REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT

HC Deb 03 December 1963 vol 685 cc1035-105

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

6.12 p.m.

Mr. Grimond

When I was about to be doubly interrupted, I was going on to the question of the staff at the right hon. Gentleman's disposal. Does the right hon. Gentleman want to interrupt?

Mr. Heath

The right hon. Gentleman had been citing a particular case of an application for loan assistance. He remarked that the Board of Trade ought to have staff more suitable for dealing with these items. I know of this particular case and I have studied it very carefully. It was for a loan of a considerable sum of money, which had to be handled by the Board of Trade Advisory Committee, an independent body with a very skilled professional staff fully equipped to deal with these matters.

I know that the firm itself has paid tribute to the excellence of the accountants which helped it in dealing with this whole matter. It is the Committee's responsibility to deal with these things thoroughly, as it did in this case, and then give its advice, and it is up to the firm to decide whether to accept the arrangement suggested. There have been some adaptations to these arrangements since the original proposal was put forward by B.O.T.A.C. and I was hoping that in these circumstances the firm would feel able to go ahead.

Mr. Grimond

We all regret that this firm has not felt able to do so. Its point was that it felt that there had been a change in attitude and that there had been delay.

It is difficult to deal with these matters without appearing to criticise the staff of Departments. No one wants to do that and what I am saying is not intended as a criticism. If what I said earlier gave that impression, I certainly withdraw it. The excellent civil servants who serve us all do so extremely well. My point is that the job now is quite different from what it was 10, or 20, or 30 years ago, and from my experience I doubt whether Government Departments have the machinery, statistics, or export knowledge required to deal with development problems which are now constantly being put into their laps.

There should be far more exchange of staff between industry and the Civil Service, and industry must give the Civil Service far more statistics about its intentions than is now the case.

Sir Harmar Nicholls (Peterborough)

Is not the right hon. Gentleman being a little contradictory? He has just made the very reasonable observation that only so much can be done with the staff available; but a moment earlier he suggested that we should go into other regions and extend and stretch ourselves even further. We have to face up to the human frailties which go with this. It looks as though the Government are making a sensible allocation of their forces.

Mr. Grimond

That might have been so if the Government had not been in office for 12 years, but they did not come into office yesterday. Even now they do not tell us whether, if they think it is desirable, they will create the necessary machinery.

The Secretary of State told us how he hopes that his proposals will be carried out. They are to be carried out by committees of civil servants in the regions, with a committee in Whitehall. This is not enough. The Crowther Committee strongly made the point that proper development agencies are needed in the regions with executive powers to do such things as to hold land. I am sure that the Crowther Committee was right. This is something for which I have pressed in respect of the Highlands for years and years. There must be an executive Highland authority if we are to have proper development in the Highlands. I would be grateful to know that the Government have not wholly shut their minds to this idea, because it appeared from what the Minister of Transport said that he rejected this Crowther recommendation, which is crucial. If that recommendation is rejected, grave doubts are cast over how far the Government will be able to implement any of their proposals.

Lastly—and I shall be very brief after that half-time interval—there are two other matters about which I want to ask questions. It is not only the total overall lack of employment which is serious in these districts of unemployment, but the lack of employment for cleverer and more enterprising people. The steady movement of head offices of every sort to London has beheaded whole regions of Britain. It is now not enough to give them economic aid, because there is no one to use it, and all that happens is that these areas have branch offices and branch factories which are the first to be closed in any recession, all the top people having gone South to London. Why these areas are depressed and why people will not stay in them is of fundamental importance and is a social as well as an economic question. Opportunities for the brighter boys leaving school are not available in these districts.

Two engineering firms in the South which I have visited lately have told me, when I have asked them why they do not work in the North, that there are no suitably trained people in the North and that trained people in the South will not go to the North. We must be profoundly disappointed with the retraining facilities which are offered by the Government. Of 25,000 redundancies, only 1,700 men, 7 per cent., are getting retraining. If we want to build up these areas and build them up to the top level, we have to give far more attention to retraining and to building up the pool of skilled manpower in the areas of the North.

I should like to be told a little more about the Location of Offices Bureau. There are 30,000 new office jobs in London every year, and that is one of the reasons why the regions are losing so many of their top people and why there is intolerable congestion in the London area.

The Minister of Housing and Local Government and Minister for Welsh Affairs (Sir Keith Joseph)

The commonly accepted figure is 15,000. I wonder where the right hon. Gentleman gets his figure of 30,000.

Mr. Grimond

I get it from the Minister's own White Paper. There are 40,000 new jobs in London and only 25 per cent of them are industrial.

Sir K. Joseph

The figure of 15,000 refers to Central London. That has been the trend over the last few years and Central London is the key area.

Mr. Grimond

I was talking about the London region. My figure comes from the Minister's White Paper.

The Fleming Report recommended that certain Government offices should move out of London, and I believe that the Government have accepted that 27,000 civil servants should go. But where will they go? Will they go far, or will they merely move to the outskirts of London or to the Midlands? Are they not only the lowest-paid office workers? How many whole Departments will go out and how many heads of Departments? If the Government want to build up the regions and to set an example, it is not enough to move out the bottom people. It must be whole offices. I do not see why this should not be done and I have never been able to understand why some of the nationalised industries should not move out. The suggestion that the National Coal Board should conduct its affairs from one of the coal mining regions is very sensible.

Another point made by the Toothill Report in this respect is of prime importance. People who have gone to the North have said that they find it almost impossible to find opportunities to talk to people in their own line of business or to customers, and they insist that they must be able to do so but are hampered by travel difficulties. So far as I know, there are only three Herald aircraft serving all the internal air services of Scotland, and yet air travel is not mentioned in the White Paper.

The Government should give some attention to proposals made by Colin Clarke for differentials in taxation in different areas. A differential payroll tax or in contributions is suggested. This would help the labour intensive industries to get away from the congested areas of the South, while for the capital intensive industries, which are probably the growth industries, there is a strong case for moving more of the research organisations away from the South-East. This suggestion was made by the hon. Member for Middlesbrough, West (Dr. Bray) and I have never seen a conclusive answer against its being done. I know that it happens to some extent, but a bigger scale is necessary.

I must confess that I am disappointed with these White Papers. It can be counted for something that even in their twelfth year of office the Government are considering these proposals in this context at all, but even so it is for only two regions. There are other regions with high unemployment and depopulation problems, like Wales and Scotland, which are ignored. These proposals are not new, but are merely old proposals brought back as a patchwork and now designated as policy.

The Secretary of State for Scotland (Mr. Michael Noble)

In his party's Amendment, the right hon. Gentleman talks about democratic control of regional planning agencies". I am not certain what that means and I am sure that the House is not, either. It would help if the right hon. Gentleman would tell us.

Mr. Grimond

I thought that I had dealt with that in my speech.

Shortly, the Government should take note of the fact that the county councils have joint committees and ought to have a rôle in this planning. Are the Government to take no notice of recommendations that at least some negative control should be exercised at regional level by people who live in the regions, or is this to be a purely bureaucratic, an imposed, control, all decided in Whitehall?

6.23 p.m.

Sir Colin Thornton-Kemsley (North Angus and Mearns)

The right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr. Grimond) made the point that the measures were to be directed from Whitehall. I began to wonder whether he had read the White Paper on Central Scotland. I am sure that he must have done so, in which case he will recollect that the regional organisation for Central Scotland is to be directed by the Scottish Development Group, a body operating not from Whitehall, but from Scotland itself. I agree with much of what he said about the democratic organization of regionalism and I shall hope to show that in what might be a somewhat critical speech.

First, may I say that I welcome the appointment of my right hon. Friend as Secretary of State for Industry, Trade and Regional Development. It seems to me an appointment of exactly the right man for an imaginative assignment.

Despite official discouragement and growing and increasing congestion the great conurbations of London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and so on—those vast city regions, which are erupting with explosive force over the surrounding countryside—are continually growing. On the other hand, the working populations of the more distant parts of our island, particularly in Scotland, are continuing to decline. I hope and believe that my right hon. Friend will conceive it to be one of his primary tasks to do something to correct this unbalance in our national economy.

I welcome also the White Papers which, as The Times in a leading article on 15th November wrote, gave firm expressions of faith in the vigour and vitality of the areas. I welcome particularly the White Paper on Central Scotland. The fact that I wish to voice a criticism should not obscure the fact that I welcome the conception and initiative of the White Paper. I know that a great many hon. Members wish to speak and therefore I propose to confine myself, briefly and substantially, to one point and to one aspect only. It is one where I think we are in danger of going wrong—here I find myself in some measure of agreement with the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland—in our failure to recognise the need for a regional organisation to prepare and implement the regional plan in the White Papers.

I have long held the view—I have expressed it before in this House and elsewhere—that land planning in Britain should be related to three main levels at which problems are presented. There is the local level, for which purpose the present local planning authorities are adequate; there is the regional level where problems which cannot be tackled adequately within individual local government areas should be dealt with; and thirdly, there is the national level at which national policy is determined.

National policy for the Scottish central region is laid down in the White Paper Cmd. 2188 and, in my submission, ought to be implemented through a regional plan. The central Scottish region covers no fewer than twelve local planning areas. It covers two counties of cities and ten or eleven county council areas. Yet there is no proposal, as I understand it, to invite the co-operation of any local representative in the formulation of the regional plan.

Paragraph 160 recognises that many interests are involved in carrying out the programme, local authorities; new town corporations, of which four in Scotland,—and perhaps a fifth if Irvine is to be designated, as many of us hope—lie within the ambit of the area covered by the White Paper; nationalised industries, and the Scottish Council (Development and Industry). But there is no proposal to bring a single representative of any of these interests into the planning and administration of this regional area.

I dare say that many of my right hon. and hon. Friends have read the P.E.P. publication which was issued on 14th October, A development plan for Scotland. On page 419 it states, and I agree with this statement: Even if there existed a central planning body in Scotland with complete knowledge of the needs and industrial resources, of manpower and employment, of transport needs and facilities, of housing and other special requirements of every locality in Scotland, even so it would require local units of administration, not to mention expert and informed local opinion and a wide measure of public support. I am well aware that it would be wrong and indeed useless and futile to make this criticism about the lack of a proper democratic regional organisation without saying first what I think is the present organisation, because I may be wrong about it—we are not told clearly what it is—and, secondly, what I think it ought to be. I think the present organisation is that the Scottish Development Group, comprising representatives of the Scottish Development Department and other Government Departments concerned have made a plan. They may, presumably, from time to time be presided over—this is to some extent guesswork—on rare occasions by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Scotland; sometimes by the Under-Secretary of State responsible for matters of the Scottish Development Department; but normally—again this is guesswork—by a senior official who generally, I think, would be the Secretary of the Scottish Envelopment Department.

I may be quite wrong, and if so I should be glad to be informed, but if this is the set-up, or if it is anything like the set-up, I consider it wrong. In Scotland we have a splendid chance to try out on an experimental basis a regional organisation which might prove a model for the whole country. The kind of body which I wish to see I would term a regional planning authority. It would be an executive body with a chairman nominated by the Secretary of State. Such a man would be difficult to find, because he must be a man of vision and energy, with a wide knowledge of land-use planning and of the needs of industry. It would probably have to be a part-time appointment, because such a man would have many other interests. There are not many such men, but I think that a search would have to be made.

Perhaps three-fifths of the members of the authority should be direct representatives of the local authorities concerned, appointed by those authorities and by the new town corporations within the area. The other two-fifths should be independent members. I am thinking of the word "independent" as being in italics. The independent members would be appointed by the Minister. Some would represent special interests, of which transport and industry are obvious examples.

An authority such as this ought to have a technical staff including a full-time general manager who, if possible, should be seconded from the Scottish Development Department. I am sure that the authority would look to the Scottish Development Group for help and advice in a variety of ways. The first task facing this authority would be to prepare a survey and a planning report of the whole area in the light of the Buchanan Report. There would have to be an analysis of probable traffic flows and needs throughout the area and of the contribution which public transport can and ought to make to the solution of that problem.

I am being critical today. There are many things which I could say that I like about this policy, but I want to concentrate on the things which I think are wrong.

The White Paper contains an admirable plan which is beautifully executed. But it omits any indication of the railway pattern. There are roads and everything else, but not a single railway is shown. It is ironic that at a time when Buchanan has shocked us into a realisation of the possibility of the sheer weight of numbers of motor vehicles on our roads grinding all movement to a standstill, Beeching should be seeking to pare away, and even to close down, large sections of our railways. This problem must be looked at closely in respect of the central Scottish region by the kind of organisation which I think that my right hon. Friend ought to appoint.

There is also the question of green belts or, at least, a green background to the industrial areas. Unless these things are thought about, there is a real danger of the creation of a continuous built-up area which in a few years would extend from Edinburgh to Glasgow. None of us can view that with equanimity. The Times leader to which I have referred states that the region remains largely a paper concept and no real concrete expression of regional unity is proposed. This is true. What is also true is that the machinery of administration proposed is basically a Civil Service structure under political direction.

My right hon. Friend the Minister, in outlining the proposed administrative structure for the north-east of England said that he was not being rigid about it. I earnestly hope that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Scotland will be able to tell the House that his mind is not closed to the establishment of a regional planning authority, which would act within the framework of the White Paper plan and under the expert guidance of the Scottish Development Group; which would be fortified by the local knowledge and experience of appointed representatives of local authorities and new town corporations in the area and nominated representatives of the Scottish Council (Development and Industry) which has done so much for Scotland in this regard.

6.38 p.m.

Mr. Joseph Slater(Sedgefield)

I am delighted that tonight we are debating these White Papers dealing with problems of development in Scotland and also in the north-east of England. Eighteen months ago representatives from the North-East were able to have what was an all-night debate on the problems in the North-East which had arisen because of the lack of policy of the present Government.

