EMPLOYMENT, SCOTLAND (Hansard, 13 February 1964)

§ Mr. Archie Manuel (Central Ayrshire)
I am very pleased that my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Brigg (Mr. E. L. Mallalieu) had the opportunity to raise the subject of the location of industry in certain parts of the country at a sufficiently early time for some of us to join him.

§ Mr. Speaker
Order. The hon. Gentleman will understand that I must ask him whether he has given warning to the Minister responsible, or the Minister he believes to be responsible.

§ Mr. Manuel
May I reply in this way, Mr. Speaker? It is the same Minister who has been responsible for the location of industry throughout the United Kingdom, and I understand that my hon. and learned Friend, who was sponsored through the usual channels, has done what was necessary. He has assured me of that and, therefore, I think that the agreement which has been made is satisfied.

§ Mr. Speaker
I think that the hon. Gentleman's answer is the word "Yes". I am obliged to him.

§ Mr. George Lawson (Motherwell)
On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. I cannot quite understand this. My understanding of the position is that it is sufficient that one hon. Member gives advice that several hon. Members may wish to intervene in a debate of this sort on a given subject and that such advice given by that one person is the advice which is accepted. I have not yet been informed that each is expected individually to give such advice.

§ Mr. Speaker
I do not know how often I shall need to say this. As far as I am concerned, I accept the assurance of the hon. Gentleman in question. If he thinks that he has done it through an agent or a series of agents, perhaps, that is good enough for me. I do not wish to inquire into what happens behind the scenes. I accept the hon. Gentleman's assurance. That is all.

§ Mr. Manuel
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I was congratulating my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Brigg on what he had done, but I do not think 685 that he received very much satisfaction from the reply of the Parliamentary Secretary. We got the usual reply which is becoming commonplace now about the need for employment to be created in many areas of the country. I wish to deal with the plainly apparent need in many parts of Scotland. I should be quite willing to include England and Wales, too, and I am not, therefore, putting the Parliamentary Secretary in the position of needing data about any particular area.
It is well known that many areas, particularly in Scotland, are doing everything possible, through the local authorities and through combinations of associations which have formed development committees, to bring industry where it is needed. I disagree profoundly with the case put by the Parliamentary Secretary when he says that, in modern conditions, modern industry being what it is, we must accept the idea that a journey of 50 miles will be commonplace, or words to that effect.

§ The Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade (Mr. David Price)
Fifteen miles.

§ Mr. Manuel
I have always believed in and propagated the idea that industry should serve the needs of the people and that people should not, willy-nilly, be driven by economic need into the congested areas and that, similarly, industry should not always be located there.
The need is becoming glaringly apparent in those parts of the country where the older industries, mainly coal mining and shipbuilding, are passing out and new industries are not coming in to replace them. In these parts, unemployment runs at twice the rate in the rest of the United Kingdom. Special attention to their needs is urgently required. Much is at stake, and what would happen has been clear for a number of years now.

§ Mr. Manuel
In these areas there has been a cessation of the old employment agencies and inevitably depopula 686 tion has taken place. There has been a gradual lowering of conditions and there is left only a nucleus of labour because the best labour has inevitably moved out.
I am glad to see that the Leader of the House has arrived. I hope that he will reply at the end of the debate. I am sorry that he has missed part of my contribution. He is deputy Prime Minister, and that is a very onerous position these days. In these areas the older industries have died out, or are dying out, or are contracting to such an extent that they are not giving the employment which they formerly gave, and very serious problems are arising.
I am sure that the Leader of the House will appreciate my next point because he has always taken an interest in local government and local government finance. During his period at the Treasury and in his Budget speeches much thought had to be given to local authority areas. In local authority areas where old industries are dying out and modern ones are not taking their place, there is depopulation and inevitably local authorities are receiving a lower rate yield.
The local authorities have taken on their shoulders onerous burdens because they have invested in houses, hospitals, libraries and clinics and all those things which they have tried to bring into being to create a good life for the people. In some local authorities in Scotland—for instance, in the old mining areas which are dying out—repayment of loan capital, sometimes running into millions of pounds, is spread over 60 years. An onerous burden is placed on local authorities and they are getting no help from the Government in respect of it.
What is the answer to this problem? In spite of all the inducements given in the Local Employment Act and the assistance in setting up industries given in the last Budget, it is clear that private enterprise is still not going into these areas. The Government must do something more of the carrot to induce industries to go into these areas is not big enough. Perhaps the Leader of the House will agree that what is needed is for the Government to make certain that Government-sponsored industry goes to these areas, thus saving them 687 from the inevitable degradation and decay which will take place if Government action is not taken.

