HC Deb 28 July 1952 vol 504 cc1225-34

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

9.49 p.m.

Sir Ian Fraser (Morecambe and Lonsdale)

The Borough of Morecambe and Heysham is an important seaside resort in one of the most beautiful places in this country, overlooked by the hills and mountains of the Lake District. Many retired people live there, and it may surprise the House to know that 1,000,000 people visit this town during the course of the year for the purposes of holiday or on day trips. The population has increased over the last 50 years due to the foresight and activity of successive councils, able town clerks and a number of enterprising citizens who have developed the hotel, boarding house and entertainment industries.

So rapid was the development between the wars that a few years before the war broke out it became necessary to embark upon a scheme, which was a considerable one for a town of this size, to provide new sewerage. In fact, a scheme estimated to cost £348,000 was started just before the war broke out. The war brought the works to an end and after the war, after a little delay, the works were re-started, but they had not been going for more than a few weeks when lack of steel made it impossible to continue and many months elapsed. Then, when steel became available, it was hard to get the right kind of labour, and when steel and labour were available delay was occasioned in securing the licences.

And so it appears that all the stars must set favourably in their courses if an operation of this kind is to proceed smoothly. Twelve years have passed and, for one reason or another, the scheme is not yet concluded. Indeed, it will take a further two and a half years to complete it and, instead of costing one-third of a million pounds, it will cost one and a half million. Within recent weeks the town council and I have made representations to my right hon. Friend the Minister of Housing and Local Government and the Department has granted them some steel. However, it is not enough, and they are still unable to use as much labour as they have and to get on with the job as quickly as they might.

My purpose is not to blame anyone—neither Government officials nor Ministers of any party and, least of all, the Borough of Morecambe and Heysham itself. Events and affairs beyond their control have caused this delay and the enormous cost and great inconvenience to which they have been put. Although, owing to recent housing measures under my right hon. Friend, they are now building more houses to sell than ever before, and still as many houses to let as ever before, it remains a fact that any great development of housing must be held up until this sewerage scheme is completed.

The House may be aware that apart from the holiday amenities and industry—if we may call it that—for which Morecambe and Heysham are famous, there is an important port at Heysham undertaking the ferry service to Belfast, and increasing work receiving and sending out tankers which, through the great refinery there, supply the greater part of the North-West. There are, however, important reasons why this work should proceed, and I repeat that I do not come down to the House to blame anybody. I come to ask the Minister and all his officials to realise the handicap, both financial and otherwise, under which this town, through no fault of its own, has suffered. I ask the Minister to do everything that can properly be done to expedite by all means in his power the supply of the necessary steel, the appropriate consent, and in every way to help this town to complete its job.

It is not only in the interests of the most important town in my constituency, and an important town from the holiday and seaside point of view in England itself, but also it is wasteful of the resources of the nation that works of this kind should be put on and put off, started and stopped, instead of being carried through smoothly.

It will be the pleasure of my constituents in a very few weeks to welcome hon. and right hon. Gentlemen opposite, who will come to Morecambe and Heysham to engage in their annual conference. They will be welcome guests. I hope that while they are there, they will have an opportunity of talking to the mayor and to the town clerk, of seeing how beautiful a place Morecambe is, and subsequently of lending me their aid in the House should my right hon. Friend the Minister of Housing and Local Government not succumb to my blandishments tonight.

9.55 p.m.

The Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Housing and Local Government (Mr. Ernest Marples)

My hon. Friend the Member for Morecambe and Lonsdale (Sir I. Fraser) has performed a great service in raising this important subject on the Adjournment debate. He raised it in a very moderate, restrained and considered way, and he put his case most lucidly. He was persuasive and reasoned, and he did not blame either the Ministry or the local authority for the dilemma in which both the Government and the local authority are placed. I am obliged to my hon. Friend for giving my right hon. Friend due notice of the points he wished to raise and for the calm and courteous way in which he raised the subject.

I quite agree with my hon. Friend when he said that Morecambe and Heysham were the most important towns in his constituency. Morecambe is a great seaside town. It has many conferences, and surveying from this Box the benches opposite I am sorry to see that none of the Members opposite are interested in the problems of Morecambe. [HON. MEMBERS: "One has now arrived."] Oh, yes, there is now one. He has sat down at the crucial and critical moment, and has saved the soul of the Socialist Party on this occasion. He is their saviour as far as Morecambe is concerned. My hon. Friend would, I am sure, have liked an audience of more than one Socialist to consider these important points.