I have never been able to understand why a Minister with special responsibilities was appointed to go to the North-East to report to his Cabinet colleagues on the conditions prevailing in that area, but it appears that as a result of his Report—which, apparently, we are not to be allowed to see—the Government have introduced this White Paper.

I think that we must recognise that the main interest of the White Paper is directed to the eastern part of our region. The idea is to make it a growth zone as a long-term policy. I suppose that we ought to be grateful that after this long period of agitation the North-Eastern area is to receive some recognition from the Government, but there is one thing that the plan does not do, and here I expect to carry all hon. Members representing North-East constituencies with me. It does not give us any immediate relief. The White Paper says that at least 80,000 people have left our region, and it seems likely that this process will continue. I cannot see this flow being abated unless something is done immediately.

It is well known that for many years the prosperity of the region has been based on a few major industries. Everyone knows the situation in the coal mining industry today, and over the past three or four years the steel and heavy engineering industries have been in the doldrums, but no doubt they will recover in time.

The chemical industry at Billingham, which is in my constituency, has been expanded, but what we have to remember is that although technical advances arising out of research and development in this modern age enable us to make considerable increases in output, they do not provide a proportionate increase in the manpower employed. For example, it may cost about £25,000 to develop and improve the I.C.I, plant at Billingham, yet that expenditure may provide employment for only one extra person.

Because of that, I am glad that the Government have put forward positive proposals for the building of new schools, hospitals and roads in the region. The highway programme announced by the Government is all to the good, but it must be remembered that even the building of roads does not substantially reduce the number of men who are unemployed in the region. During the 1930s the building of roads provided employment for substantial numbers of men, and in the North-East we were able to take many men away from the employment bureau and give them what we used to call 26 weeks' work. But we cannot do that now under a programme of highway development because of the great advances that have been made in the construction of new roads.

We appreciate that these programmes are for a long period of time, but we cannot overlook the fact that we have more than 4 per cent, unemployed in the region, and that in some areas it is even higher, particularly in The Hartlepools. We have to decide between the expenditure of social capital, and the expenditure of industrial capital.

Since the end of the war the Board of Trade agency in the North-East has developed its trading estates, but this development has not been fast enough. In my area there is the Aycliffe Trading Estate, which is specially mentioned in the White Paper. Over the years I have asked for this estate to be developed to provide employment for the men in Newton Aycliffe who have become unemployed due to pit closures in the area. We are now told that the trading estate is to be developed and that the population of Newton Aycliffe is to be increased to 45,000, but some local authorities in the area are not in favour of the Government's policy to increase the population of this new town from 20,000 to 45,000. Where do the Government expect the population to come from? I ask this so that the people in the area can get some idea of the Government's policy for this new town.

The Aycliffe Trading Estate was taken over by the Government in 1945. Prior to that it had been a Royal Ordnance factory. In 1940, the Government decided to develop a site of 800 acres, and in 12 months the factory built on that site was in production. It expanded rapidly until nearly 20,000 men and women were employed there. All this was done during the war, and the employees, who worked a three-shift system, were drawn from a radius of 12 miles. My point in drawing the attention of the House to this factory is to show that if the Government had given this area the same attention as was given to the needs of the nation during the war we would not today be faced with the heavy unemployment that there is in the area.

The Government must be condemned for their lack of consideration and the time that has been wasted in dealing with this problem. My colleagues and I have never let up in our desire to see that something was done to help relieve the unemployment. We have known what has been happening in the area, and we have known that if the Government did not do something positive many areas around the North-East would become derelict.

I turn now to that part of the White Paper which deals with Tees-side. I am glad that the Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade is present. The White Paper says, in paragraph 53, that there are only 50 acres of Board of Trade sites available and that the Government have decided to fill the gap by developing a new industrial estate of some 300 acres on the south side of the Tees-side conurbation … Why have the Government chosen the south side? Why not the north bank? In this area there is adequate land available for development. What is the matter with Portrack Lane from Stockton to Billingham and The Hartlepools? Or, to come to the other side, is the Minister aware that, according to my information, land on the Urley Nook Road, at Eaglescliffe, has already been reserved for industrial development? I am not objecting to what has already been done on the south side of the Tees, but I think that the Government ought to bear in mind the availability of sites for development on the north side of the Tees, which could have been just as easily developed. I hope that they will have another look at this.

It ought to be remembered that Billingham, even with the I.C.I. factory, has been carrying a high rate of unemployment, and the last figures that I remember, before it was made a development district, was that it had 64 per cent, unemployed. At one time, I.C.I. was carrying up to 18,000 people in that factory. It is now down to 14,000. Many of the people working at I.C.I. at Billingham and the Furness shipyards come from the Stockton and The Hartlepools areas. Therefore, expansion could easily have taken place along the front which I have mentioned within a radius of 8 miles.

It may be that the Government decided on this site because of the Boundary Commission's proposals for the greater Tees-side. This is the all-purpose authority that we have heard so much about. It may be that the Government have made up their minds about this and that is why they are proposing to develop the south side. Even if such is the case, I want to bring before the House the needs of the population regarding unemployment in the area in which they live, and which ought to be borne in mind. I could find very many suitable sites within the rural areas of Stockton and Sedgefield, which could easily be developed.

My last comment is about the airport facilities referred to in the White Paper. I am pleased to see that there is every possibility of the Middleton St. George R.A.F. Station being turned into a civil airport for Tees-side. No one has played a greater part in this matter than myself and I am not saying that with any sense of bravado. I have taken deputations to the Minister to see whether more accommodation could be made available for civil airlines. I hope that the Government will give every support to this and not let this opportunity pass.

One of the greatest obstacles—I think that the House ought to be reminded of this, and the Minister of Housing and Local Government—is that when we had what was known in the area as the Greatham Airport, it was operated on land belonging to the West Hartlepools Borough Council. Recently, it went out of commission on Tees-side because the Government were not prepared to give us accommodation for Customs facilities. I ask the Minister of Housing and Local Government and his right hon. Friend to give to the Tees-side local authorites which are now considering taking it over those facilities for Customs which are necessary for civil aviation.

Tees-side is in need of facilities for air travel and I hope that the provision of Customs facilities will not be allowed to stand in the way. I am convinced that if the Government had heeded the warning received over the years concerning the North-East we would not be faced with the serious problem of unemployment and of families who have had to uproot themselves from the area where they have been born to find employment.

The former Minister of Fuel and Power, in response to a Question that I asked him, said that there were only two alternatives concerning the men who were more or less unemployed. One was that they could have employment in other areas of the country where mining work was available or sign on the unemployment register. We have been talking about the direction of factories, but we have had the principle operating, because of the position we have been in, of an indirect form of direction being given to our mining colleagues.

Let no one run away with the idea that that has not been operating. It has been operating because there has been no other form of employment for them available within the area. Many of our young people are having to trudge the streets because of the lack of employment. Only those who have experienced this, and lived with it, can understand what it can do to a man. I said on a previous occasion that men do not shout out for work for shouting's sake, but because of their obligations to their wives and families, and only when we get a change of heart and a change of Government, do I believe that our people will receive greater security. We have often heard the saying, We live in deeds, not years … not in figures on a dial". We have not had those deeds, over the last 12 years, from the Government to give our people that sense of security which they ought to have. When the time comes to pass judgment on the policies that the Government have been pursuing over the past 12 years—the stop-go policy—I believe that the people in the North-East will give their answer.

6.57 p.m.

Mr. A. Bourne-Arton (Darlington)

I am glad to be able to join with the hon. Member for Sedgefield (Mr. Slater) in his plea that Middleton St. George should be developed as an international airport with customs facilities. I pay tribute to the work that the hon. Member has done. He has been an example to us all in the North-East in pressing for this. The hon. Gentleman is entitled to speak for his own constituency and I should not like to butt in except to say that I think he was a little gloomy about the development already taking place in that part of the constituency, Aycliffe, which borders on mine and where many of my constituents work. I am sure that he will welcome the proposal in the White Paper as much as I do that that trading estate and community should enlarge from 20,000 to 45,000 people.

For once I break my normal rule in these debates and I will not make an entirely parochial and constituency type of speech. I have done that several times in recent debates and it bores other people immoderately and it does not even interest my constituents because my speeches do not get reported. Apart from that I hope that this debate will not develop into one in which we all plug our own constituency matters.

I should like to make one point. The hon. Member for Sedgefield has touched on the division which has already appeared in this debate between the two sides of the House; at least between me and several other hon. and right hon. Members of the Opposition. It is this: the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Battersea, North (Mr. Jay), when stating what the policy of the Opposition would be, gave as his first point—I hope that I am not misquoting him—that the policy of the Opposition in these matters would be based upon places were unemployment now exists.

This seems to me to be a fundamental error. It seems utterly wrong to have to approach a problem of this kind as if it were a simple mathematical business of saying, "Here are X number of people who are unemployed, and there is a forecast that Y number of other people will become redundant in the foreseeable future. Therefore, X plus Y jobs must be planted in that area." The approach in the White Papers, which I am sure is the right one, is totally different. It is as different as the approaches of respective gardeners representing hon. Members on this side of the House and hon. Members opposite. If the Opposition gardener saw a flowering shrub withering and dying, his policy would be to put in a new plant or seedling in the same spot, whereas the wise Conservative gardener would put it into a plot of good, deep soil, alongside the position of the dying shrub. He would plant it in a spot where it would grow and thrive, and eventually overshadow the other shrub. That is the difference of approach between hon. Members on this side and hon. Members opposite.

Mr. Cyril Bence (Dunbartonshire, East)

Did the hon. Member oppose the Local Employment Bill when it was introduced?

Mr. Bourne-Atron

No. But, unlike some people, I try to learn by experience. The Act has been successful in certain respects. I am deeply grateful, as are my constituents, for the benefits that it has brought to Darlington. I had the good fortune to be a member of the Estimates Committee which examined this problem, under the chairmanship of the hon. Member for Fife, West (Mr. W. Hamilton). We learnt that it was not a sound and satisfactory yardstick to try to balance Government expenditure and investment against jobs immediately created. That was the conception behind the Act, and it is still apparently the general approach of the Opposition.

I know that what is required is a general stimulus of areas, and that we must plant our new industries, and foster and encourage them, in places where they have the best chance of developing. This is important, not only because of what is happening in areas like mine, which is faced with the immediate problem. The way in which the problem is tackled in the North-East, in Central Scotland and other special areas, will set a pattern. I hope that we shall learn, from the way in which we tackle the problems there, how to approach the next few decades in terms of the whole country.

This is not a once-for-all operation in the North-East, in Scotland or anywhere else. This is an operation which is growing with us. I promised that I would not be provincial, but we all know that we can foresee at any moment of time where redundancies will occur in our own constituencies, and make estimates of how many jobs ought to be created. The question whether to bring in an industry which does not have high productivity—that is to say, an industry which employs a large number of men in proportion to the value of the goods it produces—or whether to bring in one which is modern and efficient, and has therefore better long-term prospects, and is likely to in- crease and stimulate the whole economy of the area in the long run, is something which divides the thinking of hon. Members on this side of the House from the thinking of hon. Members opposite.

I am for the long-term stimulus of the whole region. That is why I welcome the new conception in the White Papers, of a large growth area, rather than a collection of isolated places—the conception that we had a few years ago and which we thought might work, in which we could mop up isolated pockets of unemployment one by one. That is not the answer. As I find my immediate problems being solved, and as the hon. Member for Sedgefield finds his immediate problem being solved, by incoming industry, certain industries in our areas will discover that they are inefficient, and that they must be modernised. This will cause redundancy, and so the process goes on.

If the commercial and economic future of this country is as bright as I believe, this is something that we shall live with for the rest of our lives, and we must get it right. I am sure that the proper approach is that which is laid down in the White Papers—that we should do our best to foster growth in the best places—and not the approach which lays it down that we must go round with our sponge, trying to mop up unemployment wherever it exists.

I do not want to take up any more time. I have been fortunate in being able to express my views at greater length on other occasions. I commend the approach which the White Papers make, and I am deeply grateful to all my right hon. and hon. Friends at the Board of Trade for the splendid announcement that has been made this afternoon.

7.6 p.m.

Mr. William Hamilton (Fife, West)

I am not sure where the hon. Member for Darlington (Mr. Bourne-Arton) stands. In one breath he says that he applauds the successes of the Local Employment Act, and then, in the next, he says, "Thank heaven it has gone". The hon. Gentleman was a member of the Estimates Committee, with me, when we made it quite clear that the Board of Trade was not sure what had happened as a result of the Local Employment Act. It could never tell us, and steadily resisted telling us, exactly how many jobs had been created as a result of the Act.

We made it clear in our Report that at the very time when increased investment in the development districts was required, investment in them was at its lowest. That is the condemnation of the working of the Local Employment Act. That is one reason why the Government have produced these White Papers. This is a very belated conversion on the part of the Government to what I regard as purposive and positive planning.

I go along with the hon. Member in saying that we must concentrate on areas of growth, without too much regard to the actual percentage rates of unemployment. But the hon. Member knows that the Government base their policy upon the Local Employment Act. Their yardstick is the figure of 4½ per cent. unemployment, imminent or now prevailing, or likely to prevail. That was the yardstick which the Government defended adamantly three or four years ago. These White Papers simply represent the latest of a large number of bites at this cherry.

The problem of unemployment in the areas designated under the Act, in 1960, remains as intractable as ever. I doubt whether the hon. Member, or any member of the Government, would say that the overall employment position in the areas that we are now discussing is any better. Indeed, it is worse now than it was when the Government brought in the 1960 Act. Whatever may be said of the present policies contained in the White Papers, the fact is that the effects of them cannot and will not be immediate.

