HOUSING, ENGLAND AND WALES

HC Deb 20 March 1961 vol 637 cc39-159

3.37 p.m.

Mr. James MacColl (Widnes)

I beg to move, to leave out "£1,331,904,000" and to insert "£1,331,903,000" instead thereof.

I am seeking to reduce the Vote by £1,000 in order to draw attention to the present situation relating to housing. I think that this is a very good time to have a review of the housing position. In a comparatively few months the present Government will have been in office for ten years, so that they have had plenty of opportunity to deploy their policy and to work it out in detail. Any difficulties which may have arisen in the past, any of the problems relating to war damage, and difficulties of readjusting the building industry on a civil basis have been solved a long time ago.

The economic situation of the country today, which we were told at the time of the last General Election was very good, is one which has been created by the Government, for which the Government have claimed credit. Therefore, the housing situation is something which, presumably, the Government regard with satisfaction, as something which represents a normal policy—not an emergency policy and not a policy which is gathering momentum, but one which now represents what the Government feel ought to be followed in relation to housing.

I want, therefore, to look for a moment at exactly what that position is. In the first place, it is fairly generally realised that the new completions of housing in 1960 are lower than they were in 1954. After the 1954 completions we had a General Election, in which great credit was taken by the Government for their housing achievements, but the position, so far from their having maintained or improved it, is worse today than it was in 1954.

If that is true of the positon as a whole, then it is far more true in council house building, where the situation, to which I shall turn in a moment, is catastrophic. What is not always realised is that the rate of housing production over the last five years is poorer than it was during the last five years before the war. That record over twenty-five years is an alarming situation when one takes into account not only the increases in the standard of living in other directions, but also the increases in population and of households. Fewer houses are being built today than before the war.

It is not always easy to pin down the Minister to what exactly his policy is. He is a master of the art of creating for himself targets which bear no relation to the problems to be solved, congratulating himself on what wonderful targets they are, and then pretending that he has achieved them, when, in fact he has not.

I mentioned council houses just now. In answer to a Question from my hon. Friend the Member for Salford, East (Mr. Frank Allaun), the right hon. Gentleman replied: The number of council houses completed in 1959 was not, as implied in this Question, lower than before. It was, in fact, higher than before."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 31st January. 1961; Vol. 633, c. 767.] The error into which my hon. Friend fell was, unfortunately, one into which the Housing Return also fell, because that shows clearly that in 1959 the number of council houses built was below 100,000—for the first time for about fourteen years. I do not blame the right hon. Gentleman for making mistakes. We all make mistakes. The interesting thing is, however, that he was under a different impression, and did not realise how catastrophic the slump in council house building had been.

The aspect of housing on which the Government have particularly prided themselves is slum clearance. They have concentrated all their efforts and subsidies on it, and on many occasions have congratulated themselves on the brilliance of their success. Again, it is not often very easy to pin the Government down as to precisely what it is they are doing. Sometimes they talk in terms of the number of people being rehoused, sometimes about the number of slum dwellings being cleared, sometimes about England and Wales, and sometimes about Scotland. It is extraordinarily difficult to make out what the position is.

On two occasions at least, however, the right hon. Gentleman, in talking about England and Wales, has made two specific statements. The first was on 17th March, 1960, when he said: Year after year we are closing or demolishing in England and Wales alone 60,000 houses a year that are unfit for human occupation."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 17th March, 1960; Vol. 619, c. 1605.] Ten months later, on 31st January last, he said: …we have reached this high level of 60,000 houses a year. We have been holding that steadily for some years. …"—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 31st January, 1961; Vol. 633, c. 766.] We were given the picture of the right hon. Gentleman faced by all the difficulties attached to slum clearance—all the problems of economic chance and difficulties with weather—yet, by and large, keeping to a steady average of 60,000 houses a year. What are the facts?

The Government have never reached 60,000 houses a year in any year. The best they have done was in 1959, and even then the figure was below 60,000. It was 59,000. In other years it has been lower than that. They have not ever reached this target of 60,000 houses a year about which the right hon. Gentleman has congratulated himself so monotonously and so frequently.

Even a target of 60,000 houses a year, however, bears no relation to what is required. The local authority programmes for housing calculated that in the five years of that programme—1956–60—there were to be demolished 395,228 slum dwellings. That figure was by no means an extravagant one, and it was based upon the very narrow medical test of unfitness. It was no real measure of the size of the problem of obsolete houses, but it represented the minimum local authority estimate of what was required. It works out at 79,000 dwellings to be demolished each year, and not 60,000 a year. Therefore, in the Government's very best year, 1959, they were 20,000 houses below what was required on the basis of local authority estimates.

Mr. Dudley Williams (Exeter)

How many did the Labour Government demolish?

Mr. MacColl

I have tried to explain, in simple language which I hoped the hon. Member for Exeter (Mr. Dudley Williams) would appreciate, that we are now talking about the year 1961. We are talking about the time when all the backlog of war damage has been cleared away and when all the problems of reorganising the building industry upon a basis of slum clearance have been dealt with.

If, therefore, the only answer which the Government have is the answer of the hon. Member—"What did the Labour Government do immediately after the war?"—then let us have that answer. If we are to be told that all the Government are interested in is to attach themselves to the level of the immediate post-war situation, while telling us that we have never had it so good, then that is something which we would like to hear from the Government rather than from the hon. Member.

The Minister has his excuses. He says that the problem of slum clearance is now very localised. He says that …in two or three years' time over a large part of the country there should not be one slum house left."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 8th November, 1960; Vol. 629, c. 871.] I do not know what the right hon. Gentleman means by "large part of the country." For all I know, over a geographical area what he says may be true. For example, let us consider the area in which the hon. Member for Exeter plays such a large part. If the Government knock down one cottage in the middle of Dartmoor, they may be removing all the slums over a wide area. But if the Minister means, by "large part", areas where people are living in great concentrations of population, then the answer is that the areas that are not keeping up with the slum clearance programme represent the majority of unfit houses in the country.

The figures which the right hon. Gentleman quoted in the White Paper, relating to 50 local authorities who were behindhand in their programmes, included authorities in some of our great industrial areas. If, when he talks about the problem being solved over a large part of the country, he is merely noting that in Torquay, for instance, 41 out of 42 houses were demolished in five years, I give him his figures, but we know that in the great industrial areas the situation is completely different.

The right hon. Gentleman is entitled to make the point that he is not solely responsible for slum clearance, and that it is a question of partnership between him and the local authorities. When things go well, we do not hear much about the contributions made by local authorities, but we are likely to hear about them when things go badly. What are the reasons for the slow completion of the slum clearance programmes? He gave first priority to the shortage of technical staff, but I would like to point out one reason for that shortage.

Up to 1957, local authorities had been encouraged to build up the technical staffs in their housing departments, under the drive of the early years, but then they were suddenly faced with a drastic cut in their programmes, imposed by the Government, and they had to turn away their technical staffs, who found work elsewhere. That was not the fault of local authorities. Once an establishment has been arrived at for carrying out a certain programme it is very difficult to maintain it if Government interference causes frequent fluctuations in that programme.

One of the alarming things that the Minister said was in reply to a Question put by my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham, East (Mr. Mapp). He said that he hoped to see the recruitment of technical staff improved by the engagement of staffs from other local authorities as they completed their slum clearance programmes. That was a rather nasty shock for local authorities who were hoping that when they had completed their slum clearance programmes they would be able to go on with their other necessary programmes—perhaps to increase their programmes for houses for the old people, for the sick and the disabled, and also to expand their programme of houses for general needs. By his Answer the right hon. Gentleman was saying that when local authorities completed their slum clearance programme he was going to cut down their programmes for other forms of house building to force the transference of technical staffs to those areas which had still to complete their slum clearance programmes.

Another difficulty has been the rise in the cost of land, about which the House has had a good deal to say. There are two aspects of this problem. There is the special problem of areas in which there is an excessive demand for land, about which I do not want to say much at the moment. But even in areas where there is no reason to suppose that the demand for land is abnormal the price has risen enormously. My constituency of Widnes is in an industrial part of Lancashire, which is not developing very rapidly. Nevertheless, although only five or six years ago £500 an acre was considered a fairly stiff price to pay, in the last few compulsory purchase orders it has made that local authority has been paying over £7,000 an acre. That is some measure of the obstacles which face a local authority which is trying to carry out its slum clearance programme.

The question of the interest rate affects both the cost of land and the increased cost of building. Local authorities are caught both ways. They are caught in relation to their normal costs, because any increase in the rate of interest means an immediate increase in rents. They are also caught by the excessive cost of all the auxiliary services which have to be added to the actual building cost. In this connection, the Government issued some interesting figures, which I propose to use rather than my own, because we must presume that the Government figures are fairly accurate. If a rate of interest of 3¾ per cent.—which is about equivalent to the Public Works Loan Board rate in 1950—is compared not with the present rate of 6⅛ per cent., but 5¾ per cent., the difference in respect of the loan charges on a house costing £1,500 is about £32 5s. a year. That may not seem a great deal of money, but it is enough to knock out even a £24 subsidy. In other words, over the last ten years the Government have really not been paying any subsidy at all. They have been increasing costs by raising the rate of interest on loans while increasing the subsidies by a figure not nearly enough to meet the extra costs caused thereby.

We can, therefore, say that the present unhappy position in slum clearance is largely due to the obstacles placed in the way of local authorities either directly or indirectly, by Government policy. I do not know what the current estimates will be, but in last year's estimates the amount of money paid out in subsidy for expensive sites rose very drastically. Was that due to the fact that more expensive land was being used, or that the Government were having to pay expensive site subsidies on ordinary land in areas where no such subsidy would have had to be paid before? I suspect that the second alternative was the cause of the increased estimates.

I now turn to the question of overspill, in respect of which it is very difficult to discover What has been happening. It is one of the engaging peculiarities of the situation that the Scottish Housing Return gives figures relating to the rehousing of people from overspill areas while the right hon. Gentleman as far as I know, is careful never to give any such figures. I do not know what has been happening. All I know is that some years ago the Permanent Secretary reckoned that about 2 million people were required to move from the great towns, and that that meant the building of over 500,000 houses. If that information is married with the estimate of a former Minister of Housing and Local Government—the present Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations—that 20,000 houses were needed annually for overspill, we see that that envisages a programme lasting for about twenty-five years, which is a fairly long- term project. It is much more than even the development of a single now town. The last figures I have seen, which related to 1958, showed that under 10,000 houses were being provided to accommodate overspill. I do not know what has happened since, but I suspect that, if anything, things have got worse.

Let us now consider the right hon. Gentleman's attitude towards the new towns, which form a very important part of the whole problem. For many years it has been very difficult to get the right hon. Gentleman to "come clean" on the question whether or not he intended to build any new towns. For a long time he was rather evasive about it. In a debate in July, 1960, he said: I do not rule out the idea of other new towns … It is easy for the Leader of the Opposition to suggest the idea of more and more new towns as a complete solution, but he never addressed himself, in his speech, to where these new towns should go."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 18th July, 1960; Vol. 627, c. 56–7.] If one read that statement in the context of the New Towns Act, it was reasonable to assume—and I think that most people assumed—that the Government were not intending to provide any new towns, either because they could not find sites, or because they did not want to. When the New Towns Bill was being considered, the Government were implored again and again to provide compensation for redundancy, or to give a glimmer of hope to the people employed in the new town corporations that they would get employment in other new towns. All that the right hon. Gentleman would say was that when the new towns were completed there would be openings for them in the general administration of the new towns. But at no time was he prepared to give any hope that other new towns would be provided.

The right hon. Gentleman would not pay compensation for the people who were made redundant. The demoralising effect on the staff of the new towns was deplorable. Naturally, the people who were faced with the possibility of their jobs coming to an end, the best people, the younger people, the people who had most hope in getting out of the new towns back into either other aspects of public service or into private enterprise, took every opportunity to get out because they knew that, sooner or later, their jobs would come to an end and as far as they could see there was no hope of any alternative form of employment.

What has happened now? In 1951, a preliminary plan was prepared for Lancashire, to include Parbold as a new town. In the final plan that was submitted in 1956, Skelmersdale, which was approximately the same, was designated by the Lancashire County Council as a new town area. That was cut out of the 1956 plan. As late as July, 1960, the right hon. Gentleman was still saying that he could not find sites for the new towns, yet within a matter of six months he was telling us in the House that he had decided to approve Skelmersdale as a new town. Could anything be more crazy?

Could anything be more crazy than to demoralise the staff, to break up the morale of the corporations, to do all one can to create the impression that the new towns are a dying industry, and then, when one has successfully done that, to resurrect a new town which was suggested originally in 1951 and suddenly decide to approve it? I have seen some of this. Widnes is a reception area for Liverpool. We have been vitally concerned about whether new towns would be built. I am sure that everybody concerned with the problem was under the impression that the Ministry had decided not to build a new town in Lancashire. Now I am delighted that we are to have one. If there is to be a new town, could there be a more crazy and incompetent way of setting about getting a successful new town than the method adopted by the Government?

What is required from the right hon. Gentleman is more than a few new towns dotted about here and there. What is required is a determined effort to relocate not only people, but industry, away from London and the South. The Co-operative Permanent Building Society sends out an interesting bulletin about the price of houses on which it has lent money. It points out that the outstanding feature of the property market during 1960 was the marked rise in the price of houses in the London area and in the Home Counties. It says that in the fourth quarter of 1960 the average price of a house in London was £3,335; in the Southern area, it was £2,894; in the North-West, it was £2,328; and in the North-East it was £2,185. In other words, there was a difference over £1,000 between the price of a house in London and in the North-West and North-East, the two old industrial areas which have a long history of industrial life. That increase proves more dramatically than anything else the economic consequences of the failure to deal with the problems of the London conurbation.

The North-West and North-East have been milked, and no effort has been made to stop the flow of population and the flow of jobs to these areas in the South—all the things that happened before the war. Just after the war we were determined that this kind of uneconomic and stupid inefficiency should not be allowed to go on. We were determined to tackle the problem. It is almost unbelievable that today we are faced with almost the same situation as we had before the war. The Government have failed in their duty and we are paying uneconomic prices because of the increase in the price of land and the increase in the cost of houses.

In the debate from which I have quoted, the right hon. Gentleman said: Of course, values rise in places where people would like to go to live. There is nothing strange about that. There is nothing uneconomically unusual about that. One cannot wave away the market forces."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 18th July, 1960; Vol. 627, c. 49.] Nobody asks the right hon. Gentleman to wave away the market forces, but we ask him not to bow down and worship them as though they were a demi-god which could not be done away with. We ask him to restrict market forces and encourage them to move in the direction in which they ought to move to prevent this country becoming over-weighted in the South and having a bad distribution of economic wealth as it has at present.

Having said something about house prices, that leads me to how far the shift from public to private building is a desirable feature of the Government housing programme. I do not accept that it ought to be the job of the local authority to do the dirty work which nobody else will touch. I do not accept the view that it is all right for local authorities to do the difficult jobs of slum clearance and providing houses for old people who cannot afford to pay profitable rents and let the more profitable forms of building be done for private profit with enormous increases in property values. I do not accept that, but, even assuming that that is the policy which on principle the Government wish to adopt, what are the implications of it?

Quite plainly, one implication is that the greater part of building will not be for renting, but for owner occupation. Last year, about 162,000 houses were built by private enterprise. Of those, 160,000 were for owner occupation, leaving the contemptible figure of only 2,000 being provided for letting. If people want to own their own houses, and if they can afford to do so, nobody will quarrel with that. We quarrel with the fact that they, like local authorities, pay the price of the increased interest rates, and also the enhanced cost of the houses. I have heard the right hon. Gentleman say, "You ought not to live in London. It is your own fault. If you want to live in London, you must pay the high prices." But it is no use the right hon. Gentleman saying that while the Government make no effort to see that there are jobs available outside London for people who cannot afford those high prices.

It is a simple problem in arithmetic. If a local authority builds a house, it amortises the cost over sixty years. If a building society lends the money to someone to buy the house, it normally amortises the cost over twenty-five years. If a person can afford to borrow from a building society and pay the increased amount which is involved over the period of twenty-five years, that is a good thing, because the total cost is less. But people with low incomes cannot afford to pay that increased amount and, therefore, behind all this magnificent talk about a property-owning democracy, and the wonders of owner-occupation, the Minister is forcing poor people to incur a debt burden which they cannot afford and which it is unwise for them to undertake.

The fault rests with the right hon. Gentleman and not with building societies which are reluctant to advance loans to people when they consider it doubtful whether the prospective borrower can afford the loan. People have told me that they have tried to obtain a loan, but have been considered by a building society as being either too young or too old. Either they are young people not earning sufficient to afford a loan, or the building society considers that they are too old to be able to see ahead sufficiently to repay the loan. Those are the people for whom owner-occupation will not work. I suppose that a prospective purchaser of a house costing £2,500 would need an income of about £14 a week to meet the monthly repayment charges. Half the population of this country have incomes which are a great deal less than £14 a week. Therefore, we are faced with a situation in which most of the houses are being built for people whose earnings are over the average. People whose earnings are less than the average are left to sink or swim.

One effect of this—it is something which the right hon. Gentleman, as a great believer in the virtues of private enterprise, will welcome as a sign of an adjustment of the market—is that, in my constituency, for example, houses costing over £2,000 are not very difficult to obtain, but for houses costing under £2,000 there is a waiting list of buyers. There is a temptation to lower the price with, I suggest, a consequent steady deterioration in the standards of a great many of the houses now being built. The private builder is on the horns of a dilemma. He must either try to maintain good building standards, in which case the people who need them will not be able to afford the houses he builds, or he must cut down on the cost, reduce the size, have a bad layout and be guilty of all the things generally called "jerrybuilding".

One of the most unfortunate features of this situation is the failure of the Government to do anything to maintain the standard of new houses. It is true that building byelaws exist, but they are penal provisions and are not designed to maintain a level of standard and design such as we should like to See. On the one hand, the Government are encouraging private builders to build houses which will be slums in twenty years' time, and, on the other, they are spending a great deal of time and energy trying to get rid of existing slums. We need an entirely different approach. There should be standard provisions regarding the quality of houses which should be firmly maintained.

I welcome the efforts of those local authorities which are building houses for sale after they have completed their other programme. I should prefer that houses were built by local authorities to assured standards than that those people who cannot afford expensive houses should be left to the tender mercies of private builders, upon whose activities there is so little check.

Those are the main points to which I wish to refer. There are many others which I should like to have mentioned. To recapitulate, I say that the Government's housing programme has failed to maintain the level reached five or six years ago; indeed, it has not reached the level achieved in this country immediately before the war. The Government's slum clearance programme has been a flop. No adequate effort has been made to provide houses which the large proportion of the population could afford to buy. The Government should not rely on owner-occupation to the extent that they are doing. They are not encouraging thrift, but precisely the opposite; they are encouraging people without sufficient resources to encounter the hazards of owner-occupation, and they are imposing upon those people a burden of debt which will prove a tremendous worry and anxiety in the future.

4.18 p.m.

The Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Housing and Local Government (Sir Keith Joseph)

The hon. Member for Widnes (Mr. MacColl) has omitted a number of factors to which I shall call the attention of the House. I shall endeavour to comment on the points which he made as I go along, but I must start by pointing out one major fallacy in his consideration of the whole housing theme. The hon. Gentleman compared the performance of the Government with the house building performance of their predecessors in 1954 and with those of an earlier Government in 1939. It is a constant fallacy of the Opposition that they believe that in dealing with any single problem one can ignore all the other problems of the country. If that were so, it would be only too easy to triumph over any selected difficulty.

At the moment, compared with 1939, and even with 1954, there is an advance on every capital front. I am not expecting that hon. Members will think enough is being done on any front, but as a result of what is being done, there are far more vacancies for craftsmen and managers in England and Wales than, mercifully, there are unemployed people to fill them. Let me list the ways in which capital is being invested. Apart from the housing programme, there are roads, hospitals, welfare accommodation, schools, universities, factories, power stations, water works, sewerage works, railway works and even, may I add, prisons. The fact is that the Government are advancing simultaneously on all fronts at a never before equalled pace. I hope that the House, in judging the hon. Member's speech, will bear that in mind.

I hope now to remind the House of another fact that the hon. Member did not mention. Since 1951—and my right hon. Friend is content to be judged on post-war conditions and not to pray in aid the conditions immediately after the war—the population of England and Wales has gone up by nearly 4½ per cent. The House will ask what has happened to the number of dwellings in those years. The number of dwellings has gone up by nearly 14 per cent., but because of the rising standard of living, because of prosperity, because of the large number of elderly, and mercifully again, because they have a longer expectation of life, there has been an increase in the households, actual or potential, since 1951 of about 6 per cent.

As a result, great as the increase in the number of dwellings has been and much reduced though the gap between dwellings and households is, there is still a gap and it is at its worst in the big cities. No one seeks to deny that. In a few months, and by next year, we shall begin to know the exact position as a result of the census. In the meantime, the House will want to know our estimate of the housing position in England and Wales. So far as we can judge nearly three-quarters of the population are decently housed. About one-fifth of the population live in solid houses without overcrowding, but without modern amenities. In many cases the houses concerned are small and, from the point of the housewife, inconvenient. In many cases they are in depressing and old-fashioned areas, but this second category is not degraded. The remainder of the population live in bad conditions, in slums or in non-slum houses, but overcrowded.

That is the position as we see it, but each year the position improves. There have been demolished since 1955 about 250,000 unfit dwellings or slums. The hon. Member rebuked my right hon. Friend for what he called a shortfall in the programme which had been set, but when the Conservatives launched the post-war slum clearance programme in 1955 it was inevitable that there would be a couple of years to get up speed and momentum. During the last three years the average number of slums in England and Wales cleared in one form or another has been about 57,000. Of course, my right hon. Friend regrets that he cannot get up to the full 60,000, but that is one of the penalties of a fully stretched and employed economy.

The House should also know—the hon. Gentleman did not mention it—that improvement grants which bring amenities to non-slum houses are rising at a rapid rate. Last year, no fewer than 130,000 improvement grants were made. The result of all this, as far as we can tell, is that at least 1⅓ per cent. of the total households in the country move each year out of the second or third categories—from houses without modern amenities or the relatively smaller category of overcrowded or slums—into the decently housed category. My right hon. Friend and the Government rightly recognise that each year as standards and incomes rise the contrast with the remainder who are still in relatively bad housing conditions becomes more glaring.

Mr. Frank Allaun (Salford, East)

rose——

Sir K. Joseph

I hope that I shall not be interrupted, as I have a great deal to say and the hon. Member for Widnes was not interrupted in his speech.

Mr. Allaun

Did the hon. Gentleman say that 1⅓ per cent. move from the very badly housed category to the higher category? If so, at that rate how many years will it be before the people in those atrocious conditions have better housing?

Sir K. Joseph

It is 1⅓ per cent. of the total population of which, as I have said, nearly three-quarters are decently housed already. Of the people living in non-modern non-slum houses or in slums, it is between one-fifteenth and one-eighteenth, but the pace of rehousing those will quicken.

It was said by the hon. Member for Widnes that local authorities should go faster, but that they were held back by interest rates, land prices and availability of land.

Mr. MacColl

And availability of staff.

Sir K. Joseph

Yes, and availability of land for overspill.

The hon. Member referred, also, to private enterprise housing. I am glad that he did so, because it would be very wrong in its concentration on local authority housing if the House forgot that private enterprise houses, which do so much to satisfy the huge demand for owner-occupied homes, also to a great extent cause, directly or indirectly, the release of decent housing for those in need. The hon. Member spoke as if house purchase were only for the wealthy. Yet samples taken by two large and experienced building societies, the Co-operative Permanent and the Alliance, suggest—and they are the only societies which have published these figures—that nearly half the buyers have incomes of under £15 a week and that more than three-quarters of them have under £1,000 a year. Moreover, the building society figures refer only to the incomes of the borrowers themselves and not to other earning members of those households.

The hon. Member permitted himself to say that many of these houses built by private enterprise will be slums in twenty years. Does he really think that building societies are so casual that they advance money on houses built like that? My right hon. Friend is extremely keen to improve the design and standards of private enterprise housing. The House knows that recently he reintroduced his housing medal to reward the best design which comes forward.

The gist of the complaint made by the hon. Member was that local authorities should go faster. He sought to pin the blame for their present speed on Government policy. The fact is that in no case where a local authority has a serious housing problem are the Government restraining in any way the number of houses it builds. It is said that interest rates reduce new building, but interest rates are one of the means by which the economy of the country is kept in balance. There is great competition for money and interest rates to a large extent reflect costs. It is easy to solve one problem by ignoring all the others. If inflation were to cause a balance of payments crisis all sorts of desirable projects would have to be cut.

