HC Deb 15 March 1946 vol 420 cc1476-96

3.32 p.m.

Mr. Carson (Isle of Thanet)

The matter I wish to raise this afternoon is of the greatest importance to all hon. Members of this House and their constituents. It is the subject of the time taken by Ministers to answer Members letters. At the outset of my remarks I would like to assure the hon. Gentleman who is to reply, that my object in raising this matter is not to be in any way critical of His Majesty's Government. The hon. Member for Ipswich (Mr. Stokes) said recently that the time taken by this Government to reply to Members letters compares very favourably with that taken by other Governments. That may or may not be true, but I would like briefly to examine the position and to see whether further improvements cannot be made. My object in raising this point is twofold: first, to put the facts as I see them and make one or two suggestions; secondly, because I hope that the Financial Secretary, in replying, will give us a picture of the enormous difficulties experienced by Government Departments in coping with the colossal volume of correspondence that comes to them.

There is in the country far too much of the belief that, when a constituent writes to his Member, his is the only case, that immediately the Member goes to the Minister concerned and says, "Could you deal with this please?" and that at once the Minister drops everything else he is doing, gets on the telephone and deals with the case in 24 hours. If this does not happen, the feeling is that either the Minister or the hon. Member concerned is inefficient. I think that idea is quite untrue, and must be corrected, and I hope the Financial Secretary will give us in full the difficulties experienced by Government Departments in this respect.

I should be interested, for instance, to know the average total of letters that reach, say the War Office or the Air Ministry each day from hon. Members. Now I have not worked out a comprehensive average of the letters which I have sent to various Departments, but I have taken a few cases at random. I took, for instance, the letters A, B, S and T, as examples, in my current file. I have taken the time which has elapsed, not until they have been acknowledged, but until a definite answer has been received saying that the Department can or cannot help, as the case may be.

To take the War Office first; I took 16-cases in which there was a total of 98 weeks taken in answering letters. That is an average of six weeks per answer. In these cases the longest time was 11 weeks and the shortest two weeks. This is not a completely fair average, because the longer period cases involved obtaining information from abroad, which of course occupies more time. In 19 cases dealing with the Air Ministry, 151 weeks was the total, which is an average of eight weeks. The longest period was 21 weeks, and the shortest three weeks. Some of the cases were complicated and difficult, and naturally took longer to answer. Although the replies from the Under-Secretary for Air take slightly longer than those from any other Government Department, when they do come, I have always found they are very well worth waiting for. Not only are they signed by the hon. Gentleman himself but the amount of trouble he takes is appreciated by everyone. In some of the saddest cases brought to me, I have been able to send his letter to the bereaved mother or wife, and it has been so worded as to make the bereavement a little easier to bear. In a cross-section of Ministries I found that the Board of Trade take approximately five weeks, and I am not sure that that is a fair average. I think probably they take considerably longer in a great many cases. The Ministry of Education took approximately three and a half weeks, the Ministry of Health four weeks, the Ministry of Food five weeks, the Ministry of Works three weeks, and the Postmaster-General, who, I imagine, gets fewer letters than most, nearly always answers in a matter of a week or 10 days.

I would make one or two suggestions. The first relates to the question of whether hon. Members are responsible persons or not. If they are not, my suggestion completely falls to the ground, and whether they are or not is for the Government to decide. I take two imaginary cases to illustrate my point. The first is a ridiculous one. Say Corporal Brown's mother writes to me and suggests that her son should be made a field-marshal forthwith, as he is certainly a good soldier and would be most excellent in leading the Army either in war or peace. Take another case where a man comes home on leave from Italy, and wants compassionate leave to deal with matters at home. It seems that both cases get the same priority. One is ridiculous and one important, but probably the replies would come on the same day and almost by the same post.

A builder I know who had a firm of his own came home on leave from the Army in Italy. The firm was closed during the war. His partner was killed in the Air Force. When this man came home from Italy he found that the man from whom he leased his buildings to store his equipment, was not prepared to keep the site open for an indefinite period, and new builders had started up in the very small town in which he lives. He wrote and asked me if he could get out under Class B. I wrote to the Minister of Works and to the War Office. I asked the Minister of Works whether he could do anything to get the man released as a key specialist in the building trade.

