POSTAL SERVICES

HC Deb 30 March 1965 vol 709 cc1405-535

3.54 p.m.

Sir Peter Rawlinson (Epsom)

I beg to move, That this House takes note of the White Paper on Post Office Prospects (Command Paper No. 2623), but regrets the proposals contained therein for dealing with the financial problems of the Post Office. As the House will appreciate, the Motion authorising the Postmaster-General to make payments out of the Post Office Fund has been taken formally. We now debate this Motion, which covers the whole of the White Paper presented to Parliament by the right hon. Gentleman the Postmaster-General on Thursday last, 26th March. That White Paper followed the statement which he made in the House, and this Motion is inviting the House to note the whole of that White Paper but in the terms set out. Since that time the right hon. Gentleman and his hon. Friends have put down an Amendment which reflects the position and the views of the Postmaster-General which he formed, if I may suggest it, within four weeks of taking office and which he revealed on 10th November.

This White Paper proposes increases amounting to about 33⅓ per cent.—in a part of this service of which the profit was about £8.6 million in 1963–64; in an organisation which, overall, made a profit in that year of over £30 million in commercial dealings with the public. They come at a time when there are persistent complaints and criticism of the quality of the services which this organisation provides, and at a time when the First Secretary, but three months ago, announced his declaration of intent on productivity and prices and incomes.

Therefore, if these proposals prove acceptable, from 17th May this year the postal services will join gas and electricity charges, rail fares, newspapers, petrol and numerous other consumer goods in price increases—but in this case a price increase proportionately very much greater. It may be said that it is only 1d. on the ordinary postage for a letter; only ½d. on the ordinary previous charge for a postcard. It may be said that this is insignificant, but it most certainly is not insignificant. Indeed, it amounts to a vast sum in aggregate of industrial costs.

It is an increase in prices in a service widely used by commerce, but not only by commerce. It is a service which is of great personal importance especially to the old and to the lonely. Whatever may be said in today's debate, I hope that this will not be dismissed airily as just a few pennies a week, and a matter of small importance and extent. I certainly hope—I am sure that it will not be so—that we shall not be treated to a brusque explanation of the necessity there may be for this great increase at this time.

I am advised that the estimated bill to industry of the proposed increases amounts to about £25 million per annum. Not only does this mean an increased bill for industry: it is also of particular significance because this particular increase is made by this organisation, and the importance of this rise in prices lies in by whom it is proposed. It is proposed by a Minister in charge of a monopoly of great power and wide extent. It is a perennial temptation to any monopoly—and, therefore, to any Minister in control of such monopoly—to cure any problems that exist by the simple exercise of increasing prices.

There are no shareholders to make a particular fuss; no competitors who will gain or benefit; only the users, and those users are the people whom we on both sides of the House represent today. It is, therefore, for the monopolist, an easy and very attractive way out just to put up the prices. It may be attractive and easy, but it certainly must be justified if it is to be accepted by the House of Commons.

The Post Office has immense and unique power which goes back a very long time. It was one of the earliest monopolies. It goes back to the days of fixed time carriage of mail by a relay of horses. Its first statutory provision occurs in the days of the Restoration, after the Ordinance during the Protectorate. It has had a monopoly position which has been maintained ever since. The extent of the power and protection given to the Post Office and to its servants is considerable. No one who owns or is on board a ship or aircraft on a voyage or a flight to a place in the British postal area, or who is a common carrier, or who owns or drives a public service vehicle, may carry or deliver mail, even without payment or reward. This shows the importance attached by the State to this organisation.

As hon. Members will know only too well, postal officers do not have to serve on juries, which is fortunate for them, as they do not have to listen to the advocacy of hon. and learned Gentlemen. It is a crime to molest a Post Office worker. Any hon. Gentleman or anybody else who is disorderly, or tries to sell a newspaper outside the General Post Office in London, can be fined. I use these extreme examples only to show that the State has always said that the Post Office is in a particular position. It is an organisation which is granted a great and important monopoly. It is therefore a trustee of the interests of every citizen.

As one of the oldest and most important Departments of State, the Post Offices engages in commercial activities. Therefore, its efficiency and the scale of its prices affect everyone, not excluding industry. In view of its special position and responsibility, there is an important need for it to set an example and give a lead, especially at a time when the Government of the day are preaching to employers and employees that every attempt must be made to prevent any increase in prices. If an increase in prices is proposed, let alone the increase of the substantial nature proposed in the White Paper, it is for the Government of the day and the Post Office, in the person of the Postmaster-General, to convince the House and the nation that these increased prices are necessary.

This increase comes at a time of persistent criticism and dissatisfaction with the service which the public is given. Every Member hears this from his constituents daily. We hear that it is not unusual, for instance, for a first-class letter to take two days to deliver. We hear that it is not unusual for a letter posted in London to take longer to reach an address in the suburbs of the Home Counties than for a letter posted in London to reach the North. We hear of complaints where the post arrives after the man has left the house. We hear of parcels taking four days to travel seven miles. We hear of delays and losses in the post. We hear of wrong telephone numbers which are continually being obtained. We hear of the engaged sound being eternally obtained on the exchange. We all know about these matters, and we all have to face them.

I have extracted complaints from Questions put by hon. Members on both sides of the House to the Postmaster-General and the Assistant Postmaster-General since they have been in office. These are complaints made to hon. Members by members of the public. These complaints come from Norwood, Omagh, Hampshire, Bramhope, Plymouth, South Wales, Mansfield, Carlisle, Exeter and Northern Ireland. There have been complaints about postal facilities at the House of Commons itself, about Australia and about New Zealand. When I came into the Chamber today a letter was handed to me from a person in Watford about a parcel which took six days to travel one and a half miles and about a letter which took two days.

Mr. Harry Randall (Gateshead, West)

I appreciate the right hon. and learned Gentleman's diligence in respect of the period since the Labour Government have been in office. Did he go a little further back? Did he go back five or seven years? If so, what did he find?

Sir P. Rawlinson

That should surely be for the diligence of right hon. and hon. Members opposite. I am not saying that this has anything to do with party politics. I do not think that the arrival of the right hon. Member for Bristol, South-East (Mr. Benn) at the Post Office has made any great difference to the volume of complaint. I remind hon. Members of the volume of complaint which goes on still about the telephone. I will not read to the House a list I have compiled of hon. Members who have complained about the telephone. What we must accept—this is not a matter which a new Postmaster-General will alter—is that there is general dissatisfaction with the quality of the service provided at present by the Post Office.

Nevertheless, at the same time the public is aware that this is an organisation which, in 1963–64, made a profit of £30 million out of its dealing with them. I believe that this is a record. Now we have the projection by the Post Office—I believe that "projection forward" is the correct jargon it uses—showing a shortfall on the target of profit of 8 per cent. on net assets. I remind the House that the 8 per cent. return was clearly intended to relate to the Post Office as a whole, not to only a part.

What are these figures? We should like to have the figures in a little more detail from the Postmaster-General. He will not expect us to accept purely upon his ipse dixit that this is the projection forward, without knowing exactly what the figures are. What are the details? On what are they based? If the right hon. Gentleman claims that it is necessary to have these increases at a time which must be embarrassing for his own Government, as he must be the first to accept, and also at a time when there is this dissatisfaction, let us at least see the figures so that we can study them and judge whether the right hon. Gentleman can justify these increases.

The onus is upon the right hon. Gentleman to justify the increases, because of the unique character of this service, because of the especial influence that this service has upon the commercial and personal life of everyone, because of the public awareness that overall a large profit is being obtained from them, and because of the criticisms to which I have referred. Therefore, it is for the right hon. Gentleman to justify with figures, with chapter and with verse, why this increase is necessary.

What, so far, has been given to the House? We have had, first—if the right hon. Gentleman will forgive me for saying so; perhaps he will not—the party political noises which were made by the right hon. Gentleman in November, 1964, as to the blame and as to the figures being distorted. That will be taken seriously in some quarters, but perhaps not very seriously in many quarters.

Then we had the right hon. Gentleman's statement last Thursday, in which the right hon. Gentleman referred to the statement he made in November, 1964, but asserted a shortfall in profit target as a fact. Then we had the White Paper, paragraph 6 of which asserts and alleges the estimated shortfall. These are matters on which the right hon. Gentleman will want to enlarge in greater detail—indeed, the House will undoubtedly insist that he does so—so that we can judge the urgency and necessity of the remarkable propositions contained in the White Paper. I will return later to paragraph 5 of the White Paper, which says: It would not make economic sense for the postal services to be subsidised by the telecommunication services or vice versa". Paragraph 6 of the White Paper sets out the actual or estimated shortfall for 1963–64 of £11 million. As right hon. and hon. Members will recollect, in this period there was a 6½ per cent. wage increase. In 1965–66 there appears to be an increase in shortfall of £11 million. What is the reason for this? Can the right hon. Gentleman, when he replies, give those figures to the House? What makes the loss accelerate? We can see that if there is a major pay award in a field, in which labour costs play an important and significant part, that would result. But why should that be so in the following year?

Again, paragraph 7 speaks of an increase in 1966–67 of £8 million and in 1967–68 an increase of £10 million. I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will be able to explain why this should be happening year after year. We understand that in the past there have been very substantial pay increases which are referred to in paragraph 7, totalling £83 million and representing pay increases and improvements over the past 10 years. But have those been accompanied by the necessary increase in productivity, and what proposals has the right hon. Gentleman to increase such productivity?

Does he intend to tell the House that there are ideas of further pay awards? Does he feel that the labour force should be receiving more in the form of awards? Is this the justification? Are more wage awards imminent? If not, what is the justification for the position set out in paragraphs 6 and 7? The House should be very careful in scrutinising and should be on guard against generalisations or vague forecasts in such matters.

There are two particular elements here. There is, first, a monopoly which is inevitably attracted to price increases which solve its problems and make life easier; and the Post Office either consciously or unconsciously must be orientated always towards a solution of its problems by this particular means. Secondly, the right hon. Gentleman who though a very experienced Member of the House, only came to office in October of last year with the pressures of a particular organisation upon him, to which perhaps he was not unsympathetic because the right hon. Gentleman, who has played his part in political battles, can, by blaming his predecessor, thus escape public odium and may secure some party political advantage—not a matter which the right hon. Gentleman has often had away from his mind in the past.

If one gets a situation of a monopoly and someone in the position of the right hon. Gentleman in October of last year, one gets a combination which could allow for the projection of extravagant figures and facts of shortfall. I suggest, therefore, that the House should be careful in scrutinising figures of shortfalls.

Dr. Jeremy Bray (Middlesbrough West)

If the right hon. and learned Gentleman believes that the question of this projection is related to a possible increase in costs, would he say what would be his assumption on the rate of increases of lower-paid workers?

Sir P. Rawlinson

I do not know, but the right hon. Gentleman is asking for this increase in prices and the public is entitled to ask him why he wants them. He says that it is because there is to be this shortfall and I am asking him to tell the House and the country the reason, and what is behind it.

What are the alternatives which might be looked at? In paragraph 8 of the White Paper there is the bald statement that the gap—if gap there be—cannot be filled by a cutback in services, and that there is no sign that the public would find such a deterioration acceptable. On what evidence does the right hon. Gentleman base this conclusion and assumption? What tests has he made to determine the public's acceptance or non-acceptance of what is called "deterioration"?—because, of course, there have been complaints of bad service.

We acknowledge that, but what if that bad service was made better even if the services became less frequent? What if there was an earlier, surer and more reliable post? That would be no deterioration and to get that it might be necessary to have a cutback in some of the services of the Post Office.

Has the right hon. Gentleman considered that in most areas there could be an abandonment of the second delivery, certainly in areas away from the large cities? In London and other great commercial centres a second delivery service will always be required, but is that so essential and necessary everywhere? Would such a cut-back really be unacceptable to the public as an alternative to increased prices? Or is the real problem that if the second deliveries are cut out other useful work could not be found for postmen? What would the saving be? Will the right hon. Gentleman tell us?

Paragraph 9 sets out the solution to which the right hon. Gentleman has been attracted, namely, an increase in prices. He should not underestimate the public reaction to this. He can say that it amounts to .007 of the cost of living, but that is not the only criterion. The effect on industry of this announcement, even well before these charges have come into effect, has been to cause grave concern.

I, and probably other hon. Gentlemen, have had representations about mail order firms, not the very great ones, but ones for whom the increased costs would come to about £100,000 such as in the case of a particular firm dealing in records, books and correspondence courses a firm dealing in what is called the self-improvement market.

I have read that the postal bill for Great Universal Stores will be increased by about £750,000 a year. Will the effect of this increase drive this particular business away from the present parcel post? If so, what will its value be?—because past experience has always been that with increases in price the losses have continued because the volume of business has declined. The right hon. Gentleman will appreciate that the parcel post is continuing at a lost of £8.5 million a year.

The agreement entered into by the right hon. Gentleman in July of last year with British Rail, which was foreshadowed by his predecessor—and I have no doubt that he will be willing to pay tribute to the work of his predecessor in getting such an agreement—was piloted by the East Anglian scheme referred to in debates in the House in December, 1963.

In any event, people will ask, and I am sure the right hon. Gentleman will be prepared to answer the question, why should the letter post be subsidising the parcel post? What is the logic of that? As another test of the thinking of the right hon. Gentleman before coming and asking the House for these increases we can turn to paragraph 20, dealing with the number of inland exchange operators during the year. The White Paper says that there has been little change in their numbers. Why not? What is the number of inland exchange operators at present? Has it not varied at all despite the introduction of subscriber trunk dialling to an extent of 60 or 70 per cent.?

What is the global number of calls which pass through operators now as compared with the number of such calls some five years ago? If these numbers have declined, as one imagines they would have done with the introduction of S.T.D. to the extent of 60 or 70 per cent., why has it not been possible to achieve some economy in the number of inland exchange operators? I would ask the Minister to answer these queries and say why he has settled for this increase as opposed to the alternatives.

The Minister has told us that he is calling in management consultants, Messrs. McKinsey. We welcome any commercial "know-how" that can be applied to this problem. I appreciate that it is a difficult one and I hope that everyone in the postal services will co-operate with the proposal to have Messrs. McKinsey give its management consultant advice. But why did the right hon. Gentleman have to choose an American firm? About the only thing I have in common with the right hon. Gentleman is that both he and I are married to Americans—two different Americans. of course—and, therefore the last thing I would accuse the right hon. Gentleman or myself or anybody else of is being anti-American—but why this particular firm?

Has the right hon. Gentleman in fact, found this firm to be superior to any British firm? Has he consulted those who previously employed this firm? Is he satisfied that this firm is the best, or is he just choosing it because the telephone service in America is under private enterprise and he thought that it might be a good idea to have this firm?