No authority with a serious housing problem is being restrained by my right hon. Friend. My right hon. Friend and the Government want those authorities to build faster. It is said, "How can an authority build faster when interest rates are high?" The answer is simple No local authority can claim that it cannot build more houses because of interest rates when its rents are at a low level. In 1959–60, the average rent of county borough councils was 1⅔ of the gross value and the average rent of Metropolitan borough councils at that time was about the same. We all know that it is considered reasonable for a private landlord to charge twice gross value. There is all that margin for local authorities to get by way of income before they complain that interests rates are restraining their new building.

The hon. Member said that the rise has more than swallowed the subsidy, but he completely failed to mention—this was a major omission—that since the war and since 1951 something else has risen. That is earnings. Why did he not mention that? The fact is that any such local authority that does not have a differential scheme or rent rebates is not treating either its waiting list or its taxpayers or ratepayers fairly.

I recognise, of course, and so do the Government, that there may be, and are, individual families and households and tenants whose incomes have lagged, but there is ample help for them. For local authority tenants there is the £61 million of taxpayers' subsidy for local authorities to distribute as they think fit, and for tenants of private landlords there is the National Assistance Board.

The fact is that there may well be a relationship between indiscriminately low rents and long waiting lists, because, if rents are indiscriminately low, all sorts of people who can fend for themselves hang on to their bagains at the expense of those on the waiting lists who cannot fend for themselves. The public should recognise that the lower the rents charged to better-off local authority tenants the longer the waiting lists will be.

I hope that hon. Members have worked out for themselves the little sum in their own areas, but, over the big cities and county boroughs as a whole, if only 2 per cent. extra moved out annually from local authority dwellings to homes of their own, under pressure of differential rents and helped by local authority loans and grants, 20,000 extra families a year could come off the waiting lists.

The hon. Member for Widnes made some very important points about other difficulties in the way of local authorities, and I do not wish at all to avoid them. First, he said that in some places there was a danger of lack of sites, and that the overspill essential from many cities did not at the moment have a place to go. I can assure the House that at the moment there is no hold-up of building for this reason. There is not yet any hold-up of the preparation work for future building that is on the drawing boards. But in four or five years there will, in some cases be delays and holdups if more land is not made available.

My right hon. Friend has by circular already urged local authorities to seek out all the available sites that can be used properly. It is now generally accepted that in suitable places within a city redevelopment should be at higher densities. Neither of these two techniques, however, will suffice on their own. More land will certainly be needed, and, on the whole, that land can be found only in three ways. It can be found by private overspill to existing or newly-built houses outside the big cities. It can be found by expanded towns, and/or it can be found by new towns.

The hon. Member for Widnes said that he was delighted that my right hon. Friend has nominated Skelmersdale as a possible new town. I would point out that Skelmersdale has not yet been confirmed as a new town—the whole subject is under inquiry at the moment. The hon. Gentleman teased my right hon. Friend about delay in arriving at the decision. I hope that the House will recognise that this is not a simple matter of good will or ill will. There are a number of extremely difficult interests to be reconciled in each of these decisions, and all I can say is that my right hon. Friend and the Government intend to keep ahead of need so that there is no hold-up for lack of land.

I have referred to Skelmersdale which is, at the moment, at inquiry, and there is a search going on, as my right hon. Friend has announced, to see whether there is a suitable site, possibly, to help Birmingham. At Manchester, work is going ahead progressively with the preparation for a number of schemes, and discussions are going on with my right hon. Friend's Department to see whether any more is needed. In each case of need there are a growing number of expanded town agreements, including the promising trio in Hampshire for the London County Council, and I hope that I may be allowed to say that the Housing Bill before the House should help in the whole policy of expanded towns. In addition, there is the continuing trend of private overspill.

I think that the hon. Member for Widnes seriously weakened his case when he said that the pull of London remained as effectively dominant as before the war. That is just not true. The Government's policies have succeeded in slowing down the effectiveness of the magnetism of London. It is still a great magnet, but I hope that the figures I shall give will show that the policies of successive Governments in this respect have not been unsuccessful. It is absolute nonsense for the hon. Gentleman to say that the Government have made no effort to provide work outside London; the whole policy of the development areas, the whole policy of expanded towns, the whole success of the new towns shows what absolute nonsense that is.

The House may like to know the figures for Greater London. Since 1955—and I only have these figures in convenient form to give to the House—the population of Greater London has fallen by 80,000 people. In the same time—that is, since 1955—the number of dwellings in that same area has risen by 166,000, and another 56,000 houses have been provided for Londoners—actually for Londoners—in the new towns and in town development schemes. In addition to all these, tens of thousands of families have moved out and found homes of their own.

It is true that my right hon. Friend said that people who do not have to live in London and are seeking a home might be wise to consider moving outside of London, but he never made such an absurd statement as that those whose work and lives have to be in London should consider moving out.

The hon. Member made a very important point when he took up this question of lack of sites, which is at the heart of the housing problem, but my right hon. Friend and the Government are pledged to see that, where there is housing need, housing progress is not held up for lack of land. The hon. Member went on to make a point about the price of land. I would only comment that land is valuable, that there is competition for its use and that it is bound to have risen in price with the rise in earnings and prosperity. To bring down the price would require the release of so much land as to jeopardise planning objectives—and I am sure that the hon. Member for Widnes would not desire that.

The burden of higher prices on local authorities is, of course, eased considerably by the expensive-site subsidy which meets the cost above a certain level of the land that local authorities need to acquire. But the House should not imagine that land is at the same high price everywhere. There are many parts of the country where hon. Members only wish that the prices of land were rocketing because prosperity had reached them. I was very glad that the hon. Member for Widnes forbore in any way to advance his own solution of the problem.

It was very sad that in the whole of the hon. Gentleman's speech—which took, I think, about 40 minutes—he did not find time or interest once to mention the housing problem of the elderly. It is a problem that is very much studied by my right hon. Friend, and housing for the elderly has the double blessing that it not only provides accommodation to suit those in the last decades of their lives, convenient for their use, but it enables them, by moving, to release accommodation that is often suitable for families.

The House may like to know that, in 1951, 11,000 one-bedroom dwellings were built. Obviously, some of those were not used by the elderly, but, equally, some dwellings that had more than one bedroom were used by the elderly, so that I believe it to be a fair comparison to say that in 1960 the number had risen to 27,000.

The House may have seen my announcement two weeks ago that my right hon. Friends the Minister of Health and the Minister of Housing and Local Government had under preparation a circular about the co-operation that is so necessary between health, welfare and housing authorities in the service of the elderly. I am glad to say that this circular No. 10/61 was issued by my right hon. Friend's Department on 17th March, 1961.

I hope that I have covered the main points raised by the hon. Gentleman, and that I have pointed out to the House a number of the omissions in his speech. He failed to recognise that housing is not, and inevitably is not, the only use of building resources. I hope that the House recognises that the Government's capital programme stretches simultaneously and at record level across all the fronts of social, industrial and transport need. I hope that the House will recognise that the hon. Gentleman's speech failed to take into account the rise in earnings that has occurred since 1951. I hope that the House will recognise that the hon. Gentleman completely failed to take into account the rise in population and the fission which has occurred in a number of households.

I come at the end to a summary of what my right hon. Friend thinks is the position.

Mr. MacColl

Before the hon. Gentleman gives his summary, I should like to get one thing straight. He has rebuked me for a number of matters. He now says that I did not take fission into account. I did. My complaint is that, in view of the increased fission of families, the Government's housing programme is all the more lamentably short of what we need.

Sir K. Joseph

If the hon. Gentleman accepts my rebuke on all the other major matters, I am glad that I was wrong in this respect. I omitted to recognise that he covered this point.

It is customary at the end of a speech to sum up achievements, but I think that the country as a whole recognises the housing achievements of the Conservative Government and has shown that it does in successive elections. I want to look at the future. There are still at least 600,000 slums to come down. More than half of them are in the 50 areas listed by my right hon. Friend at the back of his White Paper. There are still several million non-slum houses without modern amenities. There are many thousands of houses which are not slums, but are squalidly overcrowded.

This is the housing task, and it is a big one. The Government pledge themselves that housing progress shall not falter for lack of land. For those local authorities which after charging sensible rents could go on building only by imposing an excessive burden on the rates there is already additional subsidy available, and in the Housing Bill we are seeking to increase it. Against squalor, overcrowding and lack of modern amenities the Housing Bill should provide new weapons, but it must be left to the local authorities concerned to recruit the necessary extra skilled staff and to summon the necessary vigour for the huge task which still lies in front of them. As luckier authorities complete their programmes, specialist staffs should be available to help those authorities with most slums left.

Slum clearance and improvement grant programmes have been going long enough to be in danger of being taken for granted. I hope that the House will recognise that I have tried not to underestimate what remains to be done, but let no one underestimate what has been done and what is being done. Year by year in England and Wales nearly 160,000 people are being taken from nearly 60,000 of the worst houses—the slums—as they are demolished. If last year's figures persist—not that my right hon. Friend is nearly satisfied yet—year by year at least 350,000 more people are having their housing conditions improved by the provision of grant-aided modern amenities.

In addition, year by year tens of thousands of net new additional households are finding decent homes of their own. Probably in the aggregate at least 600,000 people each year are obtaining for the first time decent modern housing or decent modern amenities in existing solid housing. In the worst areas there are years of work ahead, but in these areas particularly we intend that the pace shall quicken.

4.43 p.m.

Mr. Edward Short (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Central)

The Parliamentary Secretary has made a general speech. I want to make rather a parochial one, because I feel that housing is a matter which affects us in our constituencies so vitally that perhaps the best contribution I can make is to talk of my own area.

I came into the House on the very day on which the party opposite took over the government of the country in 1951. Oddly enough, I made my maiden speech on the very day I entered the House. That must be almost a record. I made my maiden speech on housing in my own constituency. I said then that I represented what was probably the worst, or one of the worst, housed constituencies in the country. After ten years of Tory rule I regret to say I have still to make the claim, that I represent what is probably still one of the worst housed constituencies in the country. Whatever the Government's policy may have done and whatever the Minister's administration may have achieved in some parts of the country, it has not achieved very much for the people I represent.

I will tell the House of two cases, with one of which I was concerned yesterday afternoon. A woman called Mrs. Dixon, of Belgrave Terrace, Newcastle, rang me up to say that she was being evicted from her house. It was supposed to be furnished accommodation, but it contained no furniture whatever owned by the landlord. She had gone to the rent tribunal, which had given her the usual four weeks. She was to be evicted this morning. I tried to contact the landlord yesterday, but he was not available. I do not know what has happened, because I had to leave to catch the train to come to London.

A lady called Mrs. McCready, of 16, Wentworth Place, rang me up and said that she had been in hospital with thrombosis. When she was in hospital the landlord moved in and turned her furniture and her children out. When she returned from hospital she found that she had no home. This sort of thing is going on all the time in the area I represent.

In spite of the magnificent efforts of the Newcastle-upon-Tyne City Council during the past three years, of which the Minister has seen something recently, we have an appalling housing situation. I want to give the Minister some facts. In Newcastle, which is a city of about 270,000 or 280,000 people, there are 2,961 houses without any internal water supply. There are 16,000 houses without hot water. There are 45,000 houses without an interior water closet. There are 4,500 houses where the external water closet is shared between two or more families. I heard of a case yesterday where two lavatories are shared by 16 families. That is the house at Belgrave Terrace, to which I referred. There are 2,120 houses where the external tap—the tap in the back yard—is shared by two or more families.

There was a debate on housing in the council last week. I have a report of the debate. One councillor said this: I have known teenage girls having to strip in the back yard, even in pouring rain, trying to wash themselves before they go to work. I am ashamed to say this, but I have seen mothers with their children in my ward"— this is a ward in the centre of the city— going along to the public toilet at Marlborough Crescent because there are no adequate sanitary facilities in their own houses in Scotswood Road. That is the Scotswood Road which is famous in the song.

There is one street in my constituency called Sunset Street—not to be confused with 77 Sunset Strip—where the families have to climb a ladder when they go upstairs. There are no stairs. There is simply a ladder from one floor to the other. This is in the middle of one of our supposed great prosperous industrial cities in this affluent society of ours. Apparently the affluent society has not made much impact on the housing problem in the city I represent.

There is a threefold problem in Newcastle. I suppose that it is much the same in most other industrial cities. First, there is a vast slum clearance problem to be tackled. This is the result of generations of rapacious landlordism—landlords who took everything out of the houses and did not do even the most elementary repairs and maintenance work. Secondly, there is a considerable general waiting list. This overlaps to some extent with slum clearance, but only to the extent of about 20 per cent. of the general waiting list. Outside the slum clearance areas there is a considerable waiting list. Thirdly, there is the big problem of old houses to be modernised. There are about 15,000 to 18,000 houses in this category.

This needs a programme—I hope that the Parliamentary Secretary will bear this in mind, in view of the figure he gave—of over 2,000 houses a year to be revitalised for at least ten years, for there are always other houses coming into this category. The Parliamentary Secretary gave the figure of 130,000 houses for the whole country, but according to the return, I think that it was 126,000 last year, while we ourselves, in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, to get rid of this problem in ten years, would need to modernise about 2,000 houses a year.

This threefold problem—slum clearance, building for the general waiting list and the need to modernise older houses—is aggravated by the Government's abolition of the subsidies for general need, in spite of the considerable problem existing in all our industrial cities. In Newcastle-upon-Tyne, it has meant that in the past few years less than 20 per cent. of the houses available went to people on the general waiting list. That was the extent to which the general waiting list happened to coincide with slum clearance.

The rest of the people concerned, those on the general waiting list who do not live in slum clearance houses, are virtually excluded from any chance of getting a council house at all. This is deliberate Government policy. They stopped the subsidy for house-building for general need, and that means that the Newcastle-upon-Tyne City Council and other councils throughout the country have not been able to erect houses for people on the general waiting list, unless the people concerned were living in slums.

The problem has also been aggravated by the shortage of land, as both my hon. Friend who opened the debate and the Parliamentary Secretary said. In our case, the problem has been made worse, as I pointed out in the last speech I made on housing, by a series of decisions on the part of the Minister in favour of private development. Three years ago, the Newcastle-upon-Tyne City Council was faced with a position in which virtually it could not give anybody a house unless it could obtain the site of the old house for redevelopment. That is the position in which we have been placed for the past three years. We could not give a council house to anybody unless we could get possession of his house to pull it down and redevelop the area.

Thirdly, the problem has been aggravated by the Government's high interest rate policy, which places a fantastic burden on industrial towns. I have with me the housing revenue account for my own local authority, and, coming here in the train, I examined it very carefully. I was amazed to find the burdens which are placed upon an industrial city like mine by the Government's policy of high interest rates. I believe that this burden should be borne by the whole nation. We now have a ridiculous position in which a £1,500 council house is costing my authority, by the time it has paid for it, over £6,000. What an "Alice in Wonderland" situation—a £1,500 house costing over £6,000!

All the three difficulties which I have mentioned and which aggravate the problem stem from the Government's doctrinaire belief in private enterprise. They believe that if housing is made profitable enough, private enterprise will provide it. We take the view that because private enterprise has failed to provide adequate housing in the past, and because housing, especially in this climate, is one of the most important factors in deciding how much happiness people get out of life, public policy must intervene in the housing of the people far more vigorously than it has done under the Government.

It must intervene to provide houses on a much greater scale and also to maintain and raise standards if, in the next ten years, we are to ensure that every family in Britain is decently housed. I believe that that ought to be the policy. It should be the policy of the Government and of every local authority to ensure that by the end of the 1960s every family in Britain has a decent house, with modern amenities.

This is not the Government's policy. Their very simple and clear policy, from which has stemmed everything which they have done in housing, has been to make housing as profitable as possible. If adequate housing followed, they would, of course, be pleased, but this is not their primary aim. Their aim is to make housing profitable. The Government's policy has been gradually to reduce the number of council houses built, and gradually to step up the number of private houses built. The figures are as follows. In 1951, the first year in which the Government were in office, private houses totalled 21,000, and, in 1960, 162,000 whereas the number of council houses in 1951 was 141,00 and in 1960 it was 103,000–38,000 fewer council houses than were built during the first year in which the Government were in office.

I am in favour of home ownership, and so is the Labour Party. The Labour Government did a considerable amount to encourage home ownership. We are in favour of it, but we do not believe that a man should be forced to buy a house to get a roof over his head. We hear the Parliamentary Secretary talking about industrial workers buying houses. Let me tell him about something that happened on Tyneside. Two years ago, the Newcastle-upon-Tyne City Council put its council house rents up. It decided that any family with an income of less than £9 per week could apply for a rebate; in other words, could apply not to have to pay the increase in the rent. What astounded me was to find that in just over 30,000 council houses the people living in over 6,000 houses had incomes of less than £9 a week—over 6,000 out of just over 30,000.

On Tyneside generally, industrial wages are less than they are in other parts of the country. They are less than the national level. How can such industrial workers as these contemplate buying houses at present-day prices and with interest rates of 6 or 6⅛ per cent.? How can they look forward to paying the mortgage charges for twenty, twenty-five or thirty years? Our basic industries are shipbuilding, ship repairing and coal mining, and these three industries are contracting all the time. No one knows how far the contraction will go, and, quite apart from the present level of wages, workers in them cannot look forward and contemplate twenty years of security in which to buy houses.

On Tyneside, and, I think, in most industrial cities, our vital and urgent need is for more council houses for general needs, and a considerably stepped up slum clearance programme, and, also, a bold new initiative in the improvement and modernisation of older houses. In my constituency, we have streets and streets of old houses of which the fabric is sound, but in which there are no modern amenities of any sort. These are very often houses with outside toilets, houses in which people have to do their cooking in the living room, which have old fashioned fireplaces, gas, and so on, and which need to have £400 or £500 spending on them. It is a colossal problem in a city like mine.

As the Minister knows, we have a very imaginative scheme for dealing with this matter, but it cannot be carried out on the scale required without more financial assistance from the Government. If the Government want to preserve landlordism and provide what should be a social service, they must make the money available. I do not believe that the landlords have the money to do this work. If the Government want to save these houses and preserve landlordism, they must see that these houses are brought up to reasonable modern standards. It is not only a question of the houses themselves, because we look upon this problem not as a simple matter of individual houses or revitalising single houses, but of revitalising whole districts, which are usually dismal and dingy areas.

We must redevelop these areas and make them more attractive by planting trees, stopping up back lanes, and so on. The Minister must look at the matter in a much more imaginative way than he is doing at present. The White Paper provides for an increase from 8 per cent. to 12½ per cent. in the rent that the landlord can levy on the cost of improvements. I do not think that this will assist at all. I think that it will deter improvements.

The Minister of Housing and Local Government (Mr. Henry Brooke)

indicated dissent.

Mr. Short

The Minister shakes his head. Let us again consider the city which I represent. Before these improvements can be carried out, the landlord must get the tenant's permission. An increase of 12½ per cent. is considerable. An increase of 8 per cent. was considerable. I am sure that many tenants will be deterred from giving their permission by the additional rent which the landlord will now be able to charge. It means that the landlord is getting 50 per cent. of the cost of the improvements in grant. It is not a loan, but a gift. In addition, he will get the other 50 per cent. in just over eight years.

The Parliamentary Secretary looks puzzled. Let me explain. If the landlord carries out an improvement, he gets a 50 per cent. improvement grant. He can then charge 12½ per cent. of the remainder. This means that he will recover the other 50 per cent. in eight and a half years.

As far as we can work it out, the new subsidy arrangement will cost Newcastle——

Sir K. Joseph

I cannot allow the hon. Gentleman to perpetrate such nonsense. Landlords have to pay tax on their income. The hon. Gentleman waves that away. They have to pay for the maintenance of their property. It may well be that they will have no change out of the increase to 12½ per cent.

Mr. Short

If that is the case, why increase it? The simple fact is that the landlord gets a grant of 50 per cent. The Minister agrees with that. He can then charge 12½ per cent. per annum of the cost of the other 50 per cent. on the rent. I agree that this is less tax.

Sir K. Joseph

And less interest on his own money which has to be taken off at 6⅛ per cent. which the hon. Gentleman is so keen on stressing.

Mr. Short

The landlord will recoup himself entirely for the cost of any repairs in a very short time at the expense of the tenant.

I now wish to say a few words about the subsidy. As far as we can estimate, the new subsidy arrangement in my city will cost us an additional £4¼ million on the five-year building programme up to 1965. As far as we can estimate, we will qualify only for the £8 subsidy. I agree that this leaves out of account anything that we may get for the high flat subsidy.

Mr. Brooke

On a point of order. I do not wish to restrict the course of the debate, but the hon. Gentleman is now dealing with details in the Housing Bill, the Second Reading of which we will be able to take a week hence. May the House have your guidance, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, as to how far we can properly go into the details of the Government's legislative proposals?

Mr. George Thomas (Cardiff, West)

Further to that point of order. Since, in the White Paper, which is linked with this debate, detailed reference is made to what my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Central (Mr. Short) has mentioned, will it not be a most unfair curtailment of the debate if we are not allowed to answer the White Paper?

Mr. Deputy-Speaker (Sir Gordon Touche)

We can discuss administration, but not legislation. Passing reference can be made to the Housing Bill in general, but not in detail.

Mr. Michael Stewart (Fulham)

My hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Central (Mr. Short) was making only a passing reference to something which could hardly be described as a detail. It is one of the main features of the Bill to which publicity was given by the Government's White Paper.

Mr. Deputy-Speaker

We should not anticipate the debate on the Second Reading of the Housing Bill.

Mr. Short

I accept what you say, Mr. Deputy-Speaker. I did not intend to go into the Bill in detail, but the Minister referred to the twice the gross value formula.

As far as we can estimate, we in Newcastle qualify only for the lower subsidy—£8 instead of £22. On that basis, our housing programme over a period of five years will cost us another £4¼ million. We have council house rents which vary from 1.2 to 1.7 times the gross value. Yet we frequently get people from slum areas refusing houses because they cannot afford to pay the rent. The Minister frowns, but he should bear in mind the conditions which exist in industrial areas.

Tyneside is an area of low wages. We have many people with very small incomes. It is nonsense for the Minister to try to put the screw on local authorities to force up council house rents in this way. The purpose of the White Paper is to try to force local authorities to impose differential rents, which are quite inappropriate in an area like Tyneside, quite apart from the general rights and wrongs of differential rents.

I believe that our council the Newcastle-upon-Tyne City Council is doing a magnificent job. Both the right hon. Gentleman and his hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary have seen what we are trying to do. It is doing a magnificent job within the straightjacket of Tory policy. At the end of another ten years in this House I shall be able to make a speech on housing in which I say that our housing problem in Newcastle has been solved only if, in the meantime, we get rid of this Government and have a Government who put the housing of the people before private profit.

5.7 p.m.

Mr. Graham Page (Crosby)

The hon. Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Central (Mr. Short) will not expect me to follow him in his most able speech for his own constituency. I am unaware of the problems in his constituency, but he may find that some of my remarks on general policy support what I understand to be his advocacy of an expanded housing programme if not, perhaps, by means of the agencies which he stressed.

The ultimate test of a housing policy is whether it is resulting in a sufficient number of homes for the people. One can elaborate that test by asking, what is meant by "a sufficient number"; are the homes in the right places, and are they at the right prices? But the simple test must be: are the Government in their housing policy providing a sufficient number of homes for the people? Certain figures in the White Paper, Cmnd. 1290, make it appear as though we have just about provided sufficient homes for the number of households needing them. It is said that there are 14⅓ million houses to 14½ million households. I am not so sure about those figures from my personal experience, and I do not feel complacent about them. I should have thought that there are many more households requiring new homes than those figures indicate.

When hon. Members opposite left office ten years ago they did not tie themselves to any forecast of what could be the number of new houses provided beyond saying that it could not go above 200,000 houses a year for Great Britain. I do not think that it lies within their mouths now to criticise the Government for ensuring that only 270,000 houses a year have been provided in England and Wales and 300,000 a year on average over the past eight years in Great Britain.

However, I do not think it is the number of houses which matters so much as the total number of fit houses compared with the total number of households needing homes. That is really the comparison—not the number of new houses we provide but the number of decent homes we provide for the families requiring them. When I speak of fit houses, I mean not only structurally fit but fit so far as their situation and price are concerned.

The hon. Member for Widnes (Mr. McColl) tackled this problem in one part of his speech by referring to industrial expansion in the South as compared with the expansion in the North. Of course, the whole case of housing must be looked at from the point of view of commercial industrial expansion. I suppose that over the next ten years we ought to think of providing some 1 million more jobs, but where are we going to provide them, because the houses must follow the jobs? I think that the Government have done well in providing the jobs in many of the areas of low employment. In my own area on Merseyside we are seeing the jobs brought to the spot and we are having to face the problem of housing those filling the jobs.