I wrote to the War Office to ask them if they could tell me when his block would come up for release. I received an answer from the Minister of Works saying that he had sent the man a questionnaire. I immediately wrote to the War Office to ask if they could keep the man in England, pending the results of the questionnaire. He had only a fortnight's leave to run, I did not get an answer but as a result of a great deal of telephoning, I was eventually told that the War Office regretted very much that they could not keep him in England pending the result of the questionnaire, and so he went back to Italy. A week after he had gone I received a letter from the Ministry of Works saying that they had asked that he should be released as a key man; a week later I got a letter from the War Office saying that his release had been approved. But the man was then back in Italy, and had to be brought back to this country, which owing to the difficulties of transport meant several weeks' delay.

The question I would like to ask is: Would it not be possible for Members of this House, if they consider a case to be important, to place some sort of sign on their letters—I suggest the letter "P" in red—to show that they consider it to be an important case, which should be dealt with out of turn? If it is said that hon. Members would abuse this privilege and not use it fairly, of course the whole idea falls to the ground, but I do not believe that hon. Members on either side would abuse it. I have probably written 600 letters or more to Government Departments on cases which have been brought to my attention since I became a Member of this House, and I have marked perhaps ten of them "Urgent." But it has not made any difference at all; the answer has come back in the same time as it would have done in the normal way. If they had been answered more quickly, that might have meant that the comparatively unimportant cases would have taken a little longer, but I cannot see that this would matter much.

The second point I want to make is this. A Member writes to a Minister about a certain case and receives an answer, probably quite rightly, saying that he cannot help, or cannot allow the man in question to be brought back from India on compassionate leave, or whatever it is. The Member then gets additional evidence, perhaps a very strong doctor's certificate, or a letter from the British Legion or some other body, and again writes to the Minister. Judging purely from the length of time it takes to get an answer in such cases, it appears as if the case has gone to the bottom of the queue again, and you have to wait the same time for the second answer, as you had to wait for the first, giving the totally erroneous idea that the case takes twice as long to deal with, as it really takes. If you have started a case and then send additional information within a few days, surely that case ought to be dealt with more quickly than one which is being started from scratch.

I hope that the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, when he replies, will say something about the bottlenecks, if any, which exist in the various Government Departments. I am told, unofficially, that there is a shortage of typists. It is not a question of who can sign a letter or dictate it; it is the shortage of typists. That may or may not be true, but in the Chancellor's reply to a written Question on 13th March, he quoted the pay of typists in the Civil Service. I do not think that it is particularly good pay compared with what they could get outside. Would it not be possible to raise it, so as to compete with the wages paid outside the Civil Service? I think that, if that were possible, correspondence, not only from hon. Members, but from responsible bodies in the country, might be speeded up. I fully realise what an enormous amount of work Government Departments have to do, but I hope the Financial Secretary will deal with that point. Rightly or wrongly, the Government have decided to take over certain industries, and they will take an increasing control in industry as time goes on. If they do that, both Government Departments and hon. Members must expect more and more correspondence. If that is so, the Government must produce a machine that is fit and capable of dealing with it, I think they must overhaul the present system and see if it is not possible to improve it and get more people into it. I hope the Financial Secretary will agree that I have raised the matter fairly and without bias. I hope he will give us further facts, and will also reply to the suggestions I have made, and that that reply will help us, and, more especially, our constituents, to understand the situation that now exists.

3.47 p.m.