I can remember a personal experience of telephoning from Chicago, in 1956. I was telephoning from a call box in the Cow Palace on the outskirts of the conference hall, to a small town in Rhode Island and I got a connection in seconds. That was a remarkable experience at that time for someone used to the difficulties of getting numbers in this country. I hope that the use of the management consultants is not merely a sop, or makeweight. If it is not a sop, then it may certainly prove worthwhile.

The right thing for a great State monopoly to have done before coming here and asking for those increases in price would be, first, to tell Parliament in detail what are the figures upon which it alleges there will be a mounting shortage. I do not mean hugging them to its breasts and giving them in the course of the debate, but setting them out, so that Parliament can examine them. The burden is upon the right hon. Gentleman to prove this issue.

Secondly, the right hon. Gentleman should be able to satisfy the House of Commons that he has attempted management reorganisation. He should be able to show that he has taken all steps to see that there should be a cut down, or an appropriate economy made, and that he has tried such economies before coming to the House of Commons and demanding an increase. I suggest, therefore, that he should try the abolition of the second delivery, except for the great cities and commercial centres, and that he should re-examine the telegraph services. How many telegrams per head of adult population are sent per annum? Not very many, I suggest.

Thirdly, there is the registered post. It seems to be a commonplace that it is far more hazardous to send money and valuables by registered post than by ordinary post. If that is so, what is the point of running at a loss a registered postal service? These are matters which the right hon. Gentleman should have looked at and dealt with, and only when he has shown that those are insufficient should he have come to the House and asked for these increases.

The Amendment which is on the Order Paper in his name says that it welcomes the plans for modernisation contained in the White Paper on Post Office prospects. What single new plan for modernisation will he say has been set out in that White Paper? Will he please tell the House what new plan conceived by him is set out there? The White Paper sets out, in (a), (b) and (c), in paragraph 17, the matters which are referred to, apparently, as the modernisation. The right hon. Gentleman says that he would press ahead with standardised envelopes. Of course he should. It would be shocking if he did not press ahead with that particular project, but press ahead, of course, sensibly. He has to deal with an industry, as he well appreciates, to which due notice must be given to have a changeover to the standardised envelope. My hon. Friend the Member for Bradford, West (Mr. Tiley) brought to my attention the card industry, which deals with about £75 million and of which only 50 per cent. at present represents the United Kingdom proportion. There is an increase of about £2 million in this industry's postage. It fears that the industry will be driven wholly into foreign hands.

It is said that the right hon. Gentleman will introduce a national postal coding system. Will he tell the House that this is a project which the Post Office has not been examining——

Mr. Randall

For too long.

Sir P. Rawlinson

It may be, but why has not the Post Office, with the Dollis Hill experiments, been able to marry up the coding number and also the S.T.D. number?

That is not a new idea. Then the third modernisation is to undertake a major review, gearing the postal services to modern conditions with charges more nearly related to operating costs. Those are the matters which really need scrutiny. The charges and costs will be geared all right if the right hon. Gentleman merely says, "Up go the costs and, therefore, up with the prices".

If that is to be the system which is the classic manner of reaction by a monopoly, then we will have operating costs geared to prices. What the Postmaster-General has done, and what the right hon. Gentleman has now achieved, was to decide, in November, 1964, that prices had to go up. But is this the final amount which will be sought by the Post Office? Have we here the full Post Office demands? Is this only a first instalment, or is it the real end of the story? Will he give an unqualified assurance that there will be no further increases for the next five years?

I accept that the task of any Postmaster-General is certainly not an easy one. He has to be an administrator, a politician, and a businessman, but one of his principal tasks is to ensure that prices are kept down and to reject tariff increases unless he has given the very closest scrutiny to them. We condemn him and the Government for making sweeping and substantial increases. We do not think that he has provided a pricing policy, even if it is acceptable that there should be one, because here we have letters subsidising parcels and yet, on the other hand, the right hon. Gentleman says that one cannot have telecommunications subsidising the post. He has failed to do anything to deal with deliveries and the telegraph service and the registered mail service and I suggest to the House that there was pressure to increase charges from this organisation and the right hon. Gentleman tamely succumbed to it.

In January, 1965, his right hon. Friend the First Secretary cabled to a shirt manufacturer who promised to have stability of prices in 1965, in the following terms, "Bless you, well done". Whatever the right hon. Gentleman the Postmaster-General and the Chief Secretary may say today, I suspect that there is very little blessing in the heart of the First Secretary for what they have done, and there will certainly be no blessing in the hearts of the people of the country for the way in which the Postmaster-General proposes to deal with his prices in 1965.

4.31 p.m.

The Postmaster-General (Mr. Anthony Wedgwood Benn)

I beg to move, to leave out from "House" to the end of the Question and to add instead thereof: deplores the failure of the previous Administration to take the necessary measures to meet the mounting deficit forecast for the postal services of which it was well aware; welcomes the plans for modernisation contained in the White Paper on Post Office prospects (Command Paper No. 2623), and accepts that the tariff increases proposed in it are now required in order to permit the efficient development of these services". I should like to thank the right hon. and learned Member for Epsom (Sir P. Rawlinson) for the firm assumption made in his speech that my right hon. Friends and myself are in the position to give pledges covering the next five years. At any rate he has come as far as that, although I must say that from his speech one would imagine that his own party had never made any increases in the cost of the postal services.

I have figures before me, brought up to date in modern equivalents. We are asking for £37 million. In 1955 at today's equivalent the figure was £54 million. The increase in 1956 was £38 million, in 1957 it was £72 million, in 1961 it was £33 million, and the increase in 1963 at today's equivalent was £17 million. To come forward in the way the right hon. and learned Gentleman did as if to say that in the 13 years for which he and his colleagues were responsible the Post Office had not been forced to ask for increased tariffs was, to say the least, rather naïve.

This is an unusual debate, because although Prayers have been tabled against Regulations affecting Post Office charges in the past, this is the first record that I can find, at any rate since the war, of a Motion of censure—for this is what the right hon. and learned Gentleman moved—on Post Office finances. The debate is also surprising in that none of the hon. and right hon. Members opposite who have been Ministers at the Post Office have been asked to speak. One would have thought that the hon. Member for Totnes (Mr. Mawby), who was responsible for the Post Office with Mr. Bevins until the election, might have been asked to speak, or the hon. Lady the Member for Melton (Miss Pike) who preceded him, or perhaps even the right hon. Member for Wallasey (Mr. Marples) who was himself Postmaster-General.

Mr. Ray Mawby (Totnes)

I assure the right hon. Gentleman that he need not worry. While no one has asked me to speak, I hope to do so.

Mr. Benn

The hon. Member has brought his harp to the party and so far he has not been asked to play, but we shall listen to him with great interest.

Neither of the right hon. Gentlemen who are to speak to the Motion were in the Cabinet during the last period of the late Government. By the time that the postal services had really begun to plunge into deficit the right hon. Member for Enfield, West (Mr. Iain Macleod) had withdrawn and thus was able to say, as no doubt he will say, that he was not responsible for handling Post Office matters over the last 12 months. We have instead the right hon. and learned Member for Epsom who has emerged as shadow Postmaster-General and who has been given a dock brief for his colleagues on the benches opposite.

Before dealing with the issues that divide us and with the Motion of censure, I should like to try to establish the points of agreement that exist between both sides of the House. I think that everybody wants the Post Office to succeed. Everybody wants to see it overcome its present difficulties and provide the community with the sort of services which it will require in future. We are also all agreed on the rôle of the Post Office as a great State-owned service. The right hon. and learned Member for Epsom never queried this. He has just discovered that the Post Office is a monopoly, but although he made that discovery he did not recommend any change in the present structure.

The Post Office itself is a great State-owned enterprise and, as every Postmaster-General discovers when he comes into office, the term "Post Office" is really a misnomer, for the Post Office covers a vast range of responsibilities. It employs nearly 400,000, with a turnover of £600 million a year and with an investment programme in the forthcoming year which will run at about £229 million.

In addition to the posts, the Post Office is responsible for telephones, the savings bank and the licensing of radio and broadcasting. It is in the cable network and is now involved in satellite communications as well. The Post Office today really is a Ministry of Communications. Its rôle in society can be understood only if it is thought of in that way. At this moment, as it changes its character, it is finding itself in the middle of an aspect of modern life—communications—which is undergoing a fundamental revolution due to scientific and technical changes.

Today's debate is principally about the problem of financing this growth industry. I think that it would be better if, before coming to that problem, I tried to invite the House to see what we require of the Post Office in the future so as to be able to judge more adequately what financial provision should be made for it. The right hon. and learned Member for Epsom mentioned modernisation. The rôle of the Post Office in modernising the British economy can hardly be overestimated. The First Secretary, who is principally concerned with problems of economic expansion, will find, and has found, that he depends very much on the existence of a modern communications system. If the British economy is to grow at the necessary rate it will be the task of the Post Office in the years ahead to provide the basic communications infrastructure, not only for the community as a whole but also within the framework of the new regional planning, on which the First Secretary will depend.

I now come, after making that general point, briefly to the different aspects of the work of the Post Office and I will try to relate them to the principal objective which I have mentioned. First of all, there is the postal service, the oldest and best-known of the services provided by the G.P.O. As the right hon. and learned Gentleman admitted, they are largely dependent upon manual labour and are subject to increases in cost due to pay awards. This is not a new problem. If the right hon. and learned Gentleman had read speeches by his own colleagues over the years he would have found that this has been stressed again and again.

The postal services have been starved of capital in the past. Before the war, the Treasury appropriated the profits. Moreover, the postal services financed out of their profits the growth of the telephone service, and the postal services have been particularly starved of capital for their own building programme. The Daily Telegraph the other day said that from 1903 to 1963 no major post office building had been constructed in London.

The hours of duty of postmen are long and arduous. Before the war, postmen had to accept split duties in order to keep the service going. Nobody is going back to that now. Today the hours are still difficult and overtime reaches absurd heights. As much as 40 hours a week overtime is not unknown in the postal service in our big cities.

The staff do remarkable work. The public showed their appreciation by the great support which they gave to postal workers in their industrial action last summer. When it was put to them in public opinion polls whether they would continue to support the postmen if they knew that that would involve an increase in postal charges, no fewer than 64 per cent. said that in those circumstances they would be prepared to support the Postmen's claim. I do not believe that the community would tolerate a situation in which postmen were underpaid for the work which they did. But it will take a long time to undo the damage done to staff relations in the Post Office by the previous Administration.

Many of our projects, particularly the building projects, will take some time to come to fruition, but there are some immediate steps which can be taken as regards conditions. My hon. Friend the Assistant Postmaster-General has made it his business to interest himself in the health, welfare and safety aspects of the postal side, and these can and will be improved.

Next, of course, comes the building programme which we have to review with the Ministry of Public Building and Works to see whether it is possible to speed it up, and in this respect we hope to be able to take advantage of the modern industrialised building methods which are becoming available.

But, if we are to have modern postal services, increased investment in postal mechanisation is absolutely essential, and, frankly, this has been slow in coming in the past. This year, our investment in postal mechanisation will be nearly £2 million, rising to £4 million in two years and over £6 million two years after that. The parcel sorting machine has been perfected and will be installed in sorting offices as soon as they are rebuilt. The final prototype of the high-speed letter sorting equipment will be given field trials in Norwich where the first fully automated sorting office will be established.

This is where the relevance of the standard envelope comes in. To facilitate mechanical sorting, we shall press ahead with the standardisation of envelopes in the preferred ranges agreed by the Universal Postal Union. The exact date for introducing these standard sizes will be fixed very soon, after final consultations with the stationery trade, and thereafter non-standard envelopes will be charged at a higher rate. This is the only meaningful way of introducing standard envelopes. People are now accustomed to the idea that a rather heavier letter costs more, and, similarly, in future a letter outside the preferred range will be chargd at the higher rate. Meanwhile, Government Departments, nationalised industries and local authorities will be invited to co-operate by using the new sizes.

Similarly, the postal coding system tested in Norwich will be applied all over the country. The code consists of six characters which will permit electronic sorting right down to the postman who delivers the mail to the house to which it is addressed. These postal codes will speed the mail and people will become just as accustomed to them as they have become to the London postal districts or the telephone codes. I can tell the right hon. and learned Gentleman that we studied the possibility of having the same code for the S.T.D. area and the postal area, but this has been found not to be practicable and, of course, confusion might be created if there were any difference at all.

Apart from these changes, the time has come for a fundamental review of the postal services to ensure that they meet the needs of a modern community. We are anticipating the growth of postal business over the years. It is a great mistake to think of the postal services as a contracting business on its way down and out. It is, in fact, an expanding undertaking and it must be furnished with the machinery and the techniques required.

What form must this analysis take? Everybody has his own pet schemes. I confess to some of my own, just as the right hon. and learned Gentleman has some schemes of his. But we cannot rely on hunches and guesswork when trying to look at the future of the postal services. When Rowland Hill wrote his famous paper on Post Office reform, he was advised by Babbage, the economist, whom we should nowadays call a cyberneticist, who analysed the cost of handling the mail and who, as a result of his analysis, produced the answer that it was not the distance which a letter travelled that involved the cost but it was the number of times it had to be handled. Similarly, if we attempt a thorough fresh analysis of postal costs today, we may find that the criteria which Rowland Hill used have themselves been out-dated.

What, for instance, is the real cost of a first-class letter as compared with a printed paper package? What is the real cost of a post-card which goes cheaper but which gets first-class treatment'? In fact, there is very little cost indeed. Does weight really matter as compared with the size of the envelope and the speed with which it is required to move? How many people really want a fast service, and how many would be happy to pay a little less for something which was a little slower? These are questions which we cannot answer just on guesswork and hunch. We must have a basic diagnosis by those qualified to give it. Is the management structure of the Post Office and the postal services right for the age in which we live? Is the pattern of deliveries and collection right? What can we do to improve our services?

I tell the House frankly that we do not yet know the answers to these questions, but we mean to find out. This is the reason why we have commissioned Messrs. McKinsey to undertake the survey for us. Their brief is a wide one and, in talking to them, I have particularly asked them to investigate and report on any aspect of the postal services, from the very top to the very bottom, which they think may have some bearing on our problems. This is not a sop to the House to justify increased tariffs. It is the beginning of a fundamental analysis which we hope will produce results.

As the Post Office is very proud of its good relations with the staff, we have, naturally, proposed a joint working party to bring the management and staff sides together in order to work in parallel with this study. If we are given the tools for a proper diagnosis, we shall be ready to carry through any changes which seem necessary.