Perhaps one ought to consider the availability of public services when one is thinking where to place the homes for the people—the availability of water, heating, lighting, power, schools, open spaces, roads, railways and ports. I realise, of course, that not all these services are the responsibility of my right hon. Friend the Minister of Housing alone. I am not one of those to advocate any inter-departmental board, committee or commission to deal with this question of housing in the right places according to industrial expansion. I should have thought that that was what we had the Cabinet for. Indeed, I hope that we may perhaps hear from my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister from time to time, on this very important problem of housing our people, that there is co-ordination between the several Departments in deciding where the homes shall be provided.

Bearing those sort of distribution of population problems in mind, how many households will be needing homes over the next five or ten years? We are told that over the next ten years the population may increase by some 2½ million. Because at one end of the scale there will be more infants and at the other end more old people surviving, that gives us little clue to the increased number of households for which we have to provide. But I should have thought that, for that probable increase of 2½ million, we shall have to find at least 1 million new homes over the next ten years.

At least 1 million new households will be emerging and will require to be housed, and that, over a period of ten years, means 100,000 new houses a year. That, of course, does not deal with overcrowding in any way. I am thinking only of the new families coming into being as a result of an increase in population.

On the matter of overcrowding, I again refer to the figures given in the White Paper of 14⅓ million houses as against 14½ million households. I say again, and I am sure hon. Members will agree with me, that from our experience as Members of Parliament in our constituencies we know that the problem is much worse than those figures would indicate. There are many more families living in overcrowded conditions which ought to be housed or rehoused quickly. I would put the figure of people living in overcrowded conditions for whom homes should be provided over the next five years at a minimum of ½ million, which would mean 50,000 new homes a year.

Then as the hon. Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Central pointed out very powerfully, there is the need for the replacement of slum houses. My hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary mentioned a figure of 600,000 slums to be cleared. I would have thought, going on the 1955 returns of local authorities, that we are still left with some 1 million slum houses requiring clearance, houses which it would be very difficult to patch up and which really ought to be replaced. Of course, if we are going to do that over five years it will mean 350,000 new houses a year, because out of the 1 million slum houses which ought to be cleared we should not get 1 million families but somewhere in the region of 1¾ million families to be rehoused.

My figures show, therefore, that over a period of five years we ought to house or rehouse some ½ million households a year, two-fifths of them in respect of existing houses. Therefore, we ought to be building at the rate of ½ million new houses a year, but increasing the stock of our existing houses by only some 300,000 a year. We may be able to deal with some part of that figure by improvements and conversions, but I would rather leave that side of the picture to houses which are fit but which have not the amenities. I think that my right hon. Friend has done splendidly with the improvement grants to get the figure up to 130,000 over the past year. The great majority of those, however, are improvements to fairly decent houses which have not the amenities. We cannot use that method very much for the purpose of replacing the slums.

Can we nationally afford a programme of the magnitude of which I have been speaking? On building construction, we are spending nationally some £1,600 million a year, £600 million a year on house building and £1,000 million on other building. I should have thought that we were somewhere near saturation point with commercial building.

Office building has, perhaps, slowed down a little in London, but in provincial cities one certainly sees it going on at a tremendous pace. I blame some local authorities for this due to their greed for rateable value, and I think that they could have looked more closely at the possibility of the development of dwellings within the centres of their cities. However, perhaps a slight restriction on that office type of development would bring the expenditure on house building a little higher so as to provide for the sort of programme which I have tried to detail.

If we are to have ½ million new houses a year for five years, by whom and for what purpose—for sale or rent—are they to be built? I should like to maintain the present proportions of some 5 million owner-occupied houses, some 5½ million privately let houses and some 3½ million council let houses. I do not think that we ought to change those proportions.

As far as the owner-occupied houses are concerned, Government legislation over the past years has given great encouragement. There are still planning difficulties and difficulties over the price of land, but they are not insuperable, and I do not think that the building of houses for owner-occupation necessarily needs any special encouragement at present.

The Labour Party wishes to expand the local authority housing sector, as the hon. Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Central stated definitely. Surely much expansion of that sector would put a millstone of subsidies around the necks of future generations. We cannot afford to place sixty-year subsidies on future generations if we can provide the homes in some other way. Only a percentage expansion should be permitted in the local authority sector—an expansion to provide for tenants in financial need. The Government have indicated in the White Paper that they will be selective over the areas of subsidies. That is what they have been doing for the past year or so. About 57 local authorities have been granted the subsidies for general need, but it has all been done in a rather special and under-the-counter way, and I am pleased that my right hon. Friend is setting out a definite policy whereby the councils which are to have the subsidy for general need will be selected.

Mrs. Harriet Slater (Stoke-on-Trent, North)

The hon. Member said that there should be a limited amount of council house building. Does he disagree with the Minister's suggestion in the White Paper that the subsidies could be cancelled at any time and would not necessarily be for sixty years?

Mr. Page

If I answered that I might be going into more detail than is permitted, but I think it reasonable for any Government to maintain flexibility with subsidies, whether they are subsidies which have already been granted or subsidies which will be granted in future.

The third sector is that of private letting. An important point for hon. Members to remember about these 5½ to 6 million houses is that about three-quarters of them are over seventy years old. The hon. Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Central rightly said that if we want these houses maintained we must give more encouragement for that purpose, although he then, I think rather illogically, went on to argue that the increase in the return from 8 per cent. to 12½ per cent. should not be made. Obviously we must give some encouragement for the maintenance and replacement of these houses, but there is little in the Government's present policy towards private enterprise to encourage the development of house building for letting.

A person minded to construct dwelling houses and flats to let on a large scale finds himself up against many obstructions. He gets no capital allowances, such as are given to his colleagues erecting commercial and industrial premises. He is faced with idealist, if not ideological, rules about density. He is up against some Victorian byelaws, although my right hon. Friend is looking at that problem. He finds that most of the possible urban land which we wish him to redevelop for housing purposes has been commandeered by the local authority.

I am not sure that I understand my right hon. Friend's policy here. He speaks of a "pump-priming" policy and of providing money for housing associations in order to encourage private enterprise to come back into the business of building houses to let. Private enterprise in this business has been faced with competition from the subsidised local authorities for many years in the end-product, which is the house produced for letting. Now it is to be faced with subsidised competition from housing associations. I cannot see what is behind my right hon. Friend's mind in that respect.

Surely what is required is co-operation between the local authorities and the private enterprise developers in comprehensive development schemes. The complications of such schemes are immense for many local authorities. Perhaps if my right hon. Friend assisted local authorities in dealing with such schemes in co-operation with private enterprise, we should bring the private developer back into the building of houses to let.

I have tried to detail a five-year plan for an expanded building programme—a programme of 2½ million new houses over five years, of which 1 million would be replacement and 1½ million would be for new households. It is a plan on the basis of maintaining the present proportion between owner-occupied houses, houses privately let and houses let by local authorities, with special attention to the need to encourage the private developer of houses to let. I am sure that it is essential that we should speed the provision of homes for the people and that we ought not to be complacent about the figures. [HON. MEMBERS: "Hear, hear."] Let me pause and comment on the "Hear, hear" from hon. Members opposite. When one looks at the figures over the past ten years, and certainly over the past eight years, one finds that on the average they have been very good. I want to see them better.

5.27 p.m.

Mr. Sydney Irving (Dartford)

We listened with great interest to the hon. Member for Crosby (Mr. Graham Page), and we hope that his right hon. Friend listened to him with great attention, too, because we agree with him, first of all, that the figures in the White Paper, if not suspect, are certainly complacent. We also agree with his plea for a very much expanded building programme, and we echo what he said about the need for more accurate estimates and for planning ahead for our housing. We also accept his condemnation of the excess office building which has taken place in the last ten years, which has done much to prevent the expansion of the building programme to provide houses for those who need them.

In my opinion, housing is still one of the most serious social problems which the country has to face. Despite the remarks of the Parliamentary Secretary, there have been attempts to minimise the size of the problem. In my view, it is still one of the most distressing classes of case which is brought to me. The constituent who comes to me in great distress, having been evicted or needing a bigger house because of an increase in his family, presents one of the most serious problems. The suggestion by some senior Ministers that the problem no longer exists is a callous affront to the many people in urgent need of housing accommodation. If hon. Members opposite deny that such statements have been made, I draw their attention to the remarks of the right hon. Gentleman the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster on 29th October, 1960. When addressing a conference or rally of Young Conservatives at Wolverhampton, he said that a national housing problem no longer exists. I believe that such a statement is an insult to the many people in urgent and desperate need of accommodation.

There are three authorities in my constituency, each of a different type and each with housing powers. Each has a lòng housing waiting list. In each case it would take about ten years at the present rate of building progress to satisfy the need of the people on the list at the moment.

The truth is that lists get no shorter. Therefore, I must ask anyone making such a statement as the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster did to say where are the authorities which have no slums, where are the authorities which have no unfit properties and where are the authorities which have no overcrowding. I believe it is true that every Member of the House can from his own experience tell of young couples with children or wanting children, living in difficult circumstances in rooms with their in-laws. I am sure that any doctor from his own case papers could tell what this state of affairs is doing to the health of many young wives.

We in the Labour Party have encouraged and advocated an increase in home ownership, but we never believed that this should take place at the price of putting a huge financial burden round the necks of many young couples. It is true that the Government's policy has placed home ownership beyond the reach of the great majority of people of this country, and for many others it has created a burden of debt which will stay with them for the whole of their working lives. The Parliamentary Secretary said, from figures provided by one of the building societies, that about half the people who get advances from building societies earn under £15 a week.

In 1951 the interest rate was 4 per cent., and this meant that on a house of £2,000 the repayment over a period of 25 years was £10 15s. One is lucky now if one can get an advance at much under 6¾ per cent., and that means a repayment on the same amount of £13 8s. 4d., which is a 25 per cent, increase on the amount which had to be paid in 1951. But it is almost impossible now in most parts of the country even to find a house to purchase at £2,000. Therefore, we have the increase which has taken place through the Government's interest rates policy plus the fact that through the Government's failure to deal with land values properties are going up in price, thus creating a tremendous burden for people who want to buy their own houses.

Therefore, we come to the conclusion that the greatest need is houses to let, that private enterprise is unwilling or unable to meet this need and that only local authorities can do it and are prepared to do it. Yet Tory Governments over the years have restricted council house building by local authorities. In 1951 the number of council houses built was 234,973, and by 1959 the figure had dropped to 122,165.

The problems of local authorities have also been aggravated by the Government's Rent Act. Most local authorities, in addition to their ordinary applicants on the list, have had a steady stream of evictions, which have been a burden on their resources. In addition to throwing a burden on local authorities, this has meant a restriction of the chances of people on the waiting list, in most cases people who have already waited a number of years. Despite what the Parliamentary Secretary said, most local authorities have had to face the dilemma of whether to go on charging higher rents or to stop building. Many authorities, to their credit, decided not to restrict their house building policy, but there have been some who have done so.

The Government's interest rates policy has increased the difficulty. In 1951 local authorities could get money from the Public Works Loan Board at 3 per cent., which meant an economic rate of 19s. 4d. Now the corresponding rate is £1 18s. 9d. Therefore, in the last eight or nine years there has been a rise of almost £1 per week in the rents for council house tenants. That has come about through interest rates alone.

We hope that the recasting of subsidies will help local authorities to expand their building programmes. Paragraph 37 of the White Paper says that the rate of growth of total Exchequer subsidies will remain the same at roughly £3 million. Most authorities are welcoming the White Paper because they are hoping that each and every one of them will get the higher rate of subsidy on new building. But if the amount that the Government are going to pay is to stay at £3 million, a large number of them will be disappointed. In many cases it will mean higher rents. I should like the Minister to say something more about the authorities which will get the new rate of subsidy, because only too many are supporting the White Paper because they believe that they will get an increase in the subsidy in future.

We ought to remember—my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent, North (Mrs. Slater) made the point in her intervention—that the Government are for the first time hedging against the future. They have included in the White Paper the power to come to the House at any time and say that the subsidies which have been given in the last few years, starting with the new legislation which is in prospect, may be ended. I wonder how many years it will be before the right hon. Gentleman or his successor says that the country is now so affluent that we can afford to get rid of subsidies.

We in the Labour Party believe that a home is an essential prerequisite to a decent family life. Despite the protestations of Ministers that the problem is solved, we believe that it is still very great indeed. The National Housing and Town Planning Council in a survey which it made recently estimated that there were 500,000 families still on local authority waiting lists in England and Wales in urgent need of accommodation. Despite that, the programme is tailing away, and we have today heard the Parliamentary Secretary say that this was due to the fact that on every front there was an unprecedented advance in capital investment. This is not before time, as we will all recognise, but in every field as well as in housing it is recognised now by an increasing number of people that we are falling behind many countries in Europe.

I believe that even if what the hon. Gentleman says is true—I suspect that it is nothing like as true as the hon. Gentleman suggested, or at any rate the size is not as great as he said—in housing we are also falling behind many other countries in Europe which have had a much more difficult time in many respects than we have. If we take as an example West Germany, a country which was devastated, within her resources she was able for a number of years to build 500,000 houses a year for a population similar in size to our own. This, therefore, reflects not only the Government's failure in their housing policy but also their failure to expand the economy to enable this sort of programme to go ahead.

As has been said by a number of hon. Members, the need to modernise properties and to bring individual properties up to a proper standard is equally important. The Government's policy in this respect has been an equally miserable failure. It is no good to talk, as the right hon. Gentleman did at Question Time, about an increase of 100, 200, 300 or 400 per cent. in the number of landlords applying for improvement grants in the last two or three years. That merely emphasises how few landlords were applying for improvement grants in 1957, 1958 and 1959. In 1960 only 131,000 landlords applied for improvement grants.

Mrs. Slater

Is not the wrong word being used? Surely it is not landlords but people who apply for improvement grants?

Mr. Irving

I was just coming to that point. There is a great deal of evidence that the greater proportion of the 131,000 were not landlords in this sense at all but owner-occupiers improving their own property.

We must see this problem against the background of the great need which exists According to the 1951 census, as the Parliamentary Secretary reminded us, there were 5¾ million houses without a bath and 2¾ million households without a separate water closet. Against this need the Government's policy has been a complete failure. At the present rate, it will take at least a quarter of a century before our unfit properties are brought up to a decent standard. Therefore, I have no confidence at all that the new figure of 12½ per cent., which is the figure of permitted return, will yield any real improvement in the modernisation of our properties, and to me it demonstrates the basic immorality of a system which puts the provision of homes as a secondary consideration to the making of profit.

One thing I was pleased to see in the White Paper was the reference to co-operative housing associations. There are at the moment in this country only three or four such associations which are truly co-operative in the real sense of the word. I do not want to diminish the value of the many other non-profit making housing associations which have been working over the last ten to twenty years and longer, and, indeed, I would pay tribute to the work of Miss Merrilees and the National Federation of Housing Associations have done. I would ask the right hon. Gentleman whether it is proposed to give greater assistance to the Federation to allow it to expand its work and to give greater assistance to the housing associations so that these can expand in number.

I could not help feeling, on reading the White Paper, that the Minister had perhaps not examined other countries' experience and practice as closely as he might. In Sweden, which has, perhaps, been most successful, from 20 per cent. to 25 per cent. of the houses have been built in this way. The rate of interest for co-operative housing associations is pegged and, indeed, the State pays the difference between the pegged rate of interest and the market rate of interest. Norway also has low interest Government loans. We on this side of the House believe that only by giving this sort of preferential interest rate to housing associations and others can we get the sort of programme which is required if we are to expand our housing programme, according to need.

In each of those countries there is a parent organisation which in some cases actually builds the house itself. It provides expert advice and technical assistance, and often financial assistance to meet the gap between the amount of the total cost and the amount which the housing association can raise itself. I think there is a need for the development of Co-operative Housing Development Organisation in this country to provide technical equipment and advice, and I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will encourage the development of such a parent organisation.

The main problem of these associations, however, is that of finding land. Building land in suburban areas has increased six, seven, eight times over in value, and sometimes six times in the last few years. Sir Basil Spence, a past President of the Royal Institute of British Architects, has called this holding the community to ransom. Many local authorities have been priced out of the market because of the huge increase in the cost of land. I believe that as long as the Government refuses to have any kind of tax on site values or capital gains it will be very difficult indeed for co-operative housing associations to make an advance in getting established.

However, I hope that this will be the commencement of a great movement in Britain, because it will not only provide much needed houses but will also be an exercise in democratic control and management which, I hope, everyone in this House and on the local authorities will support.

5.47 p.m.

Mr. John M. Temple (City of Chester)

The hon. Member for Widnes (Mr. MacColl), in opening the debate, said this was a good time to have a review of the housing position. I entirely agree with him. I think that that is what my right hon. Friend the Minister of Housing and Local Government intended when he brought forward this White Paper, "Housing in England and Wales".

I am glad that the hon. Member for Widnes is present because I wish to deal with the position of building land on Merseyside and also to deal with some of the points which the hon. Member for Dartford (Mr. Sydney Irving) made about building land. I believe that the availability of building land in our country is central to the problem which we are discussing. I wish to make a certain number of constructive observations on the White Paper, and some of them will not be entirely uncontroversial, I think, but before coming to the heart of my subject, the availability of building land, I should like to make one or two detailed observations on the White Paper.

Firstly, with regard to housing subsidies. I am sorry that the hon. Lady the Member for Stoke-on-Trent, North (Mrs. Slater) has just left the Chamber, because I would say that in my view it is only realistic at the present time to take the powers to vary subsidies over a period of sixty years, because looking sixty years behind us to the time of the Boer War we can see that a lot of water has flowed under a lot of bridges since then and that housing subsidies agreed, say, in 1900 would look unrealistic in 1960. That is the position which we are looking at today. In my opinion, the rate of change in the world is accelerating, and the rate of change between 1900 and 1960, continued in the future, will be at an ever-increasing pace.

I would say that I agree with the basic concept of the formula for housing subsidies contained in the White Paper. It is right to give help to those authorities which are in greatest need. I further agree that it is right for the local authorities to give help to those tenants who are in greatest need. I do not mind going on record as saying that I wish to see a needs test for those people who want to live or have to live in subsidised accommodation.

With regard to the formula itself I would say that there are two specific points in it which deserve detailed examination. One is that one of the governing factors is the expenditure of any local authority; if the expenditure on the housing account has been large, then it qualifies for the greater rate of subsidy. The second factor which I believe merits examination as a matter of policy is that the White Paper proposes that the yardstick shall be twice the 1956 gross value. Those gross values are the letting values in 1939. I was very much hoping that we were getting away from 1939 values, because in other matters with which this House is concerned at present we are getting away from 1939 values. I think it is unfortunate that we are to go on apparently in future having regard to 1939 values when we are considering housing subsidies.

I turn now to housing for the elderly. I welcome the progress which has been made. I note that paragraph 15 of the White Paper, talking about this subject, refers to more bungalows, flats and flatlets. I have comparatively recently been to Moscow, and there I have seen the enormous housing developments, all of them, as far as I could see, in the shape of huge blocks of flats. I hope very much that when we are housing the elderly we shall put the emphasis on bungalows, because old people like to walk out on fine days, walk out of their houses and sit on a seat adjoining their properties and then stroll back. They do not want the inconvenience of having to walk down lots of stairs, if the block of flats is a high one, and they do not want even to take a lift to the bottom floor in order to walk out. I have seen some very nice bungalow colonies built, where there is a warden's house as part of the scheme, and I have seen a colony situated in the middle of a housing estate.

In talking of housing for the elderly I lay great stress on single-storey buildings, and that fits in with my argument, which I shall develop later, about the availability of land, because that type of development means that a larger amount of land will have to be allotted to the housing of old people. I hope very much that my right hon. Friend will have something to say about this matter.

Mr. J. T. Price (Westhoughton)

It would be welcome to the House if the hon. Member would develop that point later. Obviously the problem facing local authorities is how to build economically bungalows which take a great deal of space on land which in many cases might cost £2,000 an acre. They are forced to build up because of the fantastic price of land, which the hon. Member has already recognised. This is a practical and not an idealistic problem.

Mr. Temple

As a realistic and practical man I shall come to that problem. I have already said that it was central to my theme.

As for houses to let, we can all recognise that in the last fifteen years private enterprise has significantly failed to build them. There are good reasons, one of which is rent control. I should like to see rent control got rid of just as soon as we have a sufficiency of homes. The abolition of rent control will be a major factor——

Mr. G. Thomas

It has already been abolished in the sense that if private enterprise builds anything there is no rent control.

Mr. Temple

The point I was making is rather different. It is that controlled rents are at present competing with rents that would be charged by private enterprise.

We must recognise that my right hon. Friend's pump-priming scheme is on a comparatively small scale. I could not agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Crosby (Mr. Graham Page) that it is subsidised. I believe that it is supposed to stand on its own feet. Money will be made available at the same rate of interest as that which is charged by the Public Works Loan Board, but to no other extent is there any degree of subsidy. The scheme is on a small scale. According to the White Paper there are 1,450 housing authorities in the country. Therefore, if my mathematics are right, this gives six dwellings for each housing authority. I would hope that we should be able to proceed with that scheme on a much greater and more imaginative scale.

In passing, I would say that I do not entirely agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Crosby, but I should like to see a higher overall housing target. The Federal German Republic, which has a population approximately the same as our own, has a building target which is very nearly double ours at the present time.

Another factor to which reference is made in the White Paper is multi-occupation. I should think that everyone in the House and outside would welcome the fact that local authorities are to be given much greater power. They are to be able to enforce a code of good management and are to be given the power to carry out works. Exploitation by bad landlords must be ruthlessly checked. I hope that when local authorities get that power they will not hesitate to use it.

I should like to say a few words about the improvement grants. I welcomed the House Purchase and Housing Act of two years ago and as a small landlord I took the opportunity of improving two of my farmworkers' cottages through the medium of these grants, putting in bathrooms for the first time in their houses. I think, therefore, that I can claim personal experience of the working of the grants. I have already mentioned to my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Kirkdale (Mr. N. Pannell) that I intended to mention his constituency which I visited comparatively recently. From the experience of that visit and my own personal experience I should like to mention two difficulties in connection with these improvement grants.

In the Kirkdale constituency of Liverpool there appeared to me to be a reluctance on the part of the tenants to pay the extra rental which the landlord would have rightly demanded because he had carried out improvements. These tenants, particularly the elderly, did not appreciate what the condition of their homes would he after the improvements had been made. I hope, therefore, that my right hon. Friend will see to it that demonstration houses are made available throughout the country so that tenants can see what can be done to these properties through the medium of improvement grants.

Another definite snag that I found in Kirkdale was that very often people who had three-bedroomed houses were reluctant to let one bedroom go for conversion into a bathroom. I overcame this difficulty in my own case by building a small lean-to in the yard to accommodate the bathroom and a flush lavatory, but I found that in Liverpool there is a byelaw precluding the building in a yard of a substantial lean-to of this nature. I hope that my right hon. Friend will take this factor into consideration when he goes forward with his schemes for increasing the size and scope of the improvement grants.

I said earlier that my central theme would be the provision of building land. I think that it is our duty to see that a chronic shortage of building land does not develop. Paragraphs 48 and 49 of the White Paper deal specifically with land. The Government make in those paragraphs the most important statement that they seek to ensure that overall enough land is allocated for development". I hope that the Government will implement that statement.

I should like to comment on two quite different aspects of development in Britain. The first is development in Greater London and south-east England and the second is development in provincial Britain. I have always recog- nised that London and south-east England are something quite different and something quite apart. They comprise the only area in the country which is surrounded by a statutory green belt. The Royal Commission on Local Government in Greater London recognised that Greater London was something which was quite different from our provincial conurbations. Greater London is more like the urban "constellations" of the world, such as Tokio and Los Angeles or New York. It has one centre and everything is drawn into that centre, whereas other conurbations are multi-centred. They have more than one focal point within them.

I shall deal first with Greater London. In securing an appreciation of the problems in other world constellations, I was fortunate to have a one-day conference quite recently in Tokio with Mr. Yamada, director of Capital City Development in the Tokio Metropolis. I regard Tokio's problem as very similar to that of London. The population is about 10 million. It has a green belt on the map and the people there are watching everything that goes on in London extremely closely. Mr. Yamada had his assistant attending for twelve months recently at the London School of Economics. The Tokio Metropolitan Government are endeavouring to solve that overspill problem by building satellite towns. They have a programme of thirteen towns and are at the moment constructing four of them. The important point is that each of these towns is to have a population of between 100,000 and 200,000.

I believe that we should be thinking in terms of larger new towns. These larger new towns are a more complete entity in themselves. They would be a better administrative unit of local government and they would be for local government purposes an all-purpose authority. Figures which I have obtained show that 60,000 people per annum should be seeking homes outside Greater London. This is the extent of the overspill problem. If that figure is correct we should require to build one of these large satellite towns every other year. That is the measure of the problem. I and my family before me come from the north-west of England, and I recognise that London and the South-East have a unique magnetism. People leave the North-West, the North-East and the Midlands to come to London and they do not return easily to their own areas. In a free society, which we all claim to be free, provision should be made in south-east England for this natural magnetism.

