HC Deb 06 March 1953 vol 512 cc798-808

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

4.1 p.m.

Mr. M. Follick (Loughborough)

After such interesting discussions as we have had today on the care of the aged and world government, I rise at this rather late hour to address the House on a matter of grave importance to this country. It is the national responsibility for mining subsidence.

I gave the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Fuel and Power and his Parliamentary Private Secretary the fullest conception of what I was going to speak about today. I think I spoke to the hon. Gentleman twice and to his Parliamentary Private Secretary three times, besides getting in touch with his office, and I am astounded that there is no Treasury representative present today because, after all is said and done, the Minister knows that he himself cannot answer this question satisfactorily. Whenever questions on this matter have been addressed to him, he has always replied that it is a matter for the Treasury to answer. Indeed, the Parliamentary Secretary asked me whether this was not a matter for the Treasury, and I said it was. The question of mining subsidence, although it only occurs in the mining areas, concerns the whole country because we in this country live on coal. Without the production of coal the 51 million inhabitants of this country would have no existence at all. That applies as much to the inhabitants of Westminster as it does to the inhabitants of Ashby Woulds about whom I propose to speak in this debate.

Owing to mining subsidence, houses have been cracked right down, sewers have been smashed and the excrement and effluents from the sewers have flowed into the houses, spoiling the houses and ruining the furniture; schools have been spoilt and cricket fields and tennis courts which were once nice and flat have been made unusable through mining subsidence.

I have brought with me today some photographs specially taken so that hon. Members may be aware of the serious damage being caused by subsidence in these small local authorities. Here is a picture of a house in which the floor slopes so much that, coupled with the slime on it, one cannot walk successfully across it. Three feet of sewer effluent in this house spoiled the furniture. I have also another picture of a road spoiled by mining subsidence and another of a house which has had to be shored up. I have other pictures of a cracked sewer, of a brook the course of which has been diverted, and of a house which has been cracked in two.

I invite the Minister to look at these pictures so that he may see what mining subsidence really does. I know quite well that the Coal Board are responsible for reinstating dwelling houses, but they are not responsible for the loss of rent and for the passage to and fro of people who have to remove from these wrecked houses. The Coal Board are also not responsible for the road services or for the sewers in certain circumstances.

I have in my hand a map which was specially made in preparation for this debate. It shows "The Crescent," a crescent of 86 houses. Of these quite good and quite modern houses, 13 require immediate repairs, seven are too dangerous to be let, and 11 are cracked so badly that the local authority are not too sure whether they ought to be let or not. This subsidence is putting a burden on the backs of these small local authorities which they absolutely cannot carry. Their rates are so high that I have been told by the local authority for Ashby Woulds "Unless something is done to help us we shall have to abrogate our authority." This is a national question, and if the nation does not look after the miners who live in these areas they will not go to work in a region which is one of the best in the country. The output of this area is double the man-shift output of the whole country.

I should like to apologise for the absence of my neighbour and right hon. Friend the Member for Belper (Mr. G. Brown) who was intending to speak in this debate but has been suddenly called away to his constituency. I should like to bring into this debate also the neighbouring area of Market Bosworth. All these areas are linked together in one whole, and they are all suffering from this disability; yet they are all areas where there is a very high man-shift output.

I want to compare the rateable values in London and the rateable values in the areas of these small, poor, local authorities. In Westminster a penny rate brings in £44,700. Westminster has a population of about 99,000 and the rateable value is £11 million. The rate is 15s. in the £ and falls at £3 17s. 9d. per head of the population. One of the wealthiest districts in the world is paying £3 17s. 9d. per head in rates at 15s. in the £. The population of Ashby Woulds is just under 3,500 and a 1d. rate there brings in £68.