Mr. Skeffington-Lodge (Bedford)

In general, I would very much like to support the remarks of the hon. Member for the Isle of Thanet (Mr. Carson). We are frequently impressed, as Members of Parliament, with the results of the very long delay in getting replies to our letters, especially in regard to Service inquiries. Indeed, in many cases, when a Serviceman writes to us, we find that he is out of the Forces altogether before the answer on a particular query has reached us. I have found myself that this has placed me in a most awkward position. I have little indeed to offer in the way of concrete suggestions in regard to replies to our letters, but I would like to stress that those replies should, at least, reach hon. Members before anything reaches the original inquirer from Government Departments. It is most annoying to discover, when one writes to a constituent saying, "I have managed to do this for you," that he or she has already heard that the job has been adequately tackled and that we are "also rans" in the whole situation. It is a matter into which the Financial Secretary might well look.

I would also like to lend my support to the point made by the hon. Member for the Isle of Thanet on the matter of priority for certain correspondence. It might well be arranged that hon. and right hon. Gentlemen should mark their letters "Priority," and that, as a result, those letters should receive priority of attention by Government Departments. I hope the Financial Secretary can meet us on that point and help us all. I think we are people of reasonably sound judgment in this direction, and we would not mark letters '' Priority '' if they were of comparative insignificance. In general, I feel that a great deal more can be done to assist hon. Members of this House in getting rapid replies to their communications, and in keeping their constituents happy, merry and bright, on this very important aspect of their activities.

3.50 p.m.

Mr. Hurd (Newbury)

This is a matter of great importance, not only to Members of Parliament, but also to the public, because, today, every citizen is more or less under the decree of Government. His life is ruled inevitably at every turn by the decision of some Government Department. Sometimes, he feels that he is not getting fair treatment. Then he does his best for himself, and, if he fails, writes to his Member. We are serving as a safety valve. If that safety valve is hopelessly clogged and if even a Member of Parliament cannot get satisfaction or even a reply, satisfactory or unsatisfactory, within a reasonable time, it means that many thousands of citizens are living under a real sense of grievance with the world in general. I am afraid that that is the fact today. The ordinary man or woman has usually expended a great deal of patience in trying to get satisfaction before writing to the Member of Parliament. In almost all these cases there are, surely, pretty full records in Government Departments, and, as a general rule, the cases are not new when Members of Parliament take them up.

It may be useful if I give the House a record of the delays which I, as an ordinary back bench Member, have experienced in getting replies from Ministers. It is a "batting average" for the three months, October, November and December, during which I wrote letters to various Government Departments. It would be well for the Departments to know how they stand. The following are the average delays of the different Ministries. Colonial Office, eight days; Foreign Office, eight days; Ministry of Works, 12 days; Treasury, 13 days; Ministry of Fuel and Power, 18 days; Ministry of Agriculture, 18 days; Home Office, 21 days; Ministry of Health, 24 days; Admiralty, 24 days; Ministry of Labour, 26 days; Board of Trade, 30 days; Ministry of War Transport, 33 days; War Office, 40 days; Ministry of Pensions, 41 days, and the Air Ministry 50 days. Fifty days are seven weeks and one day, which is a very long time for some poor man or his wife to be waiting for the result of what they regard as a final appeal through their Member of Parliament.

I have brought that "batting average" up to date by trying to get at the delays over letters sent to Ministers in January and February. Of course, a good many of those letters remain unanswered today, and it is not a full average, but it is satisfactory to know that there is some improvement. In the case of the Air Ministry, the average delay is now only 32 days. That is four and a half weeks, but it is better than seven weeks and one day. The War Office are now running at an average delay of 26 days. I would like to support what my hon. Friend said about the charming letters that we get from the Under-Secretary of State for Air to send on to our constituents. They are kindly and very human letters, and I believe that the tone of them saves that Minister having to write further letters. If we get a stuffy letter from a Minister and send it on to a constituent, as like as not that constituent comes back to have another crack, and another letter has to go through the machine. Therefore, although it takes a long time for the Under-Secretary of State for Air to give his replies, they are generally final, because they satisfy the constituent that his case has been looked at fairly and sympathetically.