I said that I would talk about the position in the provinces. As I know a little about the Merseyside area, I shall talk about that "special review area", not because its problems are dissimilar from those of the other special review areas, but because I happen to know something of the area. I shall speak first of the area north of the Mersey—in other words, the Lancashire part of the Merseyside conurbation.

I was extremely interested in a special correspondent's article in The Times of 22nd August last year, which drew attention to the fact that in south-east Lancashire the county council proposes a green belt covering 330 square miles. It embraces fifty-one local authorities, including, I would think, the local authority of the hon. Member for Widnes. It certainly includes the great county boroughs of Manchester, Liverpool and Bolton. It was significant that that article stated that the green belt would come right up to the boundaries of those three cities. Therefore, in my view, those county boroughs, and other boroughs besides, will be faced with a real problem of housing their expanding populations within a measurable time.

The article in The Times stated that This would compel Lancashire authorities to build upwards … and provide flats (which are still far from popular in the area). I note the use of the word "authorities". It only envisaged that local authorities, presumably, would build upwards. I agree with the view expressed in The Times. It is unrealistic to think that the private developer will build upwards, because the cost of such development is relatively higher. We must ensure that sufficient land is made available for the private estate developer, because unless he builds at a rapid rate the policy in which we on this side of the House believe will not be capable of implementation.

I turn now to the area south of the Mersey, where more or less exactly the same position obtains. The Cheshire County Council is proposing a green belt or a green blanket south of the Mersey. This will present vast problems in the years immediately ahead, because the policy outlined in the White Paper and in Circular 37/1960 say that in such a case development should be beyond the green belt. Let me examine that statement. I do not believe that it will be any more popular with agriculture to put such development beyond the green belt. I should explain, perhaps, that neither of the two green belts to which I have referred is yet statutory; they are merely proposals. I believe that the economic cost to the community and the administrative cost to the local authorities would be much higher if we were to have sporadic development beyond the green belt.

Unless the development is in large units such as I have spoken of before—the county borough type of unit—I believe that from an administrative viewpoint we are only making difficulties for ourselves, and from an economic viewpoint, except for the light industries, I do not believe that towns of 50,000 or 60,000 people are viable units, because if they were centres of heavy industry they would be dependent, possibly, on one or two major industries. This in itself is bad economic planning. I believe, therefore, that these proposed green belts should be re-examined by my right hon. Friend the Minister.

I note the use of significant words in paragraph 48 of the White Paper, which states that the less good agricultural land should be used". I have seen no attempt by the planning authorities to designate certain sections of land within the green belt as less good agriculturally. That is why I should like these green belt proposals to be reexamined. I know that there are areas of less good agricultural land within those green belts, and I hope very much that before those green belts become statutory, as such a state of affairs is imminent, this matter will be given the closest possible attention.

I have been extremely interested to read the message which President Kennedy sent on 9th March to Congress on housing in the United States of America. He gave some significant figures of population increases. I always think that when we consider problems in this country we are well advised to look across to the United States, because very often what the United States does one day we do ourselves shortly afterwards. [An HON. MEMBER: "The other way round."]

The projected American population is of interest. President Kennedy referred to a population in the United States of America by 1975 of 235 million, and a prospective population by the end of the century of 300 million. Most of the increase, he said, would occur in and around the urban areas. President Kennedy therefore accepts in the United States that that tremendous increase in population, which, I believe, will be mirrored in this country, will be in and around the urban areas.

My right hon. Friend's White Paper does not shirk these problems. It refers to our growing population and to the number of separate households, but it does not refer to the fact that by 1967, what has been called the "bulge" in the schools will be reflected in the demand for housing. I believe, therefore, that a special and supra demand will occur in about 1967, if not a little sooner, and we should be ready for that supra demand.

In his White Paper, my right hon. Friend refers to the building of factories, power stations, schools, playingfields, homes and, I would add, garages. Today, however, we on this side look to the private builder to provide approximately two-thirds of the building in England and Wales. We cannot have it both ways. We must recognise that to get down to an economic cost, the private developer must have a comparatively large estate to develop. We are all too apt to say that we should encourage the private developer and in the very next breath blame him for devouring good agricultural land. That is the wrong way of looking at it. We must recognise that if the private builder is to build he will necessarily devour acres of agricultural land—and, I hope, the less good agricultural land.

As an agriculturist, I am, however, heartened to recognise that even though the private developer and all the other developments have been taking agricultural land as the years have gone by, the output from our acres has continued to increase. I have every confidence that that trend will continue, despite the necessary demand on agricultural land for urban development.

Mrs. Joyce Butler (Wood Green)

Do I take it that the hon. Member's argument is that the local authorities should concentrate their building on the expensive land in the cities and that the private developer should be encouraged to build on the less expensive agricultural land, albeit less good agricultural land, outside the urban areas?

Mr. Temple

No, I did not say that, and I certainly did not mean to convey that impression. I said that it was unrealistic to think that the private developer would engage in high development, which is acknowledged as being uneconomic and is dealt with in special ways through additional housing subsidies, which deal with high development and the extra high cost of land. To turn to a related subject, I was a guest of the National Caravan Council at its convention at Scarborough last Friday. The caravan industry in Britain is distinctly worried at the present time. It is not worried because it cannot produce caravans or sell caravans but because there is not sufficient land being allocated for caravan sites in Britain at present. [An HON. MEMBER: "There should be a lot less."]

If anyone should say to me that this is unrelated to housing, I would say that quite a number of people today are looking to caravans which are being put out as accommodation for their retirement. Looking across the Atlantic, it is significant that in the United States, not because people are poor, about 3½ million people are today living in caravans as their homes. Some of the caravans available in the United States are 400 to 600 super feet in floor space. It is by no means substandard accommodation. I believe that if sufficient land is allocated to caravan sites in this country quite a number of people who are retiring will wish to retire to caravans.

I hope that it is appreciated that the demand for land for caravan sites in Britain today is of the order of 3,000 acres a year. The output of caravans is 40,000 to 50,000 a year which converted back to acreage demands gives an acreage demand of about 3,000 acres a year. I hope that the local planning authorities will take a realistic view of this demand for caravan sites. They can be well landscaped today and would be no loss of amenity to a district. In many of the remoter parts of the country they would bring about considerable improvement in the employment situation and would use up land which is certainly of small value for agriculture.

Mr. J. T. Price

I have some views on caravans different from those of the hon. Member. On the North Wales coast, not far from the hon. Member's own constituency, one sees an enormous spoliation of the whole coastline. In North Wales, as well as in Yorkshire, Devonshire and Cornwall, some of our incomparable landscape is completely ruined by this uncontrolled rash of caravans. Can the hon. Member tell us what proportion of the caravans now erected are for housing as distinct from use for weekends and holidays and all the other amenities which people wish to have?

Mr. Temple

The hon. Gentleman has put a number of questions to me. The Arton Wilson Report on caravans said that approximately one-third of the caravans then in Britain were used for residential purposes. That figure which was given a year ago was a figure of 60,000 caravans in Britain used for residential purposes. My point is that the caravan industry is a new industry, an expanding industry. No one holds a brief for bad caravan sites. If a caravan site is landscaped efficiently and all the necessary sanitary facilities are provided it can be an advantage to the area, far from being a disgrace such as the hon. Member for Westhoughton (Mr. J. T. Price) thought. I readily agree with him about certain sites in North Wales.

I have spoken rather longer than I intended on this important subject. I would, however, draw attention to paragraph 49 of the White Paper, which states … no one could foresee all the social or economic trends … It goes on to say: But the important thing is to make sure that housing progress does not falter for lack of land … I have studied trends throughout my life, and one thing of which I am absolutely certain is that the demand for building land is definitely upwards. I am convinced that the trend for development in our country is firmly and steadily upwards. Having accepted that, I call for a reappraisal of positive, purposeful planning in the light of what I regard as self-evident trends. Planning and control in my view have come to be synonymous with restriction and the preservation of the status quo. Let planning be positive, and let control mean guiding and shaping but not stopping urban growth.

6.15 p.m.

Mr. George Thomas (Cardiff, West)

The hon. Member for the City of Chester (Mr. Temple) has made a most useful and constructive speech. He brought great knowledge to the House, and I think we all appreciate the care with which he had prepared his speech. That is not to say that I agree with everything he said. I believe that he underestimated the influence of the Rent Act, 1957, upon private enterprise. Today, controls exist only for houses which are under the £30 level, but once the occupier moves there is decontrol even there, so there is no disincentive to private enterprise to build to rent.

I believe that the hon. Member was indicating that he would like to interfere with the green belts and filch more acres from the green belts. I hope that in our anxiety to obtain land for houses we shall not filch from the green belts. If we do there will come a day when there is no "green" left in these islands. There will be nothing but one great built-up area. I therefore part company from the hon. Member on that point as well.

With regard to caravans, I have no doubt that the caravan industry has a right to look for protection, help and guidance from this House. I do not know of any hon. Member who likes to think of a caravan for his home. I believe that when we are planning for housing——

Mr. Emrys Hughes

Does my hon. Friend realise that the Army is getting a large number of caravans for soldiers?

Mr. Thomas

The hon. Gentleman—I think he is my hon. Friend—[An HON. MEMBER: "He used to be."]—is speaking of something which is of advantage to the Army. I want to speak about the housing of our people, and I hope that it will never be envisaged in this House that part of our housing programme for the people of these islands——

Mr. Hughes

The soldiers are people.

Mr. Thomas

I am talking about the ordinary applicants on the council house lists.

Mr. Hughes

Soldiers are, too.

Mr. Thomas

My hon. Friend's argument will apply to them when they return home.

To return to my argument, I believe that if we are to advance the housing programme we ought to be thinking in terms of permanent dwellings for our people—houses which any one of us would be willing to live in. We ought not to contemplate for any other family anything which we would not want for ourselves. I know that there are first-class caravans. I have seen some in which it is all right to live for a while, but I do not want them advanced as part of the housing programme.

When I listened to the Parliamentary Secretary this afternoon I was reminded once again that he is a man of considerable ability, but I believe that he put a smoke-screen before the House when talking about all the advances in so many fields of Government activity as though that was a restrictive element on what we ought to be doing with regard to council house building at the present time. I am appalled at the concept of council house estates which was revealed in the speech of the Parliamentary Secretary. The idea of 20,000 people who, I think, he suggested could move out to council house estates because their income never goes up, is like putting up a poster on every council house estate, "Here live our poor relations."

I remember the philosophy of my great friend and servant of this House, Nye Bevan, when we were initiating the new subsidy scheme after the war. We contemplated a situation in which local authority houses would be occupied by the local doctor, the teacher, the craftsman and the professional man, so that council estates would not be places where the lower-paid workers lived but communities which reflected all sections of our national life. There is a wide gap between this side of the House and the benches opposite in our ideas about council houses and who should live in them.

I hope there will be resistance in the country to the idea that council houses shall be occupied only by people receiving under £10 a week, or whatever means test figure hon. Members opposite like to suggest. Housing is a basic problem for every family in the land. There is an old saying that an Englishman's home is his castle. That is true also for Welshmen, Irishmen and Scotsmen. We all look with special affection upon the homes in which we grew up; we all have treasured memories of our homes.

Three out of every four families in Britain today are living in pre-war houses. Less than half a million of those houses in which three-quarters of our people are living have been modernised. We have no ground at all for the complacent attitude which the Parliamentary Secretary adopted. I ask this question: is it easier or harder for a person unable to buy a house to rent a house today than it was ten years ago? After all, the party opposite has not only been in power for ten years, but it has had a majority which commanded for it the right to do what it liked in respect of this welfare service, as I regard it. Today, ten years after the party opposite took power after the war, it is harder for people in the City of Cardiff, for instance, to obtain a council house than it was when that party took office.

The White Paper glosses over the shrinking proportion of council houses by stating the negative side of the situation. It says that private building is contributing each year a growing share of the total output of houses. That is the other side of the coin. Local authorities are building a dwindling proportion of houses each year. Today houses are going to the people who can pay for them and not always to the people who most need them. Surely, the morality of a housing programme ought to be, above all, ensuring that the greatest need is met first of all. That is the philosophy that inspired this House in the early years after the war. Times have changed.

The need of our people today is greatest amongst young families where saving has been impossible. I am reminded of a young man aged 24, with three or four children, who is on the housing list of his local authority. He was a boy at school when the party opposite took office. These people have a right to say to the Government, who carry full responsibility for the long housing list queues, "We expect something more positive than is found in this White Paper."

I now wish to deal with the question of the old folk and spinsters who form a large part of our community. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Central (Mr. Short), I wish to consider the problem as it affects my own constituency. It is my privilege to represent in this House a part of the capital City of Cardiff which has its own special housing problems. I am very sorry that so far no Welsh Member on the benches opposite has spoken.

In the City of Cardiff we have our problem of slums. The local authority during the past two years has shown a splendid spirit in the task of removing that curse from our midst. In Grange-town and Riverside, in Cardiff, there are whole areas of houses like those described by my hon. Friend, which are unfit for human habitation and ought to be pulled down. I think of Thomas Street and Madras Street in Grange-town, and Wellington Street and Wells Street in Riverside, which my hon. Friend the Member for Pontypool (Mr. Abse) knows so well, and it is a disgrace to think that in 1960, in this so-called affluent society, people have to continue living in such conditions. I therefore welcome the initiative which the local authority has shown in dealing with these conditions.

Other parts of the city are being cleared. One of our great problems in Cardiff is that local authority houses which were built immediately after the first war are themselves slum properties now. Caerau Square, Cardiff, is a disgrace to the city. It is owned, not privately, but by the local authority. I am glad to tell the House that the local authority now has a plan for clearing the whole of that post-first war housing development in order to rehouse the people in a proper way.

We have in Cardiff many thousands of old houses that ought to be modernised and improved, but it is impossible for our people to tackle the situation in quite the same way as the people of Birmingham, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and other parts of the country have done, because we suffer from the restrictions imposed by ground landlords. The majority of properties in the City of Cardiff are leasehold, and therefore to seek to take advantage of the improvements possible under current legislation is to ask for punishment from the ground landlord. The people of Cardiff—indeed, the people of Wales—are being held to ransom by this system. Throughout South Wales this leasehold system is a curse which is preventing people modernising their houses, having them adequately repaired and put into a condition worthy of their occupants.

The present proposals, which the Minister has broadly presented to the House, are hopelessly inadequate, because, so far as South Wales is concerned, they fail to deal with the problem of land prices and leasehold. When people cannot command the freehold of their home at a reasonable cost, it is not intelligent to expect them to modernise the property in the last 30 years of the life of the lease in order to hand it over to a finance corporation. There are hon. Members opposite who know that one finance company owns nearly 12,000 houses in Cardiff. It has now said that it will hand over freeholds, but I have an instance of a house in Cathedral Road, with 30 years of the lease still to run. The owner-occupier has been told that it will cost £1,500 to acquire the freehold from Western Ground Rents, Limited. Can we expect him in these circumstances, to modernise the premises, to install the amenities which are possible under legislation?

I remind the Minister of Housing and Local Government that he is also Minister for Welsh Affairs. Let him say something about how he is to help our people in Wales who own leasehold properties with the leases beginning to run out. How are they to have the improvement which the ground landlords certainly will not initiate? These people are owner-occupiers who would have to bear the burden themselves. I hope that he is seized strongly by this problem, because all over South Wales we suffer today, as the Irish suffered in the last century, from absentee landlords. It is making nonsense of the housing plan he is submitting. This system is an octopus which grips property in Cardiff, preventing development and improvement. I hope that the Minister will have something to say about it when he replies.

I have been a Member of this House for a long time now, and, like other hon. Members, I hold regular interviews with constituents. The most valued part of our lives as Members is the personal relationship which we are able to establish between ourselves and our constituents. I doubt if there is a right hon. or hon. Gentleman here who could say that housing is not the major social problem in his division, that he does not know of grievous human problems because of it.

If there is anything that makes me feel completely depressed it is when good, decent, hard-working people come to me with a grievous housing problem and I have to tell them that they are at the end of a very long queue and that we are having only a trickle of housing to meet the general need in Cardiff. Today, it takes two extra points to get a house in Cardiff compared with two years ago. A childless couple whose income is too low for them to buy a house will wait forever to get a council house. I know of people who have been on the list for 15 years, but because they are childless they must be told, even with the policy submitted to us today, that they never will stand a Chance of being rehoused by the local authority. Yet their income is too low to get a mortgage.

I regard housing as the most human problem with which the House is confronted. I think of old-age pensioners, nearly 3,000 of whom have their names on the housing list in Cardiff, hoping to have a flatlet or a little room in their declining years. What chance have they got? The chief way in which that list is reduced is through funerals and not through rehousing.

The Government are not showing enough sense of urgency about the needs of our people. That need is getting not less but greater, and I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will dispel some of the complacency which almost suffocated us during the speech of the Parliamentary Secretary, because if he does not, then I can assure him that in the Principality this problem will be held before him every time he comes among us.

6.35 p.m.

Mr. John Barter (Ealing, North)

The hon. Member for Cardiff, West (Mr. G. Thomas) has taken us on a flight of oratory for which both he and his countrymen are well reputed, and I should find myself unfitted to follow him in that way. But I wish to join issue with him on one or two things which he said. At the beginning of his speech he referred to the complacency of my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary. I listened with great care to my hon. Friend's speech and, whilst I detected what I understood was the purpose of this debate—a report of ten years' progress in housing—I found no trace of complacency.

Indeed, there can be little trace of complacency, or reason for it, because the only performance by which the Government's can be measured is that of the Labour Government. One hesitates to derive any complacency from a comparison with a performance which is not in itself very commendable.

The hon. Member for Cardiff, West also referred to the green belt, which he defended with a passion to which we have long grown accustomed. I am with him on that issue, except that I do not join him in the exact definition of what is and is not green belt. I hope to devote a short time to consideration of that point, because, whilst he took us over the affairs of Wales and, particularly, Cardiff, I hope to bring our deliberations a little nearer to this House, and specifically to the London area, part of which I represent.

Before doing so, however, I would like to say something which I hope will be accepted by all hon. Members—that there is not one of us here who does not but feel the need for housing advance, the humane need for the provision of adequate and decent housing accommodation for all families. I thought that in the course of debate I traced some indications that the Opposition feel that we on this side of the House may not have the same motives and desires as they have. I am sure that, on reflection, they cannot accept all their own arguments and contentions, and will acknowledge that our motives are just as good as theirs; and that each party has the intention and desire to provide adequately a high standard of living accommodation for every family. Where we differ is in the means by which this can be attained and in the priorities which must be kept in order that some considerable advance can be made.

Mention has been made of the problem of housing for older people. I am sure that the major developments in this respect which have taken place over recent years should and could be accelerated in the years ahead. There is a natural desire by older people not to surround themselves with all the work that goes with the occupation of large houses, in which they have brought up their families. There is also the good, solid, sensible objective of making houses available to successor young families with children.

I hope that the development which has taken place over the last few years, and the increases, to which my hon. Friend referred, in the provision of old people's accommodation—which has risen from 11,000 in 1951 to 27,000 last year—will accelerate even further. In this lies at any rate a clue, and part of the solution, to the big problem with which we are confronted.

We have heard of the relative performance of foreign countries, especially Germany. I have had the opportunity of seeing some old people's accommodation in part of Germany. Although Germany's performance exceeds ours numerically, since she is building about 500,000 houses a year for general housing, my impression from a personal examination is that the accommodation does not reach anything like the standard of our housing accommodation, especially in the provision of houses for old people.

I, too, want to refer to the problems of land and the question of the green belt. We recognise that considerable pressures are put upon the scarce land available within the areas statutorily surrounded by the green belt. In part, this is a town planning problem. So long as we seek to impose very tight restrictions upon an area in which there is an ever-increasing demand for land the inevitable conse- quence must be a rise in price. My right hon. Friend has comparatively recently suggested that local authorities should review their density provisions, and also endeavour to clear out any surplus land they have on their stocks, making it available for development.

I am not satisfied that the density revisions which have already taken place are adequate. I am not anxious to crowd people into a very small area, but we must recognise that some of the densities which are even now provided—after the revision—allow for replacement at a lower density than the areas being cleared. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but I do not see how we are to succeed in dealing with the London overspill in future without building a substantial number of new towns. If we are not steadily to do away with any greenery in the country, as the hon. Member for Cardiff, West said, and build towns stretching from one end of the land to the other, we have to develop to an increasing density in our cities. This need not be unattractive development, nor need it be bad for health or amenities.

My right hon. Friend has also communicated with local authorities on the question of making available land which is at present surplus to their requirements. From my frequent travels around London it occurs to me that full consideration is not being given to this point by all local authorities. There is a naturally acquisitive desire for land by local authorities, and once having acquired it they find it extremely difficult to give it up. That applies not only to local authorities; there are other public authorities who own vast tracts of land surplus to their requirements which could well be brought into use for public housing needs and general redevelopment.

The Metropolitan Water Board and British Railways are two good examples. It is also doubtful whether the gas and electricity boards have given consideration to the fact that they also own surplus land which could help to bring relief in the matter of the high price of land in the London area.

I recognise that not all these matters fall within the responsibility of my right hon. Friend, but I hope that he will feel inclined to consider making approaches to his colleagues in the Cabinet with a view to bringing about some alleviation on this point.

My next point concerns the green belt. Both inside the House and out I have heard descriptions of London's green belt as being, in many places, not a green belt, but a dirty brown one. Making a tour of the western part of London one can see odd little tracts of dirty land. When I say "dirty land" I mean land with scrub on it, which is being put to no useful purpose.

Mr. A. P. Costain, (Folkestone and Hythe)

Does not my hon. Friend agree that this land is so uneconomical that no farmer could make a living out of it?

Mr. Barter

I was not thinking of land which anyone could think of for farming. If my hon. Friend wants me to develop the argument about agricultural land in the green belt, I doubt whether it would be economical, but that is not to say that where land is being put to good agricultural use, whether economical or not, it is a bad thing. We want to retain this lung round the London area. I was concentrating on the very small parcels of land, of odd shapes, on which development could satisfactorily take place. It would be sparse development, and not highly concentrated, but it would all help in providing additional land and so relieving the general pressure for land in the London area.

A point that is related to the City centre development problems is the question of the alternative uses of land. Reference has already been made this evening to the amount of alternative construction which is going on. Roads, railways, schools, shops and offices have all been referred to as being included in the high level of capital development which is now taking place. Indeed, it is one of the highest levels of capital development, if not the very highest, in our history.

I traced in the remarks of the hon. Member for Dartford (Mr. Sydney Irving) the fact that he was not wholly in sympathy with the level of office development. I find this an inconsistent argument from the Opposition, and also from my hon. Friends, because I thought that we were all in favour of improving the standard of office accommodation, and I cannot see how we can do that without carrying out substantial office building of a completely new type. We must agree that the standard of office accommodation must be increased, and that some part of the labour force and labour resources must go into that increase.

Having listened to my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary, I am in no doubt that progress has been made. There was not a trace of complacency in my hon. Friend's speech when he referred to the progress that has been made; indeed, we all realise that we have a great task in front of us, and we wish to approach it in a constructive and sensible manner.

6.49 p.m.

Mrs. Joyce Butler (Wood Green)

It is always a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Ealing, North (Mr. Barter), because he makes constructive points and does not seek to make party political capital. I join issue with him on several points, but his speech conforms to the general pattern of the debate, which has been remarkable for the number of constructive solutions which hon. Members have put forward, many of which the Minister has failed to mention in his White Paper and in the legislation which he proposes.

One of the central points in practically every speech has been the shortage of land and its high cost. On both those points the right hon. Gentleman has had very little to say during his long period in office as the Minister of Housing and Local Government. He makes reference in the White Paper to the importance of discussing these matters with planning authorities and talks about assessments being made of the scope for extensive redevelopment in old areas, but he does not say very much more than that, and he does not do very much more than that.

This is a question which is central to the whole problem of housing at present, that where houses are most in demand the land is in very short supply, and even where it is available it is extremely expensive. Therefore, when hon. Gentlemen talk, as they do, about the need for old people's houses, they ought to bear in mind that they are to some extent speaking with split minds because we need old people's houses in the congested areas and if the land in those areas is too expensive we cannot expect the bungalows which the hon. Member for the City of Chester (Mr. Temple) wanted for old people there. We cannot afford to build them on land which is sold at the fantastic figure which it is in these congested areas.

This split personality runs through a great deal of what we hear from the Government benches. The Parliamentary Secretary said that he took some pride in the fact that the Government were encouraging private builders to build to a high standard by awarding a housing medal for good private house building. At the same time, as my hon. Friend the Member for Widnes (Mr. MacColl) said, the whole trend of Government housing policy is to encourage private enterprise to build to a lower standard to try to enable people to buy houses when they cannot afford to pay very high prices for them. We hear hon. Members speaking in eloquent tones, on the one hand, about the housing need, and on the other, supporting in the Division Lobby the Minister's policy, which is completely contradictory.