As I understand, the White Papers comprise a list largely of long-term measures, very few of which can bear fruit within the lifetime of the present Government. The Government will last at the most for another six months. To that extent the promises contained in the White Papers are "jam tomorrow". Meanwhile, hon. Members on this side, at least, are deeply concerned about the hardship and unemployment that currently exist. We now have more than 90,000 unemployed in Scotland, before the hardness of winter is on us. With wives and families, this means that more than 300,000 people are now living on the dole in Scotland. They cannot hope for anything from these White Papers.

The Prime Minister spoke of us being one nation. He should stick his head in a bucket before he talks too much about that, as long as this problem exists in Scotland. I appeal to the Government to show an earnest of their good intentions by immediately giving a substantial increase in unemployment benefit. This would inject a good deal of purchasing power into the economy at the point where it is needed most. That would be an added incentive to the Government to get rid of the problem of unemployment, because to the extent to which they got rid of it they would relieve themselves of the burden of increased unemployment benefit.

The basic concept of the White Papers is regional economic development, fostered obviously by more liberal doses of public investment. There is no longer any nonsense about the 4½ per cent. yardstick of unemployment under the 1960 Act. There is no longer any twaddle about the stop list, scheduling, descheduling and rescheduling—the stop and go. It is a complete reversal. The Government have nothing to learn from the Communists about somersaults. The Secretary of State for Industry and Trade went out of his way to point out today that there is none of this. From now on there is to be no scheduling, rescheduling or descheduling.

Mr. Bourne-Arton

Is the hon. Gentleman's argument that, although there were defects in the operation of the 1960 Act, the Government ought to stick to it in the interests of consistency?

Mr. Hamilton

Not at all. The Labour Party voted against it. The difference between us and right hon. and hon. Members opposite is that we forecast that it was the wrong policy and that it would have to be modified. The Tories said that this was the solution to the problem. Now that it has failed, and obviously failed, they say, "Although it was a wonderful success in 1960, nevertheless we will stop it and introduce something else". This is nonsense. It will not deceive anybody, certainly not anybody in Scotland. The hon. Member for Darlington represents a marginal seat. He will not be here very much longer.

Mr. Bourne-Arton

Wait and see.

Mr. Hamilton

I belong to the North-East. I know very well what the reaction of the North-East will be to these White Papers.

The idea of growth areas and major growth areas is acceptable. I am never quite sure exactly what the difference is. A distinction is drawn in the White Paper between "growth areas" and "major growth areas". The idea is certainly acceptable, but I should like to know by what objective or scientific criteria the boundaries were drawn. My right hon. Friend the Member for Batter-sea, North (Mr. Jay) drew attention to this. The whole point of drawing boundaries around these areas presumably is to give the people inside these areas preferential treatment over the people outside.

This is the whole point of differentiating the growth areas from the rest of the community. The Secretary of State did not make this at all clear. I want the Secretary of State for Scotland to make it abundantly clear that there are clear and well-defined advantages accruing to the areas specified as growth areas as distinct from areas outside, including development districts.

I make this point because the map for the Central Fife area shows that the boundaries seem to exclude many parts of the County which are scheduled as development districts. It is not clear, certainly not to the local authorities, why those areas were excluded. Anstruther, in the constituency of the hon. Member for Fife, East (Sir J. Gilmour), is excluded from the growth area. Does the hon. Gentleman know whether the Central West Fife growth area will get preferential treatment over Anstruther, which is a development district outside it? I doubt whether he does.

Sir John Gilmour (Fife, East)

I have written to my right hon. Friend on this point and I hope to get the answer shortly.

Mr. Hamilton

That bears out what I am saying. The hon. Gentleman does not know. The White Paper does not make clear exactly what the difference is.

Whilst I am on Fife, I will mention the question of the tolls on the bridge. The White Paper makes it clear that we are to have wonderful modern transport, but the tolls on the bridge are to stay. I have heard on very good authority—I should like the Secretary of State to say whether it is true—that the proposed tolls which he has in mind are twice the rates currently being paid on the Dartford-Purfleet Tunnel. If this is so, instead of the flat rate of 2s. 6d. which the joint board has suggested for everything, the tolls would be 5s. for a motor car, 8s. for a medium goods vehicle, and 12s. for a heavy goods vehicle. I have been given these figures on fairly good authority. I should like the Secretary of State for Scotland either to confirm them or categorically deny them. Indeed, I should like him to go much further and say that he will get rid of all this nonsense about tolls.

Mr. Noble

If it will help the hon. Gentleman, I can deny that at once.

Mr. Hamilton

We will see when the right hon. Gentleman makes his proposals after he has had representations from the joint board. Nevertheless, whatever the tolls are, the principle of charging tolls on the only major road coming in from the south to what is now regarded as a major growth area is a contradiction in terms. It is a flat contradiction of what the Government are aiming at in the White Papers.

I understand that the Scottish Council is to make representations—I am now making them—as to the road system in the Leslie, Markinch, Glenrothes area, where there is no improvement to be made other than on the main road north from Inverkeithing to Milnathort. There is to be no trunk road link between Fife and the New Tay Bridge. The right hon. Gentleman should give attention to this.

The new towns in Scotland, and indeed those in the North-East, figure prominently—rightly so; I am not complaining—in the context of the growth areas. When the concept of the new towns was introduced by the Labour Government, there were an awful lot of jeers, jibes and taunts thrown at the Labour Government by the Tory Party. The Tories regarded it as a Utopian ideal that would never get off the ground. Indeed, I remember Lord Hinching-brooke, as he then was, saying that it was the introduction of the Fascist State when the Labour Party talked about new towns.

It is now generally recognised by the Government and by everybody outside the House that this was one of the most imaginative and most successful social concepts in the post-war era. My complaint is that the Government have recognised this all too belatedly. For many years they did nothing about it. I suggest that, if the Government want to create more growth areas, they should set about creating many more new towns and increasing the social and cultural amenities in the existing new towns, because they have been a wonderful success. A largely increased measure of prosperity would accrue to Scotland if we had two or three more new towns. This is firm Labour Party policy: we shall increase the number of new towns.

Mr. John Brewis (Galloway)

Would not the hon. Gentleman create a new city? That would draw people very much more than a moderate-sized town.

Mr. Hamilton

We could argue about the details. I would accept the principle. In a debate before the Summer Recess I urged that a completely new administrative city for Britain should be set up comparable with Canberra. This is a much too progressive concept for the Tory Party, but it may come one day fifty years from now.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Battersea, North referred to the scant administrative changes that are to take place in Scotland. He quoted words which I already had in mind about the Scottish Development Group, that it is to continue in being. I suppose that is progress by Tory standards. There are to be a series of conferences with all the major interests involved. We are not quite sure what form the conferences will take or what influence the nationalised industries and local authorities will have at the conferences. We are told that activities will be co-ordinated. The whole question of machinery is dismissed in one paragraph in the White Paper. It is riddled with vague generalities and imprecision. At the top, for instance, we have the new Minister who opened the debate this afternoon. I am not quite sure how he fits in here. In a recent speech the Chancellor of the Exchequer made it clear that the Treasury remains the boss. The new Minister seems to be simply a rather big cog in the Board of Trade machinery to co-ordinate steps taken by other Departments, a kind of overlord of the 1952 kind introduced by the right hon. Member for Woodford (Sir W. Churchill) and very quickly abandoned.

I am glad that the Secretary of State for Industry and Trade is back in the Chamber. He is just the man I want to see. He went out of his way this afternoon to say that these programmes would be sustained, no matter what happened to the percentage rate of unemployment. This is a complete reversal of the policy of the Local Employment Act, 1960. To that extent it is an admission of the failure of that policy. I must ask the question which The Times asked in the editorial which has already been commented on. I quote from The Times of 15th November: The present schemes will have value only if they can be sustained. Can the Government maintain them and still find enough money and resources to do similar redevelopment in the other areas? ….Past neglect is now exacting a very heavy price. Has any estimate been made not only of the total cost of sustaining development in these areas but of the likely cost of sustaining it after the new policies for the other regions have been produced? This is a very important point. The right hon. Gentleman obviously could not give a guarantee that this policy would be sustained, unless he knew, or had some idea of, the total cost of sustaining all the other programmes for all the other areas, the White Papers for which we have yet to see. I should like a categorical answer to that question.

I was interested in some remarks made by an hon. Member about targets in the White Paper. If there is one criticism that could be made of the White Paper it is that it is singularly lacking precise targets. It is like a marksman saying, "I will fire a thousand bullets, but I will not tell you the target in case I miss it." That is exactly what the Government are doing. Let us take two random examples. First, housing. The right hon. Gentleman mentioned that there is to be an increased programme from 23,000 to 30,000 houses a year. When? Over what period? What is to be the subsidy structure? What will be the policy towards interest charges to local authorities? There is nothing about ail these things.

Secondly, additional training facilities are mentioned. Additional to what? How much additional training is there to be? There are no precise figures. Lord Blakenham, when Minister of Labour, was in West Fife some months ago and said that he was providing in Dunfermline additional training facilities—76 places producing about 150 trained people a year. That is ludicrously inadequate, and I told Lord Blakenham so at the time. I hope that the Government intend to increase these facilities substantially and over a very short period.

The White Paper contains all sorts of assumptions about migration. For instance, paragraph 39 says if it is assumed that the level of net emigration will fall to an average of half its present level in the period 1966 to 1971, and to about one-sixth of its present level between 1971 and 1981"— I am not sure where these assumptions came from. Perhaps they were pulled out of a hat— then Scotland's population would increase by over 600,000 to almost 6 millions by 1981. This represents an increase in the labour force of some 65.000 by 1971, and of a further 140,000 between 1971 and 1981. The next assumption following from that is: If at the same time unemployment were to be reduced from the average level of wholly unemployed in Scotland in 1962 to a level more nearly approaching the national average, a further 35,000 workers might need to be found employment. From that it is deduced that 100,000 additional jobs would be needed by 1971 and another 140,000 by 1981. There is no indication of how we are to get these jobs. When the right hon. Gentleman was asked at a recent Press conference what would happen if industry did not come, he just did not know. The right hon. Gentleman is asserting all the time that these measures, and these alone, will provide industry. We are not convinced that they will. We consider that he must have alternative proposals ready in case industry does not go to Scotland.

This is where the basic conflict between us arises. We say categorically that, if this does not come from private enterprise, we shall see that public enterprise provides it. The Government shy away from that because it cuts across their dogma. They believe that we must leave this to private enterprise—that the Government can shovel in public investment on the roads, hospitals, schools and the rest and then private enterprise will cream off the profits.

I do not think that it will work that way. I do not think that this will make any great impact on unemployment in Scotland. We are determined that, if it does not, public enterprise shall do the job. Public enterprise is already doing a great deal. It is clearing up the decay and filth that private enterprise left in my constituency, for instance. The pit heaps, the pit ponds and the squalor that private enterprise left behind are being left to the public to clear up. But if the public do this work, then the profits from the enterprises set up in Scotland should go back to the public. I hope that publicly-owned industry will take care of this problem.

I want to refer to the vagueness and platitudinous character of some of the terms in the White Paper. The language is incredible. Paragraph 53 says: … there is great scope for office employment in Central Scotland. What a wonderful revelation! The Government, after twelve years, find that … there is great scope for office employment in Central Scotland. It goes on: … many firms might well find greater advantage in settling in an area with less fierce competition for space and staff. Glory be! Next we are told Central Scotland …should as time goes on persuade a larger number of firms to consider it as a location for more of their office administration. That is all the Government say about additional office accommodation in Scotland—"Firms might go; they should go; if they go it will be a good thing because there is plenty of space and there are plenty of workers". But there is no indication of how it is be done.

Sir F. Maclean

Is the White Paper any vaguer than the assertion of the right hon. Member for Battersea, North (Mr. Jay) that a Labour Government would tackle the office problem in London.

Mr. Hamilton

This is not our White Paper. These are the Government's proposals for Central Scotland.

Mr. Jay

I pointed out three ways in which we should do the job.

Mr. Hamilton

I do not see why we should answer for the Government's shortcomings. We are debating White Papers published by the Government not Labour Party policy.

I could give an awful lot of other examples of the vagueness of the language in the White Paper on Central Scotland but I do not propose to go any further. I want to say in conclusion that, in so far as these White Papers earn admission by the Government that their previous attempts to solve these problems have been a complete failure, I go along with them. I heartily agree. But, in so far as they show evidence of a very hastily thrown together jumble of proposals designed to convince the electors that "we are all modernisers now", I am not at all convinced either by the sincerity or the ability of the Government to put the proposals into effect and solve the unemployment which has plagued Scotland and the North-East for years.

7.34 p.m.

Sir David Robertson (Caithness and Sutherland)

The hon. Member for Fife, West (Mr. W. Hamilton) is too pessimistic about labour going to Central Scotland. I have a letter from the Glenrothes Development Corporation, which I told him about the other day, in which it justifies keeping rows and rows of new houses empty because they will be needed for incoming industries which the Corporation has been very successful in attracting in recent months. The houses will be needed for key men brought in with those industries.

I also think that the problems of the monsters—London and the South-East and Birmingham, Coventry and the West of England areas—will solve the problems of Scotland the North-East and Lancashire. This region is almost grinding to a halt. We have allowed it to grow and grow unrestricted and, of course, the best of the unemployed people came here because they were certain of getting jobs. Many came from Lancashire, the Highlands and other parts. That was inevitable.

We are now within sight of having 50 million people south of the Cheviots, with only 5½million in Scotland, 230,000 of them in the Highland area. What imbalance of industry and pepole! Scotland has only 8 per cent, of manufacturing industry. England and Wales have 92 per cent. The Government have a heavy responsibility, and earlier Governments even more, for allowing this situation to go on.