I stress that this is not a question of axing our services. the right hon. and learned Gentleman asked why we did not cut out the second delivery everywhere except in our major industrial cities. If I may say so, with respect, this is exactly the wrong way to look at the problem. In the first place, we know that, if we cut out all but one delivery throughout the country, it would save us only £15 million, and we are talking about a £37 million deficit expected in the forthcoming year. If we made these minor changes—which might be right; we shall see later on—we should save no money to speak of and, in any case, it would take two or three years to carry them through and, therefore, they could not help in the immediate problem confronting us.

I turn now to one or two other aspects of purely postal policy.

Mr. Geoffrey Wilson (Truro)

The right hon. Gentleman has not answered the question which he was asked. Why McKinsey and not somebody else?

Mr. Benn

I am coming to that when I discuss the particular questions involved in the Motion of censure. I am now trying to explain what we see the postal services doing in the future.

Mr. Jeremy Thorpe (Devon, North)

I appreciate the right hon. Gentleman's difficulty; faced with an immediate deficit, he has got to increase income. But he has told the House that there are all sorts of possible variants which must be explored. Does he not feel that it would be preferable to await the outcome of a thorough-going investigation before taking these final decisions?

Mr. Benn

I can appreciate that point, but, as I shall later show, confronted with this substantial deficit, which did not begin this year but which has been going on over the two years when the party opposite was responsible, the alternatives before us were whether to borrow from the Treasury—I shall come to that in greater detail—or to take the present situation and set in hand a fundamental review at the same time. I think that the latter course is right. In dealing with a vast service like ours, which handles 30 million letters a day, even if one decides exactly what is right, one cannot necessarily carry it through over a very short time.

Mr. Iain Macleod (Enfield, West)

Will the right hon. Gentleman answer one question purely for clarification? He said just now that the deficit had been growing in the last year or two. I take it that he means the deficit on the post services alone. The Post Office as a whole made a substantial profit, did it not?

Mr. Benn

The right hon. Gentleman knows that I am dealing at the moment with the postal services. I shall come to telecommunications later. Does he suggest that we take money from telecommunications and cut back the telephone programme? Either he does or he does not. No doubt, we shall bear more about that later this evening.

I wish now to refer to one sector in which the Post Office can make a real contribution towards our export possibilities. The British Post Office is highly regarded by foreign administrations, which take advantage of our "know-how" in designing their offices and services. We are developing a fully fledged British postal consultancy service which will be available to foreign administrations and which will also help firms, especially those making postal machinery, to develop their export opportunities. The Board of Trade will co-operate with this project and we are commissioning a loose-leaf brochure showing the range of postal equipment supplied to us. This will be available abroad as well. In this way we can not only perform a service abroad but also help our exports.

There are a number of other aspects of the postal side I should like to have mentioned, but I will say only that it must not be thought that the future of the postal service is limited entirely to machinery, new buildings, standard envelopes, coding and the rather impersonal aspects of modern life. In the future development of postage stamp design, the Post Office finds itself responsible for one of the most exciting and neglected of the artistic opportunities in this country and with much broader criteria, and with the consent of Her Majesty to look at designs put in by designers covering a wide range of new subjects, we hope to make an improvement there. Similarly, we are setting up a fellowship in miniscule design at the Royal College of Art to help in this connection.

There are other projects that I should like to mention. For instance, we are hoping to establish that post offices will make space available for hanging the work of living artists. We have many hundreds of post offices in the country and I am working on this in co-operation with my hon. Friend the Joint Under-Secretary of State for Education and Science, the hon. Lady the Member for Cannock (Miss Lee).

I come now to inland telecommunications. Here, of course, the picture is quite different, as the right hon. Member for Enfield, West indicated. This is a service highly capitalised, facing an explosion of demand and which, although it, too, was starved of capital in the early years has more recently been set upon the course of expansion. Last year the telephone service grew by 7.5 per cent.—nearly twice the national average and nearly double its own average over the previous ten years. Next year the rate of growth will be 9 per cent. and the growth will continue to rise more sharply in the years ahead. Productivity is also rising and we are thus keeping the basic telephone charges stable, which means that the telephone is becoming relatively cheaper year by year as compared with other services.

This is helping to stimulate demand and to that extent to make our problems more difficult. The war-time bulge of babies has now hit the telephone market and even without any stimulation of demand, except for certain extras, and only then in certain areas, the telephone demand is growing at enormous speed. Of course, it is this speed which has caused the telephone problems with which hon. Members—including myself—have a great deal of personal experience.

This is especially true of London and the South-East, where congestion affects telephones just as much as it affects railways, schools, housing and everything else. Much of the equipment on the telephone side is old and needs replacing.

For those on the waiting list this is particularly frustrating. The last Government aimed to clear the list by next March, but the expectation of demand and growth has been exceeded by the growth in reality. Although 300,000 more exchange connections will be made by next March than was expected, even so demand has continued to outstrip the estimate. In some ways it is rather like running up an escalator that is moving down. I am reviewing the telephone programme as a matter of urgency and also intend to review the procedures by which demand and use are forecast.

Many hon. Members will no doubt raise the question of the quality of service. In part this is due to technical trouble, in part to failure by subscribers and in part to congestion of the system. But over the next five years more trunk circuits will be added than in the whole of the last 50 and the new Post Office Tower that will open in the autumn will add a great deal to circuit capacity. I hope to arrange, for the benefit of hon. Members, a small exhibition of modern subscriber facilities in the House next month so that they can see what is being done.

Now I turn to another aspect of the telephone services—the bulk supply agreements. There has been much criticism in the past, especially by my hon. Friends, about these agreements, under which the Post Office has hitherto acquired its telephone apparatus and exchange equipment. These agreements, renewed by the last Government, do not expire until March, 1968, and can only by terminated or modified by common consent.

We are not satified that the bulk supply agreement for telephone apparatus—which is relatively simple—can any longer be justified, and we have approached the firms concerned with a view to ending it as soon as practicable.

The exchange equipment poses more difficult problems. By 1968 the electronic exchanges will be starting to come into more general use. These are intensely complex pieces of apparatus and present complicated problems to the G.P.O. and to the industry. I have told the telecommunications industry that the Post Office will strike a hard bargain in negotiating the new agreements to replace the existing ones. We intend to safeguard the interests of our subscribers and to see that the new purchasing arrangements reflect the enormous importance and prospects of the Post Office as the main sustainer of the home market on which the industry depends. We want to see that we get a fair return for the research and development work done by us in designing equipment manufactured for that purpose.

Looking to the future, there is an entirely new service developing in telecommunications. This is the Datel service which permits the transmission of data at high speed and with great accuracy. It is said that in the United States within 10 years there will be more telephone lines occupied by machines talking to other machines than by men talking to other men and even women talking to other women.

This presents a very great challenge to us. We are studying the possibility of using the Datel service to help to extend the use of computers by British industry. As major users of computers ourselves—we have just ordered £2½ million worth of British computers for our own use—the Post Office is well placed to offer a new type of data link and processing service for British industry. I am discussing this with my right hon. Friend the Minister of Technology to see what prospect there is for developing such a service.

Mr. Julian Snow (Lichfield and Tamworth)

What are the short-term possibilities of Telex transmission of computer output to provincial centres from London?

Mr. Benn

The Datel service would provide facilities for transmission of data over very high-quality lines. If my hon. Friend has a particular point in mind I will look at it.

This, of course, takes us on to the future of overseas telecommunications—again a story of rapid expansion. The international telephone, telegraph and telex traffic is rapidly expanding and with the "Early Bird" satellite which will be launched next month, it will be possible in May or June for subscribers to be able to telephone America on a commercial basis via the satellite—about as great an achievement as telephoning New England from the Cow Palace in Chicago.

This opens up the possibility of British firms being able to supply ground tracking stations to foreign countries which may be interested in linking in to the world satellite system. The Post Office with its experience at Goonhilly will be ready to co-operate with British telecommunications and construction firms to develop this export market.

Finally, on international telecommunications, I refer to the importance that Commonwealth communications have for us. Hong Kong and Singapore have already been linked by the first stage of the cable which will ultimately join up with Compac at Sydney in 1966. In view of the importance of developing Commonwealth co-operation in the satellite era, the Government have proposed to other Commonwealth countries that there should be a Commonwealth telecommunications conference in London from 26th April to 13th May. There are many other aspects of Post Office activities—banking, the licensing of radio and broadcasting and the university of the air—with which I should like to deal, but I think that I have said enough to enable the House now to look at the Motion of censure in the context of the vastly developing industry which, above all, must have finance in order to develop its own resources.

What did the right hon. and learned Gentleman really say? He said that we were a monopoly. We are a monopoly, although, as a matter of fact, not in every respect, for there are private parcels carriers, for instance. He said that it was easy to increase the postal charges. He must know very well that it is never easy to raise charges and that nobody, particularly not my right hon. Friends or myself, would have any desire to raise charges unless that was absolutely necessary.

He then quoted old figures about the profitability of the Post Office. I noticed very carefully that he did not give the latest figures. He quoted the figures in the years when the Post Office was making a profit, the years when the Post Office was meeting the 8 per cent. target. He then said that the onus of responsibility fell upon me to prove that there was a shortfall. But the shortfall to which I referred was only a projection of two years of postal losses already established and, as it were, audited and even published. There can be no argument about the figures, at any rate not for the last financial year and the financial year which ends next week. This is a fact and these are the facts which we discovered when we assumed office. It was what the right hon. and learned Gentleman called a forward projection—I do not know how one can project anything except forward—the forward projection of the deficit which had developed under the previous Government.

Sir P. Rawlinson

Is the right hon. Gentleman saying that up to the present no profit has been made by the Post Office?

Mr. Benn

The right hon. and learned Gentleman keeps coming back to this point with which I intend to deal very fully. As to whether we ought to subsidise the postal services by the telecommunications services; as he may well know, the former Postmaster-General, Mr. Bevins, himself said and I certainly do not dissent from his judgment—this is in a Press release issued by the Conservative Central Office in 1960— We ought to aim at making our individual services pay for themselves. This may not always work out, but at least, it ought to be our aim, because only if we try to make our various services viable are we under a compulsion to get our methods and techniques right. That is what he said and I cannot say that I dissent from that view. I referred to it in the House the other day. I can give hon. Members the reference if they want it. It was a release by the Conservative Central Office at 1500 hours, 18th November, 1960, and the reference was 7284. It was a speech to be delivered by Mr. Bevins in Preston the following day. The total text is available in the Library of the House of Commons from where I got it.

Mr. W. A. Wilkins (Bristol, South)

Can we get it in the record?

Mr. Benn

It is in the record in the sense that it is already in the Library of the House.

Mr. Mawby

I now have the information which I tried to get from the right hon. Gentleman's office yesterday, when I was told that no copy of this Press hand-out was available. I was not told what the reference was, nor where I could get the hand-out.

Mr. Benn

I am sorry if the Post Office, among its many duties, does not carry a full stock of Conservative Party Press releases. I will look into that to see whether it can be done—if it is not too costly.

I return to the essence of the right hon. and learned Gentleman's charge. He suggests that the Government have exaggerated the extent of the deficit and his right hon. Friend the Member for Enfield, West keeps coming back to this question of the telephone profits. On 10th November, the hon. Member for Bristol, West (Mr. Robert Cooke) put down a Question about the profitability of the postal services. In answer to that Question I gave the figures of telephone buoyancy of profit, but the question was about postal services. I did not find the skeleton in the cupboard; the hon. Member for Bristol, West took me to the body and helped me to exhume the whole thing by asking me a Question which focussed attention on the greatest weakness of the previous Government's administration of the Post Office. I reported to the House that forecasts available revealed a shortfall below the target of 8 per cent. set by the party opposite which might amount to £120 million. The plain fact is that the profitability of the postal services had been allowed to deteriorate sharply in recent years and that the situation was getting a great deal worse all the time.

The next charge which is sometimes made, although not by the right hon. and learned Gentleman, is that the Government have wrongly accused Mr. Bevins of concealing these forecasts and cooking the books. The definition of cooking the books is cooking the books in such a way, as with the analogy with meat, as to make them more palatable to the consumer. That is what happened in this case. The forecast which I gave to the House in November was known to Mr. Bevins, and when he was asked to comment upon the situation he did so. I quote The Times of 12th November: It is perfectly true that when the draft White Paper was submitted to me I cut it down as I always do with White Papers that are too verbose". Of course the verbosity which he cut out was the verbosity which revealed the deteriorating situation which he had allowed to develop in the past. If the question of cooking the books comes up again, the right hon. and learned Gentleman had better remember the oath administered to every witness— the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Parliament is entitled to at least that from Governments publishing White Papers.

I now come back to the charge which we make, for this is not really a Motion of censure on us so much as a Motion of censure on the party opposite. The fact is that the last Government delayed action for political reasons. I shall read one example of this. It bears on the postmen's pay dispute and is from Mr. Bevins himself, writing in the Sunday Express. He was now speaking about the impact of the forthcoming election on the handling of postal affairs by the Cabinet of which neither the right hon. and learned Gentleman nor the right hon. Member for Enfield, West was a Member. Mr. Bevins is a Privy Councillor and his word must be taken unless it is challenged. He said: In early February I put a reasoned case to the Cabinet. In this I said that I could settle at 5 per cent.; that if they refused to back me we should have a strike in July; that the Union would then raise their demand, that the Cabinet would then fear the electoral consequences and would want to settle at a much higher figure than 5 per cent. I argued that it would be absurd to run the risk of unpopular trouble for the sake of so small a margin. I shall always remember that Cabinet. No single member supported me. It would be improper for me to narrate what was said. It is, however, proper to recall that at that time the fortunes of the Conservative Party were at their lowest ebb. There was scarcely a Minister who thought that we could win the election when it came. When I spoke of the probability of a strike in July the unspoken reactions of some were 'Well, why not?'. In high politics the most eloquent things are unspoken, but we all know the meaning of silences and looks. I knew they had cast aside my judgment. And I knew they were wrong, horribly and abysmally wrong. If the right hon. Gentleman had won his campaign in Liverpool, Toxteth, he would have been on this side of the House in this debate and not speaking for the party opposite. In that article he went on to say that he contemplated resignation and decided against it, and thought on reflection that he was wrong not to have resigned. That is the second aspect of the charge.

Now we come to the charge that these increases will affect the cost of living. Of course they will affect the cost of living. They will affect it by a fraction of one- tenth of 1 per cent., but nobody likes doing it. But there was no conflict here between the First Secretary and myself. He wants the Post Office to be well financed, just as I want his prices and incomes policy to succeed. Indeed, the profitability of the postal services depends on my right hon. Friend's prices and incomes policy succeeding. If any industrialist, called before the prices Board, is subjected to anything like as much detailed scrutiny as my proposals were by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, he will have to have a very good case if he is to get away with it. The increases are the absolute minimum necessary to put the postal services on a sound basis, and they do not even take into account the accumulated deficit which we inherited from the Conservative Party.