The other day I read the report of the medical officer of health for Tottenham. He gives a fine picture of what the borough has achieved with regard to slum clearance. Indeed, local authorities all over the country ought to be complimented on what they have done for slum clearance under great difficulties. He says, and this is the point I want to emphasise, because he puts in a few words the crux of this housing problem: It is difficult to define, in measurable terms, the effect on health and well-being of unsatisfactory housing conditions. What contributes to making housing conditions unsatisfactory includes such matters as structural unfitness, over-crowding and lack of amenities. Nothing can be more frustrating to the occupier of a bad house than the continuous battle to be waged in keeping it in a reasonably habitable condition. Inadequate facilities, and lack of amenities play their part in adding to this difficulty and where over-crowding exists the problem is even greater. It is a source of wonder at the fortitude displayed by families who live under such adverse conditions. When we talk in the comfort of this Chamber we are apt to forget, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, West (Mr. G. Thomas) said, that some families have been living for ten, fifteen, or even more years, in conditions of this kind, displaying remarkable fortitude, and many of them can see no hope of getting out of those conditions. Some of these are families in slum clearance areas who hope that by the end of ten years they will be rehoused. Some are families who cannot expect to be rehoused even at the end of ten years, because the Minister's list at the end of his White Paper is of areas with an acute slum clearance problem where even ten years will not see the end of the problem. It is a terrifying thought that families will have been living for anything up to twenty-five years in appalling conditions before they can see any hope of being rehoused from slum areas. Others are families not living in slum areas who again have been waiting a long time for rehousing.

I was appalled the other day to receive a letter from one of my constituents telling me that he had been on the waiting list since 1945. He has two bedrooms. In one bedroom his two daughters sleep in one single bed, and a son of 11 and a daughter of five sleep in the other single bed. They must have single beds, because there is no room for double beds. That is the kind of case which has been overlooked year after year because the family has two bedrooms and priority has to be given to families who have only one bedroom or where there is tuberculosis or some kind of medical need. Such families are still waiting for rehousing with no prospect, because they are not slum clearance, of ever getting a council house.

We have been told over and over again during debates on housing that families are living in council houses who do not need to live there, and that if they could be encouraged to leave those council houses accommodation would be available for families like the one I have mentioned. There are several things about that which I do not like. One is that we are never given any evidence of how many families are living in council houses who do not need to live there. It is my experience that the number is extremely small. The Parliamentary Secretary said that if about 2 per cent. of such tenants moved out it would make a great difference to the problem, but there is nothing like 2 per cent. in my area who do not need to live in council houses.

Mr. Costain

If the hon. Lady travelled home the way I do every night she would see the number of motor cars parked outside council houses. She would realise that quite a few tenants could afford to live elsewhere. If they did, they would release council houses for other people.

Mrs. Butler

I do not regard that as evidence, because many of my council house tenants have cars for their work of one kind or another. There is no evidence that they have themselves paid for them. They are often provided by the firms for which they work.

Not only is there no evidence that such families should not be in council houses, but in the London area, where some families would like to move out of council houses, there is nowhere for them to go because private enterprise is not providing private houses to let. They cannot get houses to rent, and, as my hon. Friends have pointed out, where houses are for sale they are not the cheaper houses, and there are waiting lists for houses on estates where houses are for sale at anything up to £3,000. We have no estimate of how many families on council estates ought not to be living there if that is the criterion we are to use. We have no idea how many council houses we need, so, year after year, we have these debates in which hon. Gentlemen opposite ask us to juggle with the number of council houses and, by so doing, to solve the housing problem instead of concentrating, as I believe we should, on a drive to build at least 300,000 a year, the majority of them council houses, for the next ten years so that, once and for all, we can clear up this acute housing shortage.

There was a point in the White Paper about the housing of old people to which I should now like to refer briefly. I was rather puzzled about it and perhaps the Minister will deal with this point. It relates to the new form of subsidy. Over and over again we hear about the importance of providing housing for old people, and on that we are all agreed. But I am a little puzzled because, although the Minister is introducing a new form of subsidy, by which local authorities will get either £8 or £24 according to their rent position, and although he is continuing to pay the special subsidies for houses built to meet the urgent needs of industry and certain agricultural dwellings, and so on, he is not making a special subsidy for old people's housing.

It would not perhaps matter so much to those local authorities which get the £24 subsidy, but it seems to me that many authorities which will get only the £8 subsidy will have an acute shortage of housing suitable for elderly people; and will not be encouraged by the new subsidy arrangements to meet that shortage. This is in contrast to the policy adopted under the old provisions where housing associations, as at present constituted, get a subsidy when they build houses for old people. They will continue to get that on the new basis of £24, as I understand.

The only way out of the difficulty for local authorities who will get only the £8 subsidy, and who wish to build houses for the elderly, would seem to be to form housing associations. I do not know whether that is the Minister's answer, but it appears from the White Paper that there is no special subsidy for housing particularly for local authorities who do not qualify for the £24 subsidy.

In general, I welcome the reference in the White Paper to housing associations. They are not new. I believe that there are more than 200 in existence at present and that many work closely with local authorities. They have done a good job. The new arrangements appear to be of benefit by giving to new housing associations a direct link with the Minister. This will speed up the process of building by enabling them to negotiate direct with the Ministry and cut out the time-wasting procedure of acting through the local authorities.

I am also pleased to see that, at last, the Minister has listened to the things which hon. Members on this side of the House have been saying about the importance of encouraging co-operative housing. If the right hon. Gentleman is serious about this—I hope he is—if he feels it worth while to put something in the White Paper and in subsequent legislation, I ask that he will put some "bite" into this and that he will really encourage the formation of non-profit-making housing associations and co-operative associations. I hope that this may be done, as was mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Dartford (Mr. Sydney Irving), by giving financial assistance to the Federation of Housing Associations for publicity, to draw attention to these associations and what can be done both in the provision of accommodation for old people and to meet the general housing need.

I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will send information on this point to local authorities. He has just given them further information about housing for old people. I hope he will do the same regarding non-profit-making housing associations and co-operative housing. Although these ideas are not new, they need pushing and should be given publicity to encourage their adoption. As has been the case in other countries, I think that such organisations could make a considerable contribution to the solution of the housing problem in this country. This is particularly the case in respect of those people who may be sufficiently well off to pay a little more rent than they would have to pay as the occupants of council houses. A few such people might be encouraged to move from their council house accommodation to rented accommodation provided by these non-profit-making organisations, and this would release some council house accommodation for people whose need is greater.

In this White Paper and about the housing problem generally there is a lack of information of the trends and movements of population and the need which exists, and which must be estimated if we are to meet it. I hope that the Minister will turn his attention next to a matter with which I think that the Ministry has so far failed to deal, the problem of redevelopment. I am quite sure that it will be necessary for the Ministry to undertake a great deal of research and provide much information if we are to make the best use of land which exists in built-up areas.

Hon. Members opposite have talked about building to high densities and encroaching on the green belt as solutions to the land problem. But there is still a great deal of land in built-up areas which would be available were it redeveloped on a satisfactory basis. Were that done I believe that we could provide accommodation in low buildings for old people and still have open spaces and high blocks of flats, and even office accommodation. It could be done by comprehensive redevelopment undertaken in the interests of the community and not for commercial interests. Perhaps there might be a team from the Ministry which could consult local authorities and work out plans on the spot. Not nearly enough has been done in this direction and the problem will grow.

In general, we have not done nearly enough to help individual local authorities to solve their particular problems. Statements are made about housing problems in this House and in Government White Papers but they are in general terms. A number of local authorities are faced with particular problems and special difficulties which cannot be dealt with by sweeping generalisations. They must be given indvidual attention if we are to deal with the matters as comprehensively as we should. I share the feeling expressed by hon. Members on this side that there is an air of complacency on the part of the Government about this whole question. It may be the atmosphere in this Chamber. It may be that we are getting near the Easter Recess and beginning to see a short break ahead, and feel that perhaps this is a problem which affects not all the people of the country, but a comparatively smaller number, and not all parts of the country but the main congested areas.

There is a complacent air about the whole subject. This is a problem which, for families faced with overcrowding, slum conditions, or by housing shortage of one form or another, is something which is with them every minute of their lives, particularly the women and children at home. They cannot get away from it. It is affecting their health. It affects the children's ability to take in the education they have in school and it is affecting the whole character of their family life. We cannot afford to be complacent about it until every family in the country is housed in conditions which we should like to see for ourselves.

I ask the Minister not to be content wtih what he has said in the White Paper nor with the Housing Bill which is to come. I ask him to look particularly at the problems of research and the problem of land. If he is unwilling to tackle the high cost of land in any other way, I ask him to ensure that local authorities—which really means the local communities—derive benefit from this soaring increase in the value of land which they themselves have largely created. This is something he must look at and find a solution for it we we are ever to deal with the housing problem in the way in which I think all of us want to deal with it, even though sometimes we sound a little complacent about it. I am sure we all know at heart this is the key problem in the country.

7.12 p,m,

Lieut.-Colonel J. K. Cordeaux (Nottingham, Central)

I have listened with great interest to the speech of the hon. Lady, the Member for Wood Green (Mrs. Butler) which, I am sure we all agree, was most restrained, constructive and sincere.

I noticed that in the early part of her speech she set a target for the Government of building 300,000 houses a year. We set ourselves that target over ten years ago and we hit it two years after we came to power. We have continued to hit it and in fact to over-reach it ever since. I only hope, as my hon. Friend the Member for Crosby (Mr. Graham Page), suggested, that in future we may be able to raise our sights in that respect. In all fairness, I should add that the hon. Lady said that in trying to hit that target the majority of those houses should be local authority houses. Other hon. Members opposite who have spoken have also referred to what the hon. Member for Cardiff, West (Mr. G. Thomas) described as the shrinkage in building of local authority houses.

Admittedly the numbers have shrunk a little, but, if we consider the number as a whole—I see hon. Members opposite are smiling—we find that in under ten years in which this party has formed the Government almost exactly double the number of local authority houses have been built than in the admittedly lesser period when hon. Members opposite were in power. The numbers which have been built while we have been in power, taking into account the different periods of Government by the two parties, have been very considerably more than under the Government formed by hon. Members opposite. It should also be remembered, when we consider the enormous increase of privately-built houses since our party obtained power, that nearly all those people living in privately-built houses, if they had not had such houses to buy, would be cluttering up the housing lists and making the waiting lists much longer than they are now.

I wish to refer to what has been said by a number of hon. Members opposite on the subject of slum clearance, and I have listened to every speech made in the debate. The hon. Member for Wood Green paid a compliment to the Tottenham local authority and the excellent work it has done in slum clearance. The hon. Member for Cardiff, West also complimented his local authority. A general compliment was paid to local authorities by the hon. Member for Widnes (Mr. McColl). I did not hear any hon. Member opposite pay a compliment to the Minister or to the Government, but the fact remains that the only slum clearance which has ever been done in this country has been accomplished by Conservative Governments.

Mr. John McCann (Rochdale)

The Tories built them.

Lieut.-Colonel Cordeaux

There was the slum clearance campaign before the war, which was rehousing 1,000 people a day from the slums. It would have cleared all the slums in a year or two if the war had not intervened. We were chided by the hon. Member for Widnes for not having reached a target of 60,000 slum houses demolished in a year. Perhaps that is so, but, unless my memory is wrong, in 1959 we cleared 59,650 odd, which I think is pretty near.

Undoubtedly one disadvantage flows from a successful slum clearance campaign. As hon. Members opposite have pointed out, it is that the rate of progress on the general waiting list is thereby slowed up. I believe that the hon. Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Central (Mr. Short) said that it was impossible in Newcastle for anyone to get a house if he were not on a slum clearance list. Fortunately, in the City of Nottingham we are in a happier position. Nevertheless, the general waiting list has been slightly slowed up. As a result, we are continuing to suffer in Nottingham from what in my opinion is the greatest social evil in the city at present. That social evil is described in the White Paper in paragraphs 55 to 62 under the heading, "Attack on Squalid Living Conditions."

This subject has been referred to less in the debate than other subjects in the White Paper which have been fairly thoroughly discussed. Therefore, I shall quote paragraph 55: One of the most acute housing problems still left is the multi-occupation by families or lodgers of many large houses designed originally for use by single families. There has been no proper conversion, and the houses are without adequate cooking or sanitary facilities for the numbers now living in them. Often as a result the houses are decaying and the living conditions are disgusting. "Disgusting" is in no sense an overstatement. In Nottingham we have suffered far too long from a number of sharks who have been making fortunes by buying up the older type of still quite good house, putting in a few pieces of ramshackle, broken-down, so-called bits of furniture, spreading rotting oilcloth on the floors, hanging tattered bits of calico from the pelmets, and then letting them off room by room at extortionate rents to unfortunate people who can get no other accommodation.

No words of mine can possibly describe the utter squalor of these places and the misery of the unfortunate people who have to live in them. They are in no sense what most of us understand by "furnished accommodation". The typical furniture in those rooms is one double bed, with all the springs broken, and probably one of the legs broken, too, propped up by two or three books; one mattress in the last stage of disintegration; a deal table, four feet square; a couple of Windsor chairs; and something which might be described as a wardrobe. That is all. No cutlery is provided, and no cooking or washing utensils; nothing of that sort is provided. The tenant has to provide all those himself. For that type of accommodation the normal charge is about £2 5s. a week. Cooking is done on a gas cooker in a filthy, unlit passage, shared probably by two other families. The water supply probably consists of a cold water tap shared by two or three families, and for most of them the tap is not on the same floor as that on which their room is situated. As regards the lavatory accommodation provided, I will tell hon. Members about a house I recently visited. It consisted of one outside lavatory, not even in the backyard of the house concerned, shared by five families. The roof leaked, the door would not shut and there was no seat.

I have described the type of accommodation with which this part of the White Paper endeavours to deal. In Nottingham this racket is mostly not run by our own countrymen. It is run by Indians. I think it right to say that, because I do not think that the people concerned realise what a terrible disservice they are doing to their own compatriots over here, to the cause of the Commonwealth and to race relations generally.

One man in Nottingham owns over fifty such houses. If hon. Members multiply fifty by six, which is the average number of rooms in each house, and then by £2 5s., which is the rent of a room, they will reach the staggering figure of £675 per week. That gives some idea of the fortunes which are being made out of this horrible business, particularly when it is borne in mind that the whole of the so-called furniture, not just in one of the rooms but in the entire house, could not conceivably fetch as much as £5 at an auction.

The victims are among the poorest people of the country and those least able to look after themselves. It can be said that they have the remedy of the rent tribunal, and to some extent they have, but not many take advantage of it. There are three reasons for this—fear, ignorance and a general mistrust of officialdom. The forms R.F.1 and R.F.3 which they are required to complete when dealing with a rent tribunal are comparatively easy, as official forms go, but they are far beyond the compass of most of the people concerned.

Moreover, in their ignorance they seldom realise that if they go to a rent tribunal they are given security of tenure until the case is heard and that they will almost certainly be given further security by the rent tribunal. Even if they know this, they fear—and it is the case—that sooner or later the landlord will get them out with some such story as a statement that he requires the room for relatives who are coming from India. When he does eventually get them out, they know that they have very little chance of getting any other accommodation, because these slum landlords form a close ring, and anyone who has once appealed to a rent tribunal is, from then on, a marked man.

One of the worst aspects of this business, which is particularly relevant to the question which we are discussing and to the White Paper, is that this racket is not confined to the decaying type of house. It is such a prosperous one that good-class houses in Nottingham are frequently being taken over for this purpose. Every time a house is put up for sale, the people living in the neighbourhood are terrified that it will be taken over for this purpose by one of these parasites. They have every reason for their fear, because these people can pay a much higher price in the ordinary way than can anybody else.

Obviously there are ways in which this racket can be stopped. Although I am open to correction, I think that the only practical effort until now which has been made to stop it has been that by Manchester in the Manchester Corporation Act, 1950. Section 57 laid it down that no accommodation which was suitable for occupation by the working class—I think those were the words—could be let unless the house were let as a whole or unless the lessor also lived in the house. I am delighted to see that my right hon. Friend is tackling this matter in what I feel from the White Paper is a most realistic manner. If local authorities will play, I think that it will be successful.

I wish to refer to another practice which, perhaps to a lesser degree, is also creating new slums. It results from a failure of the 1957 Rent Act—not a failure in the intention of the Act but a failure in the way in which it has worked. I refer to the powers in the Rent Act by which the landlord is enabled to increase the rent to twice the gross value provided that the house is in decent, habitable condition. As hon. Members know, provided that the landlord, either as a result of signing Form K voluntarily or as a result of having been sent a certificate of disrepair from the local authority, agrees to put a house in good condition, he is allowed to make that increase in rent and is given six months in which the repairs are to be carried out. That is a very reasonable measure because, naturally, all such repairs could not be done at once.

Unfortunately, as always happens, the unscrupulous landlord found a way round this provision. It was an extraordinarily simple way. What he did was to sign the form saying that he would undertake the repairs and then, as he was entitled to do under the Act, put up the rent to twice the gross value. After that he made not the slightest effort to do the repairs. That has happened in thousands of cases. I have come across many such cases in my constituency and they are, naturally, only a small proportion of those which have occurred.

The Rent Act provided in ample measure for justice to the tenant in those conditions. If the landlord did not do the repairs in the time allowed the tenant was entitled, after the six months had elapsed, to reduce his rent to what it had been originally and, in addition, week by week to deduct the extra amount which he had paid; that is to say, he could deduct the difference between the two rents. That was all right for the tough tenant, the man who knows his rights and means to have them; but it is not all right for some of the old ladies and others who had been brought up in an atmosphere of fear of their landlords. In many cases they just did nothing about it.

I can illustrate it best by telling the House of a case I came across in my constituency. It concerned an elderly lady aged 77 who was living alone. She had been a widow for twenty-three years. She was an old-age pensioner who also received a little National Assistance. In the eighteen years she had been in her house, the rateable value of which was under £30, which meant that it was still controlled, her rent had never been wilfully in arrears. The landlord signed a Form K under the Rent Act to do many extremely necessary repairs. The house was in very poor condition. He then put the rent up, as he was entitled to, from 1ls. 6d. to 18s. 6d. a week.

Sixteen months later the old lady came to see me to complain about the condition of the house. I discovered what had happened. No repairs had ever been done. I did the usual thing. I looked at the house and, having done so, gave her a letter telling her what she could do. I told her she could put the rent back to 11s. 6d., as it was originally, and deduct another 7s. at the same time—in fact, pay 4s. 6d. instead of 18s. 6d.—until the repairs were done.

A letter of that sort is normally good enough when shown to the house agent concerned. The old lady went to the house agent and, I suspect, saw a rather inexperienced person in the house agent's office. What happened is best described in a letter I received from the old lady a few days later which was forwarded on to me from my constituency. She wrote as follows: Dear Sir, I have been with the rent as we arranged Saturday, and they got on to me awful, said I did not know what I was talking about and would not take it. They said I had nothing to show, so I gave them your letter. He gave me the book and money back and said they will send me the bailiffs in. I have been to your office in Norfolk Place. They gave me the envelope and told me to write straight to you. I am afraid to be at home so excuse scribble, wrote in Post Office in haste. This sort of thing has been going on in quite a few cases. I know that it is difficult to think of any remedy, because the people who suffer in these cases cannot look after themselves and are frightened to do anything about it. It is perhaps unfortunate that it was not originally made an offence in the Rent Act for a landlord to accept the higher rent after six months or not to pay back the amount overcharged if the necessary repairs had not been carried out.

So much time has now passed that it may be too late to do anything about it and I know that my right hon. Friend would be very averse to introducing any further legislation amending the Rent Act. The Housing Bill which is foreshadowed is possibly not a suitable medium, but I would ask my right hon. Friend to give serious attention as to whether it is practicable to do anything about such cases.

While on the subject of repairs I want to mention two other unfortunate results of the Rent Act, though they have not actually led to any deterioration of houses. I refer to cases resulting from what I think is sometimes referred to as "creeping decontrol", that is to say, decontrol resulting from a change of tenancy in a house which was still controlled because its rateable value was under £30. There are many cases now of tenants taking over such houses—because due to the shortage of houses they are desperate—and, being house-proud, doing many repairs, often exterior repairs, which the houses needed. Then, once a house is in really good condition and greatly improved, the rent is bumped up by goodness knows what amount, or the tenant receives a notice of eviction, which has happened to my knowledge in a number of cases.

The other case, which also concerns decontrolled houses of a poor type, is when the house is in a bad state of repair and the tenant appeals to the public health authority to do something about it after the landlord has refused to take action. What often happens then, as I have found from experience in several cases, is that the public health authority gets on to the landlord and bullies him about it. The landlord accepts the directions of the authority and carries out the repairs. Then all he has to do is to increase the rent by a suitable amount so that the tenant pays for it all. If the tenant does not pay, he can get out. As a result of that, I am seldom in a position to advise anyone who comes to me with this trouble to ask the public health authority to look at the house. I myself can seldom advise the public health authority to go and do so.

It is extremely difficult to take any sort of action about these cases and I can only suggest that local authorities should be able to consider such cases on their merits, with a view to possible recontrol.

I appreciate that that would put a heavy onus on the local authority, but after all the White Paper and the Housing Bill will place a considerable responsibility on local authorities. The success of dealing with squalid living conditions in multi-occupation houses depends almost entirely on the local authorities concerned. I know that it would be out of order for me to refer to the Housing Bill in any detail, but I feel that its provisions are quite adequate for local authorities to act upon. If local authorities will play their part and if the courts do not hesitate to impose the quite severe penalties prescribed in the Housing Bill, that Bill will go a very long way to curb this evil of squalid conditions in multi-occupation houses, and I congratulate my right hon. Friend most sincerely on bringing in this Measure.

7.37 p.m.

Mr. Leo Abse (Pontypool)

I am sure that the House is grateful to the hon. and gallant Member for Nottingham, Central (Lieut.-Colonel Cordeaux) for delineating in such detail the strategems of landlords who are able to take full advantage of the present chronic shortage of good housing. I have observed in this debate that again and again the speakers behind the Minister and the Parliamentary Secretary are quite clearly displaying the pressures which they are being subjected to by their constituents and are certainly far less complacent than the Parliamentary Secretary was.

I make no apology for returning to the problems of the Principality, and moving away from the problems of London which have occupied us during the last few speeches. After all, we know from the census of 1951 that in no region of Britain were the people more grimly housed than in Wales. The terraced boxes in which so many dwell in our industrial valleys were never intended when they were built to make homes: they were adjuncts of the mine or of the forge. They were functional units to contain factory fodder for rapacious iron-masters and coal owners. They were built in an age when life was cheap, when working women gave birth to children in the mines, when the provision of a shared lavatory would have been regarded as a concession, and when a bathroom was a visionary's dream.

The census revealed that in the middle of the twentieth century 50 per cent., or 316,000, of the 632,000 houses in Wales, one of the most highly industrialised areas in the kingdom, did not have a bath. This was the highest percentage of any region in Britain. Again, we had the unfortunate stigma that we had a higher percentage than any other region of houses lacking flush lavatories. In the jet age 125,000 houses had a standard of sanitation which was reminiscent of the Middle East. In 22 per cent. of households—this is again the highest percentage in the kingdom—the millions spent on advertising soap powders are a shameless mockery, for 140,000 houses there have not even a kitchen sink. The House knows that the definition of "kitchen sink" is not piped water. It is merely defined as some sink in some room in the house which has a drainpipe leading outside. These were the conditions in 1951. No up-to-date comprehensive picture will become available until the census is taken again this year

I believe that, just as the Parliamentary Secretary speaks of samples of these cases, my own constituency itself is a microcosm of the general national picture in Wales. We find that in 1951 in Pontypool, there were 6,700 households without a bath; that is to say, 54 per cent. of all the houses there. In Blaenavon, which is the other township in my constituency, there were 2,095 households with no bath; that is to say, 71 per cent. of all the houses in Blaenavon.

After ten years of Tory Government, after the introduction of various grant schemes, we find that the Pontypool Urban District Council, acting with alacrity and speed in the case of any application for an improvement, has given grants towards the provision of 260 baths. At this rate, Pontypool will take 2½ centuries before baths are available to every household in the town. In Blaenavon, where the local authority has readily dealt with any application that has been made, 61 baths have been provided by way of standard and discretionary grants; thus it will be 3½ centuries at this rate before all the tenants have bathrooms in their houses.

I think we are entitled—this is no smiling matter. The hon. Member for Barry (Mr. Gower) may regard this as a laughing matter, but I do not. I regard it as a disgrace. If the hon. Member for Barry can smile at that when I am speaking about conditions of people in Wales, I think it is high time he looked at the conditions in his own constituency.

