NUMBER OF AIR FORCE. (Hansard, 10 March 1927)

§ Mr. GILLETT
I want to say at once that I am exceedingly disappointed we have had no answer from the Under-Secretary of State to the points raised by the hon. Member for East Bristol (Mr. W. Baker). The Air Minister must understand that the members of the Public Accounts Committee think that his Department is the worst managed that comes before it, and he simply cannot ignore the criticisms which have been made this evening simply because they have been made by one Member only. The facts are well known to his own supporters, who will no doubt give him privately the opinions they have expressed in the Committee. No notice is taken of these criticisms. Only one point is answered by the Air Minister, and the Under-Secretary does not even attempt to answer the other points. I want to bring before the Committee some of the points we had before the Public Accounts Committee, because it seems to me that if hon. Members knew some of the things that are going on they cannot view them with any more satisfaction than members of the Public Accounts Committee. There is the practice of the Ministry to pay out money to contractors at the end of the financial year. This was not only done in the year mentioned by the hon. Member for East Bristol, it was done the year after to an amount of £300,000. It 1506 has been done not once but twice. It may be said that ultimately this money goes to the contractor, but it indicates that the financial arrangements of the Ministry are not satisfactory. If we begin to look into other points which came before us there is the practice of contracts being given without any tender being invited. I put a question to the Minister on Tuesday and asked him how many tenders of £50,000 or over during the present year had been put out without open competition or competition of any kind, and the answer I received was that the number was 21. If the amount was only for £50,000 then during the present year over £1,000,000 has been put up during the present year without tenders and without competition.
My experience of this House is short, but I have been a member of the London County Council for 12 or 14 years, and I can tell the right hon. Gentleman that that sort of thing would not be tolerated for a moment by the London County Council. We know perfectly well that once this sort of thing begins you have no check over what is going on. I would not serve on a Committee, and I would not he a Minister responsible for a Department, which is giving out tenders to this amount without putting them up to solve sort of competition. I have heard it suggested that the figure is more like £4,000,000 than £1,000,000, and I should like to put a question to the right lion. Gentleman as to whether that is the case or not. I have not had it officially, but I have heard it suggested that £4,000,000 has been spent in his Department without tenders being invited. And we are told that an official, temporary or otherwise, can be an official of his department and at the same time a director of a private company. I confess I heard the answer of the Air Minister with amazement, and I have heard his defence with 1507 equal amazement this evening. Over and over again public opinion has insisted that Ministers should be quite clear of any business connection; how much more important is it that any official should be clear? If a man is a director of a private company, why is he put in the position of being a temporary official of the Air Ministry? That is a point that I put to the Minister. If the Minister says that he is a director of this company, I say to the Minister that if this man wanted to become an official of the Ministry, even for a short time, the point ought to have been put to him and he ought to have been asked whether he was prepared to give up his directorship. If it was not worth this man's while to give up his directorship it was not worth the Minister's while to appoint him to the position that he occupies.
Things like that, case after case, came before us as a Public Accounts Committee. It was not one thing, but all sorts of things. For instance, take just a small matter. We found that in one centre a small sum of money was owed by a contractor. In another part of the Ministry the position was reversed and the Ministry owed money to the contractor. What took place? The Ministry paid the contractor without making certain whether the contractor owed money to the Ministry. In that case, unfortunately for the Ministry, the contractor failed. Therefore what happened was that the Ministry had paid the contractor his debt, but the contractor's debt of about £400 to the Ministry, which might have been deducted from the money paid to him, was lost. I do not wish to lay stress upon such a case and would not mention it now if it had been a single case. But when you find all these things coming up you naturally ask whether there is anyone in the Ministry who is seriously considering the financial side at all.
I wish to thank the Minister for one thing, and it is the only thing for which I shall thank him. It is, that as a result of an interview with him he did agree to give us some more information in regard to the cost of some of the schools which are being run by the Ministry. But the information was such that it made one rather wonder once again what oversight the Ministry has over 1508 some of the Departments under its care. We are told that at the staff college at Andover it costs £538 a year for the education of each of the cadets or officers in training. An extraordinary fact of it is that the Dominions pay only £400 for such training. It seems that the Dominions think it ought to be done for £400. Compare the figure of £538 with the figure of some other colleges like Sandhurst and Woolwich. We find that at Sandhurst the cost is £425 a year and at Woolwich £487. It may be that there is some special explanation for the difference. I understand that in the figures I have quoted there is nothing allowed for the cost of the aeroplanes. Why is the figure so high? Can the Secretary of State give us any explanation?
The points which those of us who are Members of the Public Accounts Committee have been specially anxious to bring before the Minister are not new points. A Treasury Minute was passed on 1st January, 1926, saying that the Lords of the Treasury shared the concern of the Committee at the absence of effective competition for supplies of aircraft and engines for the Air Service. This is therefore a matter in which the Committee have received the backing of the Treasury, and what is required is that the Minister who has made a very successful tour abroad should, now that he has come home, look into his own Department. If things of this sort are to go on the reputation of the Ministry will suffer exceedingly, and it is most important that such things should be brought to an end. What I dislike—I was going to say even more than the fact that the things exist —is the fact that when they are raised in this House the Minister and his colleagues seem unwilling to answer the questions which are put to them. If some of the Labour boards of guardians which hon. Members opposite arc so anxious to attack were getting out tenders without any competitive system, or if they had officials who were also directors, one knows what the Conservative Press would say. It would be just as well for the Conservative party and the Minister to see that their own hands are clean before they begin to lecture us on this side of the House. The Minister would do well to go more closely into this question than 1509 he seems inclined to do and he should at any rate allow us to have an answer here to the points which have been raised.