Of course every industrialist, particularly the consumer goods manufacturer, wants to be in the market place. The London area is the biggest market, and Birmingham, Coventry and the West Midlands area is the next biggest. Every manufacturer of consumer goods wants to get into a market where there are no transport charges, only delivery charges.

So the monsters grow and grow and nothing has been done to correct the situation. Today there has been talk about more regional committees and a Highland development board has been proposed. But we do not need any more mechanism. We are full of it. This House should control the situation. It rests on us and not on regions to do the job. We should express our situation tonight, as I am trying to do, because that situation is wholly wrong and must be corrected.

The Government showed great wisdom in locating the Dounreay atomic power station in my constituency. With the aid of my right hon. Friend, now Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations and the Colonies, we ultimately got the atomic plant put there on the Pentland Firth. It was a great struggle to get it there. It lasted thirteen months.

All the civil servants, and Sir Christopher Hinton himself, said, "We will never get our top men to live there". I said to them, "I have three dukes and 20 millionaires in my constituency who can afford to go anywhere else to live but who prefer Caithness and Sutherland. Other Highland counties have the same experience".

Of course we got all the men we wanted. The chaps came from Harwell and Chester and elsewhere. They are enjoying life very much better in Caithness and Sutherland than in the places they came from. They are surrounded by beautiful scenery. They enjoy good living, plenty of open space and time for leisure. Contrast that with the situation in this area.

Under this House tonight West Indian porters are pushing bodies into underground trains in order to get the doors closed. There are queues for buses everywhere when people are going to work or are returning home. Buses come along with two empty places and can take no more. The main line railways are just as bad. Why did we suffer a situation like that to grow?

But this is the controlling situation—50 million people trying to crowd into the southern part of the country. How many more can it take? I can assure the hon. Member for Fife, West that Central Scotland will be overflowing. They will all be anxious to go there, away from this crush. The sooner we get on with the process the better.

7.39 p.m.

Mr. Cyril Bence (Dunbartonshire, East)

I do not agree with the hon. Member for Caithness and Sutherland (Sir D. Robertson) in all he said, but I certainly agree that, historically, it has been a grave mistake to allow this tremendous overcrowding in the South and South-East of England. I also agree with his criticism of regionalism in tackling this situation. One would imagine that we were talking about the government of a huge territory, contending with vast distances where there was need for communication between regional governments and a central Government thousands of miles away. That picture is, of course, nonsense.

This is, after all, a very small country. It is quite undesirable that we should split it up into a series of local machines to solve what is essentially a problem of the distribution of population and its economic and functional activity in various spheres. I am sure that the hon. Member will agree with me that I am interpreting what he was saying when he referred to the regional organisation.

We have had this problem with us now for 12 years and it has been said many times on both sides of the House that the longer we delayed taking action the more difficult the problem would become. The investment in Linwood is £23.5 million. The output is 1.000 motor cars a week, or 50,000 a year, and the employment roll is approximately 3,000. The longer we delay solving this imbalance in the distribution of population, the more difficult it becomes to solve it by orthodox means. We have already reached the stage when some unorthodox action must be taken to solve this terrible problem.

The Leader of the Liberal Party made another point to which I should like to refer. We have heard of factories being established in Scotland and the North by firms whose headquarters are in the Midlands or the South. Men accept executive positions in these branches, but it is not long before they think of their own advancement in terms of moving back to the centre. I have met this attitude often among young people who have the idea that individual progress means making their way back to the head office or the centre of the industrial complex. I hope that those who have branch factories distributed over the country will try to inculcate into their employees the idea that it might be progress for them if they move out of the centre to the perimeter.

I was anxious to take part in this debate, because some time ago a promise was made to me by a previous President of the Board of Trade in this same Government. Incidentally, I want to make it quite clear that we are debating tonight not in a new Session of Parliament under a new Government, but in a new Session under a Government which has been in office for 12 years. The impression in the country that we have had a new Government since last month is strong. I hope that those who try to put this false idea over will be more honest and will admit that we are debating a 12-year-old problem with a 12-year-old Government.

The previous President of the Board of Trade gave me in good faith a promise about an industrial site in Dalmuir, Clydebank which had been disposed of by Scottish Industrial Estates Ltd, to Ingersoll-Rand with the assumption that it was to be used as a factory. It now lies fallow with its 130 acres undeveloped. I was promised that if the Town Council of Clydebank found a client for this industrial site the President of the Board of Trade would take steps to reacquire it.

I believe that the council has written to the President of the Board of Trade that it now has a customer. I hope, therefore, that the right hon. Gentleman will reacquire the site so that the client now negotiating for it may have it. It is an admirable site situated on the river with good road and rail services. It is intended to be used for the prefabrication of housing units. It is not far from the new town of Cumbernauld and it is easily situated for the transport to it of raw materials from cement works to make the concrete sections.

My complaint is that the Secretary of State for Scotland is not co-operating very well with the President of the Board of Trade. Paragraph 91, on page 24 of the White Paper on Central Scotland, says that School building plans must match the needs of a growing and a more mobile population. In my constituency there is the new town of Cumbernauld with a growing population. The new town is an excellent concept and tremendous credit is due to those who conceived it and those who are managing it. They are doing a wonderful job. Professor Buchanan may well have made a detailed study of the design of the centre of the new town before he published his Report.

There is also in my constituency the Burgh of Kirkintilloch which has made an overspill agreement with the City of Glasgow under which Glasgow takes over houses at £10 per year per house for 10 years. We therefore have people coming into Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch, but for some reason best known to himself the Secretary of State for Scotland has decided to cut the school building programme for Dunbartonshire from £2 million to £800,000 last year. Yet the White Paper says that we shall have a tremendous expansion in the school building programme to keep up with the movement of the population.

I hope that the President of the Board of Trade will press upon the Secretary of State for Scotland to reverse his decision and expand the education programme, particularly for Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch, and, indeed, for Clydebank where we hope that the new site which I mentioned will be cleared and a new factory will be built, at which perhaps 1,000 young people from the burgh may be employed.

It amazes me that the White Paper, published after the Beeching Report, could say that Full consideration has been given … to the effect of the proposals in Dr. Beeching's report. We are to build new factories and more schools. Twelve more factories are to be built in Cumbernauld, according to an Answer given to me a week ago, but Dr. Beeching intends to close the railway. Not only is the passenger service from Cumbernauld to Glasgow to be cut, but also the service from North Lanarkshire to Glasgow. If the two passenger services are cut and are replaced by road services, those services will converge on one road into Glasgow. How in the name of fortune they will cater for all the traffic between eight and nine o'clock in the morning, the traffic from the two areas in which, by Government policy, the population will be increased in the new towns, passes my comprehension. So the Beeching proposal—

Mr. Speir

It may never happen.

Mr. Bence

The hon. Gentleman is forestalling my peroration.

The White Paper refers also to projects for water supply. We are to have great regional water schemes. It does not say who is to pay for them. We are short of water in the Burgh of Clydebank. I hive been pressing for 12 months for a grant from the Treasury so that the water supply may be enlarged there, but I cannot get it. I am told that Section 7 of the Local Employment Act does not apply because this water scheme is not being undertaken to satisfy the needs of existing industries in order that they may expand and employ more labour.

That is the kind of excuse which is given, but this is anew scheme to expand the water supply to the Burgh of Clydebank. We want to do the job because we hope that, as a result of the promise by the President of the Board of Trade that the Department will reacquire the site if we can find a customer, another 1,000 people will be employed. We can then go ahead with the water job as well, but we must be sure that we can do all this. We are frustrated by the various Departments of State, which seem not only to fail to co-operate with us, but to fail to co-operate with each other as well.

When I first looked at the White Paper and I referred also to the other White Paper recently published, Public Investment in Great Britain, October, 1963, I was reminded of the time when the Egyptians tried to force the Israelites to make bricks without straw. We are told about the Erskine bridge, but this is a project for 1970, seven years' hence. When the White Paper was reviewed in some sections of the national Press and the Erskine bridge was mentioned, people in my constituency thought that work on it would start almost next week.

In fact, if one takes these White Papers and the long-distance and middle-distance estimates of projects to commence, and, at the same time, one takes the increase in investment estimated, dividing by the number of years over which they are set, it is apparent that what the Government will be spending in Scotland in 1963–64 and 1964–65 will be quite insignificant as an increase over spending in 1962–63.

Therefore, putting the two together, I came to the conclusion that these two documents constitute almost a dishonest presentation of the Government's proposals. It is all very well to say that £10,000 will be spent, but it is misrepresentation not to make clear that it is to be spent over 10 years and amounts to no more than £1,000 a year. We have been told by the Prime Minister about a tremendous £400 million programme, but that is to come over about 12 years. It will not come within the lifetime of one Parliament. The Erskine bridge is nearly two Parliaments away. To my mind, it is quite dishonest, and I remain completely unconvinced.

The hon. Member for Hexham (Mr. Speir) said that it may never happen. I am certain that we are in a position exactly similar to the one we were in in 1958. An election is in the offing. As for public investment, the Government take a series of figures, multiply by two, and then splash all sorts of promises about in their election manifestoes. The Prime Minister has said that our economy is just at the point when we can go on to prosperity. We have "turned the corner". I heard that from Stanley Baldwin in 1930.

Mr. Sydney Silverman (Nelson and Colne)

We heard it in 1920, too.

Mr. Bence

Yes, we heard it in the twenties. Now, for some extraordinary reason, we have suddenly reached a point in our economic development when inflation is behind us, when our balance of payments problems are behind us, and when we can go ahead at a steady rate of advance towards prosperity. All is set fair.

I do not believe it. We are an island of 50 million people in a highly competitive world. I believe implicitly that a politician ought not to tell the people that Britain's economy is steady and secure at any time. In this difficult and competitive world we have to earn our living. It is quite wrong for politicians to go about the country saying, "We have arrived". Anyone who has spent years in industry or in business knows that the price of solvency is not sitting back and saying, "We have arrived" but is eternal vigilance, attending to the job and keeping ahead of the other chap.

If we want a higher standard of living, we cannot just sit back, put our heads in a bucket and say, with the Prime Minister, "We have arrived". We have not. I believe that Britain must put in a more concentrated effort, a more developed technological and scientific effort, if we are to earn our living in the world and maintain, let alone improve, our standards. People should not be fooled with that sort of stuff and the idea that everything is all right.

I believe that we can do these things not because we have "arrived", but because we have the latent skills and the latent organising ability to do them. But we have been "had" before. We were "had" in 1955 and in 1959. The same sort of glowing pictures were painted then. We were told that we had arrived. As soon as the Tories were returned, of course, we had arrived all right, but we discovered that we were in the muck again and we had to retreat. I believe, and I am certain that millions of my fellow countrymen believe, that this is the same "gag" all over again.

7.58 p.m.

Sir John MacLeod (Ross and Cromarty)

I shall not follow the hon. Member for Dunbartonshire, East (Mr. Bence), though I agree with him that we must modernise if we are to compete in the modern world. I heartily agree also that ours is only a small island, and it is in that context that I shall make my remarks. I represent an area which is not remote at all today, and this fact also must be borne in mind. I have always maintained that we must have a greater distribution of industry in these islands.

There is much that one could say about the White Paper, and, no doubt, whatever anyone may say, it will prove to be a programme of development and growth for the areas concerned. But we must develop out of the industrial belt and have greater distribution. I want the Minister to do all he can to stimulate a more balanced economy within Scotland and particularly within the Highland area itself, because in the Highlands there is a vast area which is today totally undeveloped. I believe that more detailed consideration is at present being given to this problem by the Development Department in the Scottish Office, with the co-operation of the development offices which have been set up in the Highland region, but I should like the Secretary of State to tell us how many real economic advisers he has in the Development Department.

It must be right to examine the potential possibilities of establishing a growth area in the Highlands, and it is this which I recommend tonight. It was said in the Gracious Speech that special attention would be given to the development of the Highlands and Islands, so we must get on with the job. In 1950, in a Command Paper on a Programme of Highland Development, it was said: Fundamentally the Highland programme is to encourage people to live in the Highlands by making it possible to secure there, in return for reasonable efforts, proper standards of life and the means of paying for them". What wonderful sentiments. I repeat again that we must have a policy for more balanced economic development throughout the country.

The Highland problem is quite different from the problem of the industrial belt. There is a surplus of labour now in the industrial belt. This is where the right hon. Member for Battersea, North (Mr. Jay) is wrong in stressing that we should put everything into the areas where there is heavy unemployment. We want to see in Scotland a drawing away from emphasis on the industrial belt, a drawing of people back into the High- land areas whence many of them came and made conditions in the industrial belt so much more difficult. The state of affairs at present is quite unbalanced.

It is interesting to note that the Government today contribute directly, perhaps, about half of the total regional income in the Highland area, yet the rate of depopulation in the Highlands has doubled since 1951. Admittedly, this is mostly from the rural areas, and the burghs are holding their own to a great extent. Here I draw the attention of the Government, as I have been trying to do for many years, to the Cairncross Report on Local Development in Scotland. I took this copy from the Library today, and I see that it is marked, "Not to be removed from the House of Commons". The trouble is that this appears to be the attitude also in St. Andrew's House. I do not think that it has been removed for a number of years, and I hope that the Scottish Office will noon take another look at it.