I know that there is a big difference in the size of the population of the two places, but here is the crucial fact and the important point: whereas the rates in prosperous, magnificent Westminster is 15s. in the £, in my poor little district the local authority levy a rate of £1 3s. 6d. in the £; and whereas in the millionaire centre of Great Britain the rate falls at £3 17s. 9d. per head of the population, in my area it falls at £5 15s. 9d. per head, which these relatively poor people, miners and miners' wives and their families have to pay in the area of a small local authority.

For this reason I wish to bring the matter to the attention of the Treasury, through the Minister—and once again I say I am astounded that no representative of the Treasury is here. A representative should have been here to take note of these important facts.

The Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Fuel and Power (Mr. L. W. Joynson-Hicks)

The hon. Gentleman has implied that I have not done what I undertook to do for him in getting a member of the Treasury here. I would point out that the hon. Member for Croydon, West (Mr. R. Thompson), who is sitting beside me, is a representative of the Treasury. I would further remind him that he did not address the subject of his Adjournment debate to the Treasury. He addressed it to my right hon. Friend's Department and, as it is customary for only one Minister to speak in reply to these debates, there is no point or advantage in my hon. Friend the Financial Secretary being present in person.

Mr. Follick

I am not sure that the hon. Gentleman is correct, because in my last Adjournment debate, when I spoke about the Commonwealth, there were two Ministers present on the Government Front Bench—one for the Commonwealth and the other for the Colonies.

The value of the coal that we take out of the earth of this country is selling at something like £1,000 million a year. As such an important representative of the Treasury is present, I want him to take note of that fact. The amount required to look after all this national damage is about £1 million a year. No more expense can be put on to the Coal Board. Wherever I go I am told that the Coal Board are doing a first-class job. But these local authorities have to fork out this money and in order to do so they have to increase the rates. They have phoned me today from Ashby Woulds——

Mr. Speaker

I have been trying to follow the hon. Member's speech with the greatest sympathy, but I do not yet know what he is suggesting. I know that there are certain statutory liabilities upon the Coal Board in respect of mining subsidences, and if he is advocating some extension of those he is in danger of running against the rule which forbids the discussion of legislation on these occasions.

Mr. Follick

I am not suggesting that; in fact, that is the very thing I am not suggesting. I say that this is a national responsibility. The whole nation lives on coal and as coal now belongs to the nation this question of subsidence should be the responsibility of the Treasury. It would cost only about £1 million a year. We get roughly £1,000 million a year from selling our coal. In addition, as every industry and every inhabitant who pays tax in this country pays it as an indirect or direct attribute to coal the £2,000 million we get from taxation is more or less entirely derived from coal, because without it nothing would he received from taxation.

I am appealing for these local authorities, these destroyed houses, these roads, cricket fields and tennis courts which get damaged because of mining subsidence. This should be a national responsibility.

I know how difficult it is to get answers to these questions when it comes to spending money. Quite recently I put a Question to the Minister of Transport about a road. He replied that it could not be a dangerous road because no accidents had taken place on it and until an accident had occurred he could not do anything. Are we going to wait for accidents to happen to these houses? We have recently had great floods in these areas and the whole nation was astounded at the damage. Everybody wanted to help.

Here we have something which is continuous. The floods that recently overwhelmed the East Coast will probably not recur again in our lifetime, or in a whole century; but mining subsidence damage will go on happening as long as we are taking coal out of the earth—and we must go on taking coal out of the earth if we want to remain a nation.

I want to give the Minister plenty of time to reply, but I still want to bring to his attention that there may be great uses for the nation in these excavations. In case of a war we might be able to make great use of some of these tunnels and huge excavations for underground factories. We have seen what has happened in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. We should have to get huge populations away from populated centres. Here we may have the beginnings of deep shelters and of storage for atom machinery and atom bombs or for food.

I ask the Minister whether it may not be in the interests of the nation that these great excavations and tunnels should be carefully guarded and preserved, because in the event of a future war—nobody wants a war, but if one comes we want the utmost preparation for it—it would have been wise to have another look at these things on behalf of the national welfare.