§ Captain FRASER
I desire to ask the Minister a question with regard to certain members of the staff of the Ministry. It appears that the Lytton Committee, confirmed by the Southborough Committee, recommended that in certain appointments where technical or semi-technical knowledge was required of a kind which a civil servant would not be expected to possess, the appointments should be given to ex-service civil servants who were occupying temporary posts in the Ministry instead of seeking for suitable persons outside—provided always that the ex-service men were fully competent. It appears that the Air Ministry have interpreted that recommendation in a manner which is not so generous as some of us would like. There are obviously two ways of interpreting it. You can seek throughout the country for someone who is a little more competent than the man in your Department and you will almost certainly find him, and you can give him the job. Alternatively, if you are generously minded, as I am sure the right hon. Gentleman is, you can see whether in the Department there is not someone who is fully competent, even if he is not quite so competent as someone you can find by searching the length and breadth of the country. Certain cases have been brought to my notice which, after careful perusal, have assured me that the sympathetic treatment which I am sure the right hon. Gentleman would desire has not been given. I ask him if he will receive a deputation from the association which represents these men and hear their case. If he is kind enough to give me an answer, he may say that he assures the Committee that nothing of the kind happens in his Department. I hope he will not give that assurance before he has met this deputation and heard their point of view.

§ Sir S. HOARE
My hon. and gallant Friend the Member for North St. Pancras (Captain Fraser) has just raised a question to which I have given a great deal of attention since I went to the Air Ministry. I have gone into particulars of these cases myself, and I think I can say that in the matter of the employment of ex-service men, the 1510 Air Ministry has as good a record as, if not a better record than, any other Department. I think there is a higher percentage of ex-service men in the Air Ministry than in any other great Department of the State. I have always tried—I will not say to weigh the scales —but, at any rate, to give the ex-service men in the Department the very best possible chance of permanent employment. My hon. and gallant Friend says that there are certain eases which have been brought to his attention in which he thinks that has not been done. I shall be delighted if he will discuss those eases with me, and I will undertake to go into them personally myself and if any injustice has been done, which I do not think can have been the case, I will see that it is put right.
The hon. Member for Finsbury (Mr. Gillett) gave me and my Department a very bad character. He said we were the worse Department in the view of the Public Accounts Committee. [An HON. MEMBER: "Hear, hear!"} I see there is another hon. Gentleman who seems to share that view. I attach a great deal of importance to the views of a Committee of one's colleagues like the Public Accounts Committee. The members of it will remember that I met the Committee last year and discussed with them at great length the questions which the hon. Member and the hon. Member for East Bristol (Mr. W. Baker) have raised this evening. On certain of these questions the Public Accounts Committee made suggestions where they thought that the procedure of the Air Ministry might be improved. I have given the fullest attention to the recommendations they made and in more than one respect, and in very material respects, we have already carried out those recommendations. The hon. Member mentioned two or three specific points. He mentioned, first of all, the payment of advances to contractors. The payment that we make as advance payment to contractors is made under rules actually laid clown by the Public Accounts Committee. I do not think I could give a more complete answer to the hon. Member's charge than that.

§ Mr. GILLETT
May I suggest to the Minister that his Department last year had no power to be paying what they did, whether the rules were laid down by the 1511 Public Accounts Committee or not. I put it to the Minister that his Department exceeded the powers which they had in paying this money.

§ Sir S. HOARE
I repeat that advance payments are made actually under rules approved by the Public Accounts Committee.

§ Mr. GILLETT
May I suggest to the right hon. Gentleman that the Auditor-General suggested that there was no power and they exceeded their powers in making payments as soon as they found they had exceeded the amount of the Estimate.

§ Sir S. HOARE
It is rather difficult to argue the details of this matter across the Floor of the House. My view does not agree with that of the hon. Member opposite. I repeat that advance payments are made under rules approved by the Public Accounts Committee and we have a right to make them. Then the hon. Member raised another question, namely the fact that the Air Ministry gives a number of orders without open tender. I should like to say that as regards open tenders in the case of our orders, the difficulty is that the Air Ministry, in the nature of things in a technical service like this, is dealing time after time with patents and proprietary articles. Take a single and most conspicuous instance, that of proprietary designs in machines and engines. It is practically impossible in many orders, some of them substantial orders, which the Ministry gives in the course of the year, to have open tenders for proprietary articles of that kind. I can assure him that wherever it is possible to have open tenders I, personally, welcome them. Then he raised a further question about the cost of the educational establishments of the Air Force, and he quoted the case of Cranwell.

§ Mr. GILLETT
No, Andover.

§ Sir S. HOARE
I think the hon. Member will find that our cost compares very favourably with the cost of the staff colleges of the other services, and if he will go into the details I think he will find that there is no extravagance connected with Andover or any other educational establishment under the Air Ministry.
1512 Underlying his criticisms, there is a suggestion that the Air Ministry is more extravagant than the other Departments. My answer to that would be that we have had inquiry after inquiry into the organisation of the Air Ministry and into almost every feature of its activities. I will only mention one inquiry, that of the Colwyn Committee a year ago, and every one of those inquiries, so far from substantiating the charges made by the hon. Member, have given us a very good character. That being so, I do not take quite the black view of myself and my Department that the hon. Member opposite seems to take. I believe we can stand criticism, not only on the points of detail he has raised, but upon the broad lines of policy on which the greater part of our expenditure is made.