MALNUTRITION.

HC Deb 24 November 1937 vol 329 cc1251-315

3.49 p.m.

Mr. Leonard

I beg to move, That this House has noted with concern the convincing evidence of widespread malnutrition which is being intensified by rising prices, and regrets the continued failure of His Majesty's Government to take effective steps to deal with this grave and urgent problem of hunger and want in the midst of plenty. The Motion is quite concise. It makes reference to the convincing evidence that can be seen, to the fact that malnutrition is intensified by rising prices and it charges the Government with taking no real and effective steps to deal with this problem. Finally, it calls attention to what must be obvious to everyone—the existence of want in this country to-day in the midst of plenty. I have heard expressions of opinion from time to time as to the importance of this matter. I have heard that it is of importance to industry, of recent years it has been referred to as a problem affecting the Fighting Services and I have even heard that those who continually advertise and advise that we should eat more of this or that food, hope that the problem will be solved by the eating of the product which they advertise. I put this subject forward for none of those reasons, but for the overpowering reason that it is the right of every man, woman and child to live the life that can be given to-day by nature and science.

In regard to the evidence, there is an inclination to pile up figures based upon statistics and technicalities, but I would ask hon. Members who demand evidence whether they ever walk the streets of our cities with their eyes open. Have they ever been told that women whom they deem to be 5o years of age are actually only 35 or 39? Have they ever noticed the undersized and under-weight men that are in evidence everywhere? Above all, have they taken the advice given by the hon. Member for Springburn (Mrs. Hardie), in her maiden speech, that they should pay attention to the different types of school child leaving the gates of the schools in the poorer areas, and leaving the gates in the areas of the well-to-do? There is evidence in plenty.

We are always informed that economy is one of the factors which has to be considered, but I am of opinion that it is false economy to try to economise on the lives of the infants of the country.

You cannot repair an injured infant, and you pay for your neglect throughout its life. Even in its maturity it reminds you of your indifference and neglect in those years when you were practising false economy. I am particularly pleased by the work that has been done by the Children's Minimum Council, although I am sorry that the council's report makes very dismal reading. Under the heading of national income we are informed that 13 per cent. of the population live in families where the income is 10s. or less per head. That is appalling enough, but we find that in the families with 10s. or less to live upon reside 23 . 5 per cent. of the children. That is a prime danger, and of itself justifies our consideration of this question.

With regard to the pre-school child, I regret that I cannot find much evidence of controlled-group investigation. One doctor has given us the result of his investigations into 125 school children from a poor district whom he compared with 124 children from a well-to-do district. He found that 36 per cent. of the poor children showed evidence of malnutrition, and that 50 per cent. were below the standard of weight and height, whereas the well-to-do children showed no malnutrition; only 5 per cent. were below height and only 13 per cent. below weight. Only 20 per cent. of the poor children passed the test for anaemia, whereas all the children from the better class district did so.

It would not be possible to investigate all the circumstances that IN e are discussing without referring to the unchallenged evidence of Sir John Orr upon infant mortality. He said that well-to-do infants have a death rate of 3o per thousand, those in poorer districts ion per thousand, and in the poorest districts 150 per thousand. That evidence must be considered as very serious. I have been aware of the fact that it is difficult to diagnose malnutrition. I noticed that on the 17th of this month the "Manchester Guardian" gave us the result of a discussion dealing with the differences in the conceptions of doctors as to malnutrition. The evidence given in this report is ample. Just to show what can be done in the way of mistakes I will read the inconsistency in the judgments of the same doctor in the same circumstances: Even more striking was an inquiry into how far doctors were consistent in their own judgments. Four of the staff of the Cheshire County Council took part in an inquiry held at Northwich on dates seven days apart. There were three remarkable results. First, the extraordinary differences between the various doctors; thus on the second occasion one doctor found only three subnormal boys, another found 90. Secondly, the difference between the judgment of the same doctor on the two occasions; thus one doctor increased the number of 'excellents' and decreased the number of 'subnormals' by about half. Thirdly, on the second occasion every doctor found more boys excellently nourished and (with one exception) fewer subnormally nourished. On an average they placed one boy out of four in a different grade on the second examination. That is sufficient to make us doubt the doctor as a repository of sole right to enter into judgment on these matters. I find that in the Hebburn district, a distressed area, a new medical officer came from a non-distressed area in 1935. His conception of well-being was such that he classified as subnormal and bad more than double the number that had been classified by the previous doctor in those categories in that distressed area. That shows clearly that you accept the things to which you are accustomed. It is, therefore, with doubt that I accept the diagnoses of the doctors.

The best proof is what happens to what is called the normal child, when the normal child is given extra food and we have a controlled experiment. In Scotland a few years ago an experiment covered two groups of children, numbering 20,000. It was found that by giving one of the groups milk as against the other, the growth of the children who received milk was 20 per cent. greater than of those not receiving milk, and that in general the improvement was most marked. I have heard it stated also that some children are reluctant to take milk, but I am not prepared to accept that statement as general. One of try reasons is that, in addition to other evidence, I have the established case of a South Wales school where after a period only 46 boys out of 125 took milk. The rest when questioned said that they "did not like it" and so did not ask for it. But the strange thing is that when a voluntary organisation came forward and paid for the milk, the total of 46 who took the milk jumped up to 107, so that the excuse that the children did not like it does not hold good against the evidence.

I would like to go far afield in this matter, but time will not permit except to refer to investigations into the case of the children in Russia. There has been published by the Committee on Malnutrition a splendid report which shows the great advantage that can be gained from curative diets being introduced into schools instead of the children being given medicine. That method has also been applied in the industries of Russia, and no fewer than 600,000 persons are receiving curative diets in the canteens of various industries. The other day I put a question to the Minister of Education regarding the Oslo experiment. That experiment is based on an ascertainment of the normal dietary of a day in the households of that city, with the view of finding what were the defects and making up the defects in the form of a breakfast given to poor and rich alike, a breakfast which gives no trouble and requires no cooking. That experiment has resulted in an infant mortality of 46 per 1,000 in 1931 being reduced to 30 per 1,000 in 1936.

That experiment has been investigated by the Education Department, but it was considered that there were alternatives just as suitable for this country. I shall not enter into any argument about that. But can this country show a result such as a reduction from 46 per 1,000 to 30 per 1,000 in five years? If not I press for an extension of the experiment here, especially as London now has an infant mortality of 67 per 1,000, Newcastle 84 per 1,000 and Glasgow 98 per 1,000. I have looked at the records of Glasgow. I have a high regard for the Medical Officer of that city. I find that in 1935 they reported "no evidence of an increase-in those conditions which are the causes of malnutrition." In 1936 they went further and the Medical Officer reported that in his examination for nutritional defects 32,103 were "good," that is 58 per cent.; 21,253, or 38 per cent., were "fair"; 1,482, or 2 . 7 per cent., were "bad"; and 42 were "very bad." I do not know what "good" means? I wonder what it is in a city that has an infant mortality rate of 98. I know what is meant by "fair" in this House. 'If two hon. Members meet each other and one says, "How are you to-day?" and the answer given is "Oh, fair," the hon. Member who said that is not very good.

It is strange that in the poorer countries of the world the children are healthier— in Norway and Sweden, New Zealand, Australia the infant mortality rate is 30 to 50 per 1,000, but here in rich Britain, where we are spending£1,500,000,000 on things that we hope will never be used, we have an infant death rate of 57 per 1,000, in England and in Scotland there is a death rate of no less than 82 per 1,000. Therefore I want specifically to ask the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Health what the Government are going to do? I know why the Minister of Health cannot be here and that is why I address my request to the Parliamentary Secretary. I ask what the Government propose to do with the memorandum and details submitted to them by the Children's Minimum Council last July for the purpose of drawing attention to the need for cheap milk for expectant or nursing mothers and children under five years of age. That has been in the possession of the Government sufficiently long for them to know what they intend to do.

I refer next to the question of the physical fitness campaign. That such a campaign should be necessary is not to be wondered at, seeing that in the years 1934, 1935 and 1936 over 6 per cent. of the men presenting themselves for the Services were rejected as unfit, and we have had a right hon. Gentleman answering a question from the Government Bench by stating that the physical standard for the Army was being reduced in order to meet the type of man coming forward. Fancy that in a country such as this, fancy admitting on the Floor of the House that the workers of this country are not receiving sufficient in wages and benefits to ensure a standard of nutrition to make them able to fight for the country in time of need. What an admission to make. I do not know what hon. Members opposite think about it. Take next the case of industry. Industry also requires people who are able and fit to maintain themselves. While I admit that we are privileged to live in a country where and at a time when great progress is being made, we must never forget that we have never lived in a time when there were greater anxieties attaching themselves to the ordinary household and the ordinary worker in this country.

It is of interest also to note that one of the doctors who have been paying attention to the junior instruction centres, the Medical Officer for Cumberland, Dr. Fraser, reports that "many of the boys coming to the centre are too unfit even to want to play football." The League of Nations report on nutrition has made it quite clear that the corrected death rate in depressed areas exceeds that of a well-to-do area by 166 per cent.—an awful picture to present—and we must not forget that in this country there are 4,000,000 living in depressed areas. Do the Government know what is required? There can be no doubt that the Government do know, because the National Advisory Committee on Nutrition which reports to the Minister of Health himself—the Government's own advisory body—has stated that the consumption of fresh fruit, vegetables and milk is just over one-half of what it should be. Therefore the Government know what is required in one aspect, in order to deal with the problem. The League of Nations report indicated that the lowering of diets from 1914 to 1918 brought alarming results. They say: There is no country NS here conditions could not be improved with more Government help and direction. There the Government are definitely asked to consider this as part of the machinery that must move to get this malnutrition banished. Further the report states: While the average levels of individual incomes are high in industrialised countries large sections are so poor as to be unable to purchase proper diets. That does not mean in a poor country; it means in Great Britain, where last year the Inland Revenue Commissioners reported that there were 79 more millionaires than in the year previous, or 79 more persons with an income of£30,000 or over; and in addition 2,000 persons who increased their incomes by£2,000 a year. The report fits exactly the conditions in this country. The total sum spent on food by workers increases with the total income. Can the Government help? They can help. They must realise the facts, and the facts are that abundance is the order of the day and that the only things in which there is a scarcity are thought and willingness. If we had as much of thought and willingness as of the things we need, there would be no problem at all.

With regard to abundance, I shall not reiterate all the facts. In 1936, 37,000,000 bags of coffee were burned and millions more were put into store. Sugar, a most important food the potentiality of the foreign production of which is not known as it is so great, and yet we are acting in this country in a peculiar way, bolstering up a most uneconomic crop. Pigs and bacon—an awful picture. Small Denmark, small in size and population, actually is the second largest exporter of pigs and bacon products in the world. There is nothing to hinder our doing the same thing here by co-operative methods. We have just recently had indications that the pig marketing scheme in this country has fallen through. The result is that the curers can get all the pigs they want for the purpose of keeping their factories running to full capacity, but if they did run them to full capacity the Bacon Marketing Board would come in and prevent them from selling. That is in a country where bacon and the products of pigs are urgently required. Take wheat. The largest part of what we consume comes from countries with a very small yield per acre. I have worked on farms in Canada, I have been a homesteader there, and I know that the yields are small in comparison with what they could be if modern methods were applied.

Take potatoes. Recently it has been acknowledged that from the point of view of nutrition potatoes are a splendid substitute for white bread. What is the position? If a man in this country who is a grower of potatoes grows one acre more than he did in his standard year, he is fined£5 for that acre. In the case of fish, the same arguments apply. A control organisation says that prices must be kept up and profits must be assured. Our engineers and shipbuilders have produced trawlers capable of going into the farthest seas, but they must not. Control organisation says only in certain months will you land fish from these parts. Prices must he protected. The same with beef—control, control, control, not for the advantage of this country but for the advantage of those who exercise the control. Control, control, control means profit, profit, profit, and as soon as the Government recognise that they will be able to take steps and interfere. It is not that we cannot consume or do not need these things. We are afraid to try an experiment.

The Medical Research Council of Great Britain has accepted the standards of the Committee of the League, dated 1935, as a reasonable and necessary standard. Let me give one example in the application of the standard to a child of six years. It needs 1¾ pints of milk, one egg; one ounce of meat, fish, liver or cheese; 2½ ounces of green vegetables and 5 ounces of potato or root crop. Give the child that, and you give it the wherewithal to create two-thirds of the energy it needs; the other third can be supplied by bread, butter and cereals. But while the child has a right to that, it is not getting it, because it costs 6s. or 7s. a week to give that to a child of six, while in the case of a nursing mother it would cost from 9s. to 10s. a week. But when we are spending£1,500,000,000 on what we hope will never be used, surely we can take steps to see that children and nursing mothers, if nobody else, can receive what is essential to their well-being.

My hon. Friend the Member for Hemsworth (Mr. G. Griffiths) is going to deal with the rise in prices, so I shall not touch upon that question, but it is necessary to bear in mind that any money that is spent in this way will build up the workers and make them better workers than they have been in the past, will build up the men that the nation wants to protect it in the future, and will save on health more than is actually spent in abolishing malnutrition. The Government have the machinery to do this. Mr. Roosevelt, in the United States, is endeavouring to find any means that he can to pump more money into circulation, to get greater values into the possession of those who must spend, because the poor people must spend what they get; they cannot save it, and it always goes back to, I regret to say, those who exploit them. Many of the industries of this country need to be rationalised. There are industries and occupations in this country employing thousands of people whose conditions of work and wages are a scandal to a civilised country. Something should be done to prevent this exploitation.

Then there are the ex-service pensions. I had a letter yesterday from a London pensioner, a man who has given 40 years' service to the State. He fought in the Boer War, he fought in France, he fought in the East, and then went into the Post Office, and, because of some illness, he is now fobbed off with a pension of 30s. a week, and he, his wife, and three children are expected to live on that.

How is it possible. These pensioners provide an avenue whereby the life blood of trade could be got moving. The old age pensions, again, provide a field galore. There are also the Employment Exchanges. It would be possible to give an immediate increase to the children of applicants to the Exchanges, and to put in more money from the State side. Here you have a total of 1,400,000 people who are not living the life that they ought to be able to live. That would help to consume the things that you desire to produce in this country. Further grants for poor relief could also be given. If the machinery of this country produces commodities for use, let us get them used. If the land produces food for feeding the people, let us feed the people. Do not let us interfere with that as we are interfering at the present time. There is a market in this country to start with. Half the population of the country is not up to the standard of the Government's own Advisory Committee on Nutrition; 5,000,000 are in such a bad state that they are deficient in every respect; and these include a quarter of the country's children.