It is not only for that reason that the Treasury might find it convenient to pay out the £1 million a year. It would be a saving not only in respect of the procuration of coal, but would be in the interests of the happiness of these miners' villages. If we do not give happiness to these miners' villages, we may be driving the miners away from coal to other parts of the country where they will not have to suffer all this damage and have much of it paid out of their own pockets.

Therefore, I wish the Minister to take note of all these questions which I have put to him. I have sent pictures and a map around the House. I should like the Minister, not just to give me the answer that he has given before to my questions, but to say, "I will take this matter to the Treasury. It is a serious matter it is a national matter. I am going to see whether it cannot be handled as a national matter by the Treasury, so that these people will not be frightened every year by increasing rates in their small localities, with the great prosperous districts enjoying low rates while the poor villages have to pay 60 and 70 per cent. higher."

4.18 p.m.

The Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Fuel and Power (Mr. L. W. Joynson-Hicks)

The hon. Member for Loughborough (Mr. Follick), in opening the debate, expressly said that he wanted to leave me as much time as possible in which to reply to the questions which he raised, but I find it rather difficult to know exactly what questions he did raise. In reply to your inquiry, Mr. Speaker, he said that he was calling attention to the fact that the question of mining subsidence should be a national responsibility. I do not quite know what the hon. Member means by that, unless he is asking the Government to introduce an Act of Parliament to put the responsibility for compensation or making good mining subsidence upon a national basis.

But the hon. Member could not have been doing that, for he would have been out of order. Therefore, the only thing I can conceive that he had in mind was that he was asking me particularly, having regard to the stress which he laid upon the presence of my hon. Friend beside me representing the Treasury, to make a donation of the taxpayers' money to meet the incidence of mining subsidence.

Mr. Follick

Not to make a donation, but to accept responsibility.

Mr. Joynson-Hicks

If the hon. Gentleman was not asking for a donation, I find it difficult to know how we can succeed in overcoming the technical difficulties inherent in a debate of this sort by accepting responsibility.

However, there are one or two things I should like to say to the hon. Gentleman upon the statements he has made, because I do not think he has taken into consideration some of the facts which are known already to exist about subsidence. I think one would gather from what he said that the National Coal Board already had virtually no responsibility for meeting liability for paying compensation as a result of mining subsidence.

The hon. Gentleman did refer—I want to do him full justice—to the liability imposed on them by the Mining Subsidence Act. 1950, an Act, he knows full well, I think, that laid upon the National Coal Board liability for paying compensation in regard to damage which was caused by mining subsidence to houses of a rateable value of £32 and less in this country and about £50 and less in Scotland.

If we apply that Act to the information he gave us about Ashby Woulds, I find it rather difficult. He did not mention the rateable values of the houses of which he showed us photographs, but I presume that they must have been of a rateable value in excess of the rateable value of houses in respect of which the National Coal Board have responsibility for paying compensation under the Act, otherwise, if they came within the Act, this damage would have required the attention of the Board either by their making it good or by their paying compensation.

Mr. Follick

I did not say responsibility in regard to those houses. I was speaking about the loss of revenue for council houses while the houses are being repaired and cannot be occupied. Besides houses, there are cricket fields. There was at Moira a splendid cricket field which is absolutely ruined, and there are road surfaces——

Mr. Speaker

It seems to me that I was quite right, and that the hon. Gentleman is really suggesting an extension of the area of compensation in these cases, and that would require. I take it. legislation.

Mr. Joynson-Hicks

I think that that is exactly the position, and that although the hon. Gentleman succeeded in skating over thin ice for a considerably long time, I think that he has now fallen through.

Anyhow, he did not show us photographs of a cricket field but photographs of houses. If they are of a lower rateable value than £32, they fall within the provisions of the Act and the Coal Board are responsible. If, on the other hand, the Coal Board are not responsible it must be because the houses are of a greater rateable value than that, and in that event I do not see how the hon. Gentleman works out his mathematical calculations and the comparison with the City of Westminster, which, in any case, is an exceedingly false comparison because the majority of the rates in the City of Westminster do not come from the inhabitants who live there, but from the people who do business there.