Mr. Raymond Gower (Barry)

I think the hon. Gentleman misunderstood why I was smiling. I did not smile because I do not agree about the need for bathrooms in his constituency, and I hope he appreciates that, but I should like to ask him a question on what he said. When the hon. Gentleman said that it will take so long to provide these baths, he meant if this method of people getting bathrooms by means of grants is the only way. Presumably, his figures do not include the number of bathrooms which people have provided for themselves.

Mr. Abse

I still have not heard the reason why the hon. Member was smiling. In any event, I am saying that if the present policy of the Government continues, this is precisely the consequence, because, obviously, how these discretionary and standard grants are available, in small towns like Pontypool and Blaenavon the people know of them and therefore make application for them, and that is reflected in the figures. That is why I say that it will take 2½ or 3½ centuries in these townships for these people to be provided with the simple civilised amenity of a bath.

There are a number of reasons why there is such slow progress, that should be looked into. We have had one new suggestion in the White Paper, suggesting that there is a new panacea which will accelerate application for these basic amenities. One of the difficulties has already been indicated by my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, West (Mr. G. Thomas). Quite clearly, if a house is held on the leasehold system, and if what is to be granted in the case of a house owned by a landlord is that he will be granted his increase of 12½ per cent., as my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Central (Mr. Short) indicated, this is putting a heavy burden on the tenants.

It is, however, only a very long-term prospect, and the Parliamentary Secretary himself indicated that, from the point of view of the landlord, for, of course, in regard to that 12½ per cent. we may also have to consider that the landlord may be borrowing the money at 6½ per cent. and may have to pay tax on it. The consequence inevitably is that, even if there were the will on the part of the landlord—and I will come to that in a minute—he could not possibly contemplate taking advantage of this grant unless he has a house which he owns and which will continue to belong to him for a very long time ahead. But we have the leasehold system running right throughout South Wales. What possibility is there of any landlord, faced with the fact that his house will be taken away from him in, perhaps, 10, 20, or 30 years' time, being encouraged by this technique of putting in bathrooms or flush lavatories into these houses? None at all.

Although the considerable activities of my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, West, with the co-operation of the Western Mail, have brought an improvement in the situation in recent weeks in Wales, where landlords are being intimidated and coerced by public opinion into saying that they will offer their freeholds for sale, and though it is quite true that public opinion has coerced the hon. Member for Barry and other Conservative Members into saying that they are in support of putting an end to this situation, even so, as matters stand, the freehold of the property is still not available at a reasonable price. Therefore, this is a problem which, especially for Wales, is very real and urgent, and if the Government mean to help in putting these houses into a proper state of repair, they should resolve that the ending of the leasehold system in Wales should have special priority.

There are other problems which I should like to go into. Let me indicate some of them by taking a sample of the houses in my own constituency, which I can do, as indeed most Welsh Members can, as the largest landlord in my constituency is the National Coal Board, which owns 830 houses. The Board has inherited the houses just as it inherited the mines. Plundered mines, plundered houses. It is no fault of the Board but out of these 830 houses, only 31 have a bath and a flush lavatory; and when I asked the National Coal Board to make applications to obtain the benefit of the grants the Board undertook a comprehensive survey of the houses in the townships to see if they could possibly accede to my request.

Of course, the Board has to concern itself about the capital expenditure involved. The Coal Board has to undertake a great deal of burdens by way of social costs. It has to maintain uneconomic pits so that mining villages will not be destroyed. It has to concern itself, as no past coal owner ever concerned himself, with seeing that the rivers are not polluted, and has spent vast sums of money to maintain a reasonable standard in the rivers of Wales. It has concerned itself with compensation for elderly miners, and has to give up profit margins at times of shortage which private commercial firms would exploit. The Board has carried all these social burdens, and, in addition, has this burden of worn-out houses right throughout Wales. Therefore, when the Board looked at these houses in my constituency it found that out of these 830, 446, or more than half, are incapable of improvement at all, and was left with a balance to look at with a view to effecting improvements.

When the Coal Board looked at these houses, wanting to improve them, and considered the amount of money at its disposal, we find it is most improbable that, at the rate of progress that could be achieved, these houses will be provided with the simple amenity of a bath and a flush lavatory in less than ten or fifteen years. Even though the will is there on the part of the National Coal Board, the capital is not there. I put this to the Parliamentary Secretary. Whenever the Minister takes a sample in order to see who is making application for these improvement grants, he will see what a very small proportion is applied for by landlords. I ask the Parliamentary Secretary if he can give us an indication what the figures are.

Sir K. Joseph

The hon. Gentleman may know that there has been a return for last year which shows figures—and I am speaking from memory—of between a quarter and a third.

Mr. Abse

That confirms my view. This technique of raising rents in order to induce landlords to raise their properties to decent standards has completely failed in the past, as it is failing now. There is no question about that.

Let me quote what the Minister of Health said in 1956 when he was Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Housing and Local Government: When rent restriction was previously dealt with by the House in the years from 1923 to 1938 … the situation was that during those years the cost of building was falling steadily and the value of money was rising. … Therefore, as each slice of rent controlled property was decontrolled between the wars, very little increase in the rents of houses followed … owing to the steady increase in the value of money and the steady decline in the cost of building, pre-1914 controlled rents post-1918 economic rents moved to meet one another in those years, so that each step of decontrol the consequent rise in rents was comparatively insignificant."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 21st November, 1956; Vol. 560, c. 1764.] The significance of those remarks is well illustrated in what is said by the research department of the Conservative Party in its booklet entitled "The Rent Bill". It is stated: Between the wars houses were progressively taken out of rent control. In 1923, 98 per cent. of all the nation's houses were liable to rent control, in 1931, 70 per cent, in 1938, 25 per cent. … Controlled rents were, by the late 'twenties and 'thirties, generally adequate for house maintenance. But were the houses maintained?

The problem of worn out houses in Wales is not one which arises from postwar rent control. It is due to the fact that for decades between the wars houses were neglected, whether by the coal owners or other landlords. When the Government suggests in the White Paper that they will obtain in houses owned by landlords the simple amenities of life by giving landlords the opportunity to collect more rent, they are flying in the face of history. It is clearly not a method by which we will be able to obtain the amenities to which everyone has a right.

I said that out of the 830 houses owned by the National Coal Board in my constituency 446 would have to take their place in the general slum clearance schemes. Let me deal with the progress being made in my constituency as far as slum clearance is concerned. I believe that it is typical of what is happening in the Welsh industrial valleys. In Blaenavon, 1,685 out of 2,725 houses were erected before 1875. In Monmouthshire, despite the new building on the coast, the whole picture shows that 29,000 houses out of little more than 60,000 houses were built before 1875. It is not surprising that, although there are 1,685 houses of that age in one part of my constituency, Blaenavon, when the slum clearance scheme was sent in the number which the authority could dare to contemplate tackling was reduced to 436.

That does not mean that other houses are in a decent condition. On the contrary. The Monmouthshire County plan recognised that there must be within the period of the plan condemnation in Blaenavon of more than double that number, but, for the sake of a beginning and nothing more, the authority decided that it would try to clear the first 436. At the rate of progress which Blaenavon has made since 1955, it will take more than a century and a half to clear the 436. That is as long ahead as it is now from the French Revolution, and to clear the 1,014 envisaged by the county plan will take us as long ahead as it is now from the late sixteenth century. That is no fault of the Blaenavon Urban District Council. We have great problems in our valleys, problems of sites of subsidence and, in this case, of water supplies. The water supply problem was completely bungled by the Ministry and it held up Blaenavon's programme for years.

In the Appendix to the White Paper, in which the Government say that there are fifty or so authorities whose slum clearance schemes are likely to take a long time, Blaenavon is not even mentioned. What are the fifty or so authorities? I should like to see the full list. I do not doubt that that figure of fifty is as much a sham as the target figures for slum clearance set by the Ministry. We certainly cannot take the figures which were given in the slum clearance schemes as being the total number of obsolescent houses in existence.

Mr. Temple

The hon. Gentleman is slightly off the mark when he says that the figures in the Appendix are a sham. They are purely a sample. They are not meant to be comprehensive.

Mr. Abse

I appreciate the hon. Gentleman's point. There can be no doubt that these figures cover the worst examples. What I am saying is that Blaenavon, whose position is as bad as many of the authorities set out in the Appendix, is not mentioned. I have no doubt that there are many other authorities in a similar position.

Let me now deal with the problem in the other part of my constituency in Pontypool. Again, this is typical of the problem which was mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Widnes (Mr. MacColl). Here I quote from the South Wales Argus which describes the difficulties being met: The revelation by Pontypool's medical officer that the area's slum clearance programme is being considerably delayed by the authority's inability to rehouse families … Hundreds of families are living in unfit dwellings, and this figure is almost certain to increase as more houses are condemned each year than can be replaced. That is the position in Pontypool. The reason for it is that which has been mentioned by one of my hon. Friends and confirmed in the editorial in the South Wales Argus, which continues: The planning and building need experts, and these are the people the council cannot get. The council clerk reported that efforts to get the extra technical staff to enable the architect to tackle all the jobs had been unsuccessful. … Local authorities, even comparatively big ones like Pontypool, just cannot compete with private employers. The council lacks expertise. As a result of past Tory Government restrictions and cuts, the possibility of obtaining staff is remote. We are now confronted with an exceedingly difficult problem in our valleys because we lack the possibility of gaining the staff to deal with the matter.

The failure to rid Wales of its slums brings with it many consequences. Miners in South Wales are at a premium. There is an acute shortage of them in Monmouthshire. Many of us, such as my hon. Friend the Member for Abertillery (Mr. Ll. Williams) and myself, feel that it is our duty to indicate the opportunities which there are in the mines. We realise that we have metallurgical coking coal inside Monmouthshire which is of great importance to the nation if we are to achieve the targets which we have been set in the steel industry.

But how long do the Government think that the miners will wait for decent houses? The transformation of some of the pits from the coal owners' rat holes to modern mines by the National Coal Board has been dramatic; but it is idle to pretend that modern factory conditions can be obtained in most pits. The Six Bells explosion is still in our ears to remind us of the hazards of mining. Does the Parliamentary Secretary think that men will work underground and face the hazards brought about by the Mining Acts, which give them far less protection than the Factories Acts, and will then come up to a house without a bath, flush lavatory or kitchen sink? Even if the miners would suffer this, the young wives today certainly will not put up with it any longer.

Mrs. Slater

Quite right too.

Mr. Abse

Why should they? Why should a miner's wife be condemned to face an existence like that while others with husbands in softer jobs have all the amenities of easy housework and modern kitchens? By what snob assumption does the Minister for Welsh Affairs give himself the right to have a bathroom in Hampstead while a miner in Blaenavon has not one? Why should not a mother have the same chance of keeping a new born baby if born in the Monmouthshire Valleys or born in Merthyr as one in Hampstead?

Make no mistake. There are grim consequences to this housing situation. They are revealed by the infantile mortality rates. If we look at the relation between the infantile mortality rates in Pontypool and Blaenavon—where they were recently three times as high as the national average—we begin to see the consequences of bad housing. Look at Merthyr which figures in the Appendix. There we have the highest peri-natal mortality rates in the whole country. Is it any wonder? Then there are the wretched consequences of lack of sanitation. Every year, each winter, we have serious dysentery right throughout South Wales and the industrial valleys. It has gone up between 1950 and 1959 in the valleys of Glamorganshire 1,200 per cent., an increase of hundreds of cases. Of course there are these consequences to bad housing, consequences which are revealed in the health statistics about which all Welsh Members are complaining.

If there were real zeal on the part of the Minister, we could, however, rapidly have a considerable amount of housing which could at least do something quickly to alleviate an intolerable situation by building lower down our valleys; but what is the dismal record we have there? There is a new town in Monmouthshire. In this coming year in Cwmbran new town there will only be 200 houses completed by the Development Corporation. They are getting applications at this moment for 150 or 200 a month. After ten years of this Government the situation is that only 200 houses can be completed in a year as a consequence of the Government's capital restrictions and their periodic wrecking of the forward planning programme, as a result of credit squeeze after credit squeeze, which as a result, as my hon. Friend the Member for Widnes has pointed out, creates further staff difficulties. In the face of this situation we still have the Minister equivocating as to how he will deal with the raising of the population target of 35,000 for the new town to 55,000. We still have the Minister equivocating as to whether that will be done by the Development Corporation or whether he will hand it out as plunder to private enterprise. That is the position.

The Parliamentary Secretary may be surprised at my comments, but when we see the plunder going on in land development at Newport we know how easy it would be for those selfsame speculators to seize that land in Cwmbran. If the Minister would only unequivocally announce that the 55,000 target will be achieved by the Development Corporation, the Corporation would then be able to get its technical staff, it would then be able to have a forward programme, and would then be able to make some contribution to the solution of this grim housing situation in South Wales.

I believe that what I am saying is illustrating one thing above everything else, namely, that this Government are shirking the problem of obsolescence, because that is what has not been faced. I was interested to hear Member after Member on the other side say that the housing targets ought to be raised. They are right. They need to be raised. The Parliamentary Secretary quoted the Co-operative Permanent Building Society. I should like to quote from a work in which the Secretary to the Co-operative Permanent Building Society, Mr. Ashworth, indicated what were going to be the needs for houses in the next twenty-five years. He said very sensibly: The most generally accepted but nevertheless rough and ready estimate of the life of an ordinary dwellinghouse is between seventy and eighty years. That does not seem unreasonable for the type of housing we had in Wales. They were put up as I have indicated, and they certainly will never be as permanently suitable for life according to twentieth century standards. On the basis of an average life of eighty years and the total stock of houses, in his own words total replacement need may be put at about 5.5 million in the next twenty-five years. That is a very long way from anything the Minister has in mind. I believe that this obsolescence problem is being dodged by the Government. From the other side of the House we are hearing about the problems which these aging houses are——

Sir K. Joseph

I think that works out at 22,000 houses a year for replacement.

Mr. Abse

Replacement.

Sir K. Joseph

If one adds on the need for the rising population, I would estimate it to be some 300,000 houses, an average which we are performing.

Mr. Abse

I was dealing purely with present obsolescence. Does not the Parliamentary Secretary realise that as the twenty-five years go on he will be leaving behind twenty-five years of obsolescent houses?

It seems to me that we shall never be able to catch up with this obsolescence problem unless we begin to realise that there has to be some display of selflessness within the community, some recognition that if we are to tackle this problem we have to give up our luxury flats, our prestige offices, our meretricious shopfronts, and consider what are to be the priorities within the community. We must be frank and say to people, "Although you talk of an affluent society that affluent society is a sham in the industrial valleys of Wales and in many other parts of this country."

The real answer is that we shall never be able to transform the situation so that every family can have a decent house to live in until we can utilise the whole of the resources of the nation instead of allowing, as at present, a small section to draw until itself all the benefits it wants and wishes with complete disregard of the rights of the many, the large majority who are having to suffer so much as a result of this Government's policy.

8.12 p.m.

Mr. A. P. Costain (Folkestone and Hythe)

I think that, first, it would be right if I were to declare my interest and say that I have been connected with the building industry for many years and that I have had a special interest in housing.

I will not follow the hon. Member for Pontypool (Mr. Abse) down the Welsh valleys except to take up perhaps two points in his speech. He complained about the difficulty of getting engineers for local authorities in the smaller communities. I would just point out to him a realistic fact about that. He knows that in this country and overseas there is a shortage of engineers at present, and I think that he will appreciate that a young engineer, who would probably be the right man to take on such a job, about to embark on a career of great prospects, would be a little diffident about taking a job with a small Welsh authority, not because he would disregard the importance of the authority but because of the fact that when he went on to another situation, later, he would be asked, "What work have you done?" I think that the hon. Member is fair enough to admit that, in view of his having done that type of work, it would be difficult for him to get a job in another part of the world.

In the same way, the hon. Member has spoken with such eloquence on the question of obsolescence. I entirely agree with him that the types of houses which he has in mind in the Welsh valleys are not a credit—in fact, they are a disgrace—to the building industry. But they were built fifty, eighty or a hundred years ago, when building of that type and the whole of our industrial system were so different from what they are today. The houses built today will not show that degree of obsolescence.

I am sorry that the hon. Member for Widnes (Mr. MacColl) referred to jerry-building. That, again, is a thing of the past. It is as obsolete as the "Tin Lizzy". If the hon. Member would only refer to the National Housebuilders' Registration Council he would see that a guarantee is given with houses. Only a few years ago my hon. Friend the Member for Hornchurch (Mr. Lagden) brought to see me a great many of his constituents, thousands of whom had bought houses which my company had built. They were pleased to see me and I was very glad to greet them. Those houses had been built twenty years previously.

Mr. MacColl

The hon. Member mentioned the National Housebuilders' Registration Council. When the Government first allowed an increase in the number of building licences for private building they made it a condition that the houses should conform to the standards of that council. That is no longer a condition. We are not talking about builders of standing, but builders who are building small and very cheap houses for poor people.

Mr. Costain

I accept that point, except that to say that building societies themselves are extremely particular about this sort of thing. One has only to look at the records of the building societies to realise that not enough discrimination has been shown when people talk rather dramatically about mortgage debts. I know of very few people who have ever made a substantial loss on realising a house. I agree that the present post-war situation has helped them, but the majority of people who have bought houses have made many times their value and this is a very good method of allowing people to share in increased prosperity.

I do not say that all is right in the building industry. It is not. There is much that we have to do. I thoroughly disagree with hon. Members opposite who say that all house building should be done by local authorities. In my experience at Hornchurch, my company was building immediately after the war with the few miserable building licences given by the party opposite when it was in power. I think that we had the credit of being the first company after the war to build by private enterprise 100 houses for sale. I remember the then Minister saying, "You are building these houses, but we would much prefer to have houses built for letting. Would you object to building them for the local authority?" I said that, of course, we would not object. At that very time in 1946 we were building houses which cost £1 to 30s. per foot super to build and we were selling them on that basis with a margin of profit.

The Minister then said that building must be done to conform with the requirements of the local authorities. He said that a committee to draw up requirements must be set up. The first thing that the committee did about these houses, which were selling at about £1,100, was to say that there must be a downstairs lavatory. The only place where that lavatory could be put, with planning approval, was under the staircase. We solemnly put the downstairs lavatory under the staircase. I saw the houses some years afterwards and found that most of the lavatories had been taken out because the tenants wanted to put the pram under the stairs. This so-called improvement increased the cost within six months, and yet today I doubt whether any hon. Member who visited that site, or for that matter any surveyor, could say which house had been built under which condition.

Reference has been made in the debate to the housing of old people. My hon. Friend the Member for the City of Chester (Mr. Temple) made an excellent point about old people wishing to live in bungalows. I heartily endorse that, but, unfortunately, bungalows take up more land and, by their very nature, with one roof and one foundation, they cost 20 per cent. more. This is not the most economical use of building material or of land, but as I listened to my hon. Friend, I had the idea that where a family house was built needing more bedrooms than downstairs accommodation it could be arranged by good planning that there should be a house for old people built underneath it as part of the semi-detached house. This would be a great advantage, because it would allow the old people to have an apartment of their own and, at the same time, enable them to visit the family. Equally, it would suit the wife who did not wish to live with her mother-in-law.

My hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Nottingham, Central (Lieut.-Colonel Cordeaux) told a very touching story about some of the difficulties with impossible landlords. Nobody could fail to admit that there are such landlords, but, again, we must get the matter in proper perspective. These landlords are profiting from local shortages. We can legislate to some degree to deal with them, but one can overcome that sort of thing only by getting over the shortage generally.

Land has been mentioned several times in the course of the debate and to me, as a builder, land is one of the basic raw materials. I must be forgiven, therefore, if I say that I am very worried about the situation. One of my hon. Friends said that the situation was all right at the moment, and would still be all right for a few years yet, but I suggest that monopolies are broken only by showing that there is an excess of supply. We all realise that in a few years this land must be made available in some way or another. If my right hon. Friend said that in the next few years there would be X number of acres available for building, that in itself would immediately break down the monopoly. Living from hand to mouth is the best possible way of encouraging the speculator in any raw material, be it copper, or pepper, or anything else. If the speculator can see that there is a shortage for a certain period he will take advantage of it, and there is no way of defeating him other than by showing that there is an excess of supply.

There has been a great deal of talk about the green belt. I am as keen as anybody in the House on maintaining the green belt, but let us be certain that it is a real green belt that we are talking about. I intervened on this point when my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North (Mr. Barter) was speaking. A great deal of the green belt was simply made a green belt because the land at that time was not built on. I can think of many areas where there is a small farm of 10 to 20 acres. No one can make a living from a farm of that kind, and I cannot see why that sort of land cannot be developed by building houses on it with large gardens.

There are areas of this kind in Canada, where the large gardens surrounding fairly big houses form a kind of stepping stone between the urban area and the green belt. There are many examples in this country of this kind of farmland which the public cannot get at and from which the farmer cannot make a living. I should not have thought that such a situation was to the benefit of the community generally, and I see no reason why such areas should not be built up with houses and decent-sized gardens. If we can house people in this fringe part of the green belt they will release the house next stage down, which will release the next stage house, and so it will go on all the way down the scale, and it will not be any real infringement on the green belt.

There has been some reference to office buildings. I would point out that there is really no competition between office buildings and domestic house building. A different type of material is used. For office buildings there is a steel framework. I agree that there is some parallel between office buildings and flats, but there are a great number of trades used in house building which are not used in building offices and flats.

I submit that we must get our priorities right. We must get an even flow of the accommodation required, and we must have regard to the health of the nation. We are bringing legislation to bear upon offices. Hon. Members on both sides of the House are equally keen upon ensuring decent accommodation in offices. There are offices which are just as obsolete as some houses are. Do not let us lose our sense of proportion.

8.21 p.m.

Mr. Charles Mapp (Oldham, East)

I shall concentrate on the problems facing one of the 50 hard-core housing authorities shown in the Appendix to the White Paper.

First, I should like to ask the Minister to clear up a problem which has come into my mind during the debate. I had understood, hitherto, that the list was of the names of authorities having the greatest problem. It has been suggested during the debate that these are specimen authorities, in which case——

Mr. Charles Loughlin (Gloucestershire, West)

This is specifically stated in the White Paper. In paragraph 11, the White Paper says: Though over the country at large unfit houses should have practically disappeared within the next 10 years, in certain areas—about 50 or so, including some of the largest towns—the job of clearance will take much longer. My hon. Friend will note the phrase "50 or so", and he will observe that in the Appendix precisely 50 places are named. I think we may construe this as meaning that the 50 places listed are where the clearing of sites will take much longer.

Mr. Mapp

I am still not certain whether this is a list of authorities with the worst problem or just a typical list. If it is only a typical list, the position is far worse than the White Paper suggests.

Sir K. Joseph

The list is only to indicate to the country the widespread nature of the long slum clearance task. [HON. MEMBERS: "No."] It does not pretend to be completely comprehensive, since the text says "or so" and the heading to the Appendix says: Local authorities whose estimates indicate a long slum clearance task. The hon. Member will realise that no legislative proposal as such emerges from this list.

Mr. Mapp

It is clear that the White Paper is uncertain about the extent of the problem.

I shall now confine my remarks to two main problems, one being repairs and modernisation. The White Paper does not tie up at all with the problem which we see in our older towns. There we have street after street of houses which may, structurally—in the sense of walls—be good but internally they are without the amenities and facilities of this time and age. All that the White Paper contemplates is that on the application of the owner or landlord certain facilities may be provided.

It seems to me that in this age, certainly in the case of a corporation of the nature and size of Oldham and corporations with a similar background and environment, the local authorities should have mandatory powers in respect of these older areas and insist—there being no question of the initiative lying with the landlord—upon modern facilities being provided, with some guidance on the part of the local authorities as to what the additional rent should be.

I can illustrate what is happening in the case of an authority of that kind at the moment by quoting the latest figures—for 1959—which I have for Oldham. Out of a total of 41,000 houses, a mere 230 applications for grant have been approved, and only 14 were in respect of houses which were in tenant occupation.

I now turn to the slum clearance problem. The tone and attitude of the White Paper are far from meeting the problem that arises in areas such as the one I am quoting where there is a backlog, on the basis of present rates of progress, of twenty-five to thirty years. It seems to me that the House and the nation should appreciate the task of the authorities concerned and recognise the obligations which, historically, flow to the older towns. While many such authorities as Oldham, though not all of them, will doubtless have the higher rate of subsidy, the higher rate in terms of practical facts for slum clearance is £24 as against £22 1s. Therefore, it is next to nothing. We must bear in mind that many of the older authorities are still facing the problem of lack of technical equipment. Though in the case I am quoting there is a concerted endeavour to provide technical resources, the authority will be unable to obtain all the technical resources it wants even though the will for improvement may be there.