The difficulty about the problem is this. The sewerage scheme upon which the Morecambe and Heysham Corporation have embarked has the full blessing of the Government and the Ministry. There is no argument about its necessity. We are well aware of the shortcomings of the present sewerage system. It is antiquated, overtaxed, and is not adequate to the needs of the town. We must provide adequate drainage for existing and future houses. We are aware also of the difficulties and delays which the council have had to face in the long and chequered career of the project, both during and since the war.

Unfortunately, the recent difficulties are not only confined to Morecambe, but are shared by the rest of the country. Many other local authorities need controlled materials in large quantities for their water supplies, their sewerage schemes, and so on. I realise that Morecambe is in the unfortunate position of having flooding in the area during wet weather.

Most civil engineering projects are like reputations; they are not valued until they have vanished. Civil engineering, which is the engineer's combat with nature, is not appreciated to the same extent as the more superficial and attractive values of such things as buildings. The moment that something starts springing from the ground, the average person thinks that it is attractive, but generally speaking the things that go on below the ground and against the forces of nature are more important, more hazardous and more difficult than building projects above the ground.

I believe that in this respect the subject which my hon. Friend has raised is of crucial importance, although not as spectacular as some of the more vivid projects which the public see above the ground.

It being Ten 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."—[Mr. Oakshott.]

Mr. Marples

The present position, as my hon. Friend said, is that three major contracts are progressing simultaneously. These cover the construction of the trunk sewer. If hon. Members are interested, the trunk sewer graduates from a diameter of 18 inches to almost five feet, which shows the difficult technical nature of the operation. It is through the Westgate area and there is an outfall sewer from the main pumping station to the sea. These contracts, with others which have been wholly or mainly completed, will provide a backbone to a new drainage system for large areas in the north-eastern parts of the borough where house building is at present restricted. They will give a new and adequate outflow which is essential if the present flooding, which I agree with my hon. Friend is most distressing, is to be avoided in future.

The difficulty about the present scheme is that its future progress involves a number of constructions and the nature of the work itself places a very definite limit on the speed at which it can advance. I sit here not only as a humble and very junior Minister, but as a person who before taking my present office with its magnificent remuneration—was engaged on this class of work. I speak from important day-to-day experience in commercial life of what is involved in this type of work. Any job which is as hazardous and com- plicated as this, which involves the forces of nature, is necessarily a slow and difficult job, and the very nature of the work imposes a definite limit on the speed at which it can advance.

To take an example, the Westgate sewer, which is immediately needed to serve the Branksome Drive housing estate and other sites, is being laid in deep waterlogged ground. That portion of the outflow which has to be laid through the town is meeting difficulties, and a few days ago the Department which my right hon. Friend has the honour to lead was informed of snags which the contractors encountered in Balmoral Road. Always in these jobs underground we find difficulties involved because of the precise nature of the ground to be traversed or tunnelled. The sea outfall, for example, has to be laid three-quarters of a mile from the promenade across sands uncovered only at low tide. Obviously, work of that nature cannot continue at a terrific speed.

Sir I. Fraser

That is well understood. Is that not, therefore, all the more reason, since nature makes it slow, that man should make it as fast as possible by giving the necessary materials, especially during the summer months, when the tides are low?

Mr. Marples

I grant the cogency and force of my hon. Friend's point, but it is not merely what Morecambe and Heysham shall receive, but which part of England shall do without in order that they shall have these facilties. If we take the isolated case of Morecambe and Heysham alone, I grant this point entirely, but the question which has to be decided is which part of England shall do without the steel in order that Morecambe may have more. That is a rather more difficult problem.

I agree with him that as much as is possible to be done should be done, but I can see no prospect—I speak here perhaps partly as a technician and partly as a junior Minister—of the sea outfall, where the work has to contend with the sea and the weather, being finished within the next three years. I am afraid that building and works on the foreshore are a necessary accompaniment for a job of this size. Hon. Members must realise that the sea outfall alone is costing the best part of £500,000, and a considerable amount of plant is inevitable.

I wish to make a suggestion to my hon. Friend. If he or his local authority or any consulting civil engineer can make any suggestion as to how this work can be carried out in a speedier manner from a technical point of view, I can assure him that they will be sympathetically considered at the Ministry. But these suggestions must not be merely in general terms; they must be specific and relate to the particular problem. It will not be easy, as I know, because one of the Minister's engineering inspectors who recently visited Morecambe and Heysham went thoroughly into the progress of the work and the immediate needs for steel and timber.

What about the materials? We all know that such materials as timber and steel are in short supply in this country and are very precious. We may have large timber stocks, but the question of replacement by the expenditure of foreign exchange is one which is occupying a large part of our attention at this moment.