They are very delightful letters. One that I received on nth March says: I do apologise for the unconscionable time I have taken to reply to your letter of 1st November. I might add that this followed no less than five official apologies for delay sent to me at monthly intervals, and even now the case is not settled. There is another letter dated 8th March from the same Minister, which says: I am afraid I undoubtedly did slip up very badly in my letter of 24th January about Flight-Lieutenant Spragg, who was an Equipment Officer in C.M.F., and you were perfectly right in rapping me over the knuckles in your letter of 12th February. I am truly sorry about this slip up, but I think you will agree that we were not so appallingly at fault as we have been known to be. We are rendering a service to the Government by raising this matter, especially because Ministers and the Labour Party seem determined to overload Departments with work, much of which, in our view, should be transferred to free enterprise as soon as possible. I am sure Ministers must be as anxious as we are on these benches to retrieve the good name of their Departments for quick and reliable ser- vice to the public. I hope each Department will look at its record and determine to do better in future.

3.57 P.m

Mr. Paget (Northampton)

I am sure all hon. Members on the back benches, at least, arc grateful to the hon. Member for the Isle of Thanet (Mr. Carson) for having raised this matter, and I cordially endorse everything he said. I agree also with what was said about the Undersecretary of State for Air. It is not so annoying having to wait for a long time for a letter. What is annoying is when one has waited a month or five weeks, and then receives a stereotyped reply which could just as easily have been run off a rubber stamp on the following day. I hope the War Office, in particular, will take note of that.

With regard to the question of marking letters "Urgent" and getting them dealt with as such, if only the Departments would accept what has been said on this question I believe they would save themselves any amount of trouble, because when one does wish to have a matter dealt with quickly, one knows that it is futile writing a letter at all. The result is that one gets on the telephone, or goes round and sees a number of people. Thus one occupies far more of the Minister's time in finding the right person and in talking to the Minister on the telephone. If urgent matters could be dealt with as urgent; it would save Ministers having to deal with so much on the telephone; I hope that point will be borne in mind. I do not like disagreeing with my hon. Friend the Member for Bedford (Mr. Skeffington-Lodge), but in many cases the remedy which one is seeking to get for a constituent is urgent, and probably has already been long delayed. Let us ''not introduce a further delay by having an order going round Departments to the effect that once a Member has intervened, no remedy shall be given to a constituent unless the Member has first been notified. Otherwise we shall only make the difficulties of our constituents worse than they were before.

3.59 p.m.

Lieut.-Commander Gurney Braithwaite (Holderness)

Hon. Members who have spoken so far in this very valuable Debate have more or less confined themselves to the time factor. I want to urge upon the Financial Secretary another factor which I believe to be equally important—the personal factor. Before coming to that, I would express my agreement with the hon. Member for Northampton (Mr. Paget) in the remarks with which he concluded his speech. If I may say to the hon. Member for Bedford (Mr. Skeffington-Lodge), whose amour propre seemed to be a little hurt by the fact that departmental replies to constituents "beat him to it," this has its compensations. It is pleasant to be praised for actions of which one is deeply unaware, and the longer one is in public life the more one learns that both praise and blame descend upon one unworthily.

It being Four o'Clock, the Motion for the Adjournment of the House lapsed, without Question put.

Motion made, and Question proposed, "That this House do now adjourn." — [Captain Michael Stewart.]

Lieut.-Commander Braithwaite

However tempting the opposite view may be, particularly to hon Members who sit in this House on very slender majorities, I would say that it is in the interests of our constituents that action should be taken, and that the pride of a Member should take second place.

Mr. Skeffington-Lodge

May it not be extremely embarrassing to an hon. Member if he meets a constituent in the circumstances which the hon. and gallant Gentleman has described, and is unable to conduct an intelligent conversation on the basis of the information which has been supplied to the constituent, but not to the Member?