If the Government want to see prosperity in this country, they should balance the budgets of the citizens of the country. If they balance the budgets of the citizens of the country, their own Budget will balance much more easily. It is said that some workers spend in various directions money that they should be spending on food. Enlightened opinion on the question of nutrition is not agreed upon that. There are many who are not pie-pared to accept that statement, and are prepared to argue that it is quite possible that, if certain people spend money in going to the pictures, they will receive more advantage from the mental enjoyment they get at the pictures than they would if they spent the same amount of money on food. These things appear to be like lime and fertilisers. Fertilisers will give no return unless there is lime in the soil, and the amenities of life are necessary for people as well as food. Lord Horder in another place, on 10th November, made a statement with which I agree. He said: There are other still more basic things that are imperative in this matter: food, shelter, air, and leisure. He was referring to the physical fitness campaign. He went on to say: I prefer the word food 'to nutrition.' As a scientist I am interested in calories and vitamins; as a doctor I am a little dubious whether nature really intended us to be so selective in our diet as some people suggest. But, as one who is anxious to avoid the delays that exasperate"— I take him to mean, avoid the delays that have been inherent in all the theories that come before us— I would say: Look after the accessibility of food, and nutrition will look after itself. That is the point to which I desire the Government to attend. It may be said that we have made progress, and admitedly we have, but the point to bear in mind is that we have made progress with very little effort. What progress could we not have made if the Government had made a real effort? It would have been much in excess of any progress that has actually been made. I do not want to be looked upon as emotional, but I have no objection to being looked upon as emotional. I think we should go ahead much more quickly if the world were emotional, because, where there is no emotion, there is no motion.

With regard to the departmental aspect of the matter, I am not sure that the Departments of Health and Agriculture and Fisheries are closely enough linked in this matter. I think there could be no harm in their being brought together and considering this matter in a dispassionate manner, and seeing how they could link their work. The Board of Trade, too, could pay a great deal of attention to the potentialities of trade in this country, instead of worrying about Tanganyika and other distant places all over the world; while the Ministry of Transport might advantage consider the possibilities of coordinating the collection and distribution of the things that are essential to the welfare of the people. There can be no over-production where there is hunger, and, as there is hunger, we do not admit that there is any over-production. I shall be told that nobody will produce unless they get a profit. That may be so, but why in heaven's name should we continue producing for profit when it is profit that is causing the misery in which we are at the present time, owing to the malnutrition which results from preventing people from getting food?

The pattern of the world was destroyed by the Great War. It was a pattern that had been built up by industrialists and financiers, who were interested in talking about stocks and shares, and very seldom about men and women. There is now a new pattern, which is called national self-sufficiency, but it will be necessary to pay more attention to the power of the people of this country to purchase food if self-sufficiency is to be brought about. People must have a higher standard than they have ever had before. I make no apology for moving this Motion. I notice that the Prime Minister, speaking at the Lord Mayor's Banquet, stated that we are practically back to the good year of 1929. We are not. We are further back than that, because in the good year of 1929 there were 1,200,000 people unemployed, and in the good year of 1937 there are 1,400,000 unemployed. You may tell me about the people who are now working, but I am not concerned with them; I am concerned with the people who need sustenance, who are suffering from malnutrition, and among them those 1,400,000 are included. It is for these reasons that I move this Motion.

4.26 p.m.

Mr. George Griffiths

I beg to second the Motion.

I am very pleased to have the opportunity of doing so, though having to follow my hon. Friend the Member for St. Rollox (Mr. Leonard) makes it rather a difficult task. It makes me feel rather like the man who sat one Sunday morning through a Salvation Army meeting. The officer had been holding forth for about 25 minutes, and it was five minutes to 12 o'clock. He said, "What further shall we say?" and one of the lads, who had had his breakfast pretty early, replied, "Say 'Amen,' Captain, and let us go home." After my hon. Friend's speech I feel that everybody could say "Amen" and at least ask the Government to do something in this matter. During the last few days I have been thinking about some of the new words that have cropped up lately. Among them is the word "malnutrition." It is a newly coined word as far as we are concerned. Another new word that we had from the President of the Board of Trade yesterday is "global." It made me wonder in what part of the globe this mining business is. Then we have had the word "complacency." The Chancellor of the Exchequer has made some play with that word, and one of his sentences has stuck in my mind. He said: We have not only to think about the men who are working part-time, but we have to think about the men who are working overtime. That is the kind of thing that helps to bring about complacency.

I want to deal for a moment or two with the word "malnutrition." To me, when I was a boy going to school some 5o years ago, malnutrition meant semi-starvation and I think that that is the workaday definition of malnutrition. I know something about it. I am not going to speak from someone else's theory this afternoon; I am going to speak from my own experience as a lad of 10 in a family of 10, whose dad had to work at the coal face 50 years ago and brought home from 18s. 6d. to 24s. each week. There were then seven of us in the family; the other three had not arrived. I knew what semi-starvation meant. I knew what it was to be without any milk at all till Sunday dinnertime, when there was a drop in the pudding. I never had any milk in my tea when I was a little boy. I understood then, as a lad, what malnutrition meant, namely, semi-starvation. We have to face up to these facts. There are many Members on the other side who have never had to go through that experience, though some have, but when I hear them telling us how to cook cods' heads—

Viscountess Astor

Who did?

Mr. Griffiths

In 1926, there came an expert to lecture to the women in my Division, when the lock-out was on, and she was telling those women, who sat with their mouths wide open, how to cook cods' heads. One of them got up and said, "Who is having the fish if we have to have the heads?" What I want to put across for the moment is that our people will know how to cook fish, and put the cods' heads in the bin afterwards, when they have the money to do it. I have got written here: "Malnutrition arises largely from under-feeding, from poverty, from insufficiency; and there is no graver or more momentous issue which can be discussed by this Parliament." I may possibly be putting it across the Floor in, shall I say, an unusual manner, but I am doing it in my own manner, and, as the last speaker stated, if there is not some emotion there is nothing, practically speaking. Some people say it is sentimental tosh; but you cannot live in the world to-day without some amount of sentiment, so that you can understand the reality of things. Although I may be putting it across in a way which may be jocular in a sense. I am in earnest, and I say that with all your theories about malnutrition, 90 per cent. of it arises because the people have not the wherewithal to buy food.

When I hear people telling my folk that they do not know how to cook, and that they are wasting their money—5½d. a day; not sufficient for some of these jokers to buy a cigar—I say that it is not that they do not know the value of food; it is that they do not know how to get the money to purchase it. If they could get that money, you would have at your door a market for your produce, without going to other parts of the world. We are not pushing the farmer down; we want him to have a decent living; but we say that his best market for his produce is not at the other end of the world, but in the mining districts where we live, and we are the best customers when we have money to spend. As the hon. Member for St. Rollox says, when the worker gets money he does not spend it in the South of France. [Interruption.] He does not spend it in America either; he spends it in the township in which he lives, and it circulates again the very next week.

Yet the people on the other side of the House are crying out about markets. The farmer is crying out about the milk. We will drink all the milk you produce if you will give us the money. We will eat all the eggs that the hens lay. I would sooner eat one British egg than all the Chinese eggs. There has not been much crying from those benches lately about the poultry business. That is because there has been cold weather and a scarcity of eggs, and the price has gone up. Milk, eggs and beef—there is nobody smacks his lips more over a bit of beef steak than I do, and it is the same with every miner. Our members know that if a miner is to get coal he has got to have beef, milk and eggs; otherwise, the output in the coal mine goes down. We say that if you raise the income, practically 80 per cent. of the malnutrition will vanish.

My hon. Friend said I should deal with prices, but, before I do, I want to give you some figures. Sir Robert McCarrison, in 1936, made this alarming statement: that, so far as state sickness was concerned, in regard to short sickness periods, it had gone up by 109 per cent; and in regard to long sickness periods, it had gone up by 103 per cent. That is largely because people have not enough to eat. They get run down, and the slightest cold that comes along, down they go. I have two instances out of my division which I shall never forget. I had got two boys working in the pit. One was 15½, and the other 14½. They met with slight accidents. They were taken to Beckett's Hospital, at Barnsley. They died as the result of the accident, and the foreman of the jury said to the doctor: "How do you account for these two boys not being able to recover from a minor accident like this?" The doctor said that these two boys were in such a state of ill-health that they went under, not so much on account of the accident as on account of the condition of their health. That did not happen in America or Russia, but in my division, and it was because they had not had sufficient to eat in their school days. That is malnutrition, that is semi-starvation; and that should be sufficient to make the Government, instead of lying in a bed of complacency, waken up and decide that, in this time of plenty, nobody should go short.

Of the children in our schools, official figures show that there are 26 per thousand who definitely require more and better food. I want the two vice-captains of the Ministry of Health and the Board of Education to listen to this. While, for the country over, the proportion of boys and girls at school who require more nourishment is 26 per 1,000, in Merthyr the proportion is 130 per 1,000; in Newcastle 172 per 1,000; and in Pontypridd, 210 per 1,000. Practically one-fifth of the boys and girls at Pontypridd require more food, and we are throwing it in the sea, keeping it away. I have a letter here from a farmer in Sussex. When the Minister of War stated that they were going to give the soldiers butter, instead of margarine, my name was mentioned, and this farmer wrote to me last March, saying that he wanted to grow more potatoes, that his quota was only three acres of potatoes, and that he was desirous of growing 23 acres. He said: I have written to the Potato Board. and they have written to tell me that if I grow these 23 acres I shall be fined£115.

Viscountess Astor

Hear, hear.

Mr. Griffiths

Hear, hear. They ought to be hanged.

Viscountess Astor

rose—

Mr. Griffiths

This is not a dialogue between you and me.

I want to quote a few more figures. In Sunderland, 26 per cent. of the young mothers are sub-normal. Next week, we shall have somebody on that side of the House shouting about population. I ask the Parliamentary Secretary, what are we going to do about these things? I hope he is not going to get up to-night and reply, in a complacent mood, that all is well, and that in the sweet by-and-by it will be so-and-so. I hope he is going to tell us to-day that the Government intend to do something in this matter. I have some more startling figures, too, but I have been told by some of my colleagues: "George, we hope you will cut it short; we want to speak, too." I would not mind cutting it short for some of my pals, but not for the noble Lady.

The figures which I want to quote now are not figures compiled by the Labour party, but the figures of the Committee of which the late Prime Minister's wife, Lady Baldwin, was chairman. They are figures which they themselves have dug out from South Wales and other places. This is an indictment of malnutrition. The figures relate to infant deaths for the seven years, 1927 to 1933, and maternal deaths for 1928–34, for a population of 6,148,000 in five mining counties and seven ports in the distressed areas. The number of infant deaths in the seven areas in those years was 64,052, and the number of maternal deaths 3,965. The corresponding figure of infant and maternal deaths in London and Middlesex, with the same population, was 38,629, and the deaths of mothers, 2,206. There were 25,000 more babies died, for the same population, in those distressed and semi-distressed areas, and 1,750 more mothers died for the same population in distressed areas as against areas which were comfortable. I do not say that they all died on account of malnutrition, but malnutrition prevailed very heavily in these districts, and was one of the causes of the high percentage as far as the deaths were concerned.

I want to give a few more figures, and they are from the women's section of the Labour party this time, and not from Lady Baldwin's party. The women's section of the Labour party investigated the conditions of 1,000 homes after Sir John Orr had published his book. They went from door to door, they were on the doorstep, and obtained first-hand information. Of this number 476 were unemployed men with families, not one of whom had more than 3s. per week per head for the family to spend upon food. Seven days a week, three meals a day, that is 21 meals, 3s., or 36 pennies, a rate of about 1½d. a meal. One hundred and seventy-nine of these families had not more than 2s. a week to spend on food—just over 1d. per meal. And then we say, "All's well in England," and we have some folk in this House telling us that the workingman's wife does not know how to spend her money on food values. Food values at 1d. a meal! It is disgraceful and an insult to the working women of this country. There is no waste as far as they are concerned in spending 5d. a day. I have here a Ministry of Health Report for 1932. [Interruption.] I know that you do not like these details.

Viscountess Astor

I am waiting to give them myself.

Mr. Griffiths

Well, you will not give them to-day—I am giving them. The Ministry of Health had a committee sitting on dietetics in 1932, and that committee stated in its report that in respect of children living in a home of not less than 200 children, where they were not buying food in pennyworths round the corner, but buying it wholesale, it cost 4s. 6½d. per head, and with the rise in prices to-day compared with the prices in 1932, that means 6s. per head. They were buying the food in bulk, and these facts were revealed as the result of the Ministry of Health's own inquiry. They threw that report into the waste-paper basket a good long while ago, but it was their own inquiry. If it costs 6s. per week in a home, where there are 200 children and the food is being bought wholesale, how much would it take where the mothers have to buy food retail in pennyworths? Yet the children are having only 3s. per head at the present time, and then we wonder why there is so much mal- nutrition. Who are the people who are suffering to-day? First of all there are the people who are on public assistance. I do not know whether the Minister has seen—I hope he has, for he was up to something last Saturday—the unrest up and down the country among the people who are receiving public assistance and who are on the point of starvation. A number of the local authorities have met in the North and have decided to give at least 10 per cent. more in out-relief than what they have been giving on account of the increase in the cost of living.

I said that I was going to speak from experience. Before I came into this House I was a member of a public assistance committee—the county committee and the guardians committee. The Ministry of Health sent their inspector into our district. I received a note one day and it said, "You are surcharged£80." When the letter was opened my wife said to me, "What have you been doing?" and I replied, "I have done now't wrong." I then explained to her that I was being surcharged along with six others, but we were surcharged varying amounts. If a member had missed a Wednesday sitting and had not been present when relief was granted to a certain person, a corresponding amount was knocked off, but the secretary of the branch and I were surcharged £80. We met the inspector later on and I said, "What are you surcharging us for?" and he replied, "You have given them too much. They have had too much income in the home." I said, "What are we to do?" and he replied, "You have only to relieve destitution." I said, "Will you tell us what is the standard of destitution?" and he replied, "We cannot tell you; the standard varies." I replied, "Well, it has varied with us." This conversation took place with the district inspector. We said that we were not going to pay the money, and we then had to go to Doncaster to meet another inspector. We were kept for five hours shut up in a room like criminals, though I am sure we did not look like criminals. A fortnight afterwards the inspector sent word, "You will have to pay 5s." We took the matter to the miners' branch and put the facts before a meeting of 2,500 men at which I was also a delegate. The men said, "George, you are not going to pay a penny of it. We will pay it out of our private fund." These people of whom I am speaking are now suffering from malnutrition and on the verge of semi-starvation.