§ Miss Margaret Herbison (Lanarkshire, North)
Before I raise a number of points, I should like your Ruling, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, about the fact that a Minister is not present from the Board of Trade to reply. I understand that in the usual courteous way, my hon. Friend the Member for Motherwell (Mr. Lawson) informed the responsible Minister that if there were time after my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Brigg (Mr. E. L. Mallalieu) had made his case, hon. Members from Scotland would wish to raise various matters. What is the position of hon. Members if the Minister simply walks out?

§ Mr. Deputy-Speaker (Sir Robert Grimston)
It is not a matter for the Chair whether the Minister is present. It is not possible for the Chair to enforce the presence of anybody.

§ Mr. William Ross (Kilmarnock)
Further to that point of order. You will bear in mind, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, that very formally—it is something that I have never known during the long time that I have been a Member of the House—I heard Mr. Speaker ask my hon. Friend who rose to speak whether he had informed the Minister, and Mr. Speaker accepted the explanation that he was given. I should have thought it incumbent upon the Minister to wait to hear the debate.

§ Mr. Deputy-Speaker
That is not a matter for the Chair. It is true, I understand, that the hon. Member said that he had informed the Minister, and therefore the Chair does not deprecate the hon. Member raising the matter. The Chair cannot, however, go beyond that. It is no responsibility of the Chair whether or no a Minister is present.

§ Miss Herbison
I accept your Ruling, of course, Mr. Deputy-Speaker. Fortunately, we have the Leader of the House with us. I should like to ask him what reply we on this side from Scottish constituencies will have at the end of the debate. Is it not the right hon. and learned Gentleman's responsi 688 bility to ensure that the work of the House is carried out in a reasonable way? It certainly is most unreasonable, apart from being discourteous, that a Minister should walk out at ten o'clock. Perhaps it is because there is not one Tory back bencher present in the House.

§ Miss Herbison
I was merely giving way so the Leader of the House may reply. I am willing to give way again to hear what his attitude is, since he is responsible not only to his own Front Bench and his own back benches, but is also responsible to every Member in the House. I ask him to give a reply about the treatment that Scottish Members are getting.

§ The Lord Privy Seal (Mr. Selwyn Lloyd)
This is a case in which one has to have regard to all the circumstances. If the hon. Lady were to know them, I do not think that she would be quite as critical as she is being. I have come here and, at least, will listen to what is said and will certainly report it.

§ Mr. Manuel
To whom?