Lieut. - Commander Braithwaite

I assure the hon. Gentleman that as he proceeds along .the Parliamentary road, he will learn the necessary technique. I urge upon the Government the importance of letters from hon. Members to Departments having replies signed by the responsible Ministers. I imagine that most of us when we go to our constituencies conduct what doctors would call "surgery "—personal interviews—whereby we go into cases in great detail, before sending them to Ministers. It is important—and here the hon. Member for Bedford will support me —that Members should be able to send their constituents replies bearing the prestige of a Ministerial signature. I would be the last to say anything derogatory of the Parliamentary Private Secretaries. I believe they are a valuable, if docile feature of any House, but, however impressive may be the signatures of Parliamentary Private Secretaries, it must be borne in mind that, in fact, they bear no Ministerial responsibility at all. I am sure the hon. Member for Normanton (Mr. Tom Smith)will not mind if I tell a story about him. I have been unable to give him notice, but I know he would be the last to object. He told me that when he was a Parliamentary Private Secretary he was once billed to speak at a big meeting in Hull as the "Parliamentary Secretary to the Department." He began his speech by pointing out to the audience that this was in fact a misnomer, that he was not a Minister, he was not a Parliamentary Secretary, but he was a Parliamentary Private Secretary. A voice in the audience asked, "What is the difference?" To which the hon. Gentleman replied, "£1,500 year." That, I think, sums up the position.

I know the pressure upon Ministers in-this matter of correspondence. I know I am asking for something which is to require a great deal of labour. But it can be done. It is done by the Under-Secretary for Air, who has been praised, very properly, by two of my hon. Friends this afternoon. I do not know what hours the Under-Secretary for Air works; they must be very long. I can tell him that he is reaping a rich dividend by the satisfaction which it gives to us in sending our constituents replies over Ministerial signatures. The hon. Member for Bedford will realise the importance of securing a yard arm if the reply should be adverse. How much more satisfactory to be able to send a reply from an actual Minister, showing that one had been to the fountain head, showing that one had in fact done one's best. The Under-Secretary of State for Air goes further. The other day I received a .letter from him pointing out at considerable length that a reply which he had sent me in December had since proved to be incorrect, from information which had come to him. There was a further reply, quite unsolicited, over a matter which, I am bound to confess, I had completely forgotten. A Minister who can take that line is, to my mind, the model by which other Ministers should set their conduct. I cannot speak too highly of the hon. Gentleman's help in that connection. The time factor is important, but equally important is the authority of the reply. I am quite sure that the Financial Secretary to the Treasury will be sympathetic to what we have all said, because not so long ago he adorned the Opposition benches in a private capacity. He is probably wrestling with this problem himself, and I can think of no better contact we could have than his genial presence today. I am sure that he will convey to his colleagues the gist of this valuable, but short, Debate.

4.6 p.m.

Flight-Lieutenant Beswick (Uxbridge)

I am pleased that the hon. Member for the Isle of Thanet (Mr. Carson) has raised this matter. It has given me the opportunity to express another view which I think follows on. I agree that when the area over which Government Departments will exercise their authority is being extended, and when the interest of constituents in the way they are being governed increases, the number of letters likely to follow from that will also increase. When we are tackling this matter we are doing something which will improve the machinery of democracy. As the hon. and gallant Member for Holder-ness (Lieut.-Commander Braithwaite) said, there is something impressive to a citizen when he receives a letter signed by one of His Majesty's Secretaries of State. The citizen feels that he has direct contact with the head of a Government Department, and that is very valuable.

I would like to add my quota to the compliments which have been paid to my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Air. I think the time limit referred to earlier was rather unfair to that Department, and I am pleased at the way in which the hon. and gallant Member made an amende afterwards in referring to the matter of my hon. Friend's replies. I feel that we must get into Government correspondence a little more of that human touch which has been achieved by the Air Ministry. I thought of that strongly this week when I had two letters from constituents, each of which enclosed a form from a Government Department. One letter was from a gentleman of 81, going blind, who had applied for a pension. That pension had been refused. But the manner of conveying this refusal was by the form I have in my hand, which says: '' To the above named claimant: You are hereby informed that the decision of the Minister of Health upon your claim in respect of which an appeal was made against the decision of the Pensions Sub-Committee is as follows: That you are not entitled to a pension. It may well be that this is the most businesslike way of dealing with such cases, but I think a letter or a printed form saying, '' We regret …" or, "We are sorry it is not possible to grant you a pension under the existing law," would be a much more human way of putting over a decision of that kind. I also received this week a letter with another form attached, also dealing with an old age pension. The form is headed "O.A.P. 269," and the letter was from a lady aged 61 who has done a marvellous job, as I happen to know. She has kept herself and dependants, and has contributed to a pension. She has reached the age when she has the right to draw a pension, yet she receives another of these rather unpleasant looking forms, which says: Notice of award of contributory old age pension: I have to inform you that your title to old age pension under the above mentioned Acts has been admitted. The woman had a right to this pension. She had contributed to it. If we are to make a success of the sort of Government we have in mind, increasing the contact of the Government with the people, then the Government's relationship with ordinary citizens must also be improved; we must improve the machinery by which Governments announce their decisions. I hope that the matter which has been raised will be looked into and that an improvement will follow; that it will only be a start in an improvement which will spread over the whole area of the Government's activity.