One of these men met me a week last Saturday and was hardly as fat as an envelope looked at edgeways. He said, "George, how are we to go on?" He has been sick for some 15 years, and when I saw him he could hardly walk along the street. I can see him now. I worked in the next place to him 35 years ago when I first went to the pit. He was one of the best colliers who ever broke a piece of coal. He said that he and his wife could not "continue to go on like this. There ought to be something done. Are you going to do anything down yonder at the House for us?" I said, "When we get a chance, we will try and do what we can." They have not had their amount of out-relief increased yet, because if they give an increase the public assistance committee will be surcharged£80, or something like that. The Ministry hold them to certain things such as that. I ask the Ministry to think about those on out-relief, and the old age pensioners who receive 10s. a week, and 2s. 6d. which they get from the rates, which is practically all they have. I have an old lady of 84 in my constituency who said to me, "George"—they never call me Mr. Griffiths—"I wish you could get us another two bob. If I had another two bob I should be as happy as a bird on a tree. Do what you can to help to get us another couple of bob." And to think that we have folks talking about the scientific way of spending money and the values of food.

There are, first, the people on poor relief, secondly, the old age pensioners, and thirdly, the compensation men. I know what I am talking about; I am talking from experience, and not from a solicitor's theoretical book. I once had 3o weeks on compensation—21s, 3d. a week for myself, wife and two children, plus 4s. 9d. from the West Riding permanent relief fund—26s. in all. There was not a penny piece coming in from anywhere else for 30 weeks. A week last Saturday night I met one of my own men who was hurt 10 years ago. He is drawing 23s. 6d. a week, and the cost of living during the last two years has gone up by no less than 17 per cent. He has had the same amount for 10 years, and he does not receive any out-relief because he has a little lad working at the pit, and therefore cannot get out-relief. We of the Mining Association have over 8,000 men on our books who have been disabled for 10 years, and we are asking that something should be done for them. The hon. Member for Hitchin (Sir A. Wilson), who is to second the Amendment to this Motion, said in this House last Friday that the Workmen's Compensation Bill was not revolutionary enough for him, or he would support us wholeheartedly. I went to find out whom he did support, and I found that he went home without supporting anybody.

Sir Arnold Wilson indicated assent.

Mr. Griffiths

He did not either vote for or against. I never thought that the hon. Member for Hitchin was so revolutionary as to want to give the miner more than£3 when he was injured. Apparently he is. I hope that when we bring in a revolutionary Measure dealing with workmen's compensation we shall have the support of his vote in the Lobby. I have the latest figures given by the Ministry in respect of Poor Law relief at the present time. You never hear them talk about this on the benches opposite. Why? Because it is against them. At the present time in England and Wales, there are 1,287,618 persons on Poor Law relief, which means that there are 230,000 more now than when we were in office on the benches opposite. The President of the Board of Trade said yesterday that he had launched his magnificent Bill to get ready for another slump. I hope that the Minister to-day will give to us some consideration, and will say that the Government will do something as far as this matter is concerned.

I want to say another word about the hon. Member for Hitchin, and I know he will not mind. There are certain Members in this House who talk about malnutrition and about giving the workers something, and yet, when the opportunity conies, instead of giving the workers something, they march into the Lobby and do all they can to prevent the workers from getting it. On 23rd March, 1937, when the Agricultural Unemployment Bill was before the House for Third Reading, we pressed to a Division that the maximum amount should not be 30s., that: is, 14s. for the unemployed man, 7s. for the wife and 3s. each for three children. Hon. Members on the other side of the House said, in effect, to the agricultural labourer: "If you have more than three children, you can throw away the fourth, the fifth and the sixth where you like, because we will not give them a penny of maintenance." The hon. Member for Hitchin voted against the fourth child of the agricultural labourer having one penny piece. He voted for a maximum of 30s., and so did the hon. Member who is to move the Amendment. I would ask them how they reconcile that action with what they are saying to-day about the things the Government have done. What the Government have done has been to say to the agricultural labourer: "Look here, there must be birth control in your family after the third child, and if you do not stop there, and a fourth child comes, there will be nothing for the child."

5.3 p.m.

Mr. Hamilton Kerr

I beg to move, in line 1, to leave out from "with," to the end of the Question, and to add instead thereof: satisfaction the action taken and proposed to be taken to improve nutrition, and approves the continuous and successful efforts of His Majesty's Government to promote better health and social conditions in this country. I should like to congratulate the hon. Member for St. Rollox (Mr. Leonard) on the objective and sincere way in which he introduced the Motion. There was one phrase in his speech which particularly caught my fancy. He said there is no Motion without emotion. The problem of prices and its associated problem of nutrition, although it concerns itself with facts and figures is, as the hon. Member said, essentially a human problem. The problem of the loaf on the breakfast table affects equally every class which inhabits this country. It affects equally the worker in the great industrial city, the agricultural labourer in his cottage and the black-coated worker in his garden city residence. Perhaps many hon. Members opposite, like myself, have often watched on a Saturday evening the housewives in their constituency going on their rounds of purchases. They will have seen them with baskets on their arms, sometimes pushing a perambulator, passing from shop to shop and shrewdly assessing the various prices of the goods which the shops offer. They will have seen them standing at the windows trying to decide whether they will buy New Zealand or Danish butter, or more often trying to decide whether for their midday meal on Sunday they could afford a prime cut of beef.

The hon. Member for Hemsworth (Mr. G. Griffiths), whose speech so attracted the House, drew attention to rising prices. Before I proceed to discuss that question I should like to congratulate the hon. Member upon the knowledge he displayed in regard to such delicacies as cods' heads. Having listened to his speech I can readily understand that it was his eloquence which overcame the opposition of the War Office, and persuaded it to adopt butter instead of margarine as a staple food for the Army. Such an achievement is very notable. His constituents will not be able to say of him what two ladies once said when they were discussing the engagement of a certain young lady. Said one: "Have you heard that Erica is to marry her X-ray specialist?" "Is she?" said the other, "Well, no one else can see anything in her."

I do not want to worry the House with too many facts and figures which are dry things at best, but as the question of rising prices was mentioned, I should like, as briefly and as concisely as I may, to talk about the question of prices. Are rising prices a bad thing? Hon. Members will recollect that the representatives of the British Commonwealth of Nations, who met at Ottawa, decided that one of the first essentials of a world return to prosperity was a rise in commodity prices. Subsequently, those nations which sent their representatives to the World Economic Conference at the Science Museum in London decided that the first essential for a return to world prosperity was a rise in prices.

Economists never wearied of telling us in those days that the producers of primary products, like the farmers in the great wheat belts of America and Canada, were compelled not only to dismiss their labourers, but were unable to pay the fixed debt charge they owed to the banks for the purchase of agricultural machinery, because the price of wheat was so disastrously low in the world market. Seeing that a rise in prices was universally admitted as a necessity and as irresistible, we have to ask ourselves two questions: (1) has the rise in prices gone too far, and (2), has it outgrown the purchasing power of the masses of the people of this country? I cannot do better than quote from an article written by Mr. Johnstone, which appeared in the "Daily Telegraph" on 5th November. In that article he compares the cost of living index in 1930 and 1937. In 1930, a year of gradually deepening depression, of rising unemployment and of goods from abroad flooding the home market, the index was 138. In 1937, a year of record employment, of industries booming and of high levels of production. the figure was 145, or a rise of 3¼ per cent. How have wages responded to this movement? The Ministry of Labour index shows that wages since 1930 have risen by 4 per cent., so that as far as facts and figures go that cancels out the rise in prices.

Before I proceed to discuss the aspects of malnutrition I should like to address a few arguments to the House with regard to imports. Can we see any conceivable means of controlling the prices of imports? The Advisory Committee on Nutrition, which hon. Members have quoted, analyses our chief imports from abroad, briefly, as flour, meat, butter, margarine, and fruit. It must be obvious that we cannot possibly control the price of these commodities in the great open markets of the world. There are such things as drought, market conditions and little dislocations which arise from time to time in world markets. Therefore, whether we like it or not, we cannot control the prices of these commodities when they come to this country. How far is it true that the tariff policy of the Government has artificially forced up the price of food? I should like to quote briefly again from the same article in the "Daily Telegraph." Taking the years 1930 and 1931 in the first nine months the value of imports coming into this country was£202,000,000. If we add to that figure the amount which the Sugar Duty brought in we have an aggregate sum of£212,000,000. Taking the year 1937, in the first nine months the value of imports was£190,000,000. If we add to that figure£22,000,000 in respect of the Sugar Duties and the Ottawa duties and other duties, we reach a total figure of£212,000,000. Therefore, the value of the imports in those two periods is virtually the same. If we translate the quantities imported in 1930 into the values of 1937, we have a figure of £191,000,000, and if we translate the 1937 quantities into the values of 1930 the figure is£206,000,000.

I pass rapidly over these figures because I know they are dry and uninspiring things at the best. With regard to prices, we have to consider what our policy should be. Should we continue the policy which we have pursued up to now, which has had three bases: (1) sound finance, (2) moderate protection of the market and (3) trade agreements with countries overseas. What is the alternative? The only alternative to that policy is to subsidise the consumer. During the War, during the heat of that conflict in 1917, when we stood with our backs to the wall, the Royal Commission on Wheat Supplies was initiated. That Royal Commission bought wheat from the wheat producers at world prices and sold the wheat to the millers at a price which, allowing for manufacturing costs, would allow the 4–1b. loaf to be sold for 9d. From September, 1917, to December, 1920. when the Wheat Commission finished its labours, those transactions had cost the country no less than£162,000,000 or, roughly, an average of over£50,000,000 a year. Therefore, it seems to me that this policy of subsidising the consumer would be a very expensive alternative to the methods we have already tried.

I know that hon. Members opposite will not agree as to some of the results which the Government have claimed for these efforts. But I think no one can deny—I am talking of the present and not of the future—that, as things stand, the improvement that we see in the country to-day has gone a very long way. Translated from facts and figures into everyday details it means that whereas formerly we saw great queues of unemployed stretching outside the Exchanges, there are now notices at the Exchanges calling for skilled labour, more ships are coming into and going out of the ports, more people are travelling on the railways, and those terrible slums, those narrow airless courts in our great cities, are fast disappearing, and giving way to vast housing estates along the big arterial roads.

Having covered briefly the ground an these aspects of the question, I want to talk not of the past, but of the present and the future. We have to consider, par- titularly when we seek to deal with this problem from the human point of view, that class of unfortunate men and women who have not been able up to the present time to find employment. They are to be found principally among the older age groups of men and women over 45. They are to be found in areas such as South Wales, Scotland, Lancashire and Tyneside, areas where formerly the entire work was devoted to one particular industry, and where when the crisis came, there was no alternative either in the form of light industries or other industries to fall back upon. When I think of these people I particularly welcome the instruction of the Unemployment Assistance Board to their officers to make special provision for them in cases where the rises in prices have begun to affect them. They are the people who cannot be too often remembered on the Floor of this House, men and women who have spent their lives in industry and whose enforced idleness really hurts their sense of self-respect. The self-respect of working men and women is a most important and valuable thing to sustain.

What of the future? The Advisory Committee on Nutrition, quoted by the hon. Member for Hemsworth, brought out one important fact. When they analysed the foods required for human welfare under three heads, calories, fats and proteins, they drew attention to the fact that the consumption of milk in this country is only half what it ought to be. We all welcome a more vigorous milk policy. We know that milk is being distributed to school children, and I see from the figures one interesting fact. Whereas 92 per cent. of the schools in this country are included under the milk scheme, not more than 5o per cent. of the children avail themselves of the milk supplied. There is certainly need of vigorous propaganda to bring home to the people the benefits which milk can give to growing children, and the foundation of health which it can give for after-life.

I think that a great deal can be done in further research into the whole question of nutrition. Therefore I was particularly interested to read in the report of the Advisory Committee on Nutrition that two committees are due to set to work; the first on the question of income distribution and the second household budgets. We ought to know much more about the income distribution of the people of the country. A short time ago a totally unofficial body, the London Press Association, produced statistics in a book called "The Home Market" which divided incomes of the people of this country into three groups—one group above£10 a week, the second group between£4 and£10, and the third under£4 a week. The result, to my mind, was so interesting, that I hope the committee which the Ministry of Health are setting up will speedily produce official figures. When we discuss the whole problem of nutrition we should know exactly how much the average working family spends on meat, vegetables, repairs, omnibus fares, etc. With these two committees pursuing their investigations I hope we shall finally have an authoritative pronouncement on the whole question of food values. It interested me very much, while listening to the speeches of the Mover and the Seconder, to see how evidence from expert sources differs on the whole question of nutrition. A great step forward would be taken if we could get an official pronouncement.

The British housewife has often been maligned on account of her lack of cooking knowledge, but I have to confess, considering the immense difficulties that she has to face, that she does very well indeed. The average working-class woman not only has to give breakfast to her husband and send him off to work, but wash the children and send them to school. When they are gone she has to clean the house. Many hon. Members doubtless have had the same experience as I have had myself in some of the great industrial towns where even the smallest houses are spotlessly clean and the stove is polished as brightly as a patent leather shoe. The housewife has to do this as well as bake and wash. She is often too tired to go out and receive cooking instruction. Therefore I think when the investigation into the whole question of nutrition has been completed, every local authority should, in conjunction with the Ministry of Health, be able to circulate into every home specialised knowledge on the values of food. The actual circulation would not cost much, but the effect would be excellent. Public health would immediately improve, and disease decline. I am certain that the British housewife would once more be able to return to those proud traditions, so talked of in the eighteenth century, when British cooking was the envy and admiration of foreigners when they visited this country.

5.19 p.m.

Sir Arnold Wilson

I beg to second the Amendment.

Before I deal with it I will answer the hon. Member for Hemsworth (Mr. G. Griffiths). He asks why I voted in favour of the Unemployment Insurance (Agriculture) Bill, 1936. I did so because my constituents include a large number of farm workers and I am satisfied that I was representing their views in holding that it would be a mistake to bring agricultural unemployment benefit substantially above the current rate of wages payable in a county in which there is practically no unemployment among able-bodied farm workers and demand even for the older men beyond the insurable age. He has also asked me why I did not vote on Second Reading of the Workmen's Compensation Bill moved from the Socialist benches last Friday providing, amongst other things, larger allowances to men temporarily disabled by industrial accidents. I spoke for nearly half an hour to explain why, and I will repeat it very shortly. I wished to wait until the two committees set up by the Home Office had reported and I hold, personally, the view that workmen's compensation should be removed from the sphere of private profit and correlated with National Health Insurance.