If any subsequent legislation takes the shape outlined by the words in the White Paper, I am sure that the Measure will have a very rough passage through the House at the hands of hon. Members who are as near to the housing problem as is the hon. and gallant Member for Nottingham, Central (Lieut.-Colonel Cordeaux), who has told us of some of the things that he has encountered in his experience. I am convinced that the White Paper is a departmental brief put together in the way in which civil servants may be expected to put one together. Knowing the Minister's caution—rather, his over-caution—about taking one step forward, obviously the recommendations in the White Paper are recommendations for the next two or three years, not interfering at all as far as possible with the sacred cow of private enterprise.

There are obviously only two levers with which to tackle this major problem. One is private enterprise. By all means let it go forward under the rules of the game; but I beg the Minister and the House to inject further energy, drive and enthusiasm into the work of the local authorities, which I find so lacking in the White Paper.

8.29 p.m.

Mr. Michael Stewart (Fulham)

We have been able, in this debate, to examine the record of housing to date and to look in general, though not in detail, at the Government's new proposals.

The first thing that emerges from our examination of the record to date, is that the total effort which the nation is now making for the provision of new houses is not adequate to all the needs that we face—the need created by the growing population, the need to clear slums, the need of the elderly, the need to relieve overcrowding and to deal with obsolescence. That inadequacy has been made clear in the debate on this side of the House by the very graphic and powerful speeches of my hon. Friend the Member for Pontypool (Mr. Abse), my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, West (Mr. G. Thomas) and my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Central (Mr. Short).

My hon. Friends made clear to us how this problem, which we must, of necessity, so often discuss in terms of figures and major facts, is, in the end, the problem of Mrs. Dixon, who is evicted, and Mrs. McCready, who has just come out of hospital to find that her family has been evicted while she has been in hospital. That was some of the evidence which my hon. Friends gave to us of the inadequacy of our total effort. The same story was taken up by hon. Members opposite in the speeches of the hon. Member for the City of Chester (Mr. Temple) and the hon. Member for Crosby (Mr. Graham Page). They also emphasised that our total effort is not adequate to our total needs. Let us break down those needs and examine one or two of them particularly.

If this debate has done one thing it is to remove some of the pretence about slum clearance as expressed in the White Paper. Any ordinary person reading the White Paper would suppose that the nation had been for some little while clearing slums at an average rate of about 60,000 a year. It was brought out by my hon. Friend the Member for Widnes (Mr. MacColl)—and I take it that it is not now challenged by the Government—that they have not, in fact, reached that figure. The figure of 60,000 is actually a little higher than ever achieved before in any one year. In that paragraph, the maximum is represented as if it were the average. In his remarks, the Parliamentary Secretary tells us that the table at the end of the White Paper was inserted to show the wide nature of the slum clearance problem. But the argument in paragraph 9 was to try to persuade us that it had now been reduced to very narrow dimensions. We have that point at least established with regard to slum clearance.

About the needs of the elderly, the White Paper states, very properly, in paragraph 15: There is also an urgent need for local authorities to provide more bungalows and flats and flatlets suitable for old people. Despite what has been done so far, there is still that urgent need.

The White Paper makes it clear that nothing in the new policy will alter the amount of subsidy which will be available as a whole for housing. That will proceed as it would have done, anyhow. But that total amount of subsidy is now to be spread over a wider range of needs than previously. We may argue whether that is a good thing to do or not. One thing that it must do is to give the needs of the elderly less priority than they have had up to now. When we raised this point in a debate on housing the elderly, a little while ago, the Parliamentary Secretary tried to answer it by saying that under the new arrangement it would not be necessary for a local authority to pull down a slum to earn the subsidy, so there will be, as he put it, some more accommodation although perhaps not very attractive accommodation for the old people.

If that answer means anything, it means that if the new policy does not push housing for the elderly into a position of lower priority, it can only avoid doing so by pushing slum clearance into a position of lower priority. There is no doubt, from the White Paper, that the total amount provided in subsidy is not affected by the new policy. The White Paper admits, in paragraph 16, what we have long urged, that in addition to the special needs—the elderly, slum clearance, and so on—there is the very pressing need of people on the general waiting lists of local authorities, for it is those, in effect, whose needs are described in paragraph 16.

If we add all these considerations together, surely we are driven to the conclusion that the kind of policy required is this, that we must bring into the subsidy arrangements those on the general waiting list and not confine subsidy to the elderly or to the slum clearance problem; but if we do that we must be prepared to see an increased total rate of council house building and an increased rate of growth of the subsidy from year to year.

We have urged the restoration of the subsidy for general need, but it was always understood that that ought to be an addition to the limited subsidies in existence at the present time. What the Government have done is to take the same amount of subsidy and to spread it more thinly. Yet if this debate has brought out anything, it is that the needs of the elderly and of slum clearance are still present and that the Government have now admitted also the needs of those on the general waiting lists of councils.

The conclusion we must draw from that is that if we want the nation's housing effort to be adequate, we must have an increasing rate of council house building. Even one hon. Member opposite who did not want to see the proportion of council house building to the whole increased still wanted the total of building increased, and, therefore, must have wanted the absolute total of council building to increase as well.

When the whole line of our argument leads us to the conclusion that council house building ought to be expanded, then, in paragraph 18 of the White Paper, it is made perfectly clear to us that that is exactly the thing that the Government do not intend to have happening, because that follows from the financial proposition laid down in paragraph 18, that the total amount of Government help to local authorities for house building will be unaffected by everything that is in the White Paper.

How do the Government come to this contradictory situation—that the nature of their surveys and arguments lead us into a position where we must, if we have any logic, argue for a steady increase in council house building, and yet the Government apparently have resolved that that is not what is to occur? I would say, in passing, that council house completions in January of this year were 1,000 less than they were in January, 1960, which is not a happy prelude to the new policies outlined in the White Paper.

Why do the Government get themselves into this self-contradictory position? First, they are deeply imbued with the belief that private landlordism can in some way or other be bribed or cajoled into doing the job properly. The right hon. Gentleman's policy is always the stick for the local council, a bigger stick for the tenant, and larger and larger carrots, or asparagus, for the private landlord. We have had that policy going on over a number of years, and we had one of the results of it described graphically to us tonight in the speech of the hon. and gallant Member for Nottingham, Central (Lieutenant-Colonel Cordeaux). One of the biggest carrots offered to landlords has been the Rent Act, and we find over and over again that, despite that carrot and other carrots, many of them will not take seriously their duty of keeping the property in decent repair.

I say at once that I do not launch this charge recklessly at all landlords. The right hon. Gentleman opened in my constituency not long ago an improvement scheme carried out by a public-spirited landlord, to whom I am glad to pay tribute, and who, apparently, has found it reasonably profitable to carry through those improvements before the even larger carrot of the White Paper was dangled before him. I sometimes wonder why, if he could do that, a great many other landlords should not do it as well.

Now we find, as the hon. Member for Nottingham, Central told us, that even when we offer the gigantic carrot of the Rent Act many landlords will still try to dodge their duty of repairs and take advantage of the age, infirmity, or perhaps ignorance of some of their tenants. There is no doubt that the Rent Act has resulted in scandalously high rents, with no adequate return to the community. A recent item in the Press shows the return which is coming to some people: London City and Midland Properties are stepping up their total pay-out from 30 per cent. to 50 per cent. and are handing round a one-for-one free issue. That is the nature of the carrot.

Where is the extra accommodation that the Rent Act was to have given us? When I asked the right hon. Gentleman that question recently he said, in effect, "Look in the evening papers." So let us look in the evening papers. Here is one advertisement: Cockfosters. 35 minutes to the West End. Semi-detached house, 15 gns. a week. There is another one for 10 guineas a week, another for 16 guineas a week, and another for 30 guineas a week. One advertisement says, rather more coyly, "Just telephone". There is nothing in the list at under 4 guineas a week, and the accommodation for that price would be adequate for one person, or, perhaps, at the most, two people. There is no sort of answer there to the people's housing problem.

The right hon. Gentleman tells us that the effects of the Rent Act cannot be too bad because he has encouraged local authorities to deal with abuses of the Act by the weapon of compulsory purchase, and he keeps telling us how few requests to confirm such compulsory purchase orders he gets. I will tell him one reason why he does not get as many as he should. His Ministry is acquainted with the case of Rodney Court, in the area of Hatfield Rural District Council. The comparatively new proprietors of Rodney Court were engaged in the profitable task of charging their tenants more than many of them could pay, and then telling them that they could clear out because there were plenty of others who would pay the higher rent.

The local authority knew perfectly well that the rents were exorbitant, as it admitted by expressing its willingness to rehouse the tenants even if it meant jumping the ordinary housing queue. This local authority, with 600 people on its waiting list, some of them on it for years, now rehouses 21 of those families out of Rodney Court, some of them statutorily controlled tenants, and thus presents the owners of Rodney Court with 21 flats available in the present market of decontrolled tenancy.

This is the way in which some local authorities will actually help landlords to profiteer out of the Rent Act and the present shortage, instead of doing what they should do—put a compulsory purchase order on the property. The right hon. Gentleman would do well to inquire whether local authorities are using their powers adequately, for he may then find out why he does not get so many requests for compulsory purchase orders. Local electors, in the next few weeks, might well inquire whether their representatives are using their powers adequately to cope with abuses of the Rent Act.

The second reason why the Government are in this anomalous position is that they will not face what are two of the major parts of the housing problem—the burden of interest rates and the price and the use of land. It is because they will not face these two problems that we get so many lectures from the party opposite about the duty of councils to pursue what are called "reasonable rent policies." Broadly speaking, whatever policies councils pursue on rents within anything like reasonable limits will have only the very smallest effect on the major task of providing people who have not got decent homes with somewhere decent to live.

It is sometimes suggested that people who could perfectly well afford to buy their own houses go on living in council houses because they get the advantage of subsidised rents. I do not believe that that happens except in a very small number of cases. Why should it? The man who has an income large enough for it to be prudent for him to start to buy his own house may very well get a loan on advantageous terms from his local authority, and the interest that he pays on his mortgage can be counted as a rebate for Income Tax purposes. It would pay him better to do that than to get the very limited advantage of a subsidised council house. That is a trivial point.

I appreciate that the person who may feel a sense of grievance is the hard-up tenant of the private landlord, contrasting his lot with that of the council tenant. But it does not help him to tell him that council tenants will pay more, too. What he wants is to be delivered from the harshness of the Rent Act, and not merely to find another kind of harshness being applied to council tenants as well. That line of argument is a blind alley. I am not saying that some rent policies may not be wiser than others, but if we look up this avenue for a real solution to the housing problem we are looking in the wrong direction.

I want to turn to the major problems of interest rates and the price and use of land. It is not necessary to labour the degree of importance which the rise in interest rates since 1951 has had in making the task of councils more difficult and expensive. At a time when local elections are pending it is desirable that the electorate should realise how great a part of the difficulties which their local councils face is the result of Government policy. Since 1951, the rise in interest rates has had fourteen times as much effect on the economic rent of a house or flat as any rise in the price of labour or materials. Councils, builders and architects may be as prudent as they like, but their efforts cannot affect more than about 10 per cent. of the real cost of a house to the local authority and the tenant.

My hon. Friend the Member for Dartford (Mr. Sydney Irving)—in a most interesting and helpful speech—drew attention to the Scandinavian experiments with differential interest rates and special interest rates for housing projects. I beg Ministers to consider this matter again, instead of repeating the parrot remark, "We must not shield housing from any economic difficulties which the country may face." We certainly have not been shielding it. Compared with 1954, the proportion of the total gross fixed investment in this country going into the provision of housing has decreased. Of our total real investment we are devoting a smaller proportion to house building than we were in 1954. It is true that it is not very much smaller, and that 1960 has improved slightly on 1959, but it is still less than it was in 1954. There is a very good case for considering whether we ought not to shield housing somewhat. If our talk of a rising standard of living and improving civilisation means anything, it ought to mean that we are working as hard as we can towards the ideal of everyone having his own home.

I do not want to be over-puritannical, or to talk censoriously of some of the lighter pleasures and perhaps less serious forms of expenditure which many members of the community go in for, but we ought not to pride ourselves on the increasing number of frills in our civilisation until we have done a little more to attend to its decencies. That fact lies behind this relation of our housing effort to the total gross fixed investment of the country, and one way of putting it right would be a specially favourable rate of interest for housing projects.

The Minister is about to introduce a new policy, and up and down the country borough treasurers have been busy trying to work out whether they will gain or lose under the new proposals. I will read a comment from one such official an official of a council which pursues what the Minister would call a reasonable rent policy. He said: the additional subsidies"— to those authorities who get them— will be welcome but will only go a little way to fill the gap between expenditure and income. The Council's rent rebate scheme will help to steady the rate charge for a time, but in the long run unless interest rates are reduced or subsidies increased a continuation of building will be bound to increase the burden on the rates. That thread goes throughout his report, that however they come out on the sub- sidy question the one kind of help they realy need is help over the burden of interest rates; and it is exactly the help which the Government so repeatedly refuse to give them.

I want now to turn to the question we have debated so often, the price and use of land and its effect both on our housing problem and on many other aspects of our national life. Let us, first, consider some instances of what has been happening to the price of land. Consider some land in Bethnal Green, which is to be bought for a necessary public purpose. In the last eighteen months the value of that bit of land has gone up from £1,200 to £6,650. It has multiplied about five and a half times, and that is in Bethnal Green. I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Bethnal Green (Mr. Holman) will allow me to say that Bethnal Green is not a resort of fashion. It is what Oscar Wilde's Lady Bracknell would have called the unfashionable side of London. It is an area where the population is declining, and yet that is happening even there.

In Woolwich, a piece of land has risen in value during the last eighteen months from £1,700 to £8,000—nearly five times. The London County Council, in the three years ended 1953, bought 82 sites, about 320 acres. They cost £4 million. In the three years ended December, 1960, the London County Council bought about the same area of land, and instead of costing £4 million it cost £8 million.

Some hon. Members opposite will go round at the L.C.C. election demanding to know why the expenditure of the Council has risen. Let them take their inquiries to the Minister. The Minister will ask: what is your remedy? Let him have the choice of several. He could consider again some form of development charge, not necessarily a 100 per cent. charge. He could consider a capital gains tax on sales of land, part of the proceeds of which should go to local authorities. He could consider the rating of site values, or he could consider, if he dared, a considerable extension of public ownership by local authorities of urban land.

If he does not like any of those, let him remember that he is a member of a Government. It is not his job to say that he cannot think of anything and turn every other proposal down. It is his job to protect the community from "wolves" and "sharks". If there is ever a prospect of any working man getting out of any of the social services the merest farthing which he does not absolutely need, the eyes of hon. Gentlemen opposite are sharp enough to spot it, and their wits are keen enough to devise a way of preventing it from happening. Yet, apparently, they stand blind and helpless before this rampant and ruthless pillage of the community by land speculators.

Worse, in the long run, than the immediate profiteering is what is to happen about the use of land in the absence of any real policy by the Government. I think that it was the hon. Member for Crosby who said that we need not urge a special co-ordinating committee for transport, employment, housing and the use of land because he believed that that was what the Cabinet was for. He may be right, but I wish that feeling was more in the minds of members of the Cabinet. At the present, the Government's transport, unemployment, building of new towns and housing policies are all determined almost entirely independently of one another. What is happening as the result? A steady congestion in the London region, using that term in a fairly wide sense.

It is true that the London County Council has done the best that it can to deal with it. Paragraph 14 of the White Paper remarks: The London County Council have achieved good co-operation with a number of receiving authorities. This is in the task of getting its population out to new towns. This is less true of the provinces, where town development schemes do not always seem to have been so persuasively and effectively pursued by the exporting local authorities. I commend that remark about the London County Council to Sir Percy Rugg during the next few weeks of the London County Council elections. The London County Council has been able to do that by offering the exporting authorities further financial and technical aid beyond what was provided in the Government's own legislation. That again, one might remind Conservatives at the London County Council elections, is the reason why the London County Council has to spend money and employ staff.

On this major question of the London region, let us take the area on the map which is within daily travel distance from London, the whole area in which somebody could live if his work were in the centre of London. Everything we do about roads, or every faster mechanical device which is invented, causes the region within daily travel distance of London to get larger and larger.

What is happening in that region? Since 1952, 1 million more jobs have been created and 400,000 of them are within that region. More and more people have been trying to live on the periphery of that region, which causes them to have to make longer and longer journeys to work. What is happening to land in that region? The Minister ought to know, because I believe that the Ministry has made a survey. If I am wrong, I hope that he will publish the result of the survey, but I believe that it has revealed that in that region there is less than a three-year supply of land available for housing, land not yet built on, and that the nearer we get to the centre of that region the more scarce is such land. The greater part has already been bought by speculative companies.

This is making it progressively more and more difficult for people in that region—a great proportion of the total population—to own their own homes within a reasonable distance of their work. The refusal of a Tory Government to plan where that might threaten very wealthy interests is gradually making nonsense of their idea of a property-owing and home-owning democracy.

If we go on like this, it will be progressively more difficult in each decade for the ordinary person who wants to live in that region within reasonable distance of his work to get a home of his own. I conclude, therefore, that in housing we now have a problem which is not being tackled adequately. We have a sphere where hardship and injustice are real and where local authorities, despite the heroic efforts of many of them, are continually frustrated by Government policies. This situation is due partly to the steady refusal of the Government to plan. In their White Paper they say: It is a fallacy to suppose that one … can plan for the next half-century… But that is a poor excuse for not exercising foresight over the events of the next ten years. They refuse either to plan the national investment or the use of land. This situation is due also to the Government's tenderness towards high profits, towards land speculators and towards private landlordism.

9.0 p.m.

The Minister of Housing and Local Government (Mr. Henry Brooke)

Once again the party who failed in their housing policy have been seeking to criticise the Government who have succeeded. I welcome this debate. Housing is a basic human need. In the first four or five hours of this debate there should have been a much larger attendance than we had although that small attendance on the benches opposite—[HON. MEMBERS: "What about the Government benches now?"]—shows that dissatisfaction with the Government's housing policy is not half so widespread as hon. Members opposite pretend it is.

The hon. Member for Widnes (Mr. McColl) said that I regarded the housing situation with satisfaction. I certainly do not. [Interruption.] I appreciate that hon. Members opposite do not wish to hear the Government reply, because they will have no answers to it.

Mr. G. Thomas

On a point of order, Mr. Deputy-Speaker. In view of the fact that it is so difficult to hear the Minister, would it be in order if we adjourned while some Welsh Conservative Member could come to support him?

Mr. Deputy-Speaker (Major Sir William Anstruther-Gray)

That is not a pont of order, but it would be in order if hon. Members would preserve reasonable quiet for the Minister to make his speech.

Mr. Brooke

I can assure hon. Members opposite that nothing they say, no amount of noise they make, will embarrass me, because I know that I have an overwhelming case.

As regard the housing situation, I am never satisfied and there is no complacency whatever on the part of the Government. In proof of that, I have only to call in evidence this White Paper. In the admirable speech made by my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Nottingham, Central (Lieutenant Colonel Cordeaux) he supported what the White Paper said about the question of "Squalid Living Conditions." [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Dunbartonshire, East (Mr. Bence) is very loquacious now, but he has not been here during the majority of the debate.

Mr. Cyril Bence (Dunbartonshire, East)

I have been in and out.

Mr. Brooke

In the White Paper which my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Nottingham, Central praised, we said in regard to houses in multi-occupation: Often as a result the houses are decaying and the living conditions are disgusting. That does not sound like complacency. Elsewhere we said: there are still serious shortages in some areas, and there remains some terribly bad housing I stand by that. [HON. MEMBERS: "Hear hear."] I stand by that as I stand by the previous sentence in the White Paper, which says: Taking the country as a whole, there has been an immense improvement in the housing situation. As to complacency, the Parliamentary Secretary in his admirable speech mentioned that probably at least 600,000 people each year are obtaining for the first time decent modern housing in decent modern conditions under the Government's policy. Far from being complacent, in his anxiety not to overstate the case he in fact under-estimated that total. It might well also have included the families which are moving into existing houses re-let by local authorities. At least 750,000 people each year are getting decent housing for the first time by moving from the slums, benefiting from improved amenities, being offered the tenancy of existing council houses——

Mr. Loughlin

Not by a private landlord.

Mr. Brooke

—or removing themselves from the waiting list by their own efforts by buying a house of their own.

The hon. Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Central (Mr. Short) spoke of bad housing conditions in his constituency and asked me whether I knew about these things. Whenever I am invited by a local authority to see what it is doing about slum clearance, I always insist not merely on seeing the new houses and flats which the authority is building and which it wants to show me but also on seeing the type of slums which the authority is pulling down. I have climbed these ladders, of which the hon. Member spoke, which go up to the bedrooms. I have gone up these unlit, twisting stairs into dark, dilapidated, unventilated bedrooms. I know about the cold tap under the stairs in a dark corner.

Mr. Emrys Hughes

How long did the right hon. Gentleman stay?

Mr. Brooke

I know about the tap in the yard and the privies across the common yard or, in the case of back-to-back houses, at the end of the terrace—crude privies, when one reaches them, which ought to be pulled down and replaced by modern conveniences. All this must go.

Mr. Marcus Lipton (Brixton)

Such houses belong to private landlords.

Mr. Brooke

The sooner it goes the better. Far from holding back slum clearance, I am constantly urging local authorities to speed their slum clearance. The truth is that except for these people who have not yet been rescued from the kind of conditions which I have described from my own observation, most of the rest of the population is better housed today than it has ever been in history. As the White Paper states, by the end of this year one person in four in the whole population will be living in a post-war house.

The hon. Member for Widnes alleged slow completion of slum clearance programmes. He was answered by my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Nottingham, Central, who pointed out that the only two great slum clearance drives in history have both been under Conservative Governments. No Labour Government have ever been able to initiate and to carry through a slum clearance drive.

I want to be fair to the hon. Member for Widnes. He indicated that local authorities had drawn up estimates of a slum clearance programme of 75,000 or perhaps 79,000 houses a year. Frankly, I never believed that that programme could be achieved, and I never endorsed it. I never believed that local authorities would manage to accomplish much over 60,000 slum houses demolished or closed each year.

My one concern about slum clearance is that as one housing authority after another finishes its slum clearance—which is what is happening—other housing authorities will speed theirs, because I want this average of about 60,000 houses a year to be maintained. I give it to the hon. Member for Widnes that the figure in 1959 was not 60,000 but 59,663. He made a big point of that. I give it to him, too, that in the last three years we have averaged between 57,000 and 58,000 a year. I invite him to give the House the comparable figure of what any Labour Government have achieved.

But the progress of slum clearance in the big cities, where the need is most acute, is very closely linked with the necessity for making successful overspill arrangements, and I regard this as one of my prime responsibilities. We must ensure that sufficient land around and in the neighbourhood of large cities is allocated for housing development and, indeed, for public housing development so that no local authority with a large, long-standing slum clearance programme shall be held up for lack of land. That is what the White Paper means by saying that the Government intend to ensure that housing policy shall not falter from lack of land.

My hon. Friend the Member for the City of Chester (Mr. Temple), in a most interesting speech to which tribute was paid from the other side of the House, spoke of the importance of judging rightly where green belts should go. The House knows that in the area which my hon. Friend mentioned, namely South Lancashire, we have in progress an examination on a regional basis by the local authorities concerned to assess what the overspill needs are, how much land will be required for meeting them, and where that land can be obtained.

My concern is to carry that out—we have already made great progress with it—in each of those areas round the big conurbations where there is an overspill need, so as to ensure that slum clearance will never be held up. I assure my hon. Friend that we have certainly not in mind what he called sporadic development beyond gree belts. I agree that sporadic development would be entirely unsuitable. What we need to do is to define the green belt round each conurbation and then determine which towns, villages or communities on the far side of the green belt are suitable for expansion to meet the housing needs.

My hon. Friend spoke also about the building, based partly on his experience in Japan, of new towns of a larger size than those for which we are planning. I have no fixed ideas about the ideal size for a new town, but I say to my hon. Friend and to members of the Bow Group that in 1961 it is not all that easy to find anywhere in England or Wales a very large area of land which is suitable in all other respects for new town development and does not include agriculture land of the highest quality.

When I invited the London County Council to look all around London for a possible site for a new town, I understand that it looked at seventy different sites and finally came down in favour of Hook, an area which was heavily criticised by the Hampshire County Council and others. I say that simply to illustrate the intrinsic difficulties of finding possible new town sites even for populations of 50,000 or 80,000. It is that much more difficult if even larger sites are being sought.

I entirely endorse my hon. Friend's statement that planning should be positive and purposeful. I endorse his statement that the need is to guide and shape but not to stop urban growth, unless he means that in not stopping growth we should allow all the cities and conurbations to extend as far as they will. That cannot be right. Some built up areas are already too large. We should surely fix and hold firmly a green belt round those areas and ensure that new buildings go elsewhere.

My hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North (Mr. Barter) suggested that some public authorities were retaining excessive land. I have asked all the planning authorities in the London region to look at this question and see whether they can spot in their areas any land which is being wasted or not being put to the best use and let me know. That is in hand.

My hon. Friend spoke of what he called "grubby land" on the edge of the green belt which he thought might be used for housing purposes. Land just beyond a built-up area always tends to be grubby. It is not quite the open and unspoiled countryside to be found right away from houses. Therefore, if land which is now grubby is built on, land a little further out may be made grubby in its stead. Nevertheless, I shall be glad if my hon. Friend or any other hon. Member will be good enough to give me examples of land which they think might be put to housing use which is not at present being used, or is not allocated, for that purpose. I shall be only too happy to investigate it, because I am determined to ensure that we do not run short of land and that land prices do not rise by artificial shortages being created through land which might be available and suitable for housing not being allocated for that purpose.

My hon. Friend the Member for Crosby (Mr. Graham Page) advocated the stepping up of the building programme to 500,000 houses a year. I think that was in the right spirit. As Minister of Housing, that is the sort of thing I should like to see happen. The hon. Member for Widnes criticised the Government per contra because we were building 297,000 houses in 1960, as compared with 347,000 in 1954. He always made his comparisons, which he wanted to be adverse to the Government, by choosing other periods when Conservative Governments have been in power. He never mentioned that the 297,000 houses completed in 1960 compares not unfavourably with the best year of the Socialist Government of 227,000 houses.

Mr. Bence

Just after the war.

Mr. Brooke

I want a high rate of house building. The hon. Member for Dunbartonshire, East says "Just after the war", but in fact it was in 1948, and I leave him to explain why the number of houses built by the Socialist Government dropped by 30,000 for the next three years.

Mr. Leslie Hale (Oldham, West)

The right hon. Gentleman, who was the guest of the Oldham Corporation, will remember that he visited, kindly and generously, these miserable streets that still exist in Oldham. Will he tell us what his policy now is in regard to these miserable, overcrowded streets of two-storeyed, houses with no backs, that still exist in Oldham, which he saw and in respect of which he expressed his commiseration? What is going to happen to them under his new scheme?

Mr. Brooke

I was hoping to come to the speech made by another hon. Member representing Oldham—the Member for Oldham, East (Mr. Mapp). One of the purposes of this White Paper policy is to assist authorities such as Oldham, which undoubtedly have a long continued slum clearance programme ahead of them. What I was about to say was that in 1960, in England and Wales we completed 20,000 more houses than in the year before, and that, at the latest date, there are 12,000 more houses under construction than there were a year before.

In reply to my hon. Friend the Member for Crosby, I must point out that at the present rate of building of 300,000 houses a year in Great Britain, the building industry is already fully strained. Since 1954, we have stepped up the building of schools, hospitals, roads and many other things, and if we are to build another 200,000 houses, which will involve an additional capital investment of between £300 million and £400 million a year, we shall inevitably have to make cuts in building and construction work of other kinds.

I want to take up a number of points that have been made by hon. Members on both sides of the House. The hon. Member for Widnes suggested that the Government have failed to do anything to maintain building standards. The Government have, in fact, given their full support to the National House Builders' Registration Council, a body which exists to seek to kill jerrybuilding in this country. I am glad to say that a steadily increasing percentage of all private houses built carries the certificate of that Council. Moreover, I have at this moment a sub-committee sitting on this very question of the design of houses.

The hon. Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Central spoke of the particular difficulties on Tyneside, of which I am well aware. One of the problems inherent in Tyneside housing is that on Tyneside, as in Scotland, there is a tradition of low rents. The fact that the accepted level of rent has always been low has inevitably had its effect on the quality of housing there.

I want to help the Newcastle-upon-Tyne City Council. I have approved the North Killingworth scheme which should be of assistance. Despite what the hon. Gentleman says, the city council is not short of land. He pointed out, rightly, that there were many houses in the city which needed improvement. I hope that he and everybody else will publicise the improvement grants which are available. If the owners of these houses cannot afford to put up their share of the cost of improvement, I hope that the city council will exercise its powers to make loans to them to do so. My hon. Friend the Member for Crosby——

Mr. G. Thomas

As the right hon. Gentleman is also Minister for Welsh Affairs, while he is dealing with improvement grants, will he also deal with the very serious problem in South Wales where improvement grants are of no use under the leasehold system?

Mr. Brooke

I am seeking to take the speeches one by one and to do justice to them. I was coming to the hon. Gentleman's speech. I would not accept that the improvement grants are of no avail under the leasehold system. I accept that it depends on the unexpired period of the lease, but improvement grants are available to any house which has a prospective life of more than fifteen years, and they are calculated with that in mind. I, therefore, would not think it out of the question that an occupying lessee with a lease of thirty years to run, which was the period mentioned by the hon. Gentleman, should apply for an improvement grant and make use of it. In thirty years he will certainly have had full value for the expense.

The hon. Member for Dartford (Mr. Sydney Irving), to whose speech I listened with great interest, argued that housing lists get no shorter. I think that he should examine the figures in different constituencies and different local authorities, whatever may be happening in his own. I have with me the report which is to come before the Hampstead Borough Council in my own constituency on Thursday this week. I find that the housing list in Hampstead has diminished since 1951 by two-thirds and that the number of people in the top category—that is, those in the category of acute housing need—has been reduced by one-third in the last four years. That is the position in London, an area acutely affected by the Rent Act and I believe that it will be found broadly true.

The hon. Member for Cardiff, West (Mr. G. Thomas) said that council estates should be not only for the lower-paid workers and that he would wish to see in them doctors and professional men and all kinds of people. If he feels like that—he is entirely justified in feeling like that—would he suggest that all these doctors and professional men should have their rents subsidised? [HON. MEMBERS: "Yes."] That is the difference between us. We consider that Parliament and the local authorities ought to do justice to those who are not living in council houses as well as to those who are. If a local authority wishes to have a wide variety of tenants on its council estates, then it should justify that to the rest of its ratepayers by having some form of differential rent scheme.

I listened with special interest to the speech of the hon. Lady the Member for Wood Green (Mrs. Butler) who spoke, as she always does in these debates, with great sincerity. She said that in her constituency few council tenants could afford to move. No doubt she knows her constituency, but I can say with confidence that in London and a number of other cities where in general differential rent schemes are not yet applying there are substantial numbers of people in council houses receiving subsidies which they do not really need. If those subsidies were withdrawn they would start to consider facilities which are now available for house purchase. Any local authority which shields its tenants from considering whether they could make independent arrangements of their own is acting cruelly towards people in genuine housing need on its waiting list.

The hon. Lady asked for more information about population trends. We are hoping for that from the forthcoming census. I entirely agree with her about the need for making as much information as possible available to local authorities about means of urban redevelopment. My Ministry is already giving advice in response to requests about that to a number of local authorities and we shall always be ready to do so.

The hon. Member for Pontypool (Mr. Abse), whose speech I was sorry to miss, said that the list at the end of the White Paper was a sham. I understood that he complained that it did not include Blaenavon. It is not a sham. It is a broad indication of those areas where there is a long-continued slum clearance task. I am not saying that there are no other authorities besides these fifty which face considerable tasks, but it seemed to me that it was valuable to put before Parliament and to put before the country those fifty or so local authorities who, prima facie, have the biggest task in front of them.

The hon. Member for Oldham, West (Mr. Hale), whose speech I was sorry to miss, said something, I understand, about the Government worshipping the sacred cow of private enterprise. It was the sacred cow of private enterprise, of course, which enabled the country to break through the limit of 200,000 houses a year which the Labour Government had accepted. I am not seeking to say that private enterprise housing is better than public housing, or vice versa. What I am saying is that we need both, and as the country becomes more prosperous, as ability to pay increases, as the rightful ambition for better housing conditions develops, then more and more people will want to make their own arrangements through the benefit of private enterprise.

Mr. Hale

I am completely out of touch with this peroration, which appears to relate to some other hon. Member whom I have not heard.

Mr. Brooke

I am very sorry if the hon. Member for Oldham, West has not heard of the hon. Member for Oldham, East. I always thought they belonged to the same party. Perhaps I was labouring under a misapprehension.

The Government have in these ten years achieved a very substantial improvement in the housing conditions of the people at large. There are many problems yet unsolved. In this White Paper which is before Parliament we indicate the next steps we propose to take in order to ensure further progress towards bringing help to those in most need of that. I agree with my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Nottingham, Central that no one's need is greater than that of those tenants in those houses of multiple accommodation who are often living in revolting conditions.

There and elsewhere we intend to go forward, and I invite the House to agree that the Government are not, as the hon. Member for Widnes said, crazy and incompetent, but are putting before Parliament and the country a practical and constructive programme.

Question put, That £1,331,904,000 stand part of the Resolution:—

The House divided: Ayes 267, Noes 215.

Division No. 115.]	AYES	[9.30 p.m.
Agnew, Sir Peter	Doughty, Charles	Joseph, Sir Keith
Aitken, W. T.	Drayson, G. B.	Kaberry, Sir Donald
Allan, Robert (Paddington, S.)	du Cann, Edward	Kerr, Sir Hamilton
Allason, James	Duncan, Sir James	Kimball, Marcus
Arbuthnot, John	Duthie, Sir William	Lagden, Godfrey
Atkins, Humphrey	Elliot, Capt. Walter (Carshalton)	Lambton, Viscount
Balniel, Lord	Elliott, R.W.(Nwcstle-upon-Tyne, N.)	Lancaster, Col. C. G
Barber, Anthony	Emery, Peter	Langford-Holt, J.
Barlow, Sir John	Emmet, Hon. Mrs. Evelyn	Leather, E. H. C.
Barter, John	Erroll, Rt. Hon. F. J.	Leburn, Gilmour
Batsford, Brian	Farr, John	Lewis, Kenneth (Rutland)
Beamish, Col. Sir Tufton	Fell, Anthony	Lilley, F. J. P.
Bell, Ronald	Finlay, Graeme	Lindsay, Martin
Bennett, F. M. (Torquay)	Fisher, Nigel	Linstead, Sir Hugh
Berkeley, Humphry	Forrest, George	Litchfield, Capt. John
Bevins, Rt. Hon. Reginald (Toxteth)	Fraser, Hn. Hugh (Stafford & Stone)	Longbottom, Charles
Bidgood, John C.	Fraser, Ian (Plymouth, Sutton)	Loveys, Walter H.
Bingham, R. M.	Galbraith, Hon. T. G. D.	Lucas, Sir Jocelyn
Bishop, F. P.	Gibson-Watt, David	Lucas-Tooth, Sir Hugh
Black, Sir Cyril	Glover, Sir Douglas	MacArthur, Ian
Bossom, Clive	Glyn, Sir Richard (Dorset, N.)	McLaren, Martin
Bourne-Arton, A.	Godber, J. B.	McLaughlin, Mrs. Patricia
Box, Donald	Goodhart, Philip	McLean, Neil (Inverness)
Boyle, Sir Edward	Gough, Frederick	McMaster, Stanley R.
Brewis, John	Gower, Raymond	Macmillan, Rt. Hn. Harold (Bromley)
Brooke, Rt. Hon. Henry	Grant, Rt. Hon. William	Macmillan, Maurice (Halifax)
Brooman-White, R.	Grant-Ferris, Wg Cdr. R.	Macpherson, Niall (Dumfries)
Browne, Percy (Torrington)	Gresham Cooke, R.	Maddan, Martin
Bryan, Paul	Grimston, Sir Robert	Manningham-Buller, Rt. Hn. Sir R.
Bullard, Denys	Gurden, Harold	Markham, Major Sir Frank
Bullus, Wing Commander Eric	Hall, John (Wycombe)	Marples, Rt. Hon. Ernest
Burden, F. A.	Hamilton, Michael (Wellingborough)	Marshall, Douglas
Butcher, Sir Herbert	Harris, Frederic (Croydon, N. W.)	Marten, Neil
Butler, Rt. Hn. R. A. (Saffron Walden)	Harris, Reader (Heston)	Matthews, Gordon (Meriden)
Campbell, Sir David (Belfast, S.)	Harvey, John (Walthamstow, E.)	Maudling, Rt. Hon. Reginald
Campbell, Gordon (Moray & Nairn)	Harvie Anderson, Miss	Mawby, Ray
Carr, Compton (Barons Court)	Heald, Rt. Hon. Sir Lionel	Maxwell-Hyslop, R. J.
Carr, Robert (Mitcham)	Henderson, John (Cathcart)	Maydon, Lt.-Cmdr. S. L. C.
Channon, H. P. G.	Henderson-Stewart, Sir James	Mills, Stratton
Chataway, Christopher	Hendry, Forbes	Montgomery, Fergus
Chichester-Clark, R.	Hicks Beach, Maj. W.	More, Jasper (Ludlow)
Clark, Henry (Antrim, N.)	Hiley, Joseph	Morgan, William
Clark, William (Nottingham, S.)	Hill, Dr. Rt. Hn. Charles (Luton)	Morrison, John
Clarke, Brig. Terence (Portsmth, W.)	Hill, Mrs. Eveline (Wythenshawe)	Mott-Radclyffe, Sir Charles
Cleaver, Leonard	Hill, J. E. B. (S. Norfolk)	Nabarro, Gerald
Cole, Norman	Hobson John	Neave, Airey
Cooper, A. E.	Hooking, Philip N.	Nicholson, Sir Godfrey
Cordeaux, Lt.-Col. J. K.	Holland, Philip	Noble, Michael
Cordle, John	Hollingworth, John	Nugent, Sir Richard
Corfield, F. V.	Hornby, R. P.	Oakshott, Sir Hendrie
Costain, A. P.	Hornsby-Smith, Rt. Hon. Patricia	Orr, Capt. L. P. S.
Coulson, J. M.	Howard, John (Southampton, Test)	Osborn, John (Hallam)
Courtney, Cdr. Anthony	Hughes Hallett, Vice-Admiral John	Page, John (Harrow, West)
Craddock, Sir Beresford	Hughes-Young, Michael	Page, Graham (Crosby)
Critchley, Julian	Hulbert, Sir Norman	Pannell, Norman (Kirkdale)
Crosthwaite-Eyre, Col. O. E.	Hutchison, Michael Clark	Partridge, E.
Cunningham, Knox	Irvine, Bryant Godman (Rye)	Pearson, Frank (Clitheroe)
Curran, Charles	Jackson, John	Peel, John
Currie, G. B. H.	James, David	Percival, Ian
Dalkeith, Earl of	Jenkins, Robert (Dulwich)	Peyton, John
Dance, James	Jennings, J. C.	Pike, Miss Mervyn
d'Avigdor-Goldsmid, Sir Henry	Johnson, Dr. Donald (Carlisle)	Pilkington, Sir Richard
Deedes, W. F.	Johnson, Eric (Blackley)	Pitman, I. J.
de Ferranti, Basll	Johnson Smith, Geoffrey	Pitt, Miss Edith
Digby, Simon Wingfield		Pott, Percivall
Powell, Rt. Hon. J. Enoch	Shepherd, William	Van Straubenzee, W. R.
Price, David (Eastleigh)	Simon, Rt. Hon. Sir Jocelyn	Vane, W. M. F.
Price, H. A. (Lewisham, W.)	Skeet, T. H. H.	Vaughan-Morgan, Sir John
Prior, J. M. L.	Smith, Dudley (Br'ntf'rd & Chiswick)	Vosper, Rt. Hon. Dennis
Prior-Palmer, Brig. Sir Otho	Smyth, Brig. Sir John (Norwood)	Walker-Smith, Rt. Hon. Sir Derek
Profumo, Rt. Hon. John	Spearman, Sir Alexander	Wall, Patrick
Proudfoot, Wilfred	Speir, Rupert	Ward, Dame Irene
Quennell, Miss J. M.	Stanley, Hon. Richard	Watts, James
Ramsden, James	Steward, Harold (Stockport, S.)	Webster, David
Rawlinson, Peter	Stodart, J. A.	Wells, John (Maldstone)
Redmayne, Rt. Hon. Martin	Stoddart-Scott, Col. Sir Malcolm	Whitelaw, William
Rees, Hugh	Storey, Sir Samuel	Williams, Dudley (Exeter)
Rees-Davies, W. R.	Summers, Sir Spencer (Aylesbury)	Williams, Paul (Sunderland, S.)
Renton, David	Sumner, Donald (Orpington)	Wills, Sir Gerald (Bridgwater)
Ridley, Hon. Nicholas	Taylor, Sir Charles (Eastbourne)	Wilson, Geoffrey (Truro)
Ridsdale, Julian	Teeling, William	Wise, A. R.
Roberts, Sir Peter (Heeley)	Temple, John M.	Wood, Rt. Hon. Richard
Rodgers, John (Sevenoaks)	Thatcher, Mrs. Margaret	Woodhouse, C. M.
Roots, William	Thomas, Leslie (Canterbury)	Woodnutt, Mark
Ropner, Col. Sir Leonard	Thompson, Kenneth (Walton)	Woollam, John
Royle, Anthony (Richmond, Surrey)	Thorneycroft, Rt. Hon. Peter	Worsley, Marcus
Russell, Ronald	Thornton-Kemsley, Sir Colin
Scott-Hopkins, James	Tilney, John (Wavertree)	TELLERS FOR THE AYES:
Seymour, Leslie	Turner, Colin	Mr. Edward Wakefield and
Sharples, Richard	Turton, Rt. Hon. R. H.	Colonel J. H. Harrison.
Shaw, M.	Tweedsmuir, Lady

NOES
Abse, Leo	Forman, J. C.	Loughlin, Charles
Albu, Austen	Fraser, Thomas (Hamilton)	McCann, John
Allaun, Frank (Salford, E.)	Gaitskell, Rt. Hon. Hugh	MacColl, James
Allen, Scholefield (Crewe)	Galpern, Sir Myer	McKay, John (Wallsend)
Bacon, Miss Alice	George, Lady Megan Lloyd (Crmrthn)	Mackie, John
Baird, John	Ginsburg, David	McLeavy, Frank
Baxter, William (Stirlingshire, W.)	Gordon Walker, Rt. Hon. P. C.	MacMillan, Malcolm (Western Isles)
Beaney, Alan	Gourlay, Harry	MacPherson, Malcolm (Stirling)
Bence, Cyril (Dunbartonshire, E.)	Greenwood, Anthony	Mallalieu, E. L. (Brigg)
Benson, Sir George	Grey, Charles	Mallalieu, J. P. W. (Huddersfield, E.)
Blackburn, F.	Griffiths, Rt. Hon. James (Llanelly)	Manuel, A. C.
Blyton, William	Griffiths, W. (Exchange)	Mapp, Charles
Boardman, H.	Gunter, Ray	Marquand, Rt. Hon. H. A.
Bowden, Herbert W. (Leics, S. W.)	Hale, Leslie (Oldham, W.)	Marsh, Richard
Bowen, Roderic (Cardigan)	Hall, Rt. Hn. Glenvil (Colne Valley)	Mason, Roy
Bowles, Frank	Hamilton, William (West Fife)	Mayhew, Christopher
Boyden, James	Hannan, William	Mellish, R. J.
Braddock, Mrs. E. M.	Hart, Mrs. Judith	Mendelson, J. J.
Brockway, A. Fenner	Hayman, F. H.	Millan, Bruce
Broughton, Dr. A. D. D.	Healey, Denis	Milne, Edward J.
Brown, Rt. Hon. George (Belper)	Henderson, Rt. Hn. Arthur (Rwly Regis)	Mitchison, G. R.
Butler, Herbert (Hackney, C.)	Herbison, Miss Margaret	Moody, A. S.
Butler, Mrs. Joyce (Wood Green)	Hewitson, Capt. M.	Morris, John
Callaghan, James	Hill, J. (Midlothian)	Mort, D. L.
Castle, Mrs. Barbara	Hilton, A. V.	Moyle, Arthur
Chapman, Donald	Holman, Percy	Neal, Harold
Chetwynd, George	Houghton, Douglas	Noel-Baker, Rt. Hn. Philip (Derby, S.)
Cliffe, Michael	Howell, Charles A.	Oliver, G. H.
Collick, Percy	Hughes, Cledwyn (Anglesey)	Oram, A. E.
Corbet, Mrs. Freda	Hughes, Emrys (S. Ayrshire)	Oswald, Thomas
Craddock, George (Bradford, S.)	Hughes, Hector (Aberdeen, N.)	Owen, Will
Cronin, John	Hunter, A. E.	Padley, W. E.
Crosland, Anthony	Hynd, H. (Accrington)	Pannell, Charles (Leeds, W.)
Cullen, Mrs. Alice	Irvine, A. J. (Edge Hill)	Pargiter, G. A.
Darling, George	Irving, Sydney (Dartford)	Parker, John (Dagenham)
Davies, G. Elfed (Rhondda, E.)	Janner, Sir Barnett	Pearson, Arthur (Pontypridd)
Davles, Harold (Leek)	Jay, Rt. Hon. Douglas	Peart, Frederick
Davies, Ifor (Gower)	Jeger, George	Pentland, Norman
Davies, S. O. (Merthyr)	Johnson, Carol (Lewisham, S.)	Plummer, Sir Leslie
Deer, George	Jones, Rt. Hn. A. Creech (Wakefield)	Popplewell, Ernest
de Freitas, Geoffrey	Jones, Jack (Rotherham)	Prentice, R. E.
Dempsey, James	Jones, J. Idwal (Wrexham)	Price, J. T. (Westhoughton)
Dodds, Norman	Jones, T. W. (Merioneth)	Probert, Arthur
Donnelly, Desmond	Kelley, Richard	Proctor, W. T.
Driberg, Tom	Kenyon, Clifford	Pursey, Cmdr. Harry
Dugdale, Rt. Hon. John	Key, Rt. Hon. C. W.	Randall, Harry
Ede, Rt. Hon. C.	King, Dr. Horace	Rankin, John
Edelman, Maurice	Lawson, George	Redhead, E. C.
Edwards, Rt. Hon. Ness (Caerphilly)	Ledger, Ron	Reid, William
Edwards, Robert (Bllston)	Lee, Frederick (Newton)	Reynolds, G. W.
Edwards, Walter (Stepney)	Lee, Miss Jennie (Cannock)	Roberts, Albert (Normanton)
Evans, Albert	Lever, Harold (Cheetham)	Roberts, Goronwy (Caernarvon)
Finch, Harold	Lever, L. M. (Ardwick)	Robinson, Kenneth (St. Pancras, N.)
Fitch, Alan	Lewis, Arthur (West Ham, N.)	Ross, William
Fletcher, Eric	Lipton, Marcus	Royle, Charles (Salford, West)
Foot, Michael (Ebbw Vale)	Logan, David	Short, Edward

Silverman, Julius (Aston)	Sylvester, George	Wigg, George
Silverman, Sydney (Nelson)	Taylor, Bernard (Mansfield)	Wilcock, Group Capt. C. A. B.
Slater, Mrs. Harriet (Stoke, N.)	Thomas, George (Cardiff, W.)	Wilkins, W. A.
Slater, Joseph (Sedgefield)	Thomas, Iorwerth (Rhondda, W.)	Willey, Frederick
Small, William	Thomson, G. M. (Dundee, E.)	Williams, D. J. (Neath)
Smith, Ellis (Stoke, S.)	Thornton, Ernest	Williams, LI. (Abertillery)
Sorensen, R. W.	Timmons, John	Williams, W. R. (Openshaw)
Soskice, Rt. Hon. Sir Frank	Tomney, Frank	Willis, E. G. (Edinburgh, E.)
Spriggs, Leslie	Ungoed-Thomas, Sir Lynn	Wilson, Rt. Hon. Harold (Huyton)
Steele, Thomas	Wade, Donald	Woof, Robert
Stewart, Michael (Fulham)	Wainwright, Edwin	Wyatt, Woodrow
Stonehouse, John	Warbey, William	Yates, Victor (Ladywood)
Stones, William	Watkins, Tudor	Zilliacus, K.
Strauss, Rt. Hn. G. R. (Vauxhall)	Weitzman, David
Stross, Dr. Barnett (Stoke-on-Trent, C.)	Wells, Percy (Faversham)	TELLERS FOR THE NOES:
Swain, Thomas	Wells, William (Walsall, N.)	Mr. John Taylor and Mr. Rogers.
Swingler, Stephen	White, Mrs. Eirene

It being after half-past Nine o'clock, Mr. SPEAKER proceeded, pursuant to Standing Order No. 16 (Business of Supply), to put forthwith the Question necessary to dispose of the Resolution under consideration.

Question, That this House doth agree with the Committee in the said Resolution, put and agreed to.

Mr. SPEAKER then proceeded to put forthwith, with respect to each Resolution come to by the Committee of Supply and not yet agreed to by the House, the Question, That this House doth agree with the Committee in that Resolution:—