§ Miss Herbison
Since there is to little time, I cannot carry the point further, but I hope that it will be taken up through other channels so that we can find out what protection back benchers have in the House. I am at least glad that one of the Under-Secretaries of State for Scotland is present. He might do a little more than his right hon. Friend the Secretary of State did in trying to ensure that the mining industry continues to flourish in Scotland.
The Minister who replied to my hon. Friend who raised the matter today stressed strongly that the President of the Board of Trade and the Government must be guided principally by the level of unemployment. I want to talk for a few minutes on an area which has heavy unemployment. In Scotland, we have 101,000 men and women unemployed. The tragedy is that almost 70,000 of them are men. Seventy-thousand of the breadwinners in Scotland are without a job and have little hope of finding one in the near future.
689 The position is even worse than the figures lead one to believe, because many of the 70,000 have been unemployed for such a long time that they are getting no unemployment benefit. But besides the degradation of being thrown on the scrapheap of unemployment for a long time, they have the further degradation of having to apply to the National Assistance Board to have any means to live and to keep their families.
If any area that, according to the Government's own definition, should be having far more assistance than at present, it is Scotland. An even greater tragedy than that of the 70,000 men I have spoken about is that of the 8,000 boys and girls under 18 who are out of work at the very threshold of their working lives. The biggest indictment against the Government after 12 years in office lies in what they have done to thousands of young people in Scotland.
What are the Government's proposals? For almost eight years they steadily refused to build advance factories in Scotland. A previous President of the Board of Trade said that industrialists wanted tailor-made factories. He himself was always beautifully dressed in tailor-made clothes, but we have discovered that there was as little proof in that statement as in many others made by the Government.
Under great pressure the Government finally decided to build some advance factories and these have brought work which we would not otherwise have had. I have two in my constituency. One was let before it was finished and the other was scarcely finished when it was let. These advance factories, at least in my constituency, have "gone like hot cakes". If only that part of my constituency so badly hit by pit closures had been given advance factories years ago, we should now have had a thriving community with diversified industry.
We have been told by the Government that a 15-mile journey to work is no hardship. It is not—provided there are easy travelling facilities. But human beings are not birds. When one talks of 15 miles that may be true as the crow flies, but it is not always only 15 miles by road. That is certainly so in Lanarkshire. We need a new industrial estate in the Wishaw-New Mains area, which 690 has not had a single penny spent on it under the Local Employment Act.
Time and again hon. Members from this area have made the strongest representations to the Board of Trade. New Mains is in my constituency and Wishaw is in that of my hon. Friend the Member for Motherwell (Mr. Lawson). An industrial estate would help not only the immediate area, but the areas which have been hurt by the closing of the mines and of Cokeness Ironworks, places like Carluke and Ford. Ministerial answers about travelling to work from places as isolated as Ford have Peen farcical, and that is why I said that human beings were not birds.
An additional difficulty is that in the winter roach in this area are sometimes impassable. What employer with this pool of unemployed labour will take a man from 15 miles away when in the winter he may not be able to get to his job every day? At least the Under-Secretary listens to us and I think that he is concerned about Scotland. He and his right hon. Friend should show far more guts a bout this matter and should fight to give Scotland the industries it so desperately needs.

§ Mr. Cyril Bence (Dunbartonshire, East)
The House will be grateful to my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Brigg (Mr. E. L. Mallalieu) for raising the subject of bringing industry to small places like Barton-upon-Humber.
Scottish Members represent areas which contain small burghs. Small communities are very valuable and I was shocked when the Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade expressed the view, presumably the Government's, that a community of fewer than 500,000 people cannot expect the economic diversification which is necessary to provide full employment. Have we all to choke together in huge conurbations of 500,000 people before we can have a variety of occupations? If so, this is a sad day for civilisation.
I regard the small community, the small township, even the market town, as an invaluable part of a civilised community. It is often the centre of a recreation of energy, a flowing out from the city, almost a cyclical renewal of 691 life from the big conurbations, and an important factor in maintaining a stable society. I was amazed that the Parliamentary Secretary, with his industrial connections, should have made such a frightful statement. For his view that populations of less than 500,000 cannot expect the sort of diversification needed to maintain full employment is frightful. That might have been true 100 years ago, but modern industries do not employ vast numbers. The so-called new industries have extensive plant monitored by only a few hundred men and women, but with tremendous output. The oil and chemical industries are good examples. There is no need to have an oil plant in the centre of a population of 500,000.
Oil plants can be put down in areas of small communities, because only a few men are needed to work such plants. On the West Coast of Scotland there are many small towns with populations of between 5,000 and 7,000. The young people of those areas are having to move out into the huge conurbations to which the Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade referred. Instead of allowing those areas to become depopulated, we should establish light industries there to produce consumer durable goods. By using modern techniques, these small communities could produce a lot of goods.
The attitude adopted by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade is nineteenth century. It is completely out of date. The Government talk about modernising Britain, but they are not thinking of modernisation. They may be thinking of modern techniques, but they are still back in the nineteenth century, when one had to put down an industry in an area with a large population. That is not the position today. Anyone who visits an oil refinery can see that a small labour force is responsible for a tremendous output.
The Parliamentary Secretary suggested that we should create townships of half a million people. I do not agree. I think that we should create small communities, and get our people away from the huge conglomerations into which they have been concentrated. I am an engineer. I have spent most of my life trying to produce more and more goods 692 with a smaller and smaller labour force. I hope to see the day when many of our small burghs in Scotland are not merely dormitory towns with populations which are getting older all the time, but are small, thriving, dynamic, communities in which there are a number of industries producing small bits and pieces for the motor industry, or for the different branches of trade and commerce.
I hope that the Under-Secretary of State for Scotland will invite his hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade to come back to the House and express his regret that in the second half of the twentieth century he is thinking in terms of the early part of the nineteenth century, when producers put down industries only in areas where the maximum amount of labour was available.