Having said that, I turn to the Amendment itself. We have had a most pessimistic view put forward by the hon. Member for St. Rollox (Mr. Leonard). I am sorry he is not here to be cheered up. We have also had a gloomy report of his experiences in the happily long-distant past by the hon. Member for Hemsworth, but the fact is that the standard of nutrition in this country is unquestionably higher to-day than in any other country in Europe, and probably much higher than in the great cities of America. The Board of Trade figures show a steady increase in the consumption of meat, butter, cheese and of imported fruit year by year in this country, and there has been no recession for the past five years in the increase in consumption of the most valuable and protective foodstuffs. The figures are incontestable.

When we come to the question of the Oslo breakfast, so far as this country is concerned there are very few working men in this country who would wish to live on Oslo diet. We are far ahead of Norway and we have no reason whatever to be ashamed of our own progress in the last five years. The proportion of British working-class wages spent on food is lower than in any other country in Europe though the proportion spent on rent and burial money is, I believe, substantially higher. There is more money left for the amenities of life of wage-earners in this country than in any other country in Europe, and I am the last to under-estimate the importance of the amenities of life as part of nutrition. The sum spent on tobacco in this country is incomparably higher than elsewhere. I leave beer to the Noble Lady who, I hope, will follow me.

Viscountess Astor

No, you deal with it.

Sir A. Wilson

Let us be perfectly clear what beer is. Whilst I differ from my Noble Friend in regarding beer as a food, it is also a luxury, and the expenditure on it has gone up for some years past. The money spent on quasi luxuries could be spent with advantage in some cases in other directions. The proportion spent on bread, on the other hand, has actually decreased. It is 10 per cent. lower than it was twenty years ago, perhaps because we have got into the habit in this country of eating inferior bread. I am fortunate at home in having a wife who with her own hands bakes for the family bread of British stone-ground flour, and I go home knowing that I shall have some really good bread and butter.

The hon. Member for St. Rollox referred to Sir John Orr's authority as being unchallenged and unchallengeable. I do not accept his deductions as scientifically accurate or his estimates as reasonably precise. His conclusions depend upon many approximations. They are based on uncertain data and some of his generalisations are not logically supported or statistically sound. He relies on the assumption that the necessary money cost of food is equal at all ages. If any hon. Member is interested in more detailed criticism I should refer him to an article by an equally unchallengeable statistician, Professor A. L. Bowley, in "The Nineteenth Century and After," December, 1936. Neither Sir John On nor the International Labour Office nor the Women's Co-operative Committee who were collecting information in South Wales, can tell us more than that there is malnutrition in lower-paid categories of workers—but they cannot tell us anything as to its incidence or extent. The importance of more data has been emphasised by the hon. Mover of the Amendment. Until e get it we should not accept the gloomy descriptions we have had from the Opposition benches. All we really know from these reports of the International Labour Office is that in certain countries wages and other resources are insufficient to provide adequate diet. There is very good ground for that, but there is no valid estimate of its extent and we must await the further researches of the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Labour.

Malnutrition before the age of five in some degree is not uncommon in the poorer families and particularly in the distressed areas, but I am unable to accept the statistics of the hon. Member for St. Rollox. I am sorry he is not here or perhaps he would put me right. I went off to the Library to consult the Annual Report of the Registrar-General, in which I found that the infant mortality per 1,000 live births from all causes in 1926 was 70, and in 1936 56, and there has been a successive reduction during each intervening year. I cannot square those figures with those quoted by the hon. Gentleman.

Viscountess Astor

I think he was talking about just one certain area.

Mr. G. Griffiths

Glasgow.

Sir A. Wilson

So far as England and Wales as a whole is concerned—Scottish pride prevents Scotland being printed with the figures for England and Wales—the mortality figures under five years of age have dropped since 1910 from 36 to 17, and under ten from 3 to 2, a 50 per cent. improvement. There is no reason for depression there and much for encouragement. Malnutrition of expectant mothers is another reality which the Government's Milk Bill will seek to remedy. The White Paper states that the Government regard the continuance of the scheme of the provision of cheap milk as of the greatest importance.

Mr. G. Griffiths

When the hon. Gentleman refers to malnutrition of expectant mothers does he classify them?

Sir A. Wilson

No, they are not classified at all. It is a general statement and I have reason to believe that the malnutrition of expectant mothers is much more widespread than would be gathered from the wage average. In the Liverpool area it appears that mothers coming from homes where there was ample money coming in were on the whole less healthy at childbirth and were suffering more from malnutrition in the purely technical sense of the word—not semi-starvation—than those coming from the poorest homes.

Mr. G. Griffiths

The figures for the West Riding of Yorkshire for 1936 show that out of 92 deaths 51 were of poor mothers.

Sir A. Wilson

I gather from the report of the chief medical officer of health that a special inquiry is on foot in the West Riding which will doubtless cover that point. I am not disputing the need for milk. I am pointing out that the Government have decided to carry on the milk scheme and to develop it further, and I am speaking in support of an Amendment which views with satisfaction what the Government are doing and propose to do. Why should we he despondent?

In the past 10 years deaths from diseases directly or indirectly due to malnutrition have dropped for the most part by half, intestinal tuberculosis by half, rickets by half, infantile convulsions by one-third, diarrhoea and enteritis by half, diseases of pregnancy by 10 per cent., deaths under one year have dropped from 70 to 56 per 1,000, and the report of the chief medical officer indicates that the public health has been thoroughly well maintained. Malnutrition due to insufficient means does exist, but it is to a relatively small extent among families of unskilled wage-earners in regular employment.

The real causes of malnutrition are six in number, long-continued unemployment, prolonged sickness or physical disability, bad environment, insufficient purchasing power, poor quality of many of the foodstuffs available, and lastly the irreducible element of human incapacity and carelessness which is found equally in all classes in the country. Indeed, as far as cooking is concerned, I am inclined to think incapacity is less common among the poor than it is among those who are comparatively well-to-do, and who are more inclined to be unduly affected by advertisements of patent and preserved foods. Long-continued unemployment is one of the principal causes of malnutrition, but it is one for which you cannot condemn the National Government. Year after year the figures for unemployment have shown an improvement and there is no evidence as yet that the rates fixed by the Unemployment Assistance Board are inadequate as compared with the figures and cost of living for 1929. But the problem is admittedly serious. There are 460,000 insured persons, men, who have been unemployed for more than three months, and 260,000 of these who have been unemployed for more than 12 months. Assuming that half of these are breadwinners of families there may be 1,000,000 persons in that group who are affected by long-continued unemployment. But this problem, too, is being tackled with success. The report of the Chief Medical Officer of Health on the state of public health makes this reference to Newcastle, one of the distressed areas, where three-quarters of the unemployed have been unemployed for more than 12 months: The majority of families even of the unemployed were receiving diets which were not seriously inadequate according to commonly accepted standards. That is the report by an impartial authority. There is great activity going on in the Ministry of Health and other Government Departments in this matter. A dietary survey by the Ministry of Health is in progress, the Ministry of Labour is collecting material on family budgets and the Minister of Labour has made it clear that the Unemployment Assistance Board and public assistance committees should use a wise discretion in increasing grants in order to meet cases of need and rising prices.

I turn now to insufficient purchasing power, one of the oldest complaints of mankind. The spread between wholesale and retail prices in this country is far greater in relation to vegetables, fish and other perishable produce than in regard to any other class of produce. To a large extent this is because we have lost the costermonger and the public market frequented so much formerly by housewives. That is not a matter in which the Government can possibly accept blame or exercise a great measure of control. The costermonger has been driven out largely by the local authorities. There was a time when he went from one end of the town to the other selling his produce for what he could get for it. Now we are in the hands of the shopkeeper and the great general stores, and to keep prices up they are sometimes prepared to allow perishable commodities to be destroyed. The costermonger performed very valuable functions, and so did the retail market.

I went to the town in which I was bred, Rochdale, a year ago, and I visited the old market where I used to go with my nurse to get celery, potatoes, cabbages, and eggs straight from those who grew them, at the cheapest retail prices. It was dilapidated and dirty—not a place to which a housewife would willingly go and was being much less used than formerly. Nobody who has a new housing estate in his constituency can be unaware that one of the principal troubles of the residents is not that they are paying high rents or have to travel a long way to their job, but that retail prices for ordinary commodities are higher than in the old markets to which they were accustomed to go. I should like to see a committee appointed to consider how public retail markets can be encouraged. Something must be done to prevent the spread of prices in regard to perishable commodities which contain all the vitamins we want. Hannah More said: Know when to save and when to spare, And where to buy and thou shalt ne'er be bare."

Where to buy is a much more difficult problem to-day than it used to be when the retail markets were free. Bad environment is another cause of malnutrition. Has any Government done more than or even as much as the National Government to improve environment? Housing schemes sponsored by the Government are now developing and whole slum areas are disappearing. Some hon. Members have been complaining about high rents. The annual return of the Ministry of Health, Command Paper 5527, July, 1937, dealing with rents of flats and houses owned by local authorities, shows that out of 886,000 houses owned by local authorities more than half, 462,000 to be accurate, were let at rents of less than 8s. a week and about three-quarters at under 10s. per week.

Mr. G. Griffiths

Plus rates?

Sir A. Wilson

These figures exclude rates. In fact the Government are tackling bad environment with success. Then there is another aspect of insufficient purchasing power and that is the high standing charges of family budgets for things other than food and fuel. Every shilling on the rates is a shilling off the table. Local authorities to my mind are spending more than they should in what are, comparatively speaking, luxuries, thus adding to the rates and reducing the amount of food that a family can buy. The increase of the rates is serious but there again the Government have no responsibility. [An HON. MEMBER: "What does the hon. Member mean by luxuries?"] I am thinking of swimming baths, larger and more expensive roads, and the large palaces which are being erected to house local governments. There is, I think, a tendency towards extravagance which I should like to see checked. All this is having an effect on the rates, and the rates have an effect on the amount available for food.

Then there is a question which I perhaps shall be out of order in dealing with in any detail—the question of burial money policies. Every inquiry made by the Labour party or by any independent authority has shown the great strain on working-class budgets of these burial policies. A recent inquiry in South Wales showed that it worked out at an average of 4s. per family for a dozen or more families, all of whom were unemployed but who had to go on paying, otherwise they would have lost every penny they had put in. Dr. Gonigle and Dr. Kirby of Stockton-on-Tees put this amount at 2s. 9d., and the average is from 2S. 6d. to 4s. per week. It is "useless thrift" for men who are not getting enough food and whose children are not being properly fed and clothed to pay 2S. 6d.-4s. in order to provide for their burial. Of course, the surrender value is next to nothing. I should like to see this system drastically reformed. There is£70,000,000 a year of working-class money going into it, collected from door to door, and I have no doubt that we could save£40,000,000 of this money. The Financial Secretary to the Treasury in the last Government said that the Government contemplated legislation and I have no reason to think that it will not be introduced.

I turn finally to the question of the quality of food available for sale. The Ministry of Health had a thoroughgoing inquiry into adulteration, a Departmental Committee has sat, the Acts of Parliament are being consolidated, and I understand that the Minister has announced that he hopes shortly to promote legislation dealing with the whole question of adulteration. That is not likely to be a controversial Measure. I hope bread is tackled. I think that the herring deserves almost as much consideration as bread, and I hope that the National Government will deal with the herring industry in order to increase the consumption of herring, and will succeed in establishing the herring more firmly on the breakfast table.

Mr. Banfield

The hon. Member has made a charge about the adulteration of bread. I am a bit of an expert on this question, as he knows, and I should like to ask what he means by adulteration?

Sir A. Wilson

I must plead not guilty to having said that bread is adulterated. I said it is of very inferior quality. It is being stripped, for hedonistic purposes, of some of its more valuable constituents, which I understand are being fed to fowls, and a perfectly white, tasteless, odourless paste, only palatable when eaten quite fresh, and not always then, is handed out in slices to children, who are told it is bread. My children will not eat what is known as baker's bread, but prefer the bread made of the old stone-ground flour, the difference between the two being tremendous.

Mr. Banfield

The hon. Gentleman's complaint is not against the bakers, but against the millers, who are responsible for the flour. May I tell the hon. Gentleman that the stone-ground flour of which he speaks used to be called super-bran?

Sir A. Wilson

I have not mentioned the bakers. I should be the last to do so, for I have no reason to think that they are not doing their best with the somewhat indifferent materials that are supplied.

Mr. Banfield

That is very handsome of the hon. Gentleman.

Sir A. Wilson

For the rest, we are continuing the campaign for improved health and improved nutrition. The physical fitness compaign, the campaigns of the Milk, Herring and Potato Boards, the efforts to get people to eat more fish and more potatoes, and to drink more milk, are going ahead, all under the direct auspices of boards set up by the National Government. We are going ahead on a broad front, with the assistance of a great number of persons of good will outside this House. As Lord Chancellor Bacon wrote to the King in 162o: For the good that comes of particular and select committees and commissions, I need not commonplace…it will make many good spirits, that NA e think little of. co-operate in them. The National Government have every reason to look forward to a steady repetition in future years of the improved figures both of health and of mortality and of consumption which has marked the whole progress of our nutrition campaign for the past five years.

5.48 p.m.

Mr. Ridley

I listened with interest to the speeches made by my two hon. Friends in moving and seconding the Motion. I wish to direct my brief remarks to a special aspect of this problem, but before doing so I will comment on one or two of the observations made by the hon. Member for Hitchin (Sir A. Wilson). The hon. Member derived an undue measure of satisfaction from what he conceives to be the improved standard of public health during the last few years resulting from the efforts of this Government and previous Governments of a similar nature. The hon. Gentleman said that the standard of nutrition in this country is higher than in any other country in Europe and that there has been, in a specified number of years, a 50 per cent. improvement in the infantile mortality figures.

I listened to the hon. Member with considerable attention, but I did not hear him make any reference to which I consider to be two of the principal factors that have contributed to any measure of improvement. The first is unmistakably the growth of the trade union movement. During the last quarter of a century, the growth of the trade union movement has compelled the unwilling employer—frequently the unwilling Conservative employer—to give a less inadequate standard of wages than was the case before the trade union movement secured power and influence. The party opposite, with which the hon. Member is associated, has done its best, sometimes with brutality and frequently with cruelty, to oppose the growth of the trade union movement. [HON. MEMBERS: "Nonsense!"] If hon. Members opposite were to-day employés of the Union Bank of Scotland they would be experiencing, even in 1937, the shadow of that kind of anti-trade union activity.