4.10 p.m.

Mr. Boyd-Carpenter (Kingston-upon-Thames)

I hope that this Debate may have the effect not only of eliciting a courteous, helpful reply from the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, but in drawing attention to the extraordinary variation in the speed of replies as between different Government Departments. I hope the hon. Gentleman will not only reply, but will forcibly invite the attention of the black sheep to their particular degree of blackness. In particular, I trust we may not be given the defence that certain Departments have a vast volume of correspondence and that they have, therefore, to be dilatory in dealing with it. The volume of correspondence, as I understand it, is substantially stable, and it is, surely, up to those Departments which for one reason or another—and bad administration is often the reason—have a considerable volume of correspondence to make the necessary administrative arrangements to deal with it. They should be persuaded to make those arrangements.

To take the example of the War Office, there is nothing—nosudden act of God— suddenly to cause it to receive a large amount of correspondence. It should not be beyond the ingenuity of those responsible so to rearrange the administrative structure of that Department as to secure a reasonably rapid reply to letters from hon. Members. We ought not to be treated merely to the defence that these letters are rather tiresome, and that they come in very large numbers, and that, therefore, it is impossible to deal with them. After all, hon. Members are performing a most important constitutional function in raising semi-formally with Ministers the grievances of their constituents, and they are entitled to have those matters dealt with speedily and efficiently.

I trust that it may be appreciated by Departments that their delay in dealing with correspondence invariably leads to a large number of Questions being put down to them at the Table of this House which would otherwise not be put down. Hon. Members who desire, in particular from the War Office, a reasonably speedy reply have no alternative but to put down a Question, because they know from bitter experience that they cannot get a reply in a reasonable time by any other means. That, I understand, is the reason why the Order Paper so frequently bears, particularly in the case of the War Office, an enormous number of Questions dealing with individual cases and not with general matters of policy.

On the subject of the War Office, which has figured with some dismal distinction this afternoon, and whose effortless inefficiency has been brought out with some vividness. I would support most strongly what has been said by my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Holderness (Lieut.-Commander Braith-waite) as to the right of hon. Members to receive a reply over the signature of a responsible Minister. I would at once acquit the Secretary of State; the right hon. Gentleman is most punctilious in that matter. But the same cannot be said of his Junior Ministers, and whereas it may well be the case that, in some instances, waiting for a Ministerial signature causes delay, none the less a consistent practice has been made of reply by Parliamentary Private Secretaries. With the greatest respect to those most valuable functionaries, that is not the response to which an hon. Member is entitled.

There is one other point I would venture to make. I have suggested that the fault in the "black sheep" Departments is bad organisation. That bad organisation is demonstrated not only by the delay in Members of this House getting a reply, but by even worse delays from which the public suffers. I should like to quote two examples. The first is the case of a soldier, and I have drawn all the facts of this case to the attention of the War Office. It is a case of a man whose Class B release was authorised and passed through the War Office on 15th August. On 8th September, the soldier in blissful, or perhaps I should say unblissful, ignorance of this decision, embarked for India. In February of this year, the Class B release authorisation caught up with the soldier in India, and, as he was then within three weeks of his Class A release, he properly refused it. This is a case where, through administrative inefficiency, a man was deprived of a release to which, ex hypothesi, he was entitled.