I shall quote one or two passages from the Cairncross Report. The Under-Secretary of State who is on the Front Bench will not, of course, have the Report, but I will read, first, from page 40: We have envisaged the problem of local development in national rather than in local terms and have assumed that the development of country towns and districts should be subject to the same general principles as development elsewhere. We recognise that efforts to influence or control industrial development must pay regard to a number of limiting circumstances. After dealing with these limiting circumstances, the Cairncross Committee goes on to say that, subject to those limits, policy should be guided by three objectives which, in order of importance, are "— I shall read them out, because this is where, I hope, we shall see development taking place in those burghs where already there is existing machinery to cope with development. The three objectives are: (i) to accelerate the growth of new industrial communities in promising locations; industrial growth should come first, ahead even of the need to reduce unemployment in other areas". That is in conflict with the argument of the right hon. Member for Battersea, North, that we must deal first and primarily with the unemployment areas. I believe that we should do it in both spheres. The second objective is: To make fuller and more economical use of manpower and natural resources that are in danger of being wasted. That is happening in the Highlands. Emigration means waste of manpower. The third objective is: To arrest the decline of communities, and the consequent waste of material and social assets which they possess, in cases where a little help might restore them to a thriving condition. We have to arrest that decline if the rural areas of this vast area are not to be completely depopulated.

One area in which growth could be stimulated is that between Invergordon and Inverness. It is central, and it is a potential growth area for the whole of the North of Scotland. It is necessary not only to develop this potentially viable area but to establish holding areas that have experienced such heavy unemployment. To do this we have to modernise all communications so that labour can move about rapidly but, to a great extent, in its own environment.

In this connection I must return again to the closure of the railways. Paragraph 21 of the White Paper states that this will … in consultation with the Secretary of State for Scotland, take account of the consequences of the proposal for the present and prospective economy of the area involved. Yet it has just been proposed that the passenger service should be withdrawn from the whole of the area north of Inverness.

The only appeal is to the Transport Users' Consultative Council. That Council can judge the hardship only, so that the economic consequences will presumably not be considered at all by it. I want the Secretary of State to announce tonight that there is no intention at all of withdrawing that service. Everyone knows that if we are to have viable development, the service cannot be closed because there is no adequate alternative in the foreseeable future. I hope that the Government will stop all this nonsense of waiting until the Consultative Council has judged the hardship. The Minister of Transport can surely get the opinion of the Secretary of State even before using that machinery.

These closures are contrary to the Government's express policy on Highland development, and we must also take into account the consequential effects on employment where the population is sparse and alternative employment is hard, if not impossible to find. In Kyle of Lochalsh, in my own constituency, there is little or no alternative work for the railwaymen.

In the Invergordon area there is one of the finest ports and harbours in the whole of the country, and it is tragic that, since the Royal Navy ceased using it, it should be used only as an oiling station for the N.A.T.O. fleet when on exercise. This port should be properly developed. There is a railway service which an industry that has developed in the last two years uses extensively and increasingly. It would be disastrous to close that line. The area has air communications, and one of the finest climates in the country. It must be wise to develop the area rather than increase the difficulties in the over-populated industrial belt.

We would all like to see the establishment of industries that use the area's natural resources—agriculture, meat-processing, fish-processing, potato-processing; it is one of the best areas for potatoes—but it is not necessary to use only the natural resources. A small industry has been established in Dingwall, which is in this area, making components for the motor industry in the South of Scotland, and for other industries, too. Electricity and water are available, and this industry has the enterprise and the know-how. That shows that it can be done. It is not absolutely necessary to base development on natural resources.

I must also mention the lack of Government sanction for our Hydro-Electric Board to get on with their programme. I understand that two schemes in my constituency have been proved to meet the McKenzie method of judging production costs between hydro power and that produced by the conventional thermal schemes. I therefore cannot see why there should be any delay in approving them. Inquiries may be necessary, but I hope that they will be speedily completed so that we can get on with the work. This would mean a great deal to employment in the Highland area. Our hydro-scheme produces power that is in ever-increasing demand, and I hope to see industries set up that will use more electricity.

If the White Paper's plan for Central Scotland is not to drain still further the population from the Highlands, which has contributed so much to the difficulties in the past, some counter-attraction must be established in conjunction with the White Paper proposals. A large community in that area would also help to support larger-scale social amenities of all kinds. In the Scottish Grand Committee this morning we discussed the tourist industry in Scotland; that would help to develop the social amenities necessary for industry, too.

We must get it into the minds of industrialists that, with modern communications, the Highlands are no longer remote. People think of the Highlands as being almost in some other world but forget the tremendous development in Canada, where distances of thousands of miles are involved. We are talking of a journey of 400 or 500 miles. One can go to the North of Scotland in the morning as I do on occasion, do a day's work, and return in the evening. That means that executives could enjoy the bright lights of London, if they wished, yet supply first-class management in this area and keep practical day-to-day control of business there. At the same time we do not want too many branch industries because, if anything goes wrong with the economy, the first thing an industrialist does is to close down the branch and return to head office. In addition, we could contribute to the decentralisation of office work.

The amenity of the area must be considered, and we have it. The comparatively lower rents must be considered—we have them, too. Many things could be done, such as a detailed survey of land use, but we have a tremendous number of surveys going on. We have all these reports; I think that we have enough information to enable us to get on with the job, and we also have the machinery. We are dealing with virtually virgin undeveloped country, which should spark the imagination of all the chaps who want to produce new plans from virgin areas.

The Government's Highland policy has fallen short of the objective of economic growth, and unless the problem is to become completely intractable it will have to be dealt with now. The longer it is put off, the more serious and difficult it will be to tackle. To a certain extent, the present policy has proved ineffective. Today, there are twenty different Government agencies endowed with special concern for the social and economic growth of the region. There are far too many bodies looking after the interests of the Highlands, yet few of them have more than a narrowly defined executive authority, and to a great extent they are proving inefficient. There is a gap to be filled between this and the town and country planning conception in the White Paper.

The Government have done a certain amount through their fiscal policy. The hon. Member for Kilmarnock (Mr. Ross) has accused me of criticising the Government and then patting them on the back. We have to pat them on the back because, in the Highland area, the Local Employment Act has to a great extent been effective. It has assisted in the establishment of industry in Invergordon and in Dingwall, and it indirectly assisted the Fort William project—

Mr. Ross

Perhaps the hon. Member will allow me to remind him of the occasion in July when he asked his right hon. Friend the President of the Board of Trade how many projects there had been, and how many new jobs had flowed from those projects, under the Local Employment Act from October, 1959, to July, 1963. The reply was 350 jobs. That is the amount of success of that Act in the Highlands—90 jobs a year.

Sir J. MacLeod

That is all very well, but 300 jobs in the Highlands is a tremendous number. It is not enough, I agree, but 20 jobs in Dingwall are very welcome. The trouble is that in many Highland towns there is not a great unemployment problem because the people have drifted away. The drift of population is the problem. These figures, which may appear low, are very useful, but they do not go far enough. I hope that the contribution which the Government have made to the Highland Fund will help tremendously. But we are dealing with a rural economy. It is being found that these small enterprises wanting help in the area are not keeping proper accounts. There is a great shortage of accountants. If any people in Glasgow want to establish themselves in the Highlands, there is a great shortage of accountants to deal with these matters in the rural areas. That is why the Highland Fund is finding it difficult to get on with the job. I hope that Members who represent Glasgow constituencies will urge accountants to go to the area and give their assistance.

Another vehicle which could be of great immediate use is the Scottish Country Industries Development Trust. I am glad that this body is at present reviewing its functions and extending its sphere of activity and looking into the question of business management and industrial efficiency. These are matters which cause difficulty in the rural areas. It is very important in areas which are run down that even the smallest two-or three-men businesses should try to bring about business efficiency. It is difficult for any Government body to give financial help to a company which does not have proper accounts to show. These are practical points which must be dealt with by the Government now because the smallest industry must be encouraged if there are people in the area willing to get on with the job.

Unfortunately, this body is called the Scottish Country Industries Development Trust. I think that that is apt to give a wrong impression, because this body is helping to develop any industry which manufactures or provides a service in the small towns and country areas of Scotland. I hope that every encouragement will be given to this body to expand its activities because it can do, and is doing, a good job in the rural areas.

The time is coming when there will have to be more effective co-ordination of all the disjointed efforts being made in the Highlands area. The Development Department, although it was rather ridiculed by the right hon. Member for Battersea, North, has not been established for very long—for about eighteen months, or something like that. I hope that that body will be able to coordinate more and pull together the organisations looking after the Highlands' interests. The development officers in the Highlands who are working in conjunction with the Development Department are very sincere and are doing a good job, but they need much more encouragement if we are to have the development that we want in the Highlands.

8.25 p.m.

Mr. William Ainsley (Durham, North-West)

I do not want to follow what the hon. Member for Ross and Cromarty (Sir J. MacLeod) said about the problems affecting Scotland, though he has my sympathy. The Government have moved the boundary between England and Scotland and placed it somewhere in the Midlands of England. We in the North-East, therefore, have sympathy with the people of Scotland, for we face exactly the same sort of problems.

As the Secretary of State for Industry and Trade opened the debate it passed through my mind that his speech was a sort of deathbed repentance. It certainly undermined all the legislation which has been passed over the last 12 years and was a condemnation of the Government's previous policy.

Four recent Reports will have serious repercussions in the West of Durham and the North-East of England. This is where there is no co-ordination between Government Departments. The first Report is the Beeching Report. Quite recently, I attended two transport users' consultative committee meetings affecting my constituency and the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland (Mr. Boyden) and constituencies in other parts of Durham. Thirteen railway stations are due to close and the passenger service in the west of Durham is to be brought to an end.

The Minister of Transport has just issued his report on roads. It may be that on his bicycle he has got no further than Durham. We are, therefore, left with the development of the roads in the east of the county. It is proposed that the development should take place to the east of the Great North Road which runs through the County of Durham.

Finally, we have just had the Local Government Commission's Report and now we have the Report on regional development in the North-East. Paragraph 39 refers to the growth areas. It is the other areas to which I want to refer.

My constituency of North-West Durham has a population of 50,760. That is leaving out one of the local authority areas, the Brandon urban district. The tact that that area has 20,000 inhabitants conveys to me that it is to come into the growth areas. How farcical it is. The Crook area has been scheduled from the beginning under the Local Employment Act. This area comes within the Bishop Auckland group of areas and the national figures do not reveal the true picture for West Durham. The last figures which I had for the Crook area were 9.2 per cent, unemployment. Yet this programme will neglect the growth of the whole of that area. The programme can be judged only in the light of our national economic development. With only a 2 per cent, annual increase in output, industry has had no urge to expand over the past years and any extensions which have escaped through the loopholes of the Local Employment Acts have been of factories in areas already congested.

I have appreciated the problems of my constituency since I was first elected to this House, in 1955. This is an area in which 1 was born and in which I have lived since. I know the people, their anxieties and their worries. The area's whole economy was based on the coal industry and its by-products and its washeries. No industry came to the area to compete with mining for the available manpower. I remember serving as a boy in the First World War and then marching to take up the watch on the Rhine. Immediately we got to Cologne, we received orders that the miners were to return home, for they were wanted in the interests of the national economy. In peace as in war, the miners have served the nation, but now they are to be cast on one side. That is my objection to the Government's policies.

I was recently talking to Dr. Reid, chairman of the Durham Division of the National Coal Board. I told him that we were suffering from the success of our own policies. We have been transferring men from the closed uneconomic collieries of the West to the East, but only the active people, only the younger face workers. The West has thus been left with the problems of the elderly and of the young just leaving school so that the community was not in balance. The new programme will accentuate that imbalance.

Need I remind the Government that the Durham Division of the Coal Board and the miners are now discussing the redundancy of about 4,500 miners this year? We shall have to run fast with this programme if we are just to keep standing still with the unemployment problem. Towns and villages are decaying in the west of Durham because there is no industry in the area.

How has this state of affairs come about? It did not happen yesterday, or the day before. The Government's industrial policy has been to saturate the home market and that has resulted in over-production and in the loss of many export markets. The world does not owe us a living. We have to earn it, but it has been easier for the industrialists to flood the home market than to seek exports. I am not unmindful of the Government's negotiations to enter the Common Market. Industrialists followed the pattern and concentrated in the South-East, which was a magnet to young people from Scotland and the North-East.

I have had experience of local government and I could give illustration after illustration to prove the point. I remember when Dame Florence Horsbrugh was the Minister of Education and I was one of a deputation who went to see her. I told her that she could say "No" better than Molotov could. It was she who carried through the Government's policy of restriction. Hon. Members will recall that it was in her time that the Government imposed a ban on school building. We have never caught up.

As chairman of my county council, I at once came to London and asked the then Opposition Chief Whip, the late William Whiteley, whether I could get in touch with the chairman of the London County Council. I arranged an unofficial meeting with the then chairman of the London County Council, Mr. Victor Mishcon. I told him that his problem was ours in reverse. London was being saturated with industry while we were being denuded of our basic industries and our young people were being attracted to the London area.

That has been allowed to go on in order to enrich the coffers of the land grabbers, the property racketeers and the take-over bidders. It has been done at the expense of providing work and employment in the rest of the country. That has been Government policy as was revealed by the Rent Act. The Government are now introducing Measures which they hope to push through during this election year. I ask whether they really mean the policy which they are advocating, because, if they do, it is a condemnation of the Local Employment Act 1960. The only way in which our problems could be dealt with was by the provisions in the Distribution of Industry Act, which was superseded by the Local Employment Acts.

I recall sitting on an Estimates Committee which probed the cost of the repairs at 10 Downing Street and with State House. State House had been empty for a long time. Although there were offers by four industrialists who were anxious to use the building, the owner refused them because he was waiting for the Government to take it over. The Government brought in staffs of various Departments to justify taking over the whole of the building. They even took over a shop which was attached to the building and had been empty for a year.

We in Durham were promised by the present Home Secretary that the Land Registry would be moved to Durham and also another Government Department, but we were told that we must keep quiet about it. My hon. Friend the Member for Durham (Mr. Grey) has been cam-paining for years for Government Departments to be moved to the city, but all we have is the Post Office Savings Department. If the Government mean business they should start by moving their own Departments to the areas where the problems exist.