Mr. Follick

They live on coal.

Mr. Joynson-Hicks

I have read somewhere that man cannot live on bread alone. According to the hon. Gentleman he lives on coal alone. There is already, as I was saying, a considerable field in which the National Coal Board do have responsibility for mining subsidence in regard to railways, to roadways, and many things of that sort, and also with regard to sewers, to which the hon. Gentleman referred.

Time is getting on and I cannot take the hon. Gentleman through the detailed particulars of the Acts in question, but I wonder whether the hon. Gentleman took into account the reflections of the Blanesburgh Report as to the effect of the Public Health Act, 1875 (Support of Sewers) Amendment Act, 1883, upon Sections 18 to 27 of the Waterworks Clauses Act, 1847.

If the hon. Member pursues his line of thought along those lines, he will find that there is a liability on the Coal Board with regard to sewers, provided that the sewer authorities exercise their rights. Therefore, if consequential damage is caused as a result of the breaking of sewers through mining subsidence, it may well be that the responsibility is upon the local authority or the sewer authority rather than upon the Board.

The effect of all these responsibilities other than those laid upon the Coal Board under the 1950 Act amount to about £1 million a year. The hon. Member said that the total cost of the additional damage resulting from mining subsidence, in which he was apparently including, I think upon a rather rough estimate, the consequential and indirect damage, amounted to an additional £1 million. If he includes all that and arrives at that total, I cannot conceive upon what basis he is making his calculations.

If he will recall the evidence given before the Turner Committee and the Report which they made, even in 1949 they admitted that the additional damage over and above the £1 million for which the Coal Board were then responsible, and without allowing anything for the indirect and consequential damage to which the hon. Gentleman was referring, would amount to the further sum of £3 million. Their recommendation was that of that sum £1 million should be met by the Coal Board and £2 million, subject to periodical revisions, should be met by the Treasury, and any surplus over and above that amount should be met by the Coal Board pending any further revision. Even since that date the estimate has risen to £4 million.

Therefore, assuming, as of course we must, that the hon. Member was not asking for any additional legislation but was merely discussing the terms of the Turner Committee Report, he was in fact proposing laying upon the Coal Board an additional liability of about £3 million.

Mr. Follick

Not on the Coal Board.

Mr. Joynson-Hicks

That is the inevitable consequence of the hon. Member's argument.

I agree with him that nobody wishes to see at present any increase in the price of coal or in the liabilities imposed upon the Coal Board. The Chairman of the Board has been saying in public recently, and in the mining areas which he has been visiting, that the price of coal has, in his view, reached the limit. Whatever the theorists and economists may have to say about it, I think that all hon. Members will have personal knowledge from their own constituencies which will confirm that for practical purposes the price of coal has now reached its limit. I can most assuredly agree with the hon. Member in that respect.

I do not know that there is anything else I can usefully add at this stage. I should have very much liked to pursue our consideration of the Turner Committee Report and also of the Blanesburgh Commission's Report, which goes rather further back but which included certain very useful and helpful suggestions, in particular, a suggestion which ultimately found its way into legislation in the Mining Subsidence Act, 1950. That was fundamentally a recommendation in the Commission's Report.

I take heed of the hon. Member's suggestion that the underground roadways in the mines should be retained for strategic purposes, although I do not quite follow how that is to come about. Had the hon. Member warned us, it would have been advisable to have had present for the debate the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Defence, the Under-Secretary of State for War and several other hon. Members of the Government. The protection of the roads underground is the first interest and responsibility of my right hon. Friend. and myself, not for strategic purposes but to ensure the safety of those who work underground.

Question put, and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at Half-past Four o'Clock.