I come to the wonderful proposal which is repeatedly made by Members opposite that if we took the telephones into account nothing would have to be done about the matter at all. But if we were to take £37 million from the telephone service to finance the postal services, we should be cutting telephone investment by 20 per cent. during a year when demand is rising more rapidly than ever before. It would be the equivalent of delaying the connection of 800,000 new subscribers or multiplying the present waiting list by a factor of 20. It is therefore simply not practicable to take the money from the telephone service.

I come to the question of why we proposed to raise so much money on the first-class letter. Costs have risen 25 per cent. since the price of the first-class letter was set at 3d. in 1957. However, if the right hon. and learned Gentleman had looked a little further back into his own party's time in power, he would have found that during the years when hon. Members opposite maintained an 8 per cent. return on the postal services, the profit on the first-class letter, expressed as a percentage, was higher than it will be now under the new tariff changes. In 1960–61 there was a profit of £19 million on the first-class letter service, which represented a profit margin of 30 per cent. over and above the estimated cost of that service.

The problem for us is a manifold one. First, there is an acute staff shortage. It is very difficult to recruit postmen, and there will be a shortage of 2,000 postmen in the autumn in London. This is one of the reasons why the quality of the service has suffered. We need the money to finance the accelerated mechanisation. Nothing but an increase of this order on the first-class letter service would have raised the necessary revenue.

The right hon. and learned Gentleman asked why we did not increase the cost of the parcels service. If we had put ½d. extra on the first-class letter and put the rest on the parcels service, parcels would have been more expensive than the first-class letter service and people would have put their parcels in the first-class letter service to go as letter packets. This was not a practicable proposition, and it has not been worked out by the Conservative Party.

The question has been asked, why use consultants? Surely I have said enough in dealing with the basic problems of the Post Office to make it absolutely clear that these problems are so fundamental that it is just not possible to pop into the Post Office, think up a new idea, give some orders and expect the problem to be solved. This matter requires detailed analysis. Right hon. and hon. Members opposite engaged five, six or more consultants when they were in power.

We picked McKinsey for one simple reason. Having taken soundings of those who have used this concern before and of others likely to know, we were absolutely satisfied that they were the best people for the job. Hon. Members must accept or reject my judgment, but it was not for any other reason than that. Like the right hon. and learned Member for Epsom, I am married to an American and, having four children, I am impressed by the productivity of such a match. But it was not for that reason that I decided to engage this concern.

I am looking forward to the speech tonight of the right hon. Member for Enfield, West. There are some questions which the Opposition must answer in this debate. He was a member of the previous Government. Does he or does he not still support an 8 per cent. return on the Post Office? If he does, no amount of juggling inside the Post Office between one service and another can make up a deficiency which, without this tariff increase, would mean that the Post Office return would be down to 5 or 6 per cent. in the forthcoming year.

Secondly, if the right hon. Gentleman is in favour of an 8 per cent. return—I do not see how he can reject everything which happened when his party was in power—why was it not achieved from 1962 onwards up to the present year? Why were the forecasts of the deficit suppressed by the Conservative Party before the election? Was the development of the postal services included in the costing of the election programme about which we heard so much from hon. and right hon. Members opposite? What sum of money does the right hon. Gentleman think should be raised in view of the published figures of a shortfall? Is he in favour of borrowing the money from the Treasury against current losses, or of cutting the telephone investment programme?

Sir Ian Orr-Ewing (Hendon, North)

Earlier the right hon. Gentleman talked about cutting the telecommunications investment programme by 20 per cent. Did he mean the previous planned investment programme for the coming year, or the current investment programme?

Mr. Benn

If we were to get £37 million in cash terms from the telecommunications service, a 20 per cent. cut would have to be made in the investment programme for the forthcoming year, which would be equivalent to not connecting 800,000 subscribers or, if we raised the money on the telephone services—and that has not been suggested—it would involve an increase of £7 in exchange rentals throughout the country. These are insupportable proposals, and I cannot believe that the House will accept them.

When the Conservative Party was in power, it did many good things in the Post Office. It achieved the new status in 1961, which was a great advance. It maintained an 8 per cent. return from 1958 to 1961. It began the telephone expansion programme—a bit late, but still it began it—and that is why the situation is not more difficult. But, as the years progressed, and particularly as right hon. and hon. Members got near a General Election, they decided that it would be safer to leave it to the next Government to deal with the matter. They did this with the trade gap, with defence and with the hospital service. They have done it with the B.B.C. The published figures today show that the Corporation is £5 million in the red. They did it on the postal services. They calculated very exactly that if they won the election they would be able to carry it off because they knew it to be necessary and that if they lost the election they would be able to move Motions of censure on the Government which succeeded them and which had the courage to do what was right. It is the worst case of collective political funk in recent political history.

Now we have the extraordinary situation of the prisoner in the dock moving a vote of no confidence in the jury. That is the best I can make of this extraordinary Motion of censure. Right hon. and hon. Members opposite left us to solve the problem. They set targets for the Post Office. We accept them; we think they are right. These are the men who controlled the Post Office absolutely for 13 years, or, in the case of the right hon. Gentleman, for 12 years. They are the party of modernisation. I have waited eagerly to hear the plans for modernisation of the right hon. and hon. Members opposite. What did they propose—to cut the second delivery in rural areas. That was all that they had to offer for a service which has such an enormous expansion potential.

We do not intend to allow this great publicly-owned industry to suffer from under-investment, under-payment of its staff or under-pricing of its services. The plans which I have mentioned, some of which are in the White Paper and some of which I have dealt with in my speech, are designed to give this country the most modern communications system in the world. I believe that if there is a serious proposal to do this, if this is really planned, the public will want to see it soundly and properly financed, which we intend to do.

5.20 p.m.

Mr. Ray Mawby (Totnes)

Towards the end of his speech the right hon. Gentleman said that the last Government had done many good things, particularly for the Post Office. I am glad that he said that, because during the major part of his speech he was reporting progress on matters which had been put in train when we were in office. I was happy to hear him refer to many of the forward-looking ideas started by the previous Government and which he is continuing. In particular, I was happy to see the signing of the agreement between British Rail and the Post Office for the more up-to-date handling of parcels. This continues to be a problem, but it is being tackled in a way which we hope will provide better service in the future.

I support what the right hon. Gentleman said about getting criticism of the Post Office into a proper perspective. One has to realise what enormous problems have been created by the increase in demand, particularly in telecommunications. Here there is an annual growth of 16 per cent., and when one realises the equipment and the manpower which are available to deal with this increase, one cannot fail to pay tribute to the Post Office staff for keeping criticism to a lower level than it would be if they were not pulling their weight. Criticisms can, and no doubt will be, made of the Post Office, and no one should be satisfied until perfection has been achieved, but on the other hand, we ought to accept that there are many problems which appear to be insurmountable, and yet answers are found to them.

I want to get straight the point made by the right hon. Gentleman when he answered a question asked by my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, West (Mr. Robert Cooke), because this started a whole host of statements which ended with the First Secretary of State saying, during the debate on 2nd February, 1965, that the Post Office had cooked the books. He said: I repeat, the Post Office. The Government published figures that they knew to be false, having cut out figures they knew should be there. Now that I have justified it, can the right hon. Gentleman show that I am wrong?"—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 2nd February, 1965; Vol. 705, c. 1004.]

Mr. Randall

My right hon. Friend is not present. Will the hon. Gentleman tell us whether he notified my right hon. Friend that he proposed to raise this matter this afternoon?

Mr. Mawby

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, because I had neglected to inform the House that I had notified the right hon. Gentleman that I proposed to raise this matter, and he replied saying that he intended no discourtesy to me or to the House by not being here when I did so. He sent me a note saying that he would try to be present when I was speaking, but asked me to read his letter to the House if he could not be here. I intend to read it, because I do not want to say anything behind anyone's back on this issue. All that I want to do is to get the matter cleared up once and for all, because a serious allegation of that kind ought to be backed up with facts.

I wrote to the Postmaster-General and asked him whether I could look at the facts and figures on which this statement was based. The right hon. Gentleman quite properly sent my letter on to the First Secretary of State, who wrote to me on 17th February and said: When we took office in October official forecasts prepared in the General Post Office revealed a prospective deficiency (on the postal side) below the 8 per cent. return required. … These forecast figures must have been known to Bevins, but no mention of them was made in the Report and Accounts published last July. The First Secretary went on to quote a statement which the right hon. Gentleman quoted a little earlier today of the statement by Mr. Bevins in The Times of 12th November.

I felt that the matter could not be left there, so I wrote to the right hon. Gentleman again and said: As the forecasts which you mention do not justify your remark on the 2nd February that 'the Government published figures that they knew to be false', perhaps it might be best if you arranged for me to see the actual papers from which you quote in your letter. I thought that that was a reasonable request to make. Even if the House could not be given the facts, as one of the Ministers in charge of this matter at the time, I would be aware of the evidence on which the right hon. Gentleman made his rather exaggerated claim.

However, he wrote to me again on 1st March and said: What has emerged from our correspondence is a straight disagreement about the interpretation of events which have been made public. In those circumstances, I do not think that we can take it any further. With the greatest respect to the right hon. Gentleman, these facts have not been made public. We had a statement from the Postmaster-General, followed by a statement from the First Secretary of State. The Postmaster-General did not make the allegation made by his right hon. Friend, but he suggested that there was evidence, or part of a White Paper, which had been deliberately cut because the Government of the day did not wish the nation or Parliament to know the facts.

If that is so, I do not believe that the matter can be left in the air. When the First Secretary said that the late Government had published figures which they knew to be false, he made an allegation which ought to be nailed. We ought to be shown the evidence on which that statement was based. The right hon. Gentleman has written to me to say that he cannot be here, and I propose to read his letter because it repeats his previous statement. He says: Your notice that you might refer to me in the debate only reached me this afternoon. I stand by what I said on the 2nd February, namely, that your Government published figures it knew to be false, having cut out figures they knew should be there. Bevins bore this out in his statement quoted in The Times of November 12th.

Mr. Snow

Read it.

Mr. Mawby

It has already been quoted a number of times, and I hope that I shall not be guilty of tedious repetition if I read it again. He says: Bevins bore this out in his statement quoted in The Times of November 12th: 'It is perfectly true that when the draft White Paper was submitted to me I cut it down'. He concludes: On this very short notice I obviously cannot undertake to be in the Chamber when you are called, but if you do refer to this matter you might like to read this letter. I have read out the letter. I am sorry if I gave the impression that I was trying to hide something. I was only trying to save the time of the House by not repeating something which had already been said by the Postmaster-General.

The important fact is that, without that evidence, the House and myself can only ask, where in the last Report and Accounts are there false figures? I must ask the Postmaster-General where, in the last Report and Accounts which were issued, where in that whole book, are there any figures which he has now proved to be false? It is important that he should state quite clearly which of these figures are false.

On the other hand the Postmaster-General has not, until now, repeated what the First Secretary said. All that the right hon. Gentleman has said is that certain things were left out. This is a different matter. If there have been certain things——

Mr. Ron Lewis (Carlisle)

Does the hon. Member agree with what the previous Postmaster-General wrote?

Mr. Mawby

The hon. Member surely understands the English language. There is all the difference in the world between falsifying figures and not saying something. Do hon. Gentlemen opposite really believe that when the civil servants of a Department prepare drafts of any document, the Minister must then issue that document as a whole? If this is so, there is no point in having Ministers at all; let the civil servants run the show.

It is obviously difficult to remember the particular point to which the Postmaster-General refers. Therefore, if the allegation is made that false figures were issued by the previous Government, I believe that it is incumbent on the right hon. Gentleman to tell us where those false figures are. If he is not prepared to do that, he should withdraw and apologise to the House for the statement which he made.

Mr. Archie Manuel (Central Ayrshire)

The hon. Member was closely in touch with this Department in his previous position. Would he not agree that if figures were left out—I think that this is admitted—it is bound to create false impressions, to say the least of it? That was what the Minister was referring to. If figures are left out, then, of course, they are cooked.

Mr. Ron Lewis

Concealment.

Mr. Mawby

The hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Mr. Manuel) knows no more than I do what sort of figures are supposed to have been left out, nor the terms in which those figures were used. He does not know and I do not know. I have plumbed my memory, but, obviously, unless it is refreshed by seeing those figures again, it is a matter of opinion as to what the basis is for the allegation by the First Secretary that fraudulent figures were issued. If one understands the English language, this means that someone has altered some of the figures in this Report and Accounts and has, therefore, given the wrong impression.

After all, if one wants to know anything about the Post Office, one looks at the Report and Accounts. One should look at the appendices of the facts and figures, where one will find what all the sections of the Post Office have made. The appendices deal with a number of years. Unless the House can see the evidence upon which this statement is based, I believe that the right hon. Gentleman ought to withdraw and apologise to the House. I believe that it is right and proper that this course of action should be taken in this matter.

Mr. Geoffrey Rhodes (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, East)

Surely the hon. Member would agree that there are such things as errors of omission as well as errors of commission, but that in either case they create a falsehood.

Mr. Mawby

That may be true. [HON. MEMBERS: "Oh."] All that I am saying is that a grave allegation has been made by the First Secretary of State. He refuses to allow even me, let alone the public, to see the facts and figures upon which he bases that allegation. If he sincerely believes this to be true, he should publish the evidence upon which he bases that allegation. If he is not prepared to publish, he should withdraw.

I should certainly look with great interest upon evidence which is brought forward. Anyone who says that the last Government fraudulently changed figures, without being prepared to bring the evidence forward, is using his position intolerably. It creates an intolerable situation if a Minister does this sort of thing.

Mr. Stratton Mills (Belfast, North)

My hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Mr. Mawby) will have noticed that the Postmaster-General did not repeat the allegation of false figures in his speech, nor has he intervened this afternoon to make that allegation to support the First Secretary. Therefore, I think that my hon. Friend can take heart, in that the Minister responsible for the Post Office has not confirmed that allegation.

Mr. Benn

The hon. Gentleman should not get that impression at all. My right hon. Friend the First Secretary of State does not need anybody to defend him. If someone brought out a prospectus and did not include forecasts of loss, he would go straight to gaol, under the law. If someone publishes figures which leave out certain forecasts—there is no doubt whatsoever about this; Mr. Bevins himself has admitted that he cut passages from the White Paper—then he publishes, in this case, a report which is misleading. This is the only charge which I have ever made, and this is the charge relating to the handling of the Post Office accounts by the previous Administration.