Many civil servants are sick of the inconveniences of living in London, where there is an ever-increasing problem of housing and congestion and traffic. They are anxious to live with their own families. The nation has gained its strength from the community spirit which is reflected in our village life, but in our towns people do not know their next-door neighbour. There is no sense of home life. This sort of situation helps to promote juvenile delinquency and leads to the break-up of homes.

We in West Durham feel that we have been written off by the Government. When Lord Hailsham, now Mr. Quintin Hogg, was charged with investigating conditions in the North-East I wrote to remind him that there was a military camp standing empty at Branchpeth, and within a radius of a few miles there were places like Willington, Bishop Auckland, Crook and Durham. At one time nearly 4,000 soldiers were stationed there, but now many of the brick buildings are empty.

What did we do? The Minister of Labour said that there was a possibility of starting a class, and in July of last year, just before the Summer Recess, I was told that 24 boys and 60 adults would be trained there. During the Recess, however, there was a complete somersault by the Government. When we debated the Government's training scheme, I asked the Minister of Labour how many people were to be trained in the North-East, and I informed him that if he did not know the answer I would provide him with the information. The fact is that 20 people are to be trained at Tursdale Mining Training Centre because the mines in West Durham are being closed.

The Durham Division of the Coal Board is planning a new training centre at Seaham Harbour. Being on the edge of the coalfield, the centre is, naturally, of some importance. In a Written Answer last week I was told that A variety of training courses for young people is available at technical colleges in Bishop Auckland, Consett and Durham. Further first-year apprenticeship courses in engineering for boys will be available early next year at Tursdale Government Training Centre."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 18th November, 1963; Vol. 684, c. 25.] That is what the Government propose to do to deal with the problem in West Durham.

When will the Government face the reality of the situation and realise that there are thousands of young people in the west of Durham who are unemployed? This is not just propaganda for election purposes. We are dealing with human beings. This is a problem with which I have to live. Young people are leaving school and are not able to find work.

The Government are thinking of making the whole of West Durham a travel-to-work area. It is impossible to do this, for the simple reason that there are no adequate roads. The only road that we have is the Roman road, the A.68. The others are merely turnpike roads which have been strengthened. There are 24,000 people in Crook and Willington, 15,000 in Tow Law, and these people, together with those in Weardale, will not be able to get to work at Aycliffe, unless, of course, the Government want them to work on the night shift, in which case they will have to travel during the day, and getting some sleep will present problems. I invite any hon. Member who is desirous of doing so to visit this area and see the problems there for himself. What will happen if Dr. Beeching closes the lifelines in this area?

When we probed into the operation of the Local Employment Act, we had a report from the chairman of the estates committee. He spoke of the development in the Team Valley and Aycliffe Trading Estates, and we should very much like to see Lord Hailsham's Report. It is proposed to develop where there are already opportunities for providing diverse industries, but nothing is proposed for us in the West to replace the industries that we have lost.

I notice that in the development of our Colonies it has always been the policy to develop the natural resources of the country by building roads, by providing transport, and by using the soil for productive purposes, but here we are doing just the opposite. We shall denude West Durham and cause further congestion in the east of the County of Durham. We shall leave the western districts to the old people, as residential areas, in which to die their natural death. We have to deal with this problem in a realistic way. Only by treating the North-East as a unit and planning for the whole of the economic development there can we bring about some semblance of success. I can assure the Government that, so far as the West is concerned, under their plan there will be no solution.

We can develop at Crook and thus cater for the people in Tow Law and Weardale and the surrounding area, and Brandon Urban District Council will deal with the overspill of Durham City. We can cater for the people of Langley Park and the villages around there. These will be all good, sound economic units. Unless we are prepared to plan our natural resources, I see no hope for the success of this scheme. Therefore, it certainly will be with pleasure that I shall vote against the scheme proposed by the Government.

8.52 p.m.

Mr. Stanley R. McMaster (Belfast, East)

I hope that the hon. Member for Durham, North-West (Mr. Ainsley) will forgive me if I do not follow his remarks, but devote the little time left to me to the interests of Northern Ireland in the context of regional development.

In my constituency, I have a great deal of heavy and light industry which is connected with the shipbuilding industry. This industry, as my right hon. Friend said in opening the debate, has benefited a great deal by the credit facilities—£75 million worth—which were made available to British ship owners to place orders in this country. My only regret is that this sum is not to be enlarged and that, all applications having now been made, the Government have announced that they do not intend to do anything more this year for these traders.

I should like my right hon. Friend to consider the position for a moment. I welcome the presence of the Chief Secretary of the Treasury. I should like him to give sympathetic consideration to approaches that I hope to make to him to extend the shipbuilding credit system, because there is still unemployment in our shipbuilding yards. In Belfast, during the last two or three weeks, we have laid off between 350 and 400 men. These men work in the black trade, that is, the boilermakers, the caulkers and shipwrights, and they cannot find alternative employment in Northern Ireland. This led to an unfortunate strike.

I am glad to say that good sense has prevailed, as it usually does in our shipyards of Harland and Wolff, and that the men were all back at work at the beginning of this week. In an interview that I had with the men this week-end, I was particularly grateful to see how far they were prepared to go to ensure that Harland and Wolff did not lose any orders as a result of uneconomic working.

I believe that flexibility of labour, about which my hon. Friend the Minister is deeply concerned, is definitely assured in our yards. But the fact remains that men are being paid off. The shortage of employment before Christmas, with no prospect of another job, is a terrifying one, as every hon. Member will realise. Despite the fact that more work is coming in the new year, more could be done by the Government to help our shipyards, which cannot proceed with some work though slipways are empty, because of the strict timetable in the stages of building, resulting from the narrow margin in the shipbuilding industry today. Shipyard work cannot go on, and men are still being laid off, because of the shortage of credit stage by stage.

The Government could also help Northern Ireland in defence. It was recently stated that Polaris submarines were to be placed in yards which had previous experience of building them. This principle could be extended to Harland and Wolff when a new order for an aircraft carrier is placed, because only one aircraft carrier serving in our fleet today has been built at a place other than Belfast. Harland and Wolff probably has more experience of building aircraft carriers than any other shipyard, not only in this country but in the whole world.

In spite of the principle previously laid down for a competitive tender—which principle was set aside in the case of the Polaris submarines—and also the unemployment in Harland and Wolff, there is a good case for placing the aircraft carrier order with Northern Ireland. I am glad to see that the Prime Minister is listening to my remarks. I hope that he will use all his influence with his colleagues in the Cabinet when this subject comes up.

I welcome the attention which has been given to the problems of regional development in general. This will help the whole country, and especially those areas in Scotland and the North-East which received so much attention in the opening speech of the Secretary of State for Industry. I regret to say, however, that Northern Ireland was mentioned only in passing in my right hon. Friend's speech. When attention is given to providing work in Scotland and the North-East it must be realised that to some extent this must be at the expense of Northern Ireland.

The two White Papers, published a few weeks ago, pointed out that the North-East is to receive an increase in public expenditure. That expenditure is to rise from £55 million this year to £80 million next year, and £90 million in the following year. The White Papers point out that 5½ per cent of the population of Great Britain lives in the North-East, and that in the past 5½ per cent, of the total of public expenditure has been spent in the North-East. This expenditure is to rise as a result of the Government's programme, to 6½ per cent, in the coming year and to 7 per cent, in the following year. For Scotland, the sums of money concerned are £100 million, £130 million, and £150 million respectively.

The midland area of Scotland carries only 7½ per cent, of the population of Great Britain, and the percentage of public expenditure which is being spent is to rise from its present 7½ per cent, to 11 per cent, next year and over 11 per cent, the year after. In other words, in the North-East an extra 2½ per cent, or 3 per cent, is being spent in public expenditure above its share calculated purely on a population basis. For Scotland the increase is between 4 per cent, and 5 per cent. But in Northern Ireland, as is shown in the joint report of the working party, although we have 28 per cent, of the working population, the amount spent in public expenditure is only 1 per cent, above the national average. This is static, at 3.8 per cent.

I ask my right hon. Friends on the Treasury Bench to give sympathetic attention to Northern Ireland. My right hon. Friend the Secretary for Industry and Trade, said that the extra help being given to Scotland and the North-East would be at the expense of other areas in the British Isles. The new co-ordinating body which is being set up in the Board of Trade must pay particular attention to the problems of Northern Ireland and expressly cover them.

I was brushed off a little when I sought to interrupt my right hon. Friend's speech. He reminded me of the Government at Stormont, but I remind my right hon. Friends that the United Kingdom is a single unit and that the Treasury here is a key figure. This is why there are 12 Ulster Unionists in the House. The unemployment figure for Northern Ireland, at 6½ per cent., is 2 per cent, worse than that for Scotland or that for the North-East Coast. Northern Ireland should he granted the same kind of help in priming the pump as is being given to Scotland and the North-East.

I should like to see an increase in the building of schools and hospitals and technical training colleges in Northern Ireland, and perhaps a college of advanced technology set up. I want to see an increase in the building of roads, bridges, advance factories and offices—all increased in step with Scotland and the North-East—and impetus given to our slum clearance and rehousing.

May I end with two suggestions? First, I want a better liaison between the Government here, between the Ministers responsible for Education and those other matters of which I have spoken, and their opposite numbers at Stormont, so that any increase in public expenditure will be reflected straight away not only in Scotland and the North-East, but in Northern Ireland. We must get away from the Hall Report, which was printed in the days of credit squeeze and standstill—away from the recommendation that there should be no increase in public expenditure. Finally, I want a better share for Northern Ireland of defence work, both for our shipyards and our aircraft industry, for Short Bros., and Harland, and I want more Government contracts given to Northern Ireland.

9.3 p.m.

Mr. William Ross (Kilmarnock)

May I begin by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Dundee, West (Mr. Doig), whose speech was worthy of the occasion, of the constituency and of himself. He was forthright and non-controversial—at least, non-controversial for Dundee. I assure the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Scotland that no one in Dundee would have disagreed with a single word he said. I look forward, as I am sure does the House, to much more controversial efforts from him in future.

My hon. Friend was also logical, which the Government are not, because he pointed out that if the Government intend to carry out their policies for jute and to endanger the mainstay of the city, they should put Dundee into the special position of being a growth area and of having special consideration. He echoed the feelings of my hon. Friends who have not had an opportunity to speak today. We have another day to come, and I am sure that we shall hear the ringing voice from Greenock and voices from Glasgow and parts of Lanarkshire. As hon. Member for Kilmarnock I should like, too, to make a constituency speech.

The main point is that today the Government's policies have had a tepid welcome, and there will be reactions not only of anger but of outrage all over the areas not covered by the two White Papers when the full implications are realised of the speech made by the President of the Board of Trade.

Mr. W. Hamilton

And Secretary of State for Industry, Trade and Regional Development.

Mr. Ross

He said that any advances going to these two regions would be at the expense of other regions. This implies within central Scotland that any special advantages—and I presume there are some—of being within a growth point will be at the expense of other areas. Can we wonder, then, at the agitation of my hon. Friends whore present Dundee, Glasgow, Greenock and Kirkcaldy? As my hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy Burghs (Mr. Gourlay) knows, the part of his constituency which has the highest rate of unemployment is outside the growth area.

The Minister said, "We are dealing with the regions and taking these two first because they are the worst. But then we shall deal with the others, and after we have dealt with all of them we shall see whether they fit into the national scene." It is like doing a crossword puzzle without the clues or a jigsaw puzzle without the guidance of the full picture.

All we have here is Alexander's Ragtime Band, and the tune they are playing—they have brought themselves up to date—is "Let us twist it again as we did at the last election". The only thing which is not in the Scottish White Paper is the candidate's photograph.

This is purely and simply a piece of political posturing. The Government use the word "plan". We talk of congested roads. The most congested political road in Britain today is the road to Damascus. All the repentant Tories have seen the light but they are so blinded by it that they do not know what a plan means yet. However, the word is used more than once in this grandiose fiction of script writers' imagination. They have described it as a comprehensive plan for modernisation of the area and for stimulation of industry.

I ask the President of the Board of Trade whether there is anything new in this at all in relation to industry? Is there a single new decision, a single new inducement? There is nothing. In Scotland, all the new growth areas—so-called—are already within development districts. They could have got all this without the White Paper.

The only thing that is new is a suggestion that there will be increased public expenditure—not this year, and, indeed, not by this Government, but some time in the future, starting next year. My right hon. Friend the Member for Battersea, North (Mr. Jay), in a brilliant speech, brought the whole thing down to proportion. The figure will be £10 million extra next year.

Mr. Noble

indicated dissent.

Mr. Ross

Yes. Of course, we do not expect the Secretary of State to know. The figures were given by the President of the Board of Trade for this, that and the next thing. This year the figure is £130 million, next year it will be £140 million and thereafter it will retain its proportion. It is a long time since I taught in school but my arithmetic makes that an increase of £10 million. I dare say that even in Argyll they would agree with that.

I want to deal with some aspects of this wonderful plan to demonstrate that it is a piece of political posturing. The White Paper on Central Scotland is sub-titled A Programme for Development and Growth. On page 18 there is an item dealing with airports, and it includes this statement about Turnhouse: … the scale and timing of further development of the airport…will be examined. Then we come to ports. It says: The authorities of all the principal ports on the Clyde and Forth have either prepared, or are now preparing, plans… These plans …will be examined … Then we come to railways. The White Paper says: The contribution which the railways can make to the promotion of economic growth in Central Scotland is indisputable". It is indisputable all right. In 1961 the Government decided to plan Livingston. In giving their reasons for selecting Livingston as a new town they said: The area proposed for designation lies in the valley of the Almond, between Mid Calder and Polboth. The Edinburgh-Glasgow Trunk Road (A.8) forms the northern boundary and the southern tip lies just south of the Edinburgh-Motherwell-Glasgow railway …Livingston should, therefore, be able to benefit at an early date from first class transport facilities to Edinburgh and Glasgow. That was in 1961—before Beeching. That railway is being closed. But do not worry. Let us turn to the new White Paper again. It says: Full consideration has been given in drawing up this programme for Central Scotland to the effect of the proposals in Dr. Beeching's report. In fact, Dr. Beeching has had his way. The Government have accepted it and will fit in their plans with his decisions.