In case the Financial Secretary should think that he is getting away too lightly, I would point out that my second illustration relates to the Treasury. I invited his attention to the action of the War Damage Commission in applying to the police court for the committal of a certain individual. I received, as one always does, a courteous reply to my inquiry from the Financial Secretary. He told me that the matter was being inquired into, and that an official of the War Damage Commission had been called upon to make a report. Last week, I received from my constituent a statement, first, that the committal had again been applied for, and, secondly, that the official had informed him that he had had no inquiry whatsoever from his superior officers. No doubt the Financial Secretary was innocently misled, but it does show how administrative inefficiency defeats the best intentions of a Minister. I ask the Financial Secretary to give the House some assurance that the whole administrative set-up—if I might use a colloquialism—of Whitehall is being reviewed and reorganised, with a view to dealing with the vast mass of business which natural developments have imposed upon them, plus that which the policy of the Government has forced upon them.

4.18 p.m.

The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Mr. Glenvil Hall)

I should like to say that I, with other Members who have spoken, appreciate the spirit with which the hon. Member for the Isle of Thanet (Mr. Carson) has raised this matter. I believe that other Members have had it in mind to raise this subject, had he not done so, and therefore this Debate has been inevitable. It may strike some people, who do not know our methods, as rather incongruous that we should pass from a vast canvas like India to a Debate on a purely domestic subject of this kind, but all of us realise, although we are discussing only the question of correspondence between Members and Ministers, that this matter has very wide repercussions. It is something which should be debated, and in so far as we can get Members' letters dealt with efficiently and quickly, we shall do so. With this Debate in prospect I have had discussions on this matter with many Departments. I am here, rather, to answer for other peoples' sins. [Hon. Members: "And your own."] I will come to that in a minute, but at the moment most of the charges have been levelled at other Departments, and not against the Department with which, at the moment, I am most closely associated. In passing, I would say that the hon. and gallant Member for Holder-ness (Lieut.-Commander Braithwaite) remarked with some truth, that I, when I was sitting on his side of the House, must have had knowledge of many of the points which are being raised today.

The hon. Member for the Isle of Thanet asked me if I would give some figures of the number of letters received by the Departments. The Departments receive a very large number of letters each week, but I confine myself to the figures of those received from hon. Members. The War Office is now receiving about 5,000 letters a month from Members of Parliament. A short time ago it was about 7,000 a month, but the number has dropped by 2,000 a month within recent weeks. The Air Ministry receive about 4,000 a month, the Ministry of Labour about 1,600, the Ministry of Health about 1,200, the Ministry of Works about 1,000 and other Departments, a lesser number. I find from inquiry that the delays as between one Department and another—this has been borne out by observations of hon. Members this afternoon—vary considerably, not unnaturally according to the volume of letters received from Members of Parliament. The hon. Member for New-bury (Mr. Hurd) indicated that the Colonial Office appear to be best in dealing with their letters. The Colonial Office, I think, get fewer letters than any other Department, from Members of Parliament.

Mr. Skeffington-Lodge

Can my hon. Friend give particulars of the number of letters received by the Admiralty, so that we may know how this compares with other Service Departments?

Mr. Glenvil Hall

I am sorry I have not the figures for the Admiralty, but I will see that they are obtained, and I will let my hon. Friend have them. My information is that the Admiralty receive fewer letters than the other Service Departments, and the average, I believe, would be about 600 or 700 a month at the present time.

Dr. Morgan (Rochdale)

The Colonial Office is just as bad as the other Departments. It takes four to six weeks to get an answer to a letter.

Mr. Glenvil Hall

I am informed that the Colonial Office get fewer letters than other Departments and, as we have heard, they appear to answer letters within a week or so.