Secondly, supporters of the Government cause considerable annoyance to my hon. Friends on this side when they take credit for the growth of the social services system which, during the last 25 years, has undoubtedly made a considerable contribution to the standard of public health. But the great social services system of this country has been wrung, by constant pressure by my hon. Friends, out of successive reluctant Conservative Governments. There is hardly a social service in existence that has not been opposed in its initial stages by the very people who, in 1937, claim the political credit for it. It is not inappropriate for me to tell the House, particularly in view of what I intend to say in a few minutes, that some six or seven months ago, on a Wednesday afternoon, I went to the Library to read the Debate on the 1906 Act concerning the feeding of necessitous children, a very miserable and meagre little Act. I discovered that that Act was vigorously opposed by Conservative Members of the House at that time, and that the leader of the Opposition, in the Committee stage, said that the Bill would lead to the prolific production of children, to the improvident marriage of young persons at the ages of 19 and 20, and would be a deliberate incitement to the working classes to spend their money on drink. Whatever improvements have been made in the standard of public health during the last quarter of a century have been due far more to the work of my hon. Friends than to the present Government.

I am glad that the Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Education is in his place, because I desire especially to direct attention to the last report of the Board of Education. On page 48 of that report, in connection with the nutrition and feeding of school children, it is stated that the medical officers of the Board, as a result of the 1936 investigations and returns, reported that 74 . 1 per cent. of the school children were in a normal condition of health, and the report goes on: In the country as a whole school medical officers found no evidence of any general deterioration in the condition of the children as a result of the economic stress of recent years. I would like to ask one or two questions. From what standard was there "no evidence of any general deterioration?" Secondly, the report says that 74 . 1 per cent. of the children were in normal health. What does the word "normal" signify? Is there one standard of health for all the school children—public school, secondary school and elementary school like—which is regarded by the Board as the normal standard of health, or are there, as I fear, different standards of normalcy for different social classes of children in different areas and even in different schools in the same area? The normal health in the middle-class group is a higher normal health than it is among the working-class children. It is notorious, and it is supported by the figures that were given by my hon. Friend the Member for St. Rollox (Mr. Leonard), that in any public school at a given age a child is higher and heavier than is his less fortunate brother of the same age in an elementary school.

I wish I could avoid the conclusion that in this matter, just as the Board of Education still has a class view of the type of education that working-class children are entitled to have—the elementary type of education—so it has a class view as to the normal health that an elementary school child is entitled to enjoy. It believes that those children are entitled only to an elementary education and that similarly they are entitled only to an elementary standard of health. I am certain that if one took the whole of the children from any elementary school in my division, 74.1 of whom on the average would be regarded, in terms of the Board's report, as being normal, and put them into any reasonably comfortable middle-class town and had them inspected by the medical officer in relation to the normal standard of school-child health there, they would all be found to be substandard, and not normal standard. They are regarded by the Board as being normal only because they conform to the average of their own school and of their own area, and not because they conform to the general average of health throughout the whole scholastic system.

I wish, also, to draw attention to the investigation carried out in Newcastle to which my hon. Friend the Member for St. Rollox (Mr. Leonard) referred. I wish to quote two or three other figures from the investigation in support of the point that was so well made by my hon. Friend. A sub-standard of nutrition does not only mean shorter height and lower weight, but, what is very serious indeed, a lowered capacity of disease resistance. It was shown in the Newcastle investigation that out of 124 children in the better class, two had had pneumonia, one pleurisy and two chronic recurring coughs. In the working class, 17 had had pneumonia and 32 bronchitis. It was shown that in the better class group, 6 had had measles, and that in the working-class group, 46 had had measles. There is definitely a class distinction in the assessment of child health as between a child in the elementary school in an area such as that covered by my constituency and a child who was much more fortunate in discriminating as to the type of parents he would like to have. In order to pursue the point, I will draw the attention of the Parliamentary Secretary to the last part of paragraph 20 of this part of the report, in which it is stated: In some areas the arrangements for the discovery of under-nourished children are not yet complete. How, then, can we place any reliance upon the figures produced in the report when the report itself states that the arrangements for discovering undernourished children are not yet complete? In others the income scales adopted for the purpose of assessing the parents' ability to pay are too severe, while in others the food provided, the service of the meals, and the premises in which they are served are all or severally open to criticism. The need for the periodical nutrition surveys recommended in paragraph 7 of Circular 1443 has been strikingly proved in an urban area in Lancashire where, until 1936, only tree milk was provided for about 700 children. As the result of a thorough nutrition survey"— How many areas are there where a thorough nutrition survey has to be undertaken for the first time?— it was found that 1,300 additional children were in need of supplementary nourishment, and a complete scheme for the provision of meals and/or milk is now in operation. Paragraph 20 of the Board's report is completely inconsistent with the satisfaction expressed in an earlier paragraph. I seriously urge on the Government that these grave disparities as regards child health, between one area and another, between the Special Areas, for instance, and areas like my own which while not Special Areas are still distressed areas, and areas which are more comfortably off, are having a very serious anti-social effect. The present inadequacies in the provision made for the working-class child lead to a lowering of physical efficiency and also to a lowering of the capacity for disease resistance. In my constituency which, as I say, is not as bad as the Special Areas there are, I am sure, hundreds of children who are denied a regular and satisfactory amount of meat, milk, butter, eggs, cream, fruit and all those things in which the children of most Members of this House can enjoy freely when their appetite tempts them to do so. There is also the question of the capacity for enjoying holidays at the seaside. I would not mention this subject were it not that earlier references have been made to it. There must be still thousands of children in this country who have never played on the sands, who have never bathed in the sea, who have never bared their bodies to the sun who have been denied not only the opportunities of enjoyment, but the opportunities for recuperation which they seriously need.

For those reasons I direct attention to the present operation of the school meals arrangements. The Board of Education in the last few days has been courteous enough to supply me with some interesting and up-to-date information, and I discover from a careful analysis of that information, that, taking counties and boroughs and county boroughs, the following are the percentages in each of those three categories, of authorities which provide nothing at all—neither milk nor solid meals. In the case of counties, 41 per cent. provide nothing. In the case of boroughs 24 per cent. provide nothing and in the case of county boroughs 3 per cent. provide nothing. I suggest that there is scope for political reflection in those figures and the Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Education may be able to understand how it is that in the case of the county boroughs, 97 per cent. of the authorities provide something, while in the case of the county councils only 59 per cent. provide anything at all. Taking the same three categories again, we find that of the counties, 87 per cent. provide no solid food; of the boroughs 66 per cent. provide no solid food and of the county boroughs only 19 per cent. provide no solid food.

I wish particularly to draw attention to the inadequacy of the present arrangements in the county in which my own constituency is situated. The Derbyshire County Council does not provide one free solid meal for one child in the whole of that county. To those who know that the coalfield in Derbyshire is a pretty considerable one, and who know something of the present depressed condition of the people in the mining industry, it is a shocking thing, that, in the whole of that county, as far as I know, up to 31st March, 1936, not one free solid meal was provided for one school child. That is not due, as the Parliamentary Secretary once urged, to rural difficulties. It is due to a complete absence of sympathy or willingness. Despite what the Board of Education has attempted, it has not yet clone enough to persuade reluctant local authorities, with an unsympathetic political point of view, to make use of the provisions which are on the Statute Book for this purpose. It is only by doing so, that we can avoid a substantial deterioration in the public health with its obviously serious results, and also avoid the complete frustration of the whole process of our educational system.

6.7 p.m.

Viscountess Astor

While I am grateful to the hon. Member who put down this Motion for discussion, I am sorry that in the course of the Debate we have heard from some hon. Members the old cry of class consciousness. Nothing upsets me more than to hear people talk about class consciousness. I do not happen to be class conscious, and I find that when questions of class distinctions between different sections of the community are introduced in a discussion, one always gets away from the facts. This is a Debate in which we want to face the facts, to find out whether the Government are doing enough and try, if possible, to make them do more. I am not going to condemn the Government. Personally, I am deeply grateful to the Government for all they have done. I have been in the House long enough to have seen a good many Governments come and go. I had to sit here from 1929 to 1931 and watch our social services disappearing. had to watch the unemployment figures going up, and up and up, and the trade figures going down, and down and down, until the National Government came in and not only saved the country, but saved our social services.

I am the last person in the world to condemn the Government in regard to the social services. I watched them face the slum problem in this country. No other country in the world has done as much in as short a time to deal with that problem as this country. I remember the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Wakefield (Mr. Greenwood) before he was Minister of Health, and I remember his promises. I heard Mr. Sidney Webb, as he then was, and others talking about the Socialist schemes that were all ready and cut-and-dried and only waiting until the party got into office. When they got into office we sat here for two years and said, "Show us your schemes. We do not care what they are; if they are workable, give them to us."

Mr. T. Johnston

The Noble Lady, I understand, is referring to slums. Has she forgotten that the first attack on the slums was made in the 1930 Act passed by the Labour Government?

Viscountess Astor

I remember that Act perfectly. The Government to which the right hon. Gentleman belonged did nothing else but pass that Act. As I say, we used to ask hon. Members opposite to show us their schemes, but they had not any plans that would work. They have told us a lot about the atrocities of the capitalist system. I say we should thank God that we have a capitalist system and a Government who believe in it, instead of a Government who have only theories that will not work. I am not here to apologise for the National Government. This Government, faced with the slum problem could have said, "We are doing pretty well about housing, and we are carrying on as all other Governments have done, and that is enough." But they did not say that. They said that the slum problem had to be faced, and they got to work and they did something about it.

I want to put this question to them. Are they going to face the question of malnutrition as they faced the slum problem? They can claim that they are the only Government who have given milk to the school children. They can claim that the system of school meals has extended enormously. We know that our social services are the finest in the world. But, even all that the Government are doing will not solve the problem of malnutrition, and I want to see them tackle that problem just as they tackled the slums. I know there is a terrific temptation to make political capital out of these questions. It is very easy to hit the Opposition in discussions of this kind, and, indeed, I do like to hit them because it is too easy, but my experience in this House goes back for some time. It is all very well for comparatively new Members opposite to make statements such as we have heard, but they cannot get past an old bird like me with such statements. The kind of exaggeration which we hear from the Members of the Opposition will not do any good. We heard the hon. Member who moved the Motion speaking about great numbers of people being hungry and in want, but exaggeration will not solve the problem. The Government say "The problem is there, and we must see what it is possible to do about it, but until the extent of the problem has been defined we cannot know what to do." It is no good hon. Members opposite asking them to set up another committee. I hope the Government will do nothing of the kind. I am suspicious of too many committees.

We have new knowledge of malnutrition to-day just as we had new knowledge about slums and housing when we set about dealing with those problems. A century ago, the medical officers of health, if there were any at that time, would have been content with the conditions which existed when we started to deal with the slums. But we have new knowledge about the appalling effect of slum dwellings on the health of the people and I would say that the wife of a miner's leader or a trade union Member of this House to-day has far more comforts and lives on a higher standard than a queen of a hundred years ago. We cannot go back as some hon. Members are constantly trying to do. We want to go forward. We have to-day a higher standard of nutrition. It is interesting to note that an international body representative of eight countries, was set up to consider this subject, and they agreed that malnutrition was not confined to the poor countries, but existed in the rich countries like America and Great Britain. They also said that medical knowledge on the subject was sometimes deficient and we cannot always go by what the medical people say on this question.

This important committee carried out a lot of expert work, without any national prejudice. This is important when it comes to the question of food production, each country wants to be self-sufficient. We know that if each country insists on being self-sufficient and producing its own food supplies, we cannot solve the problem of making the proper foods available at right and cheap prices. In spite of dangers due to national prejudice the committee produced a splendid report. I do not think any country has gone ahead in dealing with the subject as we have gone ahead here. Certainly no democratic country has done so, and we can only compare ourselves with the democratic free countries.

In England the Minister of Health appointed an advisory committee under the chairmanship of Lord Luke. Certain estimates and figures made by Mr. Lloyd of the Market Supply Committee were accepted as substantially accurate by the Minister's own Committee. Practically the same figures are to be found in the report by Sir John On. The Minister cannot get away from it by saying that Sir John Orr's figures are wrong, because they are approximately the same as the figures accepted by his own Committee. It may be said that a full survey was not made. It may be said that the survey might have taken in a larger range of families, but I think it is agreed that the figures in both cases are pretty nearly accurate. Sir John On said that there were in this country 4,500,000 people who were, not starving, not even hungry, but who had not enough money to buy for their children and themselves sufficient of the right kind of foods for health, such as vegetables, fruit and milk in addition to bread. That is a very serious statement, and I think the House of Commons ought to ask what the Government are going to do about it.

It is no good setting up any more committees. That is what I am really against. This is a question that will not wait, and I have, I hope, a constructive suggestion to make. Suppose it was a case of only 3,000,000 people in the country whose income was such as not to allow them to buy what are called these health foods, that would be serious enough, but the committee, the Government's own committee, said it was 4,500,000. Mr. Seebohm Rowntree said that if the Government wanted the children in large families to get enough of these health foods, they would have to give cash allowances to the tune of£5,000,000. I do not believe we can do that at once. We all know that the hon. Member for the Combined Universities (Miss Rathbone) has talked in this House for years about family allowances, and we all know too that for many years past one of the great difficulties has been that the trade unions have been against them. [Interruption.] You are so generous and so unlike the rest of us over here; you are so perfect, so I am showing that there is a flaw in your perfection. The trade unions would not have anything to do with family allowances, but I think that is the right way. We shall not get that at once, however, so what are we going to do about it?

We have a rise in prices, we know, and I think it is owing to two things, namely, the world market and our policy of marketing boards. Look at the price of milk. That is entirely the fault of the Milk Marketing Board but these marketing boards are not a thing invented by the National Government. They were invented by the Labour party to solve all problems, and the National Government were stupid enough to take these unworkable Socialist ideas from the Labour party. The Labour party, who talk about all these boards, are really the party that invented them and made it a crime for farmers to sell cheap milk. It is the Labour party that made it a crime to grow so many potatoes. They cannot get around it and they know they cannot. Socialist theories will not work, but the National Government foolishly took them on in this case. Never again should we look to the other side of the House for ideas; they will not work.

Sir Arthur Salter

Does the Noble Lady agree that it was the provisions of the 1933 Act as to quotas and restriction of imports which enabled the Marketing Board to put up prices as they would not have been able to do under the Addison Act of 1931?

Viscountess Astor

That is what you knew the Marketing Board would not do, and if the hon. Member will read the speeches made by my husband in another House and pamphlets written about it, he will see that he predicted that that is what would happen. Anyhow, the first thing they ought to do is to see to it that the Milk Marketing Board should not be elected mainly by farmers. They should do what they did in Ulster and have people who have nothing to do with the industry. That is working very well. It ought to be done at once. There is no doubt that the Government have got to subsidise foodstuffs, I think to the tune of£5,000,000. They are bound to do it to get to these malnourished children. They should subsidise school feeding, infant welfare centres, open air nursery schools, and maternity centres, and if they did that, the result would be an enormous increase in our own homegrown agricultural products.

