they are compelled to accept much less than the washing cost, while they have had taken away the only remedy they had, which was to leave the laundry. One of the laundries concerned regularly lost between seven and eight per cent. of the total wash every week; and month after month, when I put questions to the Ministers, I was assured that there was no reasonable ground for complaint. Compensation was paid on the nail with the utmost alacrity, and the Minister saw nothing to complain of. But the housewives did not take the same simple-minded view. At last the Ministry were persuaded to take the whole of the civilian wash from this particular laundry and to ensure in future that it should wash only for the War Office, who will no doubt be glad to receive 20 times the washing costs on the usual turnover of seven or eight per cent. per week.

However, this laundry was by no means the only case; there were other laundries equally unsatisfactory, although that was perhaps the most glaring instance. I am constantly receiving complaints about every one of them. Some of those complaints are quite unjustified: housewives are sometimes unreasonable, but they like to change when they do not care for a particular concern with which they have to deal. Some of the complaints are not the laundries' fault, because the labour situation in the laundry trade is very serious, but the volume of them is much too large to be wholly overlooked.

In the meantime, the Minister, who has made himself an accomplice to the loss of the seven or eight per cent. of the wash, which has been going on week after week and month after month, has refused to give any additional compensation for the losses for which he is himself an accessory after the fact, and has refused to give any additional coupons, so that even if the money were paid, which it is not, the housewives would be unable to recoup themselves for the actual garments which they have lost. When I asked the Minister yesterday about this rather extraordinary situation, he said that this was one of the minor evils in a world war which Oxford housewives should be glad to undergo. I am not altogether able to accept that argument. I have often been told during the war, as the excuse for laziness, incompetence or indifference, that there is a war on, but I have seldom been given that excuse except when there was no better excuse to be given. I ask the Minister in his reply, which I hope will be comprehensive and frank on this delicate subject, to give me a little better assurance than his chief gave me yesterday.

I want to ask three definite questions. The first question is, what justification can there possibly be for continuing compensation at the arbitrary rate of 20 times the washing cost? The ordinary common law rule is that if a person loses or damages another's goods he shall pay the value. That applies to the whole country. The second question is, having regard to the fact that his Ministry has become an accessory after the fact by a compulsory allocation of housewives to a laundry which habitually lost their customers' clothes and habitually paid on the nail, what compensation does the Minister propose to offer those housewives in coupons—which is what they are interested in? Why should they not have coupons for the loss he has compelled them to suffer?

And the third is this. The scheme which was admittedly an experiment has now been in existence for very nearly a year. It has not, so far as I know, been applied to any other town. If the experiment has been a success—as I suppose the Minister will try to let us believe—why does he not apply it to the rest of England, perhaps even to Scotland, as I see my hon. Friend the Member for Dunfermline Burghs (Mr. Watson) here? I can only assume that it is because if he did he knows that either the scheme would have to be withdrawn or all the Ministers involved, and they are numerous, would be out of office in a fortnight, because a more dangerous body of people to infuriate than the housewives of this island I could scarcely imagine. If, on the other hand, the experiment has not been a success, then I think I am justified in asking that the housewives of Oxford should be freed from the incubus of this burdensome, expensive, tyrranical, bureaucratic scheme. I am quite as anxious as my hon. Friend to save petrol and rubber——

Mr. Magnay (Gateshead)

Otherwise it is all right?

Mr. Hogg

But there are other things which we want to save in time of war. We want to save clothes for instance. Has my hon. Friend ever really totted up the cost in clothes to the people of Oxford as against the rubber and the petrol which he would save? I should be interested to know. Another thing we want to save is temper. Has he imagined the amount of accumulated bad temper—only part of which, I am sorry to say, I have succeeded in passing on to him and his colleagues—which has been caused throughout this city by reason of the scheme? We want to save the time of Ministers. His own Ministry has only just recently come into it but I can assure him that his colleague the Minister of War Transport, or his Parliamentary Secretary, has had stacks of letters on this subject. Has a calculation been made as to how much time of highly placed officials all over the city area and in the House of Commons has been spent on justifying this scheme for a few gallons of petrol and for a few pounds of rubber? I suggest that the time has come for the Ministry to make up their minds either to run the risk of applying this scheme to the whole country and seeing how it is taken by the House of Commons as a whole or else to withdraw it from Oxford and admit frankly that although it was an experiment which may have been worth trying it has been a failure.

The Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade (Captain Waterhouse)

It is quite certain that this House has enjoyed the speech of my hon. Friend a good deal better than his constituents have enjoyed their change of laundry, and that is not really surprising because, as he truly said, laundry work is a personal service. People get used to having their clothes done in a certain way, they get used to the people who call for those clothes, and they get used to the amount they pay for that service. Obviously any change in this particularly personal service is going to raise a good deal of friction. My hon. Friend has said with truth that this is not an isolated effort to zone. It has been done in milk and to a degree in laundry services over wide rural areas, but not with quite the precision that was used in Oxford. On that point, if I may just give some figures supplied to me by my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of War Transport to show that these inconveniences are not altogether useless, I am informed that as a result of the zoning scheme as a whole 34,000 vehicles have been saved and the equivalent of 25,000,000 gallons of petrol in a year. I am not putting this forward at all as a justification for the Oxford scheme but as a justification for making some attempt at zoning in the country as a whole.

Mr. Hogg

That applies to milk as well or laundry only?

Captain Waterhouse

My hon. Friend says it applies to retail deliveries which are zoned.

Mr. Hogg

All milk?

Captain Waterhouse

All retail deliveries. Why, then, was Oxford singled out for this particular experiment? The answer is several sided. The laundry position in Oxford was never a very happy one. The principal reason was that it so happened that the launderers in Oxford were on the outskirts of the city and the vans calling, both from the city and the county, were crossing and recrossing con- tinually. It was thought, therefore, that for geographical reasons Oxford might be particularly suitable for zoning, and zoned it was.

I do not want to represent to the House that this zoning went initially with quite the swing that might have been hoped. It was true that some of the launderers thought that the Board of Trade were going to make a notification to the customers, and vice versa. Some laundries took the trouble to tell all their customers that a change had been made and that in future they would go to such and such a laundry. Others merely relied on public advertisement. As my hon. Friend has graciously admitted, after these little teething or washing troubles in the early stages, the thing cleared itself up and the scheme, we thought, was running extremely nicely. However, that apparently was not the opinion of all the residents of Oxford and some 327 of them sent a petition to my hon. Friend asking him to raise their grievances in this House, and that he has done repeatedly and ably. The main grievance was about one laundry, which, for obvious reasons, it would not be fair to name. My hon. Friend has said that that particular laundry was losing some 7 or 8 per cent. of all the articles sent there. That is a most fantastic and, as far as my information goes, completely unfounded figure.

Mr. Hogg

I got it from my right hon. and gallant Friend's officials.

Captain Waterhouse

Either on that occasion my officials must have been more anxious to please my hon. Friend than to give the truth or, what I think is more probable, he misunderstood them because the losses of this particular laundry have amounted for the past six months to 4.4 per cent. of the charge for laundry. That sounds quite a lot. That figure was.7 per cent. more than it had been in the previous six months and that may be where this lucky or unlucky "7" comes in. Let us think of this figure of 4.4 per cent. in terms of the value of the goods laundered. On the laundry custom of a "20 times" return for lost articles the actual loss of capital value would be one-twentieth of 4½ per cent., which is about.2 per cent. So far from it being anything like 7 per 100 articles, it is about 2 per 1,000 that are being lost. I am not saying that that is good or that the laundry are not blameworthy for that amount of loss. But the case was not so glaring that, out of every dozen and a half shirts that one sent to the laundry, one lost one. That would be almost beyond the bounds of coupon perseverance for most of the inhabitants of this country. That is one of the points of detail I want to make clear to my hon. Friend. He asked three specific questions. What justification was there for this rule of 20 times the washing price? Well, that is an old custom of the laundry trade, and possibly it is out of date, but a Question was put down by the hon. Member for Gillingham (Sir R. Gower) in August of this year and my hon. Friend got this reply: Some months ago, my director of laundry services discussed this custom of the trade with the Institution of British Launderers, which, at his request, advised their members to waive this limitation, when they were satisfied that a larger claim would be justified." [OFFICIAL REPORT, 3rd August, 1943; col. 2099, Vol. 391.] I am told that, in fact, firms were so advised, because it is clearly a contract between an individual firm and the person who can do washing, and one could do no more than advise, unless one made an Order, which would be in our powers today. Advice has been given to the laundry firms asking them that, when proof is produced, they should not adhere to this strict rule but should pay rather more.