The White Paper talks of an enormous number of projects, some of them started before the last war and some, we are told, will be finished next year. My hon. Friend the Member for Dunbartonshire, East (Mr. Bence) has been told that the A.74, which was to have been finished by 1965, might be finished by 1970. That road was started in about 1938. No definite new projects are mentioned here. Anything that is new has a question mark over it. It is also hoped that investment resources may permit a start to be made on the construction of a high level bridge at Erskine … This is a catalogue of deferred hopes, of projects started at various times to meet existing needs. It is a collection of platitudes. ߪ there is great scope in Central Scotland for office employment … Someone in Scotland described the part of the White Paper dealing with amenities as "platitudinous piffle". I would not describe it as such. To me, it was not worth a word. The Government have discovered the Edinburgh Festival. Did they plan that too?

One of the few references to Dundee is the reference to the theatre there. Members of our kirk dramatic society are very annoyed because they do not get a mention. We are told platitudinously that these things are all necessary. What are the Government going to do to encourage local authorities to go on with these things? The answer is "absolutely nothing".

This is a piece of posturing. The President of the Board of Trade will remember that he had a few things to say to me about the Local Employment Act. I suggested, and we on this side have suggested, that it was not a success, and so the right hon. Gentleman repeated the kind of stuff that we had from the Prime Minister when he was touring round Kinross. Never was a man so ill-reported. He had a fireside chat with the local correspondents and that night the Dundee Courier came out with the statement that Mr. Ross had said that the state of Scotland is important in this connection and the Prime Minister replied, 'I will take Mr. Ross on any platform he likes.' That was in the Press. Mr. Ross was still in Crieff, and Mr. Ross said that he would meet the Prime Minister, and when the reporters asked the Prime Minister he said, "I was misreported".

It is stated that there is a sum of £47 million for Scotland. This is the latest. The figure has risen by £3½ million from the same source since last week, because last week I asked for the figures for each year. It is interesting to note them. They are, for 1960–61, £3.4 million; for 1961–62, £18.4 million—that was when the motor industry was building up—and for 1962–63 the figure is down to £14.4 million. In the current year, when unemployment is higher than it has ever been, the sum is £7 million and we are told by the Estimates Committee that it is expected that it will drop back to the 1960 level of £3 million.

The aim of the White Papers is to try and distract the minds of the people from the Government's failure in carrying out the pledges and promises for Scotland and the North-East and the other areas made in 1959–60. All this stuff is not new. We have had it before. We had it from the last Prime Minister. We had it at the time of the General Election. Here is the then Prime Ministers message to Scotland: In Scotland the main emphasis will be on the provision of jobs. Scotland's over-dependence on the old-established industries is reflected, even in the most prosperous times, in a relatively higher level of unemployment. We are determined to correct this disparity, and we shall continue our successful work to attract new enterprises…. You will see that for this purpose we are going to bring in a Bill to modernise our distribution of industry policy. I am sorry that the Chancellor of the Exchequer is not present. He had plenty to say and we had plenty of Amendments to put forward at that time to strengthen the Bill, but they were all turned down. Even the hon. Member for Bute and North Ayrshire (Sir F. Maclean) and the hon. Member for Ross and Cromarty (Sir John MacLeod) supported the Government at that time. It is interesting to note that the only hon. Member opposite who supported this White Paper today is not present now. He is already on the stool of repentance.

We were asked what we on this side of the House would do. We were asked whether we would direct people. I ask hon. Members to look up HANSARD for the 23rd February, 1960. This is what the present Chancellor of the Exchequer said then: We cannot get people to go to the areas where we want them to go until we first compel them"— this is the Chancellor of the Exchequer— to expand other than in the crowded Midlands and this South". The crowded Midlands and the South are more crowded than ever they were, and the worst hit areas are still worse hit.

The right hon. Gentleman went on to say: We intend to tackle this problem on a progressive basis by dealing, first, with the areas which are worst hit and then giving support to places which are less badly hit."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 23rd February, 1960; Vol. 618, c. 216 and 219.] He said that the success of that Measure would be judged not by money; that it was sheer folly to talk about money in that sense. That is what the President of the Board of Trade said at that time—that it is foolish to measure success in terms of money spent. I hope that that goes home to the Prime Minister. What matters is the number of jobs related to the need, and those two things have never been matched in Scotland, the North-East or even Northern Ireland.

Mr. Speir

Or Wales.

Mr. Ross

Yes, the voice of Wales will be heard.

How can an hon. Member for one of the Highland constituencies be satisfied with the Local Employment Act, which provides 90 jobs a year? What does he imagine will be the effect of the White Paper, which, I presume, he will support tomorrow night? What will be the effect of concentrating effort, if it is concentrated—and this is the Government's pledge—in Central Scotland? What will be the effect on the Highlands or on the Borders? It will be to exaggerate and continue the depopulation of those areas. What we want is a plan for Scotland matched to the true needs of Scotland as a whole.

Listen to this: In seeking new industry, we must make sure that the advantages we have to offer are as widely known as possible. To my mind, they are space and manpower. By contrast with some other parts of Britain, there is more than enough space available in Scotland to accommodate all the industrial development we could want—and it need not be only in the Forth and Clyde Basins. There are Dundee and Aberdeen and many country areas, including the Highlands, where sites and good labour are waiting for development. We do not want to spread congestion in our central belt and produce our own national coffin through lack of foresight."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 19th July, 1962; Vol. 663, c. 674] That was said by the Secretary of State for Scotland last year, in the first speech he made, in the debate on Scottish industry and employment.

It is economic nonsense. I think that it was the noble Lord the Minister of State who said that we wanted to make the centre of Scotland as attractive as the Midlands of England. It is not the most attractive part of the world, but, surely, we do not want to repeat the mistakes of the past. If we are re-planning and modernising Scotland, creating new towns and new growth areas, we must take advantage of our attractions, attractions of space and the availability of manpower elsewhere than in this narrow belt.

In 1952, at the time when we had the Cairncross Report to which the hon. Member for Ross and Cromarty referred, a delegation from this side of the House went to the Secretary of State for Scotland and the President of the Board of Trade at that time and pleaded with them to give us a blueprint for Scottish industry. My hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh, Leith (Mr. Hoy) will remember that occasion because he was with us. Nothing was done. We drifted on. Even the distribution of industry policy was not properly applied.

Who was the Minister of State for Scotland at that time? He has had promotion since then. I assure the right hon. Gentleman that I have been looking at all the speeches he made about Scottish industry in another place while he was in that exalted position. He never made one.

The Prime Minister went round Kinross lining up all the factories, 50 yards wide—what a silly way to line up factories—and some of them were empty, while some had not even been built. If all the men in Scotland who had been made redundant had been lined up, he would have had much less of the feudal loyalty to which he was able to appeal in Kinross and West Perthshire.

What has happened to Scotland is a disgrace. How can the Government say now that they have a plan, when all we have are, in truth, projects, long-deferred promises and platitudes? What was it the previous Prime Minister said in his message to Scotland?— The best test of the value of promises is performance. So it is.

The Government are getting so many Reports now, and they are so near an election, that they accept them all without hesitation. What about Robbins? Accepted straight away, never mind what has been done in cutting down education in Scotland. Incidentally, what increase is there to be in education next year, apart from the increase in teachers' salaries? There is no increase whatever shown in the public investment programme. There was the Cameron Report, the only survey made in this country of the transport needs of an area, and it was in the Highlands of Scotland. That was accepted, too. A board has been set up. What has happened about that? Just this week, we have had announcements about the closing of stations and the withdrawal of services.

Who is really who in Scotland? Is it the Secretary of State for Scotland? Is is the Prime Minister? Or is it Dr. Beeching and the Minister of Transport, who combine the sadism of Burke and Hare with the irresponsibility of Francie and Josie? If the Secretary of State for Scotland fully appreciated the position, and the dangers in which he is putting the social life and future hopes of that part, he would tell the Minister of Transport to tell Dr. Beeching to forget all about this withdrawal of passenger services there. It is absolutely ridiculous to go on with this farce if the Secretary of State for Scotland and the Prime Minister really mean their pledge to the Highlands and to Scotland about the adequacy of alternative transport. It is no good saying that it will never happen; it all depends on their standard of adequacy. After what has happened elsewhere, the Highlands had better be prepared for the worst.

There has been considerable criticism, not only in this debate but in the Press in Scotland about the burden the right hon. Gentleman is placing on the construction industry. It is reckoned that if this work carries on it will require an increase of about 30,000 or 40,000 men in that industry in Scotland. The construction industry has at present about 11,000 men unemployed. If we add the number of men in shipbuilding and coal mining who might be able to change their jobs easily, I gather that it still leaves about 25,000 men who will have to be retrained. We are told in this so-called plan that we are to build up to the ability to retrain 1,700 men a year.

How is that to be done? As has been pointed out more than once, we are trying to expand the industry by one-third in three years when the N.E.D.C. has already pointed out that we shall be straining it to expand by one-fifth in five years over the whole country. The thing does not add up or match up. That is why there is cynicism about the areas covered, and anger and despair in the areas that are lined up.

I want now to draw attention to yet another Report—which, once again, has been accepted in principle by the Government. Some people have said that the Buchanan Report is the most far-reaching Report we have had. The Crowther Steering Group did not have a great deal of faith in the Government's promises and pledges for sorting out the imbalance in the country, because it said in paragraph 14: We would not wish to pre-judge the success of the efforts that are now being made to attract industry and population to those parts of the country that have been losing them. But it is doubtful whether they will have such a far-reaching success as wholly to reverse the present tendency for South East England and the Midlands to grow at a faster rate than the rest of the country. If they are to grow at a still faster rate, my hon. Friend the Member for Mother well (Mr. Lawson) was right when he said that, relatively, the other parts of the country will become poorer, and lag further and further behind. It is happening within Great Britain as a whole, and it will happen by Government decree to an exaggerated extent in Scotland if these plans are carried out.

Paragraph 45 of the Buchanan Report sums it all up. The Toothill Report said the same thing; that Scotland is suffering in an extreme degree from the ills from which the whole of Britain is suffering. It said that one way to cure it was by planning, with proper targets for industry. It said that this had been done elsewhere, but we have not got it in Britain. Where do we go from here? We do not know the targets for industry. We do not know which industries will be expanded, or who will expand them. There is no decision here at all. In fact, no one has been consulted. I ask the Secretary of State: have the Government consulted any local authority about this plan, or are they just intending to start? This is a piece of window-dressing.

The Government should pay attention to paragraph 45 of the Crowther Steering Group's Report, which states: In any effective programme of urban modernisation, such as we have been outlining, it is possible to distinguish four main stages. I want to quote only the first one: First, there must be a clear statement of national objectives. Regional planning cannot work in isolation. Unless there is a policy on a national basis dealing with the location of industry and population, from which would flow policies in respect of roads, ports, air facilities, etc., regional planning cannot be successful. Without such a policy it is impossible to know what populations and kinds of employment must be planned for locally, nor the rate at which development can take place, nor can there be any certainty that some uncontrolled drift of events will not reduce all local plans to futility. What we are getting is a continuation of drift. Planning is antagonistic to the principles of hon. Members opposite, because it means interfering with the sanctity of free enterprise, and with this strange belief of, "Leave them alone, and everything will come right." Until we do get purpose, ruthless planning, and acceptance by the Government of responsibility for what they pledge to the people about full employment and growth within the whole nation, we will continue to drift.

I sincerely hope that tomorrow night hon. Members from Scotland and from all those areas which have discovered that even though they are development districts they will get no priority from the Government, and that their problems will not be met, and who realise that what we have is piecemeal, ineffective planning, will take their stand against the Government. This is my advice to the twelve Members from Northern Ireland. If they feel that this country needs at this moment more than ever to turn its back on the past and to release and harness the energies of the people, let them use their political power here to achieve it. Until they do, the Government will drift on. I sincerely hope that tomorrow night will be a turning point.

9.36 p.m.

The Secretary of State for Scotland (Mr. Michael Noble)

It is always a pleasure to welcome a maiden speech in this House. I am particularly delighted to have the explanation from the hon. Member for Kilmarnock (Mr. Ross) that the very forthright speech made by the hon. Member for Dundee, West (Mr. Doig) was, for Dundee, non-controversial. We look forward, as the hon. Member for Kilmarnock said, to some really forthright and controversial speeches in future from the hon. Member for Dundee, West.

I welcome the fact that this is a United Kingdom debate, although I am sure that some of my hon. Friends and some hon. Members opposite probably feel that Scotland has hogged a good deal of it. However, I think that those of us who live north of the Border realise very clearly that our problems cannot be solved without looking, at the same time, at the problems in the South of England. Therefore, a United Kingdom debate, even it it spreads unevenly over two days, is a good thing.

The hon. Member for Kilmarnock said that the Government were playing a tune which he described as "Let's twist again". Having listened carefully to most of his rather long speech, I quite cheerfully face the "Crazy Gang "opposite, because they seem to be just as much out of date as a good many of their ideas. The point that he made to the effect that it was impossible to give advantages to growth areas without, to some extent, penalising other areas is perfectly true. Again and again, during the years I have been in this House, hon. Members opposite have asked the Government to give priority to Scotland. What does "priority" mean unless it means giving more to the places which need it most?