It has been said that if the people of this country ate enough of these health-giving foods, prices would at once go up. For instance, milk would rise by 70 per cent., fruit by 60 per cent., eggs by 65 per cent., and vegetables by 45 per cent. What a terrific help that would be to the farmers, because all these are fresh commodities and they have a natural advantage over the foreigners. That ought to be the policy of our Keep-Fit programme and of our agricultural programme—to encourage, by subsidising, the growing of food for these necessitous children. It would immediately solve the problem of these malnurtured children and help our agricultural policy, and it would be the basis of our Keep-Fit programme. I think the House of Commons ought not to be complacent in this matter. We ought to see it as a problem and to want to solve it, but it will depend on what the Government will do in the next year. That is why I am so keen on it. If they are going to do any good, the back bench Members have not go to say, "Hear, hear," and be complacent and talk about the wonderful things we have done. They have got to say, "We have done wonderful things, but we have got to do even more wonderful things yet."

Some hon. Members say that children will not take milk. Well, the Government tried an experiment. They tried giving cheap milk in some of the distressed areas, and what was the result? The children immediately drank four times, and the mothers three times, as much milk as before, and it is nonsense to say that they will not take milk. Hon. Members opposite talk a great deal of nonsense about poor starving children not being sufficiently fed. It is not all poverty, it is not all a question of wages; much of it is ignorance, and a great deal of it is bad cooking. It is a most astonishing thing that at our open-air nursery schools children come who have had too much to eat, but of the wrong sort, and we have got to get an educational policy to teach children in certain areas what are the right things to eat.

The House of Commons knows that I always get back to open-air nursery schools whenever I speak, and I believe that if we could press the Government at once and say, "You know very well that the local authorities are not doing what they could do in this matter," it would be a good thing. We have had a most important report from the Board of Education which shows that the local authorities have powers; first of all, to discover the children and then to feed them freely, where their parents are unable to do it. There has been progress in the last five years, but there are many local authorities which are not doing what they ought to do in this regard, and the Government ought to take powers to make the local authorities do it. Then, if this House of Commons insisted on£5,000,000 going towards this question of malnutrition and the growing of fresh vegetables, fresh food, milk, and bread, school feeding, maternity centres, and open-air nursery schools, I believe we should do more in that way than by all the sub-stuff speeches that we could make and that we hear from time to time.

It is a question of poverty and ignorance, and as the Government have done so splendidly about the slums, I hope the House of Commons will not let them go to sleep about this question. There is not only the Minister of Health, but there are also the Minister of Agriculture and the President of the Board of Education. We ought to have a national policy and ask both the younger and the older Members of this House to press it forward. Do not let the Government go to sleep. Do not be put off by exaggerations from the Opposition. Simply because the Opposition are making this a party question, we will not make it a party question. It is a national question, and I hope the Government will face it in a national and a productive way.

6.25 p.m.

Mr. R. Acland

I hope we shall have the Noble Lady the Member for the Sutton Division of Plymouth (Viscountess Astor) with us in the Lobby at 7.30 this evening. I thank the hon. Member for Clay Cross (Mr. Ridley) for the tributes which he paid to the social services based on principles pioneered by my party 25 years ago, and I would remind him that his party came into existence mainly because some people thought that my party was going too slowly, and that since his party came into existence no new principles of social legislation of any sort or kind have been pioneered through this House. The hon. and gallant Member for Hitchin (Sir A. Wilson) questioned the accuracy of some of Sir John Orr's figures. Sir John Orr says there are 4,500,000 people hungry every week and 18,000,000 who, though not conscious of hunger and though satisfactorily filled, are in one way or another suffering from malnutrition. Let us say with the hon. and gallant Member for Hitchin that those figures are very considerably inaccurate. Let us say they are twice too high. We then get 2,250,000 people hungry and 9,000,000 suffering in one way or another from malnutrition.

Well, that is a very serious situation, and it is not made any better by comparing it with other countries or with seven years ago. I really do not think the Government make a good case in this House by comparing the position with that of seven years ago. It is all very well for the country and for the platform, where people do not know any better, but in this House of Commons we know that in the last 3o years we and the whole world have moved through a period of rising trade cycles. The Government can justify themselves before a simple audience by quoting figures from 1930 to 1937, but in this House it is a little bit babyish to take those years and compare them, and then pretend that something frightfully clever is being done by the Government now. Does not all history show that these things go up and then down, and then up and down again, and does anyone suggest that that is not going to happen now? Anyhow, we are left with this very serious situation, and what are we going to do about it? The remarkable thing about the speech of the hon. Member for Oldham (Mr. H. Kerr), who moved the Amendment, thanking the Government for the proposed action which they were going to take, was that he did not mention any action that was going to be taken. That cannot be said of the Seconder of the Amendment, who spoke of the family budget inquiry, but I did not understand that that inquiry was being held with a view to taking any action, but that it was being held with a view to drawing up more accurate statistics for the cost-of-living index, and we have been told that the unemployed have been specifically excluded for that very purpose.

Now I want to make a practical suggestion about this problem. I say that the core of this problem is milk. What are the Government going to do about that? We are told that there is to be a scheme. The scheme ought, as an absolute minimum and as a sort of rather small introduction, to include cheap milk to school children for the whole year, to children below school age, to prospective mothers, and to factory workers. The milk-in-factories scheme ought to be pressed with the whole resources of the Ministry. It is an absolute gift, because you sell something to a man who does not have to pay for it. You invite a factory owner to allow you to bring milk into his factory for the workers. You are asking the factory owner to give you 90 seconds of his workmen's time to drink milk, and you will in return give him the health of his workers and reduce their absences from sickness.

Beyond those special schemes we ought to provide for more milk to go to the man who is perfectly normal, who is not of school age or below school age, who is not working in a factory, or who is not expecting to become a mother, and that requires that milk should be made cheaper. It could be done if the Government would take a new outlook on this question and would depart from their everlasting habit of calling something a policy which merely consists of applying a certain sum of money to some point of the existing economic situation. It is all very well for the noble Lady to talk about spending£5,000,000 on food, and suggesting that that would put up prices by 70 per cent.

Viscountess Astor

Put up consumption, I said, not prices.

Mr. Acland

We take rather a different view. We say it is not a policy merely to put more money into the existing situation. We say that a policy would consist of making some physical alteration in the existing system. Will the Government tackle on those lines the retail trade in milk? They might find, if they did, that something would be involved—I do not quite know what word to apply to it—but they might find that they would have to unify something in the hands of a commission, and I hope that if they did they would not funk. There ought to be one retail milk service in each street. There ought to be special rates for orders given with cash-in-advance at the beginning of the week. There ought to be special rates for those who take the milk on the first delivery, and for those who care to collect it from the depot for themselves. Anybody who wants fancy deliveries, wants to give his order at odd hours of the week, or who wants credit, had better be asked fancy prices. On the basis of cash-in-advance with the order at the beginning of the week for a level delivery by the first delivery daily throughout the week, and one service per street, there could be an enormous reduction in the price of milk. I have not enough time to go into the question of selling milk which is clean enough—not half boiled, and only half boiling the milk because it is so unclean that it will be damaging to health if it is sold without boiling. If the question of compensation were to come up, I would point out that the large companies have proved that they are only making one-tenth—was it?—of a penny per gallon profit on their milk, and that would be a very adequate basis of compensation in the case of the big companies.

I should like, in conclusion, to comment on one thing which the Noble Lady said, that we can only compare ourselves to democratic countries. I have a great aunt who was 61 at the time when the women's suffrage movement was at its height, and I am extremely glad to say that she is still alive. She was opposed to votes for women, and whenever she failed in some particular respect, forgot her ticket, or left her umbrella in a taxi, she always comforted herself by saying, "There you are, that proves that women are not fit to have the vote." In the same way, when the present Government, who do not take a particularly favourable view of democracy, cannot through their own incompetence get done a job which could be done by first-rate men, when they find themselves in exactly the same position as my great aunt, they say, "Well, does not that just show that democracy is not really a system which will work well?" This improvement in the distribution of milk, cutting the cost of retail distribution to the enormous benefit of our people, could be carried through by a Government which was determined to do it consisting of men who really knew the job of pioneering new principles in legislation, and not content to follow an efficient but uninspired Civil Service.

6.35 p.m.

The Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Health (Mr. Bernays)

First, I should like to express my appreciation of the brevity which has been displayed by the hon. Member for Barnstaple (Mr. Acland), and I should also like to congratulate the Mover and the Seconder of the Motion. I only wish there were time for me to attempt an answer to all the questions put to me, but if I had the duty of answering all those questions I should be speaking not merely for the Minister of Health but for the Secretary of State for Scotland, the Minister of Pensions, the Secretary of State for the Home Department, the President of the Board of Education, the President of the Board of Trade, the Secretary of State for War, the Minister of Agriculture and the Minister of Labour.

Mr. Gallacher

And the Foreign Secretary.

Mr. Bernays

I think that was the only Department which was not involved. I feel that in comparison with me, Pooh-Bah would, under the old regulations, have been rejected as "not genuinely seeking work." Though the problem of nutrition has been raised from the Labour benches, it is one which concerns deeply every Member of this House. Each of us bears a responsibility for the welfare of those by whom we were sent here. A discussion of this kind is one which the Government welcome. They realise as much as any hon. Member opposite that their record will be judged, as every Government's record will be judged, by the answer to this searching question, "Have your legislation and your administration been reflected in the homes of the people in increased happiness?"

Although the hon. Member for St. Rollox (Mr. Leonard) was very restrained in his speech, there is not much restraint in the Motion. It speaks of widespread malnutrition, and I will deal with that point first. I should like to try to dispose of the idea that in this country there is, as the Motion states, a grave and urgent problem of hunger. I think I can best answer that allegation by a quotation from a speech made by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Wakefield (Mr. Greenwood) at Leeds at the beginning of the year, in which he said that he was not going to pretend that malnutrition was very widespread, but he added that it was a real problem in certain areas. The figures in the latest annual report of the Chief Medical Officer of the Board of Education show that out of 1,680,000 school children examined, only 0 . 7 per cent. were suffering from bad nutrition; and Sir John Orr, who has been frequently quoted in this Debate, has never suggested that there was real hunger. He says on page 36 of his report: It should be kept in view that the standards on which the above comparisons are made are those compiled for the maintenance of perfect health, which is a standard very different from the average health. I think it will be agreed in all parts of the House that it is irrefutable that every man, woman and child in this country is enabled to obtain, at any rate, the minimum necessary for subsistence. I do not propose at this stage to enter into the question of what is or what is not an optimum diet. Naturally, we must all give the statements of Sir John Orr the weight they deserve, coming as they do from an eminent man who speaks with great authority, but he himself stated that his conclusions were only tentative and based upon a comparatively small number of cases. I say that we have not yet the necessary evidence to form any abso- lute conclusion, but the Government are carrying out intensive inquiries, and it was to further that object that they appointed the Advisory Committee on Nutrition upon which Sir John Orr is himself serving. We have now had the first report of that committee, and they certainly give no support to the alarmist views expressed in the Debate this afternoon. They mention, in fact, how the consumption of some of the actual foodstuffs referred to by the Noble Lady the Member for Sutton (Viscountess Astor) has increased of late years. In paragraph 36, on page 16, they say: The consumption per head of most foodstuffs has increased since before the War. The largest proportionate increases have been in condensed milk, fruit, butter, vegetables (other than potatoes), eggs, tea, margarine and cheese. Large increases in the consumption of condensed milk and butter have also taken place during the last o years. But there is one disquieting sentence in that report: "The consumption of milk ill all forms per head of the population is too low."

To the problem of making good that deficiency in the consumption of milk the Government are giving unremitting attention, and not merely attention. They have adopted two main lines of approach to the problem—investigation and action. What we in this House are all interested in is action, and I will summarise as briefly as I can the action taken to increase the consumption of milk. Long before the report of the Advisory Committee appeared the Government had taken action. In the autumn of 1934 there was introduced what has been described as the largest experiment in supplementary feeding which the world has yet seen, the milk-in-schools scheme. With the help of an Exchequer grant and a contribution by the Milk Marketing Board this scheme enables children in schools recognised for grant by the Board of Education to buy for a halfpenny a bottle of milk containing one-third of a pint. This means that parents can provide their children with milk at school at half the price they would have to pay for it if they provided it in their own homes.

Mr. Johnston

Less than half now.

Mr. Bernays

It is very nice to have that acknowledgment. Nearly 3,000,000 children are receiving milk under this scheme. The hon. Member for St. Rollox said poverty was the bar, but I am sure he will recall that in most areas milk is provided free for those children who need it and are unable to pay for it, and the number of children at present receiving milk in this way is about 400,000 in England and Wales and over 60,000 in Scotland. As the scheme covers 93 per cent. of the children in elementary schools it is clear that lack of facilities is not the reason why actually only half of the children are consuming milk. It is a question which is giving considerable concern to the Board of Education, and an important item in our health campaign which is now proceeding is to publicise the value of milk in schools.

I come to the question of milk and other things for other classes of the community. As part of their maternity and child-welfare services local authorities may arrange for supplies of milk and other foods to expectant and nursing mothers and children under school age, and those powers are now exercised universally. Further, following the report of the Nutrition Committee, general circulars were issued by the Minister of Health and the Secretary of State for Scotland asking authorities to review their arrangements for the supply of milk, to remove any undesirable restrictions on the supply and to make sure that the income scales adopted for the purpose of free or cheap supplies did not make it difficult for any mother to take advantage of the arrangement. The response to the circular of my right hon. Friend has been most satisfactory. Nearly all the welfare authorities, 402 out of the 412 to whom it was addressed, have sent replies. Those replies indicate that the importance of the question is realised, and that where the arrangements have fallen short in one particular or another the authorities are doing their best to improve them. I have the figures here: 98 authorities have increased the period during which milk is supplied, 62 have increased the quantity of milk supplied and 47 have adopted a more liberal scale.

There are also experimental milk schemes organised by the Milk Marketing Board in conjunction with the local authorities. Schemes are in operation in the depressed areas of Jarrow, the Rhondda, Walker-on-Tyne and Whitehaven. Under those schemes milk is supplied at 2d. a pint to expectant and nursing mothers and children under school age. The hon. Member for Barnstaple stressed the importance of milk in factories. The Ministry of Health is very well aware of the importance of it.

Mr. Acland

Has the hon. Gentleman any figures showing how that matter is going?

Mr. Bernays

I will let the hon. Member know. Now I come to the question of the price level. In the statement of the Government's long-term policy contained in the White Paper issued last July, the Government declared their intention to bring forward proposals for securing, in co-operation with the milk industry, a reduction in the price of liquid milk to local authorities for the purpose of their maternity and child welfare arrangements. Local authorities will then be in a position to carry out further extensions of their present arrangements.