As regards steel, we have only had a control over the distribution of steel fairly recently, and I am afraid that during the earlier months of this year we could not produce the authorisation at the time for the amounts for which we were asked. I am sorry, and I apologise to my hon. Friend for the fact that we were not able to meet his requirements. We had a large number of local authorities wanting authorisations in connection with various projects, some of them bigger than this one, and we had to spread our allocation as fairly as we possibly could.

I believe that nearly 1,000 tons of steel have still to be authorised for this particular project. A large part of this is for what is known in the trade as contractor's plant, and that is chiefly for the supply of steel sheet piling, which is used for coffer dam purposes. Steel sheet piling is extremely difficult to supply at the moment because a normal section of a Larsen steel sheet pile weights a ton, and if someone wants 500 steel sheet piles it really means 500 tons of steel. That is a large amount which, as hon. Members will realise, would make many motor cars.

It may be—I say only that it may be—possible for this steel sheet piling to be hired from some firm of contractors who have in stock the particular type which may be required; I do not know. But I promise my hon. Friend that I will pursue this problem tomorrow in order to see whether some assistance can be given in this respect. I hesitate to tell my hon. Friend, who in his tenacious and charming way furthers the interests of Morecambe in a way which we all admire, that steel sheet piling is really the concern of the Ministry of Works. But I do not think that any Government official should shelter behind the fact that the Ministry of Works is responsible for a particular section of this scheme. I think the Government as a whole must be responsible.

My latest information is that the applications for steel authorisations made to his Department have all been dealt with. We have issued permits for all the steel needed up to and including this quarter, and the Ministry of Works have also completely satisfied the current needs of contractors who need authorisations from that Department. And for timber too we have met all the needs up to date.

What about the future? On behalf of my right hon. Friend I cannot make any categorical promises, because we do not know for certain how much steel and timber we shall have to allocate next year. But my right hon. Friend is fully seized of the importance of this scheme, especially in relation to the house building programme of the borough. We will do our best to cover with authorisations the continuing needs of the various contractors. I hope we shall be successful and enable smooth and easy working to be maintained during the coming year.

May I go into some of the technical details of this scheme? The Westgate sewer which is possibly one of the main sectors of this scheme, should be completed next year. That part of it which runs under the Branksome Drive Estate is being laid now, but there have unfortunately been difficulties recently in connection with it. If it is successfully laid, site operations for the houses can get under way and new houses could therefore be ready by the time the sewer is finished.

So far as this site is concerned, I think there need be very little further delay. House building in the north-eastern part of the borough would be greatly facilitated, as soon as the Westgate sewer is finished, but until the new outfall to the sea is finally completed house building in this section of the borough, although it can continue, must to some extent aggravate the existing drainage difficulties which are already met with there in the shape of the surcharging of the sewer and flooding from time to time.

This largely is a technical problem, and technical problems can rarely by solved by the Government deciding whether this or that policy should be adopted. It is necessary for the technicians to decide which sections shall receive priority and what they themselves as technicians decide to do in that section of the scheme. This is an important question, not only from the point of view of my hon. Friend's constituency, but also in connection with the housing programme as a whole.

My right hon. Friend has expressed and re-affirmed his determination to proceed as vigorously and fast as he can with his ambition to reach a certain number of houses per year. But those houses are obviously of no use unless they are supplied with electricity, water and sewerage facilities.

Sir I. Fraser

Before my hon. Friend reaches his last sentence, may I thank him for the help he has offered, and say that I know the council, with such advice as they think fit to take, will take every advantage of the careful but nevertheless sympathetic promises he has given them.

Mr. Marples

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for those kind remarks. If the council have any suggestion for an advancement of this work, I can assure him that it will be treated sympathetically. My right hon. Friend, or perhaps I in a more humble position, will receive, if necessary, a deputation from my hon. Friend or the council.

I know Morecambe and Heysham very well. I am half way between youth and old-age. My personal inclination at the moment is to visit Morecambe for a day or two to recuperate and then to hurry to the hinterland to climb the rocks in the Lake District. My hon. Friend can be assured that, as old age creeps upon me, I shall be more inclined to rest in a deck-chair at Morecambe than to climb the rocks in the Lake District. Anything which my right hon. Friend or I can do for Morecambe will be done.

The considerations here are mainly technical. They are not necessarily questions of policy. We are in sympathy with the scheme as a whole. We will give it every possible priority consistent with the demand of other local authorities. If we can speed up the work in this difficult time, we shall certainly do so. I hope that the local authority will accept this assurance so that we can proceed with the housing programme in Morecambe as fast as possible.

Question put, and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at Seventeen Minutes past Ten o'clock.