The hon. Member for Kilmarnock also said that the Government's plan was a piece of political posturing. I am very tempted to say that a great deal of the opposition which I have heard from hon. Members opposite today arose, perhaps, because they are afraid that things are going rather better in Scotland than they hoped they might. They are, therefore, hoping that this will not continue and that the "Crazy Gang" will continue to sit on the benches opposite. If the hon. Member is taking the figures of public investment in Scotland at the beginning of this year, investment was running at the rate of £100 million. During the course of this year, for reasons which become increasingly obvious if anybody studies the White Paper, the figure went from £100 million to £130 million and it goes to £140 million next year. Therefore, it is dishonest to say that the whole of this represents only a 10 per cent. rise.

I see the fun, if the hon. Member for Kilmarnock wants to indulge in it, of picking out odd sentences in any White Paper and saying that they are platitudinous. But I find this difficult to understand from the hon. Member, who presumably read, although I dare say he did not write or approve of, "Signposts for the 'Sixties".

The hon. Member asked particularly about the problem of the burden on the construction industries. I admit that this is a difficult problem to assess accurately. Last spring, I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. George Middle-ton. We were discussing a speech which I had made a short time before, saying that I thought we would need in Scotland 10,000 to 20,000 extra building operatives very quickly. He explained to me the difficulties inherent in building up a trained force unless there was an adequate supply of work in front of it and the difficulties that this could create for the trade unions.

Now that we have attempted to show that there is enough work in front of the trade unions in the building and construction industries in Scotland for the next five or 10 years, and, in addition to that, we hope that my right hon. Friend the Minister of Public Building and Works will be able to stimulate new sorts of building and more efficient uses of material and men, it does not seem out of reason to set our target for the next five or 10 years pretty high.

Coming back to the main subject of the debate, the persistent problems of unemployment and migration and the immensely accelerated rate of industrial change in some sections of the Scottish economy often seem to tempt people to believe that by some magic formula a solution could be found which would cure all our ills, regardless of the fortunes of the national economy as a whole. This fallacy derives from an excessive degree of introspection and concentration on the margins of the problem.

The table in Appendix 2 of the Scottish White Paper shows, for example, that, taking all the industries and services together, and, in particular, the service industries which employ rather more than 50 per cent, of all insured workers in Scotland, Scotland's rate of growth in those industries and services which are expanding is in step with the rate of employment growth in those industries in Great Britain as a whole. The rate of growth in these expanding industries, which employ nearly 1½ million people, or about 70 per cent, of the total Scottish labour force, was, in the three years down to mid-1962, fractionally higher than the Great Britain figure.

The critical problem in Scotland, therefore, has been the accelerated rate of change in the older industries, and I shall have more to say about this later. What is clear from these figures is that the greater part of the Scottish economy is in good heart and that the rate of growth matches and more than matches the United Kingdom figures.

I now turn to the application to Scotland of the Government policy outlined by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Industry, Trade and Regional Development. For the reasons that I have given, this policy must be cast in the framework of our policy for Great Britain as a whole and within that framework it is my responsibility, as Scotland's Minister, to prepare and progress the implementation of specific plans for the separate economic regions of Scotland. For this purpose we have established a Scottish Development Group in which all the major Departments concerned with the Scottish economy are represented. This Group meets frequently under the chairmanship of the Secretary of the Scottish Development Department and I receive regular reports of the progress of its work. The first phase of the work of this Group is reflected in the proposals now set out in the White Paper on Central Scotland.

Action on these proposals has already been initiated. Discussions with local authorities have been started and in the course of those discussions and further consultations which I shall be having with the New Town Corporations and other bodies we shall work out with them early in the new year fully integrated and detailed arrangements for the implementation of the plan. The timing of the new developments will be closely linked with industrial progress and will be sufficiently flexible to cater for new developments in the economy.

In this work we have learned a great deal from the experience which we have gained from planning and phasing large new developments like the new towns. Our ultimate intention is that the development of both the regional infrastructure and of the growth areas, stretching across Central Scotland from Fife to North Ayrshire, should be programmed and phased with the same degree of care and precision. In this way, all the participants, from the construction industries right through to the people who will live and work in these areas, will have clearly before them the pattern of future developments.

The success of the new towns is, we are satisfied, due very largely to this kind of pre-planning and programming and to the sense of confident commitment which it inspires. It makes an immense difference to industrialists who are seeking locations for new projects or expansions to have before them a complete picture of the developments in prospect.

Mr. Lawson

The growth area which includes the new town of East Kilbride also includes the older town of Mother well, which I represent. I recently asked the right hon. Gentleman a Question about additional financial assistance, for example, towards the building of houses. The answer I got was that there was no additional financial assistance. There has been no consultation in my constituency although it is part of a growth area. What has the right hon. Gentleman to say about that?

Mr. Noble

Close consultation with local authorities is starting now and will continue regularly. There has been consultation before, of course, but now we have to get down to the details.

The hon. Member for Kilmarnock asked that we should make a plan for the whole of Scotland. Of course we could have done that, but it would have taken a good many months extra to do. [Interruption.] That may be the view of hon. Members opposite, but it will not be shared by any of the people on my staff, who have worked extremely hard in the last 15 months. Central Scotland has, rightly I think, to be our first priority. As hon. Members on both sides of the House know, it comprises 75 per cent, of our population and about 90 per cent, of the whole of our industry.

But it is perfectly clear that we have also to develop complementary measures for the other areas of Scotland, and my Development Group has already started on this work. I should make it perfectly clear that the special examination of these areas does not by any means imply that immediate action within present policies will not be pressed forward with full vigour. To give an example, I need mention only the pulp mill at Fort William.

One of the main criticisms of the Central Scotland White Paper is that it offers no direct or immediate relief to the problems of this winter. But that is not its purpose. It is concerned with a longer term pattern of modernisation for the whole area. The problems of this winter were very much in mind when the measures of financial policy announced earlier this year were put into effect—the changes in the Finance Act, especially free depreciation in the development districts, the changes in the Local Employment Act, including standard inducements, the shipbuilding credit scheme, the special programmes of additional investment and other decisions in the same field. These are already showing conspicuous results.

For example, unemployment in shipbuilding has fallen from 7,800 in April to about 4,000 at the end of October. Nearly one-third of all the new tonnage which the £75 million credit scheme is helping to finance is being built in Scotland. In manufacturing industry the amount of financial assistance offered under the Local Employment Act for Scottish projects between April and October of this year was equal to the full total of the preceding 12 months. Even this does not reflect the full results of the 496 applications which have come in for projects in Scotland out of a total of about 1,150 for the United Kingdom since the Budget. Most of these have come forward recently and are now being processed.

Hon. Members asked about the rate of failures in applications. Out of 1,150, I am told, nearly 100 have been turned down.

Mr. Thorpe

Presumably the right hon. Gentleman has no figures on a regional basis.

Mr. Noble

I was asked for the United Kingdom figure and I have given it.

Many of the new projects will give very early employment particularly where, as in the new towns and in some other areas, there are already factories waiting, into which people can move and start work at once. The full employment tally of all the projects which have recently been announced in the Press—no fewer than 16 major industrial developments ranging from printing to spun concrete pipes, and in geographical distribution from Dundee to Dalkeith and Girvan—is estimated at 31,000 extra jobs in the next two years.

I find it particularly encouraging that when the Holyrood Knitwear factory closed, or announced its impending closure, a few weeks ago, there were immediately a number of prospective developers, and the factory has already been taken up by a firm engaged in one of the fastest growing industries in the whole country, electronics and telecommunications equipment. This is a real success story and illustrates better than anything else the buoyancy of one of our best growth areas.

In the few moments left to me I will try to deal with points from the speeches made today. The right hon. Member for Battersea, North (Mr. Jay) asked why the Linwood and Paisley area had not been made a growth area. The reason is simple. In that small area there is no room to expand beyond its obvious existing expansion. The right hon. Gentleman also asked why Newcastle was included in a growth area and Glasgow was not. The reason is also fairly simple. If we look at the pattern of the two maps, it will be seen that Newcastle is in the middle of one large growth area for the North-East Glasgow is not in the middle of a growth area for Scotland and at the moment is the centre of a major overspill operation. We are hoping that many of the people in Glasgow will move out of that city and form the labour force for places like East Kilbride, Cumbernauld and other parts.

I think that I have dealt with the argument of the right hon. Gentleman that if we give a little extra to growth areas other places will get less. But I should like to assure him that because of the extra which in this plan we are giving to the growth areas, in public investment, infrastructure, roads, houses, and so on, we are not in any way cutting down on the balance for the rest of Scotland as a whole—

Mr. Jay

Can the Secretary of State—

Mr. Noble

I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will allow me to continue, because I have little time and a great deal to say.

Dr. Dickson Mabon

rose

Mr. Noble

I cannot give way. I started late and I am trying to cover a wide-ranging subject very quickly.

In his speech the right hon. Gentleman made clear that he did not accept the concept of growth areas, because he wanted all areas where there was a high and persistent rate of unemployment to be treated alike. I understand that in this he differs from the hon. Member for Fife, West (Mr. W. Hamilton) and, indeed, there is room for a divergence of opinion. We believe that growth areas are right and we intend to pursue that policy.

My hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeenshire, East (Mr. Wolrige-Gordon) give a lurid description of people in the snow who were warm round the middle, but had cold hands and feet. I know that my hon. Friend wears the kilt and he will know that if one has a kilt and keeps one's middle warm, ones hands and feet do not get cold. I agree with my hon. Friend that migration inevitably follows a certain amount of unemployment, and this we hope and plan to try to diminish greatly over the next few years. I welcome the fact that he was pleased that there has been real progress and healthy development in Buchan. He has spoken to me before about the importance of freight services to that area.

I wish to mention one point raised in the maiden speech of the hon. Member for Dundee, West. I entirely agree that we must avoid creating another Birmingham in the central belt and we have no intention of doing that. My hon. Friend the Member for Bute and North Ayrshire (Sir F. Maclean) paid a tribute to the Toothill Committee and its work. I notice that if the Government do not accept anything recommended by Mr. Toothill, the Opposition ask why, but if we do, they say they do not agree with it in any case.

Dr. Dickson Mabon

That is not true.

Mr. Noble

None the less, I welcome the fact that my hon. Friend was prepared to be generous in a constituency sense and to welcome the growth which will take place around Irvine because he knows that it will benefit his constituency as well as that of the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Mr. Manuel).

The right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr. Grimond) suggested that we should co-ordinate all these reports that come in from Dr. Beeching, Professor Buchanan, and so on, and this is exactly what the Scottish Development Department is planning to do.

The right hon. Gentleman also suggested that the Toothill recommendation, which was supported by N.E.D.C., of a 4 per cent, rate of growth in the United Kingdom might be satisfactory, but asked what was our calculation of the growth in Scotland and the North-East. I cannot give him an exact figure, because it is impossible to break down the United Kingdom figure, but it is quite clear that if we are to overtake the United Kingdom average we in Scotland and the North-East have to grow rather faster than 4 per cent.

I disagree profoundly with a remark made by the right hon. Gentleman, but he was not expressing his own thoughts. He said that two engineering firms had told him that they could not get suitable staff in Scotland. I have spoken to many engineering firms in America as well as in Scotland. They have all unanimously said how easy it is both to get and to train engineering staff in Scotland, and I think that this point should be set right.

My hon. Friend the Member for North Angus and Mearns (Sir C. Thornton-Kemsley) made most of his speech, as I expected he would, on the technical problems of planning, on which he is a considerable expert and very knowledgeable. We have every intention of keeping the local authorities very closely in our minds in the whole of this planning, because we realise how important their co-operation and their work is to the whole of the future.

On his problem of the green belt, I think that the whole concept of growth areas as set out in our map shows that we are keen to avoid the sort of urban sprawl which has occurred in the South.

The hon. Member for Fife, West assured us that the Government could not last for more than six months. He may be wrong. The intention of the plan is that we should be here for at least another five years to see it carried out. I am glad the hon. Gentleman agreed that growth areas were acceptable, because I think that they are particularly suitable for his constituency.

I welcome, also, the fact that the hon. Gentleman wants more new towns. It is true, as he said, that we need 100,000 more jobs by 1971, and 140,000 more between then and 1981, but we believe that by these methods we shall get them, and that it will not be necessary to bring in public enterprise, which is a polite form of nationalisation, to fill the gap.

I am sorry that I missed the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Caithness and Sutherland (Sir D. Robertson). He confirmed what I am sure the hon. Member for Fife, West knows, that Glenrothes is busy keeping a lot of houses empty because it knows that a great deal of industry is coming to that area. I am glad that he stressed the tremendous success that Dounreay has been in an extremely distant and isolated part of the country. It disposes once and for all of the sort of argument that one often hears used, sometimes from this side of the House, and sometimes from hon. Gentlemen opposite, that it is impossible to settle intelligent, educated and high-grade staff, to which the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland referred, in the Highlands. It can be done, and has been done very successfully.

I also missed the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Ross and Cromarty (Sir John Macleod). I am looking forward to reading his speech in HANSARD tomorrow. I had a chance of talking to my hon. Friend before he made his speech, and he told me roughly what line he was going to take.

I do not agree with the hon. Member for Kilmarnock that this has been a tepid or dull debate. I think that it has been an interesting one.

Mr. Ross

I did not say that.

Mr. Noble

I beg the hon. Gentleman's pardon. He said that the White Paper would produce a tepid result. I believe that most Members realise that this is the first attempt really to get things in Scotland put right.

It being Ten o'clock, the debate stood adjourned.

Debate to be resumed Tomorrow.