As the hon. Gentleman knows very well, having been a Minister there, continual estimates are made in the Post Office on a quarterly, if not a monthly, basis, including projections of future profitability. He could not ask the House to believe him when he says that it is a matter of puzzlement to him what this refers to. The hon. Member had access to the passages referred to, and he ought to be a little franker.

Mr. Mawby

I do not know what the right hon. Gentleman means when he says that I ought to be franker. The important thing is that I have said to the House that I have, as a Minister, seen reports and drafts which have been cut down because they were too verbose. This is a matter on which every Minister has to make his decision. His civil servants are there to give him all the advice which is required, but only the Minister can decide, in line with whatever the policy may be, what action will be taken upon it.

Obviously, Mr. Bevins has said that he cut this down because it was too verbose, but if the right hon. Gentleman expects me to remember the exact words of every draft which was placed before me during the time that I was there, then he is expecting a memory man rather than an ordinary back bencher, who had a little time as a Minister.

Mr. G. Elfed Davies (Rhondda, East)

Surely the hon. Member is not suggesting that the decision of the Minister should be influenced by whether or not there is to be an election?

Mr. Mawby

If that were the rule, we should be in a much happier position—if political parties did not take these views. In fact, every political party and every political Minister from time to time does not lose account of the political consequences of the action which he is about to take. [HON. MEMBERS: "Ah."] This is one of those things. I think Ministers on both sides—[HON. MEMBERS: "Ah."] If hon. Gentlemen really believe that all Ministers at present are, in all their decisions, free from the taint of politics, then they should not be here. They should be in kindergarten, because that is their mental age, if they believe that.

Mr. Stratton Mills

My hon. Friend will recall that on 10th November the Postmaster-General said that he would be making a fuller statement soon about increasing postal charges. It took him four-and-a-half months to get them through the Cabinet. Presumably the delay was on political grounds.

Mr. Mawby

These are problems which can arise, as anyone who has been a Minister will realise. A Minister who is in the Cabinet can get something agreed by the Cabinet more easily than a Minister who is not. Political considerations have to be taken into account. Civil servants produce all the necessary advice, but no Minister can shirk his final responsibility to make a decision, and that is a very important matter.

I go back to the most important point of all. Unless the First Secretary is prepared to produce the evidence in the House on which he made his statement, he ought to withdraw and apologise to the House. That is quite a simple thing for him to do. Until it happens we ought to treat the statement which he made with the contempt that it deserves. Having got rid of that point—at least, I have put it on a proper basis, so far as I am concerned—I believe that basically this was an excuse to justify raising the charges.

It is important to notice that while the Secretary of State talks about keeping costs steady, the costs to the Post Office, because of the actions of the Government, have already gone up by £5½ million. This has resulted from the increase in petrol tax and the higher contributions to National Insurance, and so on. Already, direct action by the Government has resulted in adding £5½ million to Post Office expenditure. Therefore, the right hon. Gentleman has provided one of the reasons for the need to raise Post Office charges.

Sir Douglas Glover (Ormskirk) rose——

Mr. Deputy-Speaker (Dr. Horace King)

Order. I have no power to stop interventions, but I have pointed out before that many interventions prolongs a speech and a number of hon. Gentlemen wish to take part in the debate.

Sir D. Glover

I abide by your Ruling, Mr. Deputy-Speaker. If you do not think that I should intervene, I will not do so.

Mr. Mawby

There is another aspect which we ought to get clear. The right hon. Gentleman referred to it, but he did not indicate his attitude. The previous Government decided that the Post Office as a whole ought to have an excess of income over expenditure amounting to 8 per cent. on net assets over a five-year period. Presumably—he does not say otherwise—the right hon. Gentleman accepts that as a fair measure of profitability for an organisation like the Post Office. If he does accept it, I go back to the question which I asked on Thursday. Does he break it down still further and say that each sector of the Post Office must be so organised that it makes 8 per cent. on net assets? This is a very important point.

I agree that it is fairly simple to separate the postal side from telecommunications. But the Minister said earlier that for many years the postal service has assisted the growth of telecommunications, and people in the service say that the postal side carried telephones for a long time and it is about time the reverse was the case. If the right hon. Gentleman breaks this down, he will get into all sorts of difficulties. There are many services provided by the post office which have a high social value, but do not make an 8 per cent. profit. They do not even make a profit, they make a loss. An example is the public telephone kiosks. We have always accepted the fact that they make a loss because of their social value. One would not consider taking away public telephone kiosks because they earned only a small amount of money, or make special tariffs applicable to telephone kiosks.

We have argued out the question of telegrams on many occasions and whether the charge for them should be economic. There are other services which, because of their social value, have been accepted although they make a loss.

The point which the right hon. Gentleman made about mechanisation is important. We are now, surely, in a position to increase the amount of mechanisation by introducing automatic sorting, and so on. The difficulty arises because of the capital which is required and, also, there is the physical effort of introducing it. I think that it will be some time before mechanisation is completed and I wish to ask the Minister whether, in deciding the cut-off point at which non-standard envelopes will be charged at a higher tariff, the intervening period could be nearer five years instead of two or three years as he has in mind.

The right hon. Gentleman knows the difficulties in changing the designs and sizes, particularly of greetings cards and Christmas cards. It would give the trade more opportunity to get rid of present models, if that is the right thing to call them, and would allow the retailers to work through their present stocks. It would obviate a difficulty which would be caused for the stationer who would have to explain to customers why cards of a certain size required a more valuable stamp. It would also avoid difficulties for postmen who would have to collect surcharges on wrongly stamped letters.

I ask the right hon. Gentleman to consider this and to make certain that sufficient time is given to allow this matter to be worked out. One of my hon. Friends is interested in a large firm which produces these cards and there is worry about competition from abroad. If the change-over could be made by easy stages the firm might well be able to hold its own.

I apologise for having spoken for so long. The last thing I want to do is prevent other hon. Members from speaking. I have made only a few of the points I had intended to make. I conclude by wishing the right hon. Gentleman the Postmaster-General well in his new office and I hope that he will appreciate that he is continuing the good work which we started when we were in office.

5.50 p.m.

Mr. Harry Randall (Gateshead, West)

I begin by congratulating my right hon. Friend the Postmaster-General for making what most hon. Members will agree was a spirited speech from the Dispatch Box. It was a pleasure to have the affairs of the Post Office described by a Labour Postmaster-General after a considerable number of years of Conservative administration. For too long I had to listen on the benches opposite to the speeches of previous Postmasters-General. Not always did I listen to them with the relish with which I listened to my right hon. Friend's remarks today.

Previous Postmasters-General have talked about the future of the Post Office. Indeed, for the last 30 or so years we have been talking about it. The challenge which faces my right hon. Friend now is that of introducing modernisation as quickly as possible, a challenge which was never accepted or implemented by the party opposite during their years in office. I agree with my right hon. Friend that whatever is done the Post Office must have the capital, the wherewithal, to achieve modernisation and improvement.

I was interested in some of the points made by the former Assistant Postmaster-General, the hon. Member for Totnes(Mr. Mawby). He accepts—and I do not blame him for doing so—that progress has been made in the past, but his right hon. Friend suggested that all the complaints about the deterioriation of services had arisen during the past five months. The hon. Member for Totnes knows that these things have been going on for a long time. Indeed, if any hon. Member knows the reasons for the deterioriation in certain respects the hon. Member for Totnes knows them, for he will not deny that the Post Office has been starved of finance. That is really what the debate is all about.

Let us consider the history leading up to the present state of affairs. We must realise, first, that this is really the continuation of a debate which began in about 1932, when the Bridgeman Committee recommended that the Post Office should be self-financing. The Government of the day did not completely accept that view. It was agreed that it should have certain opportunities but unfortunately over the years the Post Office has been the revenue collector for the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Hundreds of millions of pounds have passed from Post Office services to the Exchequer and long ago this practice should have ceased. Up to 1939 we managed to get a sort of emasculated Post Office Fund. That helped, but the contribution which the Post Office had to make to the Exchequer was too large, resulting in Postmasters-General not being able to hold sufficient back. So large was that contribution that even Tory Postmasters-General have complained about the large sums which have had to be paid to the Exchequer. During the war years the Post Office Fund ceased completely and that was a great loss to the surpluses of the Post Office and its ability to develop its services.

We move on to 1960. I am not surprised that the right hon. Member for Wallasey (Mr. Marples) has not associated himself with the Motion which stands in the names of several of his right hon. and hon. Friends. I do not for a moment believe that he would have allowed his name to have been put to that Motion. I give him credit for being responsible for producing the White Paper on the status of the Post Office. It was a commendable document and it clearly laid down the need for the Post Office to earn sufficient to face up to the capital development programmes of its various sections. I did not accept it fully at the time, but I came to understand that there was good reason for the views which were expressed and for this reason I am sure that the right hon. Member for Wallasey would not have associated himself with the Motion.

In 1961, we got the Post Office Act. That, at least, gave us the commercial freedom for which we had been looking. It gave greater scope for movement and responsibility for running the Post Office as a self-contained business. Thus, today's debate bears on the success or failure of the financial policies since 1961 and, in this connection, I remind the House that Sections 6 and 7 of the Post Office Act imposed a minimum obligation on the Post Office to pay its way with proper allocations to general reserve.

The White Paper on the status of the Post Office set this aim out more clearly. It said that the Post Office should be required by Statute to secure that its revenue should not be less than sufficient taking one year with another. I remind the hon. Member for Totnes of that, for it is not a question of five years but of taking one year with another. That sentiment was expressed in paragraph 20 of the White Paper. It stated that the Post Office had … to meet its outgoings properly chargeable to revenue account. In other words, the objective was to achieve a return on net assets averaging 8 per cent.

That principle was accepted and built into the Post Office Act. My right hon. Friend accepted it when he took over the Post Office from the previous Government. During the past two years we did not see that average of 8 per cent. achieved and that is why my right hon. Friend has had to seek endorsement for his recommendation to increase postal rates.

I was present when the Post Office Bill, as it was then, was going through its Second Reading. The then Postmaster-General referred to the 8 per cent. figure and said: Naturally, we shall do that."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 25th January, 1961, Vol. 633 c. 181.] The House expected him to do that. I hope that there will be no doubt, whatever we do in examining the record of the previous Government and what was achieved under them, that it was expected that the Post Office would aim at achieving an average of 8 per cent. in its various services.

That is the background and in 1965 we find The Times saying—this was in an editorial on 26th March last— No one will deny the Post Office's difficulties. It went on to refer to its social obligations, pointed out that some of its services were bound to involve losses, that allowances had to be made in respect of targets and that, like other nationalised industries, the Post Office was expected to make half the average rate for outside industries; in other words, about 8 per cent. It went on: Yet over the past three years the Post Office missed its target by over £60 million. Without immediate action there would be a cumulative shortfall of no less than £150 million below the target by March, 1968. So that is the position. There it is.

For years we have had under-pricing of the postal services. That has led to under-investment, and the result has been the worsened services to which the right hon. and learned Gentleman referred. We did not seek to defend those worsened services when we were the Opposition. We recognised that there was a deterioration there, but we had done more than the other side did because we have tried to look for the reasons for it.

The basic reason was that we were starved of capital, and the services will continue to deteriorate unless something is done in this respect. It was the failure of the previous Postmaster-General that paved the way for the distasteful action that my right hon. Friend has now had to take. The Opposition really have no right to put down this Motion. They should have revealed the pledges and obligations they entered into when they made certain statements in the House.

The previous Government made it very clear in Command 1337, of 1961, that the Post Office, as a nationalised industry, was expected to produce 8 per cent. on net assets. Then there was the policy pursued in 1958–59 to 1960–61—three years in which the then Postmaster-General admitted that the Post Office was making more than 8 per cent. That was his argument on the Second Reading of the Post Office Bill. He said that it had been done for three years and he wanted to see it continued. Those were pledges entered into by the previous Government, and we are now entitled to ask why there is likely to be a short-fall for the postal services of about £60 million on the 8 per cent. return on the first three years of the target period.

In December, 1963, the previous Postmaster-General said that he was not then thinking of putting up the tariffs, and I said, "Yes, not yet." The election year was not far away, and there was a reason why the previous Postmaster-General was not prepared to face up to what I believe he knew were the financial circumstances of the Post Office. I can think of only one reason for action being withheld. I am perfectly satisfied that the answer lay, not in political considerations but in political expediency, and there is quite a difference between those two. Reading the articles in the Sunday Express by the previous Postmaster-General, one is left in no doubt about what was happening behind the scenes. I shall read one or two extracts from those articles a little later. The previous Government's decision not to take action was very regrettable, but it has been taken and there is no escape; once again the present Government are having to take unpalatable action, and I am glad that they have had the courage to do so.

I have been associated with the Post Office for a number of years. I want the Post Office staff to have a fair deal, but I do not necessarily want increased charges because of that. I was in the Post Office way back in 1914, as a boy messenger. It may be that in the Post Office today we do not have the same traditions that some of the older ones had. Perhaps it would do the Post Office a lot of good if we could recruit that sort of man and woman, but there is a reason why we do not recruit them. I am proud of the Post Office and the services it provides. I do not want to see it starved of capital so that it cannot reproduce the services given in the past. We have to reshape our ideas, and some of the ideas put forward by my right hon. Friend this afternoon are important, and well worth looking at. Therefore, I hope that the House will give him the opportunity afforded by the increased charges.

We have to redeem the pledges given by hon. Members opposite, who said over the years that they would modernise. They promised that there would be capital available for that purpose, but we on this side have to redeem the promises and pledges they made. It is their five-year capital programme, not ours, that is now falling behind. If we are to redeem those promises, it is inevitable that we should face up to increased tariffs.

The right hon. and learned Gentleman suggested the abolition of the second delivery in the rural areas. The previous Postmaster-General told the House that he had a hard look at the services, but right up to last year he had made no proposal to economise on these services. How, then, does the right hon. and learned Gentleman now suggest that we should cancel the second delivery in the rural areas? In any case, I do not be- lieve that the public would stand for it. Last July, when the Post Office was going through perhaps its most difficult period, a public opinion poll made it very clear that the majority of people were prepared to pay increased charges so long as the postmen had a proper wage—and they were right.

As an ex-postman, I say that we have suffered far too much in the past from economising on services. They are false economies, and not permanent remedies. Projects are started, and then they are cancelled. Expectations in regard to building are raised, and then we find the work suddenly postponed. Services continue to deteriorate. That has gone on over the years. It is about time we broke with that bad tradition of imagining that we can improve postal services merely by the type of economy suggested earlier today.