So much for our action. I think that is the answer to the hon. Member for St. Rollox who asked what we were doing with regard to the demand of the Children's Minimum Council. He also raised the question of the boys at junior instruction centres who were not having enough food to enable them to play football. Almost while he was speaking a Bill became available in the Vote Office which deals with this matter. The Unemployment Insurance Bill enables local education authorities to provide solid meals for those in attendance at instructional centres. As to the other inquiries into family budgets and the quantitative dietary surveys I have not time to enter into them now, but when they have been completed other lines of action may be indicated and the House may rest assured that the Government will do their utmost to follow them up.

The Government have done more than any other Government to bring to the attention of the nation the importance of nutrition, and not merely of this nation but of all nations. At the meeting of the League of Nations in 1935 a proposal by our representative and the representative of Australia for an inquiry into nutrition was carried and resulted in the report by the Mixed Committee to the League of Nations which was discussed at Geneva this year, when I took the opportunity of saying on behalf of the Government that we regarded that report on nutrition both as a challenge and as an opportunity. The hon. Member for Barnstaple referred to figures which he regarded as childish. I do not think the electorate will regard them as childish. In the financial year 1930–31, when the Labour Government were in power, 153 local education authorities provided free meals; now the number is 247. Under the Labour Government, 185,000 children were fed free; now it is 535,000. When the Labour Government were in power, 27,500,000 meals were provided; now over 100,000,000 meals are provided. [An HON. MEMBERS: "It is not enough."] It is more than the Labour party gave, even though it may not be enough.

On the question of rising prices it would be idle to deny that the cost of living has risen since 1933, but the level of that year was a slump level. It was expected that some rise in the cost of living would accompany recovery, but that rise has been less in food prices than in other directions. The level of food prices—43 per cent. above pre-war—is much lower than that of all items of the household budget taken together—58 per cent. above pre-war. On 1st October, 1937, the level of prices was no higher than it was on 1st October, 193o, and 13 points lower than on 1st October, 1929. I do not think that those figures justify the claim that was made that prices are much higher.

The country knows what has accompanied the rise in prices. It is the rising employment figures. That is the real answer to the charge of poverty. Wages are the vital matter; 1,500,000 more people are getting them now than under the Labour Government. The country knows that the tremendous rise in employment could not come without some rise in prices. What were the difficulties when the Labour Government were in office? No responsible man has ever put the whole blame for the slump upon the Labour party. [HON. MEMBERS: "Yes, they have."] They were the victims to some extent of world causes. Where we censure them is that they did not grapple with them. Their difficulty was exceptionally low prices, as their leaders admitted. I have quotations here showing that Members of the Labour Front Bench at that time said that low prices were one of the causes of unemployment. We are now out of that area of very low prices, and our unemployment figures are now less than half what they were then.

An attempt is made to censure us because the low prices that produced the slump no longer exist. But the Government have not forgotten those who are in need of financial assistance. In both unemployment assistance and public assistance the Ministers responsible have recommended that, in giving assistance, account should be taken of the rise in price of certain commodities.

The hon. Member for Hemsworth (Mr. G. Griffiths) raised particularly the question of the people on public assistance. My right hon. Friend has issued a circular dated 22nd November, 1937. I will read what he says: In order to ensure that relief granted is adequate in amount, the council will appreciate the importance with the approach of winter and at a time when the prices of certain commodities are showing some tendency to rise of keeping the position of recipients of relief under close review in order to satisfy themselves that the relief they are giving is not in fact inadequate. Additional moneys are also going to distressed areas by reason of the recent revision of the block grant.

I would remind hon. Members opposite of the publication this morning of the remarkable report by Sir George Gillett in which he says that unemployment in the distressed areas has fallen by one-quarter. Even the "News Chronicle" says that there has been some improvement in the distressed areas in recent months. In the "Daily Herald," the leading article is headed "As Before," but the leader writer apparently forgot what he put at the top because he said: Things are not so had as a year ago, to he sure. At the end of that report "Hope has returned," says the Commissioner. Hope has returned, not merely to the Special Areas but to the whole country, although I agree that much remains to be done. No body of reformers can possibly remain content with or see an end to their labours. It is like climbing a mountain. You negotiate a corner, and as soon as you are round the corner you see another corner requiring the same courage and resource. Under the National Government the country in its upward climb is reaching heights never yet attained. The nation is better fed and is healthier and happier than when the Government came into power.

I have not time to deal with the statistics of the fall in the death rate, and of infant mortality, but I will take two diseases especially associated with malnutrition—tuberculosis and rickets. Death from tuberculosis now numbers only a half of what it was 25 years ago, and less than a quarter of what it was 5o years ago. Death from rickets is only half of what it was as recently as five years ago and each year fewer people suffer from those diseases. Take any test you like. In wages there has been a steady rise. Savings since 1931 have increased by£450,000,000. Social reform is continually expanding and extending. Food consumption is a pretty good barometer of prosperity, and the consumption of food, drink and tobacco is up by nearly 20 per cent. as compared with 1929. Boots and shoes are up by 25 per cent. Not merely do we find a steady improvement over the post-war period in all the factors that make for human happiness, but we find that that improvement has been greatly accelerated since the National Government took office. Judging by every test, however searching, I say that this Government has justified itself in better conditions for the people of our country, and I ask the House to reject this Socialist Motion as a distortion and a caricature of the position of England as it exists to-day.

7.2 p.m.

Mr. Johnston

Excepting always the issue of peace and war there can be no more important motion brought before this House during this Parliament than that raised by my hon. Friend the Member for St. Rollox (Mr. Leonard) this afternoon. No Socialist has ever contended, so far as I know, that there has not been a continuous and progressive improvement in the conditions of human life during the past 100 years. A group of some 36 professors, scientists and technicians in the United States have committed themselves to the assertion, that in agriculture one man can now do in one hour what it required 3,000 hours for him to accomplish in 1840. We have never disputed continuous development. We boast about it. We glory in it. We are not Luddites. We do not seek to destroy the machine; we welcome the machine, but what we do urge is that the increased productivity due to developments of science, technique, human genius—the developments of productivity ought to be progressively distributed among the consumers of the world, and that any system which prevents the fullest possible use of the new machinery and skill is a system that stands condemned, in any assembly of sane men and women. If we can prove, as we think we can prove, that in every department of agriculture, fishing, production of food and clothing, there are potentialities which we never permitted fully to operate for the production and distribution of wealth, and that these potential powers are not being used and cannot be used to-day—if we can prove that then we say that our Socialist system is a preferable system to the system for which the present Government stand.

We are not concerned to deny that there have been improvements since 1931. But it is only childish folly or university debating clap-trap to assert that every improvement that has taken place between 1930 and 1937 is due to the National Government, or that the troubles in 1930 were due in whole or in part to the Labour Government That is mere futility and waste of time, and what we have got to address our minds to tonight is simply this: Can it be proved that in the midst of abundance, in the midst of wealth unsurpassed in history, there are people in our land going without sufficient food? And if that is so, can this House take any steps to remedy such a state of affairs? There was only, I think, one hon. Gentleman in this House who attempted to dispute the proposition put before us by the hon. Member for St. Rollox. The hon. Member for Hitchin (Sir A. Wilson), a gentleman of very great industry, whose abilities I admire in many ways, n de a polite attack on my friend Sir John Orr. Well Sir John Orr is able enough to defend himself, and in any case I will not tonight attempt the task, but the hon. Member for Hitchin justified his attack on Sir John On by quoting Professor Bowley, and I happened to have in my hand at the time he was making the attack the exact article by Professor Bowley in the "Nineteenth Century" for December, 1936, to which he referred. Professor Bowley, in the last paragraph of his article, said: There is abundant medical evidence that malnutrition, slight or serious, is widespread. That is what my hon. Friend the Member for St. Rollox said. The article continues: There are classes of the population here and abroad whose unaided resources are too small for adequate expenditure on food. There is no need to wait for perfect statistics before tackling the problems. The problems of want are now of manageable dimensions. That is the authority to whom the hon. Member for Hitchin referred. Do we require to go into statistics? The committee on the proper dietary for children in Poor Law homes, quoted this afternoon, proved that when buying food wholesale in large quantities it took you 4s. 6½d. properly to feed a child in a Poor Law institution. Since then there has been a rise in wholesale prices, and if it took 4s. 6½d. in 1932, it will take somewhere about 6s. now, and if it takes 6s. now to feed a child then there are thousands upon thousands going underfed. I could not feed a child on 6s. per week, neither could the hon. Gentleman who preceded me, and neither can any Member of this House. You cannot do it. You never try to do it. We know it cannot be done, and if it cannot be done, how is it possible to say that the child of the unemployed workman which gets an allowance of 3s. per week, not for food alone, but for food, clothing, boots, everything—how can it be argued by anybody that the child for which only 3s. is given, can be adequately nourished?

Somebody quoted the report of the Medical Officer of Health for England, about the investigation by the public health department at Newcastle. There were 66 families examined by the Medical Officer of Health there, and he came to the conclusion that a few families were receiving definitely insufficient diet, and others diets which though not definitely insufficient could be regarded as on the border line. Of the unemployed, 76 per cent. only got butter; 66 per cent. never have fresh milk at any time going into the home. All the authorities—Professor Bowley, Sir Arthur McNalty, Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins, Lord Horder—every authority that we know of, we can produce here to prove that there is some malnutrition, some underfeeding, some school starvation, and we can quote a medical Member who sits on the second Government Bench, the Member for St. Albans (Sir F. Fremantle), who has published a book on the health of the nation, the preface to which was written by the present Prime Minister He tells us that the cost of disease to this nation is some£300,000,000 a year.

Let me endeavour to persuade the Government Bench that we know there are improvements going on. When I was a child the only kind of orange we could get was a Spanish one, often sour and indigestible and almost inedible. To-day we get the Jaffa orange, sweet and succulent. In the 'forties of last century the only place where bananas were ever seen was at the Lord Mayor's Banquet, and to-day they are hawked on the street barrows at a penny each. In the 'forties of last century the Thames was an open sewer, and typhoid, instead of being an incident in a generation, was common and spread to the upper classes. It was only when the Prince of Wales took it up in 1871 that there began a sanitary campaign which resulted in its practical abolition. If we could devise some means whereby the greatest disease of all, hunger, insufficiency and want, could be spread to the mansions of the rich, as cholera, small-pox and other diseases once spread, we should get this scandal of malnutrition and under-feeding stopped instanter.

I do not want to spend my time quoting authorities on malnutrition that has been ably done this afternoon. I would rather spend it making constructive suggestions to the Government. The hon. Gentleman said quite truthfully, that they were developing a clinic system, and quite truthfully that they were providing milk in the schools at is. per gallon. He wanted that scheme developed, and he said that there were not sufficient children in the schools taking the milk. Will he or anybody tell me why if it is right that the child from 5 to 14 years of age at school should get this milk at Is. a gallon, the child from one day old up to five years old should be compelled through its mother to pay 2s. Ad. a gallon? I want an answer to that question. Surely the child of only a few months of age needs milk more than a child of five, six or more years of age up to 14, yet the policy pursued by the Government, and being pursued now, is to provide cheap milk at is. a gallon for a child of 14, but to charge the mother in the depressed area—the mother of the unemployed child that is getting only 3s. a week—to charge that poor woman 2s. 4d. a gallon for the milk. I know no justification whatever for the continua- tion of that policy, and I venture to repeat the suggestion I have made before in this House.

I know there are members of the Milk Marketing Board who would welcome Government pressure to enable them to make such a change as I propose. It should be possible to authorise every medical officer of health in the country to issue dockets to every mother with children under five years of age, and to every sick and nursing mother, that would enable them to go to any registered milk distributor and get all the milk they required at is. a gallon. That would be no loss to the Milk Marketing Board. If it pays the Milk Marketing Board to sell milk at Is. a gallon to schools, and to urge that more and ever more milk be sold in the schools at is. a gallon, it would equally pay them to have that milk sold—there would be no cost for transport, because the people would have to go to the shops for it—in unlimited quantities to the poor at is. a gallon. If you were to halve the price of milk to the poor, you would increase the quantity of milk consumed, and would do a great deal for agriculture—someone has spoken about marrying health and agriculture; and you would do it almost in a night. You would develop a policy of equating production to consumption, and you would begin to fix the level of production by the amount necessary for consumption, in a land where we have millions of people now who do not get enough to eat.

There has been a lot of talk this afternoon, and I had intended to say something about it, on the question whether there are really any children at school who are hungry, or how many are hungry, or what this doctor at the Board of Education or the other doctor somewhere else has said. I see the Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Education on the bench opposite. May I direct his attention to a lecture given to the Royal Statistical Society on the 16th of this month by Mr. R. Huws Jones, the statistician to the University of Liverpool? I have the lecture here in proof, and it is a most amazing revelation of the different results that you get from different doctors examining these children. Furthermore, it is a most amazing revelation of the different results that you will get from the same doctor examining the same children at periods, only a week or two apart. Here is the sort of thing that is set out in this lecture. Out of Zoo children examined in Cheshire, one doctor found three sub-normal boys. In the same zoo children, another doctor found 90 sub-normal boys. What reliance can any Government place upon ex-parte statistics of that kind? But the plain inescapable fact, which no amount of statistics will get round, is that no man or woman in this building to-night can feed a child on 3s. per week. The thing is not possible. [Interruption.] I do not know what the Noble Lady means—

Viscountess Astor

I was referring to the open-air nursery schools, but of course that is collective feeding.

Mr. Johnston

Even in that case you cannot feed them properly on 3s.

Viscountess Astor

Very properly.

Mr. Johnston

This allowance of 3s. is not for food alone. If self-righteousness is a crime, the Noble Lady is liable to a capital sentence. The fact of the matter is that an expenditure of 3s. cannot maintain a child now. Everybody knows that. There is no need to go to doctors and international committees of experts to get that proven. We know it is true that a child cannot be fed on 3s. a week, and, if a child cannot be fed on 3s. a week, there are hundreds of thousands of homes in this land where the spectre of want and hunger abides at the fireside week in and week out.

In the few moments that remain to me, I should like to go back to the positive side of our Motion. If you can, without doing injustice to anyone, supply sick and nursing mothers, and mothers with babies from one to five years old, with all the milk that they need—let them be the judges of the amounts required—you will take one big step forward in public health, and you will begin to justify the assertion commonly made that in this country nobody need go hungry. We need not quarrel about the meaning of the word "hungry."