§ Mr. William Ross (Kilmarnock)
It is an old and established tradition that if there is a premature conclusion of Government business the Adjournment debate is started right away, and it is very difficult to be out of order on that debate.
For a long time there has been a practice—and it is one that I shall do everything I can to safeguard—that Members who have problems—and we certainly have plenty in Scotland—can inform the Minister concerned, and the Chair, and we can then debate those problems if the debate on the subject that was originally selected for the Adjournment is concluded.
The original mistake tonight was made by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade, who spoke after my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Brigg (Mr. E. L. Mallalieu), because one thing which an hon. Member is not allowed to do on an Adjournment debate, or any other debate, unless we are in Committee, is to speak twice. I understand that there may be good reasons why the Minister left, but in those circumstances his responsibility was to ensure, out of courtesy to the House and to preserve the rights of hon. Members, that someone from his Department was here to answer the debate.
When I saw the Leader of the House come in I hoped that he would make a speech attacking the Board of Trade. 693 I can remember one of the best speeches he ever made, on 26th June, 1963, at about midnight, on the Committee stage of the Finance Bill. He was then speaking as a back bencher, and I supported him. That is more than he has ever done for me. He was pleading the case of Port Ellesmere—a district in his constituency which had been left out of an industrial development area. He referred to the effect that that, plus a change in the Finance Bill, would have on development in that area. I hope that something has stirred in his memory and that he recollects the occasion.

§ The Lord Privy Seal (Mr. Selwyn Lloyd)
It is Ellesmere Port.

§ Mr. Ross
Yes—Ellesmere Port. The right hon. and learned Gentleman has got it—and they have got him.
The point that he was raising was a serious one. Because of the definition of a certain area, here was a small borough which had undertaken to take overspill from Liverpool, but in respect of which, by virtue of the fact that industrialists could not possibly be attracted there, there would be a frustration of development and a frustration of the hopes of the Ministry of Housing and Local Government in respect of overspill.
The same thing applies in Scotland, but with the difference that there are areas there which are not so fortunately placed as that part of the right hon. and learned Gentleman's constituency. I am referring to the fact that there are 100,000 unemployed persons in Scotland, and there are areas there which have double the average rate of unemployment that exists in England, and which are not within development districts. Therefore, from the point of view not of overspill alone but of obtaining employment, those areas are denied benefit by the President of the Board of Trade.
If there is one thing that the right hon. and learned Gentleman the Leader of the House has no right to sneer at it is the representation of the Scottish people in this House, certainly on this side of it.

§ Mr. Selwyn Lloyd
I never sneer at anything.

§ Mr. Ross
The right hon. and learned Gentleman has plenty to worry him about the way in which Scottish legislation is handled by the Scottish Office. He knows the muddle that it is in. He also knows that there is not a single Scottish Tory back bencher on the Standing Committees which are considering the Agriculture and Horticulture Bill, the Police Bill and the Housing Bill. That shows the extent of their interest.
While this problem exists we shall speak. We believe that it is the responsibility of the President of the Board of Trade either to be here himself or to be sure that somebody else is here when we give him reasonable notice that we wish to raise a matter of this kind. My hon. Friends have spoken about the position in Lanarkshire, Dunbartonshire and Ayrshire. This is a serious matter. Britain is in the middle of a boom, but Scotland, once more, has a high unemployment figure. We cannot blame the weather this time. We must take account of the failure of the Government's policies. They may be well intentioned, but they are not working Every week brings the story of another factory closing.
We have heard of the serious position of the factory in Falkirk. It has been there for generations, but 650 people are losing their jobs there. The same is true of Acme Wringers, in Greenock, which is dropping part of its production. This will probably mean the loss of about 1,000 jobs. What a song and dance we get from the Government if something is done that may produce that number of jobs in five or six years. I hope that the Leader of the House will ensure that when this kind of thing occurs again steps will be taken to see that a Minister is here properly to do his job in this House—