Mr. Hogg

Will the right hon. and gallant Gentleman say why, when he has compelled the launderer and the housewife together in these indissoluble ties of compulsory matrimony, he should not insist on a reasonable contract being entered into between them?

Mr. Magnay

This applies to me also, because I have been losing things from the laundry—one week it was six and the next week four. I want to know who gave these people the right to override the Common Law that they must replace, or the right to say that they will only give 20 times—because 10d. is all I got for a 4s. 6d. handkerchief.

Captain Waterhouse

I have the very greatest sympathy with the hon. Member in his troubles, but on this particular point there is no question of overriding the law.

Mr. W. J. Brown (Rugby)

Is the Minister aware that his own laundry is practically invisible from this side?

Captain Waterhouse

Well, I am not ashamed to show it. My hon. Friend was reinforcing the argument of the hon. Member for Oxford about this "20 times" rule, but so far as I know—and my hon. Friend is better able to judge this than I—there is no question at all of overriding any common law, and if any action did lie at common law, it does lie at common law, because no Order has been made which alters that at all. As I understand it, this is a matter of the contracts printed on the back of the circular issued by the laundry, and whether it is legal or not had better be tested in the courts. As the hon. Member knows, it is not my task to try to interpret it. He says my right hon. Friend should make himself responsible for these losses, because, in fact, they are due to him in that he has decided that Mrs. Smith or Mrs. Brown must go to laundry A and not to laundry B, but that is, I think, a view that is really quite indefensible. The Ministry of Food tells us where we have to get our butter and beef, and if we have tin tacks in our butter or bad beef I do not know that my hon. Friend will say any action would lie against the Ministry of Food.

Mr. Hogg

No, but he would see that we got some more butter or some more beef instead of that which had tin tacks in it.

Captain Waterhouse

We now deal with coupons, and there I admit my hon. Friend has much stronger ground, but unfortunately, as my hon. Friend has said, this is not the only laundry in the country in which there is trouble. Laundries as a whole have had a certain amount of control put upon them. It is true there has been no exact scheme throughout the country, but in many districts people have been told that they must go to a certain laundry here and not to a laundry on the other side of the county, in order to save transport. Therefore, if we were to allow an issue of coupons at Oxford we could not confine it to that place. The rule which we have laid down for our guidance in the issue of coupons is based, wisely or unwisely—very unfortunately, I admit, but that is the necessity of the position—not on what one has lost but on what one has left, and it was decided that if any individual has a sufficient number of garments to enable him or her to carry on during these stringent times of war it would be wrong to call on the general available supplies of clothes in order to enable the person to replenish a wardrobe which might already be more adequate than that of others who have lost nothing at all.

Finally, my hon. Friend makes the point—a debating point more than a point of substance—that this was an experiment and that if it has succeeded why not apply it to other places in the British Isles? If it has failed, he says, withdraw it from Oxford. This particular scheme has had real difficulties to contend with, but, by and large, it has surmounted those difficulties. If I had time I could quote lengthily from a newspaper article, published in 1942, in which the writer says: There is not a single laundry in the area which is able to give customers a reasonable service. The writer explains that that is because of the tremendous influx of people into the munition factories there. The difficulties in Oxford were acute. I do not believe that they have been aggravated by this scheme and I am quite satisfied that there has been material economy in transport which is of value to the country. On the other hand—and I give my hon. Friend this freely—it has disclosed real difficulties but we took this town because it was most favourable——

It being half an hour after the conclusion of Business exempted under the provisions of the Standing Order (Sittings of the House), MR. SPEAKER adjourned the House, without Question put, pursuant to the Standing Order, as modified for this Session by the Order of the House of 25th November.