If you can do that with milk, what is wrong about doing it with fruit? Why should we have fruit destroyed or unplucked in our orchards when there are hundreds of thousands of people who never get fresh fruit? Our herring fishermen are in a state of starvation. They cannot sell their fish; boats are falling into ruin; towns are falling into ruin; municipal capital is disappearing; a hardy race around our coasts is perishing. Have we not sufficient wit and wisdom among us so to organise the catch of these men that the needy in our distressed areas shall be supplied with the produce of their labour on the sea?

Why cannot that be done? You have done far more marvellous things than that. You wireless messages through the air; you fly across the world; you travel under the sea; you harness the tides; you can do anything and everything, seemingly, but this little simple matter of transferring surplus produce from one place to another, and guaranteeing that every man, woman and child in the land shall at any rate get food. If that were done, if the party opposite would begin to consider it, I, for one, would forgive them for taking a longer time to make the necessary social reconstruction which converting capitalism into a co-operative commonwealth would involve. Food there must be; food there is. You have discovered how to bring refrigerated food through the Suez Canal. You can bring food through hot climates to the tables of our people. There is a glut of everything that I know of except housing. I know of nothing in this land that is necessary for a decent livelihood, except dwellings, that is short, or that we could not produce or get speedily. Clothes, boots, food—all these we could have.

The Government stand for what is called a capitalist system, which says that, even if we could produce double what we produce now, the workers in industry shall not be allowed to do so. Even if we could double our product of food, the producers are not called upon to do it. We on these benches say that the aim of all production should be to meet the consuming demands of the nation. We should ascertain, first of all, what we require for decent sustenance for everyone, and then set our producers in guilds to produce those requirements. In doing so, we should produce health, happiness and wealth. I honestly believe there are men on these benches who could prove to-night that you could make these changes to the financial advantage of His Majesty's Exchequer.

If you spend£300,000,000 a year on ambulance work in connection with disease, what greater waste can there be than that? If you spend these great and growing sums on disease, ha: not the time arrived when all sections of this House should unite in an endeavour to transfer production from a system of scarcity to a system of abundance and distribution? A new era would then open before us. The visions of men like Sir John Orr, who tell us that in one generation we could add two inches to the height and so many pounds—I forget the exact figure—to the weight of our people, would be realised. We should be stronger, more vigorous, healthier and

happier. These things are within our reach now, party politics apart. The choice before this Government and every other Government is: Shall we continue, in an age of abundance, to permit 1,000,000 of our people to go either hungry or semi-hungry, either in want or in fear of want, when enough, and more than enough, lies around our door?

Question put, "That the words proposed to be left out stand part of the Question."

The House divided: Ayes, 140; Noes, 202.

Division No. 21.]	AYES.	[7.27 p.m.
Acland, R. T. D. (Barnstaple)	Harris, Sir P. A.	Owen, Major G.
Adams, D. (Consett)	Harvey, T. E. (Eng. Univ's.)	Paling, W.
Alexander, Rt. Hon. A. V. (H'lsbr.)	Hayday, A.	Parker, J.
Ammon, C. G.	Henderson, A. (Kingswinford)	Pethick-Lawrence, Rt. Hon. F. W.
Anderson, Sir A. Garrett (C. of Ldn.)	Henderson, J. (Ardwick)	Quibell, D. J. K.
Anderson, F. (Whitehaven)	Henderson, T. (Tradeston)	Richards, R. (Wrexham)
Attlee, Rt. Hon. C. R.	Hicks, E. G.	Ridley, G.
Bonfield, J. W.	Hills, A. (Pontefract)	Riley, B.
Barnes, A. J.	Holdsworth, H.	Ritson, J.
Barr, J.	Hollins, A.	Roberts, Rt. Hon. F. O. (W. Brom.)
Batey, J.	Hopkin, D.	Roberts, W. (Cumberland, N.)
Bellenger, F. J.	Jagger, J.	Robinson, W. A. (St. Helens)
Benn, Rt. Hon. W. W.	Jenkins, Sir W. (Neath)	Sanders, W. S.
Benson, G.	John, W.	Seely, Sir H. M.
Bevan, A.	Johnston, Rt. Hon. T.	Sexton, T. M.
Broad, F. A.	Jones, A. C. (Shipley)	Short, A.
Bromfield, W.	Jones, J. J. (Silvertown)	Silkin, L.
Brown, Rt. Hon. J. (S. Ayrshire)	Kelly, W. T.	Silverman, S. S.
Burke, W. A.	Kennedy, Rt. Hon. T.	Simpson, F. B.
Cape, T.	Lansbury, Rt. Hon. G.	Smith, Ben (Rotherhithe)
Clynes, Rt. Hon. J. R.	Lathan, G.	Smith, E. (Stoke)
Cove, W. G.	Lawson, J. J.	Smith, Rt. Hon. H. B. Lees- (K'ly)
Cripps, Hon. Sir Stafford	Leach, W.	Smith, T. (Normanton)
Daggar, G.	Leslie, J. R.	Sorensen, R. W.
Dalton, H.	Logan, D. G.	Stephen, C.
Davidson, J. J. (Maryhill)	Lunn, W.	Stewart, W. J. (H'ght'n-le-Sp'ng)
Davies, S. O. (Merthyr)	Macdonald, G. (Ince)	Taylor, R. J. (Morpeth)
Day, H.	McEntee, V. La T.	Thorne, W.
Dobbie, W.	McGhee, H. G.	Thurtle, E.
Dunn, E. (Rather Valley)	Maclean, N.	Tinker, J. J.
Ede, J. C.	MacMillan, M. (Western Isles)	Viant, S. P.
Edwards, A. (Middlesbrough E.)	MacNeill, Weir, L.	Walkden, A. G.
Edwards, Sir C. (Bedwellty)	Mainwaring, W. H.	Walker, J.
Evans, D. O. (Cardigan)	Mander, G. le M.	Watkins, F. C.
Fletcher, Lt.-Comdr. R. T. H.	Marklew, E.	Watson, W. McL.
Frankel, D.	Marshall, F.	Wedgwood, Rt. Hon. J. C.
Gallacher, W.	Mothers, G.	Welsh, J. C.
Gardner, B. W.	Maxton, J.	Westwood, J.
Garro Jones, G. M.	Messer, F.	White, H. Graham
George, Major G. Lloyd (Pembroke)	Milner, Major J.	Wilkinson, Ellen
George, Megan Lloyd (Anglesey)	Montague, F.	Williams, E. J. (Ogmore)
Greenwood, Rt. Hon. A.	Morrison, Rt. Hon. H. (Hackney, S.)	Williams, T. (Don Valley)
Griffith, F. Kingsley (M'ddl'sbro, W.)	Morrison, R. C. (Tottenham, N.)	Wilson, C. H. (Attercliffe)
Griffiths, J. (Llanelly)	Muff, G.	Windsor, W. (Hull, C.)
Groves, T. E.	Nathan, Colonel H. L.	Woods, G. S. (Finsbury)
Guest, Dr. L. H. (Islington, N.)	Naylor, T. E.
Hall, G. H. (Aberdare)	Noel-Baker, P. J.	TELLERS FOR THE AYES.—
Hardie, Agnes	Oliver, G. H.	Mr. Leonard and Mr. G. Grl ffiths
NOES.
Adams, S. V. T. (Leeds, W.)	Baldwin-Webb, Col. J.	Beechman, N. A.
Agnew, Lieut.-Comdr. P. G.	Balfour, G. (Hampstead)	Bernays, R. H.
Amery, Rt. Hon. L. C. M. S.	Balfour, Capt. H. H. (Isle of Thanet)	Bird, Sir R. B.
Anstruther-Gray, W. J.	Balniel, Lord	Blair, Sir R.
Asks, Sir R. W.	Barclay-Harvey, Sir C. M.	Boothby, R. J. G.
Astor, Major Hon. J. J. (Dover)	Barrie, Sir C. C.	Briscoe, Capt. R. G.
Astor, Viscountess (Plymouth, Sutton)	Bearnish, Rear-Admiral T. P. H.	Brooklebank, Sir Edmund
Astor, Hon. W. W. (Fulham, E.)	Beauchamp, Sir B. C.	Brown, Col. D. C. (Hexham)
Atholl, Duchess of	Beaumont, Hon. F. E. B. (Portsm'h)	Butler, R. A.
Campbell, Sir E. T.	Haslam, Sir J. (Bolton)	Radford, E. A.
Carver, Major W. H.	Heilgers, Captain F. F. A.	Raikes, H. V. A. M.
Cary, R. A.	Heneage, Lieut.-Colonel A. P.	Ramsay, Captain A. H. M.
Cayzer, Sir C. W. (City of Chester)	Higgs, W. F.	Ramsden, Sir E.
Cazalet, Thelma (Islington, E.)	Holmes, J. S.	Rankin, Sir R.
Channon, H.	Hope, Captain Hon. A. O. J.	Rathbone, J. R. (Bodmin)
Chapman, A. (Rutherglen)	Hopkinson, A.	Reed, A. C. (Exeter)
Chapman, Sir S. (Edinburgh, S.)	Hore-Belisha, Rt. Hon. L.	Reid, W. Allan (Derby)
Christie, J. A.	Horsbrugh, Florence	Rickards, G. W. (Skipton)
Clarke, Lt.-Col. R. S. (E. Grinstead)	Hudson, Capt. A. U. M. (Hack., N.)	Ross, Major Sir R. D. (Londonderry)
Clarry, Sir Reginald	Hulbert, N. J.	Royds, Admiral P. M. R.
Colville, Lt.-Col. RI. Hon. D. J.	Hume, Sir G. H.	Russell, Sir Alexander
Conant, Captain R. J. E.	Hunter, T.	Russell, S. H. M. (Darwen)
Cook, Sir T. R. A. M. (Norfolk, N.)	Hutchinson, G. C.	Salmon, Sir I.
Cooke, J. D. (Hammersmith, S.)	Inskip, Rt. Hon. Sir T. W. H.	Samuel, M. R. A.
Cooper, Rt. Hn. T. M. (E'nburgh, W.)	Jarvis, Sir J. J.	Sandeman, Sir N. S.
Cox, H. B. Trevor	Joel, D. J. B.	Savery, Sir Servington
Crooke, J. S.	Jones, Sir G. W. H. (S'k N'w'gt'n)	Scott, Lord William
Crookshank, Capt. H. F. C.	Kerr, Colonel C. I. (Montrose)	Shaw, Major P. S. (Wavertree)
Croom-Johnson, R. P.	Kimball, L.	Shaw, Captain W. T. (Forfar)
Cross, R. H.	Lamb, Sir J. Q.	Shepperson, Sir E. W.
Cruddas, Col. B.	Lambert, Rt. Hon. G.	Smiles, Lieut.-Colonel Sir W. D.
Culverwell, C. T.	Law, Sir A. J. (High Peak)	Smith, Bracewell (Dulwich)
Davidson, Viscountess	Leech, Dr. J. W.	Smith, L. W. (Hallam)
Davies, Major Sir G. F. (Yeovil)	Lees-Jones, J.	Smithers, Sir W.
Denman, Hon. R. D.	Leighton, Major B. E. P.	Somervell. Sir D. B. (Crewe)
Donner, P. W.	Lindsay, K. M.	Spens. W. P.
Drewe, C.	Lipson, D. L.	Stewart, J. Henderson (Fife, E.)
Dugdale, Captain T. L.	Lloyd, G. W.	Stourton, Major Hon. J. J.
Duggan, H. J.	Loftus, P. C.	Strauss, H. G. (Norwich)
Douglass, Lord	Lovat-Fraser, J. A.	Stuart, Hon. J. (Moray and Nairn)
Eastwood, J. F.	Mabane, W. (Huddersfield)	Sutcliffe, H.
Eckersley, P. T.	MacAndrew, Colonel Sir C. G.	Tasker, Sir R. I.
Edmondson, Major Sir J.	M'Connell, Sir J.	Tate, Mavis C.
Elliot, Rt. Hon. W. E.	Macdonald, Capt. P. (Isle of Wight)	Thomas, J. P. L.
Ellis, Sir G.	McKie, J. H.	Thomson, Sir J. D. W.
Elliston, Capt. G. S.	Macnamara, Capt. J. R. J.	Tree, A. R. L. F.
Emery, J. F.	Macquisten, F. A.	Tufnell, Lieut.-Commander R. L.
Emmott, C. E. G. C.	Magnay, T.	Torton, R. H.
Emrys-Evans, P. V.	Makins, Brig.-Gen. E.	Wallace, Capt. Rt. Hon. Euan
Everard, W. L.	Margesson, Capt. Rt. Hon. H. D. R.	Ward, Lieut.-Col. Sir A. L. (Hull)
Findlay, Sir E.	Markham, S. F.	Ward, Irene M. B. (Wallsend)
Fleming, E. L.	Mayhew, Lt.-Col. J.	Warrender, Sir V.
Fremantle, Sir F. E.	Mills, Sir F. (Leyton, E.)	Waterhouse, Captain C.
Furness, S. N.	Mills, Major J. D. (New Forest)	Whiteley, Major J. P. (Buckingham)
Fyfe, D. P. M.	Mitchell, (Brentford and Chiswick)	Wickham, Lt.-Col. E. T. R.
Ganzoni, Sir J.	Mitchell, Sir W. Lane (Streatham)	Williams, C. (Torquay)
Gluckstein, L. H.	Morrison, Rt. Hon. W. S. (Cirencester)	Willoughby de Eresby, Lord
Grant-Ferris, R.	Muirhead, Lt.-Col. A. J.	Wilson, Lt.-Col. Sir A. T. (Hitchin)
Grattan-Doyle, Sir N.	Munro, P.	Windsor-Clive, Lieut.-Colonel G.
Gretton, Col. Rt. Hon. J.	O'Connor, Sir Terence J.	Winterton, Rt. Hon. Earl
Gridley, Sir A. B.	O'Neill, Rt. Hon. Sir Hugh	Wise, A. R.
Grimston, R. V.	Ormsby-Gore, Rt. Hon. W. G. A.	Withers, Sir J. J.
Guest, Lieut.-Colonel H. (Drake)	Orr-Ewing, I. L.	Wragg, H.
Guest, Hon. (Brecon and Radnor)	Peake, O.	Wright, Wing-Commander J. A. C.
Guinness, T. L. E. B.	Pickthorn, K. W. M.	Young, A. S. L. (Partick)
Harbord, A.	Pilkington, R.
Harvey, Sir G.	Pownall, Lt.-Col. Sir Assheton	TELLERS FOR THE NOES.—
Haslam, Henry (Horncastle)	Procter, Major H. A.	Mr. Hamilton Kerr and Mr. Peat.

Question proposed, "That the proposed words be there added."

Mr. Ellis Smith

rose—

It being after half-past Seven of the Clock, the Debate stood adjourned.