The vast majority of the letters received by the Service Departments deal with individual cases. This means a good deal of inquiry. When they deal with questions of postings and releases, this often entails communication with the Ministry of Labour and obtaining information, not only from places in this country but from overseas. The Ministry of Pensions have often to deal with cases which call for a medical examination. The Ministry has first to communicate with the place where the papers are kept, these have to be sent on and arrangements made with the man to be examined and for the doctor to see him. All this takes time. I am told—but here my information is at variance with that given by hon. Members—that the Service Departments have cut down the delay to about three weeks in the majority of cases, though now and again they may get a special case which takes longer. They hope further to reduce the delay. The Ministry of Labour have cut down delays to about 10 days, and the Board of Trade normally take now about two weeks, but in certain categories of cases they find that it is not possible to reply to a letter from an hon. Member within a fortnight. They receive an enormous number of applications for utility furniture, apart from letters from hon. Members on that subject—at the rate of 10,000 a week from outside people. This is an enormous number and all these letters have to be dealt with, as well as letters from Members of Parliaments

As to machinery, every Department has a special section or official set aside to deal with letters from Members of Parliament, to which good degree of priority is given. Each one is marked to indicate that it comes from an hon. Member and preferential treatment is given in most cases. I want to be quite frank with the House. Up to now, complete priority has not been given to hon. Members' letters because it is felt that that would be unfair to the outside public who also write letters to the Ministers. I think it is not a bad suggestion that hon. Members might, if they so desired, mark certain of their own letters in some way to indicate that they think that they are of greater priority than others which they might write to the same Minister on other topics. I will see that this is passed on to all Departments.

Measures have been tried by the Ministries to help hon Members to lessen the volume of correspondence. Some time ago the War Office set up a kind of information bureau to which hon. Member? could go themselves and receive answers to problems and points put to them by their constituents I confess that this was not a great success, and it is likely that it would never be a real success because many of the letters which hon. Members send, and many of those to which they attach importance, are letters dealing with individual cases. An information bureau would be of very little use in that type of inquiry. Questions on all sorts of topics are answered in the House by the Service Ministers, and we have done our best to provide an up to date digest, by the printing of the weekly index to Hansard. If hon. Members had more recourse to that than some of them have, they might find many of the answers they need already there. The Minister of National Insurance himself received 6oo letters from Members of Parliament in three weeks on one new Bill alone, and he tells me that the answers to most of those letters could have been discovered by the hon Members themselves, had they looked at the Bill and the White Paper attached to it. Therefore, hon. Members can, if they will, help themselves more than they have perhaps in the past.

The Select Committee made reference to this matter in their second Report, in paragraph 12 of which they suggest that Ministers should reply within two weeks. I am here to say that the Ministers are trying to get down to that target. Whether they will in all cases is not yet certain, but it is something that they are trying to achieve, and I hope they will succeed. But the machinery is terribly overloaded at the present time. There is a great shortage of staff but I agree that letters should be couched in such language that the letter itself can e sent on to the person concerned. I remember how I suffered myself, when I sat on the other side of the House, and when I received a letter which was brief and of no help whatever to the constituent to whom I wished to send it. Perhaps my hon. Friend the Member for Bedford (Mr. Skeffington-Lodge) will see me afterwards on the point which he raised. I, too, have suffered until I learned wisdom and started my letters by saying "As you will doubtless have heard— ". At any rate there are ways and means, as the hon. and gallant Member for Holderness (Lieut.-Commander Braithwaite) knows—and, incidentally, he is never embarrassed in any situation.

If there were time I might have dealt with one or two individual points that have been raised, but I can assure hon. Members that every Department will study this Debate. We want to meet Members in this matter if we can. We realise that they have a grievance but as demobilisation increases and more people come back from the Forces and shorthand-typists are in more plentiful supply, we shall do our very best, both to see that letters are written quickly in reply to hon. Members, and that the replies, when received, are friendly and sympathetic.

Lieut.-Commander Braithwaite

And signed by a Minister?

Mr. Glenvil Hall

And signed by a responsible Minister.

It being Half-past Four o'Clock, Mr. Speaker adjourned the House, without Question put, pursuant to the Standing Order.