During our discussions on the Post Office Bill I was not too happy about the commercialising of the Post Office, but I have come to realise that it would give us the greater stability needed, so that we would no longer be at the mercy of the Treasury. Now that we have the Department for Economic Affairs, I am glad that because of the Act we shall not be so much even under the influence of my right hon. Friend there. But there can be no commercial freedom for the Post Office, no imaginative approach to its problems, no flexibility, if it is subject to the political whims we had in 1963 and 1964. That sort of thing completely destroys everything done by the Tory Government to commercialise the Post Office.

I would remind the House—though perhaps it may not wish to be reminded—that last July's discussions of the staff's legitimate claims were bedevilled because of a lack of money in the "kitty". I am quite sure that behind those discussions the biggest pressure of all did not come from the legitimate claim of the postmen, nor from lack of sympathy with the postmen—it was just that there was not the money available to meet their claims. Such a situation should not be encouraged. This is where my right hon. Friend is showing much more initiative than was shown by the Conservative Government.

I turn now to the problem of inadequate investment and its effects on delays and deterioration in services. These matters have been well ventilated on the Order Paper. Delays in services arise as a result of buildings, mechanisation, recruitment, and wages. Because of lack of capital to develop the services, Post Office buildings which were designed 40 to 50 years ago still remain. They have been described as resembling idle, gloomy warehouses, or brown tiled public lavatories. There is a good deal of truth in this. Many of our offices are slum offices. They are buildings which were planned for growth after 10 to 20 years, but they have been standing for 60 years.

Sir D. Glover

Many have been modernised.

Mr. Randall

Some have been. I worked at King Edward building in the City of London. This is the very centre. It is the pride of the City of London. It was erected in 1910. Recently, I asked in a Question what traffic was dealt with in 1910. I learned that in 1910 there were 17½ million items a week. Today, there are 22 million items a week. The traffic in the City of London is enormous. When I was there we were bursting at the seams. We had the greatest difficulty in dealing with what was called the general post and the evening mail. Considerable difficulties were caused to the staff.

I have not been there for a number of years, but I am told that nothing has been done for at least 20 years. I am told that the heating arrangements there are the same as they were when the building was erected, in 1910. I am told that last winter Calor gas stoves were offered to the staff because the heating was inadequate. I do not know who made the offer, but with millions of letters being handled every week I cannot see any wisdom in this suggestion. This is a very busy office of which some of us were proud. It deals with 2 million letters a day. Yet very few improvements have been made to the building. The same is true of Manchester and other large cities. Staff cannot be expected to give of their best, unless they are working in optimum conditions. One of the things my right hon. Friend must do is to ensure that improvements are carried out to buildings as soon as possible.

I am glad about the speed up in postal mechanisation. I attended a conference of the Union of Post Office Workers at Brighton in 1935 or 1937. The idea of the conference being held at Brighton was because a new sorting machine had emerged. It was called the Transorma sorting machine. We are still waiting for efficient mechanical sorting machines. I hope that my right hon. Friend means business in regard in what is stated in the White Paper. I hope that he will call a halt to all the experiments which have been going on and make a quick decision. I hope that we shall quickly get round to a modern method of sorting our correspondence.

I am glad, too, that work consultants are likely to be appointed. I am glad that there is to be a review of postal services. This is a move in the right direction. A new look is required. I am told that we are to have American industrial efficiency experts. I thought that the remark made by a United States Embassy spokesman recently, which was reported in the Daily Sketch of 26th March, was a little unkind. Referring to the American firm, the spokesman said: Well, I hope your postal service turns out to be better than ours". This may well express what some of us feel about the introduction even of American experts to have a look at our Post Office. But I do not complain. I would rather have the best advice on how to improve the services.

Whatever progress is made in mechanisation, the postman's lot will still be far from easy. There is a limit to the amount of mechanisation which can take place. Even with all the sorting machines possible, the postman must still prepare his walk for delivery. He must still go outside and put letters into letter boxes. He still has to go to the pillar boxes and collect letters. I do not know that any machine will be introduce to take the real hard labour out of his work.

I want to see more mechanisation in sorting offices. I have referred to my experience some years ago as a young postman. Having worked at two sub-offices in London in 1920, I arrived at King Edward Building—E.C.D.O.—just before Christmas. For some days before Christmas I spent nearly six hours every day standing at a table facing up letters, namely, ensuring that the stamps were the right way up. I know of no more soul-destroying task. This job still has to be done by hand. Even in those days there was talk of introducing a machine to face up letters, but we still await it.

The postman's lot is a very hard one. A paraphrase of what was said in the Evening Standard of 23rd July, 1964, probably puts the matter fairly, "The postman's job is an arduous one. It is hard on the feet and on the back. As well as demanding honesty and integrity, it is hard on his pocket". This puts the matter very well, because I believe that wages are at the centre of the problems facing the Post Office. Before the war, the Post Office could attract the right kind of workers. It offered terms of engagement. It offered a contract which was attractive compared with what workers in industry could get. Then the Post Office could get men who were prepared to make a career of it.

Sir D. Glover

I am sure that the hon. Gentleman, after all his service with the Post Office, does not want it to go out from the House that the Post Office has a lot of very bad workers. I am sure that everybody in the House would agree that, on the average, postmen and Post Office workers are some of the best people in industry.

Mr. Randall

The hon. Gentleman misunderstands me. I said nothing about the quality or lack of quality of the present workers. I was saying that before the war it was possible to attract workers of the right character. They had terms of engagement and a contract of service far superior to what was obtainable in outside industry. As a result, the Post Office was able to get the very best labour that there was.

I am not detracting from the quality of the present labour force. I am only saying that in those days, because of the terms of service, because of establishment, because of superannuation, because of sick leave—benefits which were not available to workers in industry—it was inevitable that some of the best workers in the country came to the Post Office. This must be recognised. It is one of the limitations we face at present. I have no criticisms of the present staff. I merely say that outside industry has benefited as a result of this.

If the hon. Gentleman wants me to underline it, I will. In the E.C.D.O., in King Edward Street, with an establishment of 2,200, there are 262 vacancies. The men will not come in. On making inquiries, I find that 450 to 500 of the staff are our coloured colleagues from the Commonwealth. That is what is happening. There is this great difficulty of recruitment which arises, I believe, because the wages situation is not what it ought to be.

This staffing problem is not found only in the King Edward Street building, but in all the larger offices up and down the country. Places like Bristol and Manchester are facing the same situation. Every day Manchester is about 250 postmen short. The difficulty is not so much in recruiting the men as in holding them. Because of the hours of duty and the lack of amenity people prefer to go into outside industry rather than remain in Post Office work. The tragedy is that we are losing experienced men. I am told that shortly five men, each with 12 years' experience, are to leave the E.C.D.O. We cannot afford to let such men go.

The answer is that we have to do as much as we possibly can to reach a satisfactory wage position. One of the things which has aggravated the staff for a number of years has been the approach of the previous Government to wages. We had the classic example of three or four years ago, of which I reminded the House at the time, of the Post Office saying that when the postmen made a wage claim they were overpaid. The letter that was sent on that occasion concluded by saying, "We shall not be seeking a reduction on this occasion". That did not help staff relations. Later, when the postmen went to arbitration the Arbitration Court awarded them an increase. Things of this kind that have gone on under the previous Administration have made staff relations extremely difficult.

The lesson was not even learned last summer. In July, the previous Postmaster-General made a very feeble exercise in brinkmanship. I will refer now to articles in the Sunday Express which Mr. Bevins wrote concerning part of his period in the Post Office. At that time staff relations in the Post Office were near to collapse. Something was happening which I never expected or wanted to see. I had warned the House of what was happening. Now we have in this article from Mr. Bevins some revelations of events behind the Post Office pay dispute.

I will quote from the Sunday Express of 31st January, 1965: When I first went to the Post Office, Ernest Marples advised me to keep sweet with the two Smiths, they being the leaders of the two unions. Mr. Macmillan had also been impressed by the electoral arithmetic. 'Don't offend all these men—their wives have votes, too'. Perhaps I should have taken this more seriously than I did. I am quite sure that Mr. Bevins is right and that he should have been advised to consider grounds other than electoral grounds. He should have endeavoured to see, and not for electoral advantage, what could have been done for the good of the Post Office. But as events moved he clearly saw there was to be a strike in July.

My right hon. Friend has referred to the comment by Mr. Bevins that he had not a friend in the Cabinet. Mr. Bevins wrote: No single member supported me. Moreover, if we are to take his account as lifting the lid, the previous Government could not have cared less. I will read a further extract: When I spoke of the probability of a strike in July the unspoken reactions of some were, Well, why not?' In high politics the most eloquent things are unspoken. That was most shameful. It was complete irresponsibility on the part of Mr. Bevins and the harm it has done to staff relations since then is something which is difficult to describe.

From my experience, I know of the value of staff consultation in the Post Office. Over the years we had built up staff consultation to the point where we were almost the envy of every industry in the country. There was nothing like it, yet the action of the previous Postmaster-General completely destroyed it. He knew that a strike was in the offing, but it appeared that he could not care less. After the dispute the postmen at least got some satisfaction.

When the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Epsom (Sir P. Rawlinson) asks why this money is wanted I would remind him that we have not yet got a final settlement after what happened last July. The inquiry is still going on and that is a bill which has yet to be paid. But there was no doubt of the attitude of the public up and down the country. The Daily Mail of 15th July, 1964, said: Basically, the facts are that postmen are poorly paid The Daily Express of 25th July, 1964, said: The postal workers must in future be properly paid. They must be in line with other responsible workers in industry". The Daily Herald of 25th July, 1964, said: Most people reckoned that the postmen had a right to more money. Then there was the public opinion poll in which nearly 70 per cent. of the people who were asked said that the Postmaster-General should pay the postmen more.

The Post Office is facing competition for labour. I believe that with sufficient labour, services could be maintained and improved. Without sufficient labour we can only face and suffer a deterioration of services. Whether we like it or not, labour in the Post Office will be attracted by good wages and so we come to the question: what kind of postal service are we prepared to pay for? It is a question of seeing things in perspective. Some people may argue that the most important sector is the factories where goods are made and that those workers must have priority. It could be argued that if that course is adopted business must not complain that the postal services are not good enough. They will be getting what they are willing to pay for. But there is another point of view. The public and the business community are prepared and willing to pay for a good service. They are not willing to pay for a bad service. They want not cheapness and a poor service, but a good service at whatever it may cost.

I believe that the Post Office has a choice before it. It can either set out to get the right kind of workers and enough of them, or it can lower the quality of service and the staff and hope to pay less for it. I am sure that the first is the right thing to do and it is because I see within the recommendations for an increase in tariffs, unpalatable as they are, an opportunity to do the things which we have wanted to do in the Post Office for a very long time that I support what my right hon. Friend has proposed in this White Paper.

I welcome this debate. I believe that we have to get away from the old concepts. Rowland Hill and his 1d. post were all right in their day, but if we are to give a service to the public we have to get away from those ideas of the origins of the Post Office. To be mesmerised by the past and present is to blind ourselves to the possibilities of the future. We seem to have been preoccupied with "ambulance work"—tidying up here and there and putting on ointment and bandages.

We have all been guilty of smug complacency. We have talked in terms of having the best and cheapest postal service in the world, claiming that our postmen are wonderful—and they are. I say that as an ex-postman myself. But we cannot live in the past. We have to face the future and the truth is that none of us can live on the past, and certainly not the Post Office, any more than it can live on its losses. That is why I welcome the fresh approach that my right hon. Friend has made this afternoon. His refreshing frankness, his thinking in terms of going forward in the development of the service and its expansion appeal to me. His courage in breaking away from the normal pattern is commendable, and I should have thought would have commended itself to everyone in the House this afternoon.

The White Paper, the speech of my right hon. Friend and the debate itself will release new forces and new ideas which will mark the turning point of the long and inspired traditions of the Post Office to the new fields of advance.

6.31 p.m.

Mr. David Gibson-Watt (Hereford)

In following the hon. Gentleman the Member for Gateshead, West (Mr. Randall) I must say straight away that I greatly enjoyed much of his speech. I particularly enjoyed his telling us that in 1914 he was a boy messenger in the London Post Office. All I can say to him, and it is perhaps a fulsome compliment, is that his spry and youthful appearance speaks well for the Post Office. I think that perhaps the second deliveries in the country districts would be more the exercise that he has been carrying out in late years, rather than sitting here in London.

In this debate on the Post Office, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Epsom (Sir P. Rawlinson) referred to the fact that the Post Office has a special position. I will not repeat what he said so well. It is a very special institution. It employs, as we know, getting on for half a million people. It touches the whole of the population very closely every day. The postman himself is a person who is much respected. I often wonder why it is that the Law Courts have not made it unlawful for a dog to bite a postman. It always seems to me most unfortunate that a postman should not be defended from this sort of attack. I think that I am right in saying that, and I am sure that the Assistant Postmaster-General, who, I am sorry to say, is not taking part in the debate today, for reasons that we well know, would agree with me in wanting to see that law altered.

One of the things on which the hon. Member for Gateshead, West spent a good deal of time, and I can well understand this, was the question of the postmen's pay. Far be it from me to say anything this afternoon which would exacerbate this problem. If I may say so, he went rather further than his right hon. Friend. He did not quite say that the increase in the Post Office charges was to pay these extra wages, but he went very close to saying it. I thought his right hon. Friend studiously avoided saying anything of that sort.

In my view, the Postmaster-General said very little about the postal services. He seemed to be on much happier ground when he was talking about the telecommunications picture. Here he spoke of some of the new and modern inventions, but if I may say so, nothing which is new during the last five or six months since hon. Gentlemen opposite have been in office. All the things to which he referred are merely a continuation of what my right hon. Friends have been busy over in the years that lie behind us. He did say that the Assistant Postmaster-General would be paying a good deal of attention to the health, safety and welfare side of the matter, but, of course, when one gets down to talking about that one immediately comes up against the problem of £ s. d.

Although there are many post offices which have been improved over the past years, however long we live there will always be post offices, as, indeed, there will be other public institutions, which will require money to be spent on them. I rejoice that in my own constituency of Hereford it so happens that one—not both—of the post offices is a good, modern building. I suppose that we shall see the happy time when the General Post Office itself there will be so modernised.

The right hon. Gentleman asked a lot of questions in his speech. Frankly, he gave very few of the answers. No doubt the consultants may be able to give him some. I do not blame him for inviting consultants to assist him. I am sure that he is right to do this and that in the minds of hon. Gentlemen on this side of the House there is rejoicing when we see that the Socialist Party has come to the time when it is prepared to have consultants from outside to go into the affairs of our public organisations. It is a very healthy state of affairs that this should happen.

The right hon. Gentleman spent hardly any time in his speech in discussing the question of parcels. This is a point on which I would like to put my finger now. If we look at the White Paper we shall see this attitude is borne out by what he says there. He is inclined to lump parcels and letters together. I do not think that that is right. I think myself that if one is to differentiate between the telecommunications and the postal side one had better differentiate much more obviously between the letters and the parcels.

I was glad that my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Mr. Mawby), with his experience in the Post Office, reminded us of the fact that the East Anglian experiment had taken place. That was an important step forward in the negotiations of the Post Office. It was an important step in securing agreement with British Railways that a new form of carrying the post should be used.

I come from the West Midlands and I believe that the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, who is winding up the debate, comes from the nearby constituency of Gloucester. He may have something to say about this but I wonder whether the East Anglian experiment might not be repeated in the West Midlands. We have some difficulties here about deliveries of post, and particularly parcels.

Without going into too much detail I know very well that the trains which carry some of the parcel post from the North to my own constituency actually come through my constituency, but the parcels are not taken off that train then. They go to the constituency of the right hon. Gentleman, from there they go to Worcester and then we get them in Hereford again the next day. I am not asking the right hon. Gentleman to look into this question now but this is just an instance of how I feel quite certain a useful inquiry could be made into the question of the parcel post.

I believe many people share my view that there could be great improvement in the delivery of the parcel post. If the Chief Secretary could pass this suggestion to his Postmaster-General I am sure that people in the West Midlands would be particularly grateful. I believe I am right in saying that if the area is on a main line the problem of distribution is relatively easy, but when one gets to the West Midlands, which is not really on main lines, and where the journey is very much across country, the job is much more difficult.

The Postmaster-General spent a good deal of time in his speech in referring to the increase in the letter post rate. There is no good blinking the fact that a rise of ld. to 4d. which is 33⅓ per cent., is a very large increase indeed. I do not think that the right hon. Gentleman quite went the whole way in answering the demand of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Epsom (Sir P. Rawlinson) to show why it was necessary to raise the postage to this extent.

Indeed, on the day when the right hon. Gentleman made his announcement, one of his own supporters, the hon. Member for Liverpool, Toxteth (Mr. Crawshaw, said that many hon. Members opposite would view the increases with alarm and that manufacturers could use them as an excuse for increasing the cost of their goods out of all proportion to their increased postage costs. There will be a certain amount of alarm about the increased postal rate, but it would be quite wrong to suggest that manufacturers or industrialists will raise the cost of their goods one whit more than is necessary.

The fact is that the rise is bound to have some effect and it is no good the Postmaster-General saying, as he is reported to have said outside the House the other day, that the effect on the cost-of-living would be to raise it by 0.07 per cent. As my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Epsom said, that does not include the increase of £25 million in industrial costs as well, and this must be passed on to affect the cost of living.

The increase in postal charges is large and I do not think that the Postmaster-General has sufficiently supported it in the debate today. We look forward to the speech of the Chief Secretary at the end of the debate. In the context of rising prices we must take into consideration, also, the general question, already raised by my hon. Friends, of the way in which the Government have been themselves directly responsible for raising costs and prices.

When the First Secretary was describing the Price Review Body which he had set up he said: There are … tens if not hundreds of thousands of different prices throughout the country. We are not going to employ an army of officials to keep watch on each and every one of these, but there is a much smaller and identifiable number of prices which are of special importance, either because they affect the whole community, or a very large part of it. …"—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 4th November, 1964: Vol. 701, c. 223.] The right hon. Gentleman went on to itemise what they were, but these postal charges are one of those things, however small, as some hon. Members opposite may think them to be, which will touch the whole community in an obvious way.

If, therefore, we are to continue to have from the Government a sequence of price rises of this sort which have a direct effect upon the economy of the country we shall be anxious about the future possible success of the incomes policy which the First Secretary is trying to secure. I am one of those who believe that it is of great importance to have an agreed incomes policy and that both sides of industry and others should work towards its fruition, but I believe, also, that many of these steps which the Government take to raise prices in this way must have a deleterious effect on the joint aim of the right hon. Gentleman and his colleagues.

The postal services are a large and important industry which nobody should undervalue. I did not agree with the Postmaster-General when he said that there were some people who thought that the Post Office was a declining industry. I do not believe that anybody in his senses could think that, and, with great respect to him in his absence, I thought that he was only putting up an Aunt Sally to knock it down again. The Post Office is large and will continue to grow. Although the postal side of the service is not quite so glamourous and modern to the public as the telecommunications side, it will still be much the most personal side and fundamentally much the most difficult to run.

When it comes to considering the pay and conditions of these many hundreds of thousands of men, I would say to the Government and the Postmaster-General, "Do not overlook the situation, also, of that small body of men, the sub-postmasters, sprinkled all over the country, many of them part-time men in small sweet shops in the countryside." There are 23,000 of them. Several of my hon. Friends, and particularly the hon. Member for Norfolk, South (Mr. J. E. B. Hill) spoke to me about this and asked me to raise the matter in debate. I hope that their position will not be overlooked when it comes to standards and pay.

The debate today, highly critical as it is of the Government, and as it is bound to be, for raising postal charges in this way, at the same time gives every hon. Member who speaks an opportunity of stressing the importance of this great service and to speak in support of the Post Office in general.

6.47 p.m.

Mr. Julian Snow (Lichfield and Tamworth)

I am sure that the House is indebted to the hon. Member for Totnes (Mr. Mawby) who, I am sorry to see, is no longer in his place, for clarifying beyond all peradventure the doubt that the suppression of the projected losses by the Post Office was done by Mr. Bevins for political reasons. There has been some doubt as to what the motivation was but now we know, and, therefore, we should know the circumstances in which the present Government took over these liabilities.

I should like to pay tribute to a part of the country's postal services, namely, the provincial directors who, I believe, are fulfilling an increasingly important rôle the larger become the responsibilities of their Department. I am very much indebted to my hon. Friend the Assistant Postmaster-General—who, I am sorry to say, is not winding up the debate, though we understand why—for the suggestions he made to me some months ago concerning the holding of a local postal conference in collaboration with the director of the regional office of the G.P.O. For years before the present Government took office, I had done my best by speech and by questioning, to try to produce a greater sense of the urgency and need for improvements in the postal and telephone services in the overspill area of the West Midlands, part of which I have the honour to represent.

I do not wish to localise my speech too much, but the fact is that there has been in the past the most gross neglect of those areas in the country which are receiving these large elements of population under the various overspill agreements. Indeed, half the Questions I have asked and the speeches I have made on this subject have been devoted to the shortcomings of the previous Tory Administration in failing to provide the essential services in anticipation of these planned transfers of population.

Under the tripartite agreement between the Minister of Housing and Local Government, the City of Birmingham and the various counties surrounding Birmingham, transfers of population and industry were planned years ahead, yet there was utter failure to provide many necessary services, not least of which the services normally provided by the Post Office.

Such had become the volume of complaints of failure to provide telephones, of delays in the postal services and of a parcel service, which had become quite unreasonably inefficient, that my hon. Friend the Assistant Postmaster-General suggested that we might secure more effective and quicker action if a local conference were held. I pay my tribute now to the efficiency and celerity with which the regional director of the Post Office in the West Midlands agreed to meet me and various local authority representatives in Lichfield some months ago.

Many matters were discussed, ranging from the recruitment of postal workers, the provision of telephones for the recently developed areas, and so on, to the particular problems of private estate development and the delays of postal deliveries which had become most marked in the area. Much effective action has been taken and there has been a reorganisation of certain services already. I thank both my hon. Friend and the regional director concerned for what they have done. I commend this sort of meeting to other hon. Members who may have similar local problems.

Certain facts emerged from the meeting which we had in my area. It is generally accepted that, this year, about 400,000 new houses will be built. A large proportion of these will be built on privately developed estates. It is obvious in the West Midlands that there has not been adequate consultation between planning authorities and the Post Office in this connection. This is important because, although predictions of movement of population and of occupancy are susceptible to normal errors, some sort of plan could be worked out for the basic preparation to be done in anticipation of the population arriving. In the event, some of the estates have been built, the private developers have, quite legitimately, removed themselves, but the roads have not been completed, therefore the cables for the telephones have not been laid down, and householders, many of whom are business men requiring telephones, have not been able to obtain service for months on end.

Another institution worthy of mention is the area postal advisory committee. These committees serve a very useful service, but I have the impression that they do not exist in many areas and their establishment ought to be encouraged with a view to securing the advice, guidance and reporting of committee members who could, I believe, ease many of the difficulties being experienced at present. One need not secure the services of people who are leaders of industry or of trade unions on these area advisory committees. Ordinary people who are at the receiving end of the postal services can, I am sure, supply the necessary membership.

I turn next to the system for providing data from computers mentioned by my right hon. Friend in his speech. I intervened and asked him what the short-term programme was for the transmission of computer data outside the main urban areas. The advice which has been given to the computer industry and professional and scientific bodies regarding the service to be provided by the Post Office Datel system is as yet insufficiently known, and I am not at all sure that the dissemination of this information has been quite as thorough as it might have been. Moreover, there is a special complication in this connection for the distributive trades. Large companies which operate either warehousing or manufacturing premises in the main urban areas frequently find it necessary to arrange for sub-distribution in, say, the North or the Midlands, and it is likely that there will be a big increase in the use of computers in such distribution arrangements. It is important to know, therefore, whether the Datel service will be extended to the more remote areas such as the development districts where companies are being encouraged to go.

The hon. Member for Hereford (Mr. Gibson-Watt) referred to the postal services in rural areas. I have two matters to raise in this connection: first, the provision of telephone kiosks; and, secondly, the rather negative proposal advanced by the Opposition today that we should consider cutting out the second postal delivery in the rural areas.

Neither planning authorities nor the regional offices of the Post Office are sufficiently seized of the vital importance of telephone kiosks. I am advised by one of my local authorities that the normal procedure is for the Rural District Councils Association to call for suggestions regarding the siting of kiosks. These suggestions, once received from the rural districts, are communicated to the Post Office, and, in due course, one hopes, kiosks are provided. This is not necessarily the best way of going about it.

To begin with, the yardstick appears to be—one can understand this from the administrative point of view—that in rural areas the economy of a kiosk must be the primary consideration. But the more these new estates, both local authority and privately developed, extend into the countryside, the more reason there is for the proper provision of telephone kiosks, and the yardstick should not necessarily be the simple question of proven economy. To give one example of what I mean, there is Government encouragement for the grouping of doctors. Doctors will, normally, group in the nearest town. There will still be thousands of rural practitioners, but they will not necessarily be in the near vicinity of the new estates. The Post Office ought to adopt a much more generous attitude in the provision of kiosks in the rural areas and, specifically, on the new estates.

Now, the Opposition's proposal that the Post Office should consider cutting out the second rural delivery. I hope that this will not be considered very seriously. In the area which I represent, and in similar overspill areas, a large section of the population, certainly on the privately developed estates, is composed of business people who, in many cases, depend on having up-to-date advice and instructions from their head offices. One of the complaints I have had in my own area is that sales representatives do not receive in good time the reports and instructions issued by their managers.

It is time we ceased regarding rural areas as an entity apart in the Post Office organisation. I see no reason, with motorisation as good as it is now, why there should be this distinction between rural and suburban areas.

I mentioned earlier the question of anticipating demand for telephones by private subscribers. At the conference to which I referred, at which was present the telephone manager of the region in which my constituency is situated, it was stated that housing development in the parish of Burntwood had outstripped all estimates and that the proportion of new residents requiring telephones was greater than the average demand elsewhere. It was pointed out that to keep pace with the demand for telephones it was necessary to have information many months in advance of development so that the necessary equipment could be ordered and cables laid at the appropriate time.

I hope that one of the things that will stem from that conference is that planning authorities will give advance guidance about the growth of population in certain areas. This is very important, bearing in mind the big housing developments which must go on for many years.

It is very frustrating for people who earn their living in a way which may necessitate quick telephonic communication to have to write to Members of Parliament the whole time in order to get a telephone installed in their home. Really, M.P.s are not the proper people to whom these requests should be put, but I do not suppose there is one hon. Member who has not had a flood of them in the past few years. The Post Office should issue a directive to regional offices to ensure that there is a close link with planning authorities so that estimates of future demand can be more realistic.

One sometimes sees criticism of the efficiency of the postal services compared with that of other countries. I have never seen any figures to prove or disprove the complaints, although I was interested to hear that the postal delivery service in the United States is not all that it is cracked up to be. If that is so, one would like to know more about our postal service as compared with those of other nations of comparable size and with similar economies.

Perhaps my right hon. Friend would consider publishing information as to the kind of delivery services provided in European countries. When I hear about letters taking six days to get from London to a place like Dijon, I wonder at what point the delay takes place. Those who have taken a holiday in a French provincial town or village know that there can be incredible local delays and a most casual attitude towards delivery.

It is important to know how good or bad we are. Could we know what happens, possibly through the agency of the International Postal Union, so that we might compare our service with services abroad? Not that I suggest that we should fall to the level of some countries I know, but at least we should know where we stand.

My right hon. Friend made a very dashing speech and I am very glad that he has now fully laid at the door of Mr. Bevins responsibility for placing the present Government in the position of having to recoup the money necessary to maintain a first-class service. After consulting postmen in my constituency I have been appalled not only by their low rates of pay, but also by the fact that they have to work the most inordinate hours of overtime. In Lichfield, I heard of a van driver who was asked to work 40 hours' overtime a week. That cannot be good for him or for the public.

I was told by a postman recently that, in a shop, there were two advertisements, side by side, for van drivers. One was put in by the Post Office and the other by a local factory. I speak from memory here, but the Post Office offered about £15 a week while the local factory offered about £17 a week. Yet Post Office drivers have to be subjected, quite rightly, to aptitude tests and research into character and to work long hours of overtime.

Of course, the result is that they do not get local postal van drivers there. This is symptomatic of the whole service. I believe that the public at large is so sympathetic to the problem that my right hon. Friend need have no great fear as to what reception will be given to the increases in postal charges if they can result in competitive wages being given to the men and a reduction in the appallingly long hours of overtime. In that context, I think that the public will take these increased charges, and take them willingly.

7.8 p.m.

Mr. Robert Cooke (Bristol, West)

I will not follow the hon. Member for Lichfield and Tamworth (Mr. Snow) through all his speech, except to challenge his last remark about the Post Office van drivers. Surely, according to his own figures, £15 plus overtime easily puts a Post Office driver above the earnings of anyone in outside industry. Further, would not such a driver have fringe benefits, about which we have heard a great deal in the past, and also a more stable type of employment than the others? That applies to Post Office workers throughout the service.

The hon. Gentleman said that the Postmaster-General had made a dashing speech. I am sorry that the Postmaster-General is not here so that I could have a dash back at him. He and I are old antagonists. Before I reached this House I had the opportunity to do battle with him and when I came here it was on the day of my maiden speech that I had to wait for about two hours while the right hon. Gentleman was moving a Motion of censure on the then Speaker.

No one would say that the right hon. Gentleman is not a man of considerable energy. We recall his constitutional battle which resulted in two magnificent additions to the Conservative Front Bench. The right hon. Gentleman is a great one for making dashing speeches inside the House and, particularly, outside. I assure the House that I have no intention of quoting extracts from Mr. Bevins's memoirs.

I am sorry that the right hon. Gentleman is not here. He and I have had a number of exchanges in this Parliament. On some occasions, due to to-ing and fro-ing at Question Time, it has been extremely difficult for back benchers on either side to get at a Minister who has been so evasive in giving to the House the figures for which we have asked and who has, indeed, used Question Time on a number of occasions to give the house a smoke screen of slanted information in preparation for the proposal to raise postal charges.

We have heard about the events on 10th November. Then, of course, the right hon. Gentleman got his dates wrong, referring to an Answer given to me, as he said, last July. But this proved to have been given in July, 1963. So he is not really all the cool precision he makes out to be. That leads me to the present reference to the matter of the alleged "cooking" of the books, a subject dealt with already and which no doubt will be referred to again later on.

In the same events on 10th November, during an exchange about postal services and telecommunications, I pointed out that the loss on the postal service in 1963–64 was less than in 1962–63. The right hon. Gentleman wagged his finger in familiar fashion and said that I had it wrong. This is a favourite way he has of dealing with interventions unfortunate to his case. But if one looks at the accounts one sees that the figures—not forecasts—were £8,139,201 for 1962–63 and £7,839,031 for 1963–64.

After such a brazen denial of accurate figures given in reply to the assertions of the right hon. Gentleman, how can we place very much weight on the figures which he has given to the House today? We have had a number of forecasts and no doubt the right hon. Gentle- man has used them as they suit his case. If it is a question of finding figures to back up an argument, forecasts may be the most convenient way of producing the so-called evidence.

I was not satisfied with the result of the exchanges to which I have just referred and I put down another Question in very plain language on 26th January, asking the Postmaster-General to forecast, in the same way as he projected the losses on the postal services on 10th November, the profits for the telecommunications services in the five years 1963–64 to 1967–68. The right hon. Gentleman answered that Question together with another about future policy, lumping mine with a Question which had nothing to do with it. He said that £190 million would be an adequate target for the earnings of the telecommunications services over the period, although he did not say what the forecast of the profit was. It is a very strange state of affairs when he can forecast losses but cannot use his ingenuity to forecast profits.

He went on in that reply to say: … I think that the target should be achieved without any increases in basic prices."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 26th January, 1965; Vol. 705, c. 157.] Is that a firm pledge that over the next five years the Postmaster-General will not consider the raising of charges for the telecommunications services, because the Government are satisfied with the prospective results? I am sorry that the right hon. Gentleman is not here to give that assurance, but I hope that whoever winds up the debate for the Government will do so. One of the arguments used earlier was that certain parts of the service were doing extremely well, even though the postal services were not doing so well as they might.

I maintain that the White Paper does not give a fair picture and does not tackle the current problems. The Postmaster-General is much given to making speeches and issuing statements of one kind or another. Last June, before the election and I suppose before he discovered that he was to be Postmaster-General, he made a speech saying: An imaginative Post Office development programme would make itself felt immediately on the general public. It has made itself felt. The right hon. Gentleman has made himself felt.

What about the cost of living? The Postmaster-General quoted some minute percentage, but I wondered whether that figure applied just to the raising of the letter rate from 3d. to 4d., or whether it applied to all the other services for which prices have been increased, percels and so on. I am not saying that the parcels rate should not be increased. Indeed, I do not think that the right hon. Gentleman has tackled that problem energetically enough, but to say that these increases have but a trifling effect on the cost of living is to evade the real question.

What impact will these proposed changes in charges have on the public, and what increased and improved services are the public to expect as a result of what the right hon. Gentleman has done? Within the last few days, on 26th March, the right hon. Gentleman admitted in the Bristol Evening Post, in reply to a letter written to him by the hon. Member for Bristol, Central (Mr. Palmer): The main reason for the deterioration in the standard of the service during the past six months or so has been the serious shortage of staff at key points. The right hon. Gentleman admits that the deterioration about which he has said so much and for which he accuses us of being responsible has been continuing throughout the months when he has been at the Post Office.

It seems rather strange to us on this side of the House that the right hon. Gentleman can come rushing here on 10th November and use the now often used device to give a long statement in reply to Questions which would not be reached on that day to tell us that prodigious losses are piling up, in his opinion, and that he proposes to make an increase in charges, but that it should have taken him so long, having made his decision, to present his proposals to the House.

Paragraph 7 of the White Paper says that the present difficulties are partly due to the pricing decisions of the previous Administration, but they are also partly due to the many increases of cost of one kind or another, including £83 million more for pay and better conditions for the staff—not such a bad move in that direction and no doubt there is more to come. Better productivity is forecast. We then have a projection of loss which says that the postal services might fall short by nearly £50 million in 1967–68.

In this imprecise world of the reckoning of profits and losses and making estimates, one can see, going back over the years, that forecasts have often been a bit out, and surely it is quite irrelevant to make these forecasts for the year 1967–68. The reference to the present difficulties being partly due to the pricing decisions of the previous Administration is a very much quieter way of putting it than the right hon. Gentleman used when he stormed to the Dispatch Box earlier today.

During this debate and in earlier Questions we have asked for quite a lot of information but the right hon. Gentleman has been rather less than forthcoming. On 10th November my right hon. Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Sir M. Redmayne) asked the right hon. Gentleman to publish in the OFFICIAL REPORT details of all Post Office projects costing more than £100,000 and for which contracts had been let, but on which work had not yet started on 15th October, 1964. In other words, he asked for some details of all the splendid projects planned by the previous Administration which has come under such hot fire this afternoon for allegedly doing nothing. The right hon. Gentleman said: I regret that the detailed breakdown for which the right hon. Gentleman is asking is not available, and the high cost of assembling it could not be justified."—[OFFICIAL REPORT. 10th February, 1965: Vol. 706, c. 109.] What an admission! The right hon. Gentleman comes to the House as a Minister of the Crown to put a closely argued case and is not able to provide vital information to right hon. Gentlemen seeking information on which to make adequate contributions to the debate. Half of the right hon. Gentleman's argument falls down simply because he has sought to deny to the House information on which a proper decision ought to be made today.

Paragraph 8 of the White Paper says that the solution is not by economies but by mechanisation. I am prepared to bet that half the projects mentioned by my right hon. Friend the Member for Rushcliffe were concerned with that very subject, and yet the right hon. Gentleman chooses to deny the House the information.

I come now to the subject of the letter rate aid the 4d. stamp. The House will no doubt recall that on 23rd November, 1964, the Postmaster-General told us that the profit on the inland letter post for 1964–65 was estimated at £4,400,000. Notwithstanding that and the fact that he made a further forecast to say that the service would still be breaking even in the next year, even on his pessimistic forecast, the public is now asked to pay charges which will bring in £21 million according to the White Paper, although in HANSARD the Postmaster-General is reported as saying on 16th March that the yield might be between £20 million and £25 million.

There is the fantastic sentence in paragraph 10 of the White Paper which reads—and I will read it to the House as it is printed— The increase in the charge for inland letters is necessary if sufficient revenue is to be raised to meet the financial obligations of the Post Office and if the right relationship is to prevail between the charges for inland letters and for other inland correspondence services". That is typical of the way in which this document has been produced—long, meaningless sentences to bolster up a shaky case. We have been accused of suppressing information. If the previous Postmaster-General cut out a paragraph which read like that, who could blame him?

The letter post is to subsidise the other postal services to the tune of £21 million. It may well be more than that. How can we be sure that the letter post will expand at the rate at which it has been expanding? Surely this forecast must be based on some sort of analysis of the possible rate of expansion. Can we be sure that it will remain a healthy service? Perhaps the imposition of the 4d. stamp will lead to a contraction and we shall find ourselves in graver difficulties than we were in before.

It has been brought out by my hon. Friend the Member for Hereford (Mr. Gibson-Watt) that the loss on the parcels service is the cause of most of the trouble. The Postmaster-General has not increased the charges for that service in order to balance his books, let alone earn the 8 per cent. about which we have heard so much. Why did not the right hon. Gentleman tackle that one with real courage? The White Paper talks about declining traffic in this service. Does the right hon. Gentleman think that the service will expand?

The Assistant Postmaster-General (Mr. Joseph Slater)

The hon. Gentleman asks why my right hon. Friend did not tackle the parcels service with real courage. What does he mean by "real courage"?

Mr. Cooke

My hon. Friend the Member for Ormskirk (Sir D. Glover) is longing to catch your eye, Mr. Speaker, and to deal with this subject. I have used the words "real courage" in my thoughts on the Postmaster-General on a number of occasions in my speech. What I mean on this occasion is that he should have grappled with the problem instead of setting about it in a half-hearted way. I will deal at greater length with what I mean in a moment.

The solution which the Postmaster-General seems to be trying to find for the parcels loss is to put up the charges. He is not sure whether the revenue will increase or whether the use of the service will decline. He has made a new agreement with British Railways after the experimental work which the Conservative Party started long before the Government took office. The statement issued by the Postmaster-General on the subject ends by saying that Over the ten year period these contracts could produce revenue for British Railways of the order of £250 million. For the Post Office and its customers, they are expected to mean better service. That is the summary of the Press handout. May we take it that there are to be no economies as a result of this new service? Has the Post Office entered into a long-term agreement on a service which is gradually declining and will it find itself stuck with a contract which will be an embarrassment to it? We have heard very little about that. We have been faced with a difficulty over the decline in the use of the parcels service.

Perhaps it would be a much more satisfactory policy to divide the service with British Railways in an economic way and to let them carry the large ones and the Post Office go on dealing with the small ones. May we know a little more about the progress made in this direction? Can it be that the First Secretary of State prevented the Postmaster-General from dealing with this problem in a realistic and courageous way, because this would have had an impact on the cost of living? Perhaps the First Secretary said "No" to parcels and "Yes" to letters.

All these questions require an answer. I hope that the Assistant Postmaster-General will deal with some of the many questions which have been asked from this side of the House.

The hon. Member for Lichfield and Tamworth, who has left the Chamber, used this occasion to speak about a wide variety of minor subjects. Before I proceed to my final thoughts on the financial situation and on the Postmaster-General, I should like to ask what has happened to the household delivery service. The House will recall that this was a service introduced experimentally by Mr. Bevins when he was Postmaster-General in the face of fierce opposition, largely on political grounds, because, as was suggested by some hon. Members opposite, wicked Tory literature was being circulated at advantageous rates by Post Office workers who did not feel very inclined to further the interests of the Tory Party. I will go no further than that. It would be out of order to pursue that matter. That was the state of affairs.

On that occasion, the then Opposition sought to call a snap Division by making brief speeches and trying to get the Division to take place much earlier than the Government of that time expected. Some of us had to provoke an argument over quite a long time to make sure that there was a representative decision. [HON. MEMBERS: "Oh."] I did not indulge in anything that could have been regarded as a filibuster. If hon. Members look at the report of my speech, they will see that I was interrupted on no fewer than 20 occasions and that I was unable to get on with my speech.

If I may return to the household delivery service, the Postmaster-General of the day, Mr. Bevins, said: Our initial estimate for the first financial year is that our profit may amount to about £300,000."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 4th February, 1964; Vol. 688, c. 1007.] I remember the hon. Member for Barnsley (Mr. Mason), who was then the Opposition Front Bench spokesman, said that this was a measly amount to bother about. If the present Postmaster- General bothered about measly amounts, perhaps he would not have to impose these savage charges on the public.

I should like to ask about future plans. The headline in the Bristol Evening Post for 15th December reads: Multi-million P.O. plan from Benn. The report says: Millions of pounds were going to be spent on new Post Offices. including one for Bristol. I wonder whether the Assistant Postmaster-General will be able to say whether these are new millions or millions already planned. If they are new millions—multi-millions—how will the postal service earn the 8 per cent. return on capital to which the Postmaster-General is so slavishly sticking in isolation from other parts of the Post Office? We shall want a great deal more detail on that, because I suspect that if this multi-million pound programme is carried out, and if the right hon. Gentleman is to stick to his 8 per cent., he will not leave the letter rate at 4d., but will come back and ask for it to be raised to 5d., or even 6d. before he is finished. The House is entitled to an answer on that.

The right hon. Gentleman has sought refuge in Command Paper 1337 of 1961 on The Financial and Economic Obligations of the Nationalised Industries. I should like to refer him to paragraph 30, which says: Increased prices would not be the only way in which nationalised undertakings could carry out the prescribed financial obligations. For a variety of reasons, such as fructification of investment and reduction of unprofitable activities, combined with continuing improvements in commercial efficiency and so on. I hope that, in accepting the provisions of this Command Paper, the Government have read it with care and realise that it suggests other ways of coping with the current problems than just putting up prices out of hand.

That Command Paper also gives a valuable table of net income after depreciation as a proportion of net assets in the Post Office for the year 1954–59. It seems that the 8 per cent. target was exceeded in 1958–59. The figures for the previous years did not always come up to that. I refer the right hon. Gentleman to the suggestion that, taking one year with another, the target should be achieved. I feel that the right hon. Gentleman is using this target at the present time as another excuse to increase the charges.

I am glad that the Postmaster-General has returned to the Chamber, because I must take up with him again his reference to the Conservative Central Office hand-out by Mr. Bevins, of 19th November, 1960. The House will recall that when the right hon. Gentleman referred to this hand-out during the course of his statement on 25th March he did not give the date. He just referred the hon. Gentleman concerned to the hand-out.

My hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Mr. Mawby) approached the Post Office and asked for a copy of the hand-out which had been referred to in HANSARD. The Post Office told him that no copy was available. It seems rather strange that the Post Office headquarters, the Private Office of the Postmaster-General, did not have a copy of this document and could not provide one. We have to consider that alongside the extraordinarily smooth, pat, way in which the right hon. Gentleman recited details of where the document could be found in the Library of the House of Commons, and gave chapter and verse. No doubt he thought that he was being clever in withholding it until the last moment, and then throwing it on the table and saying, "Here is the damning evidence".

I wish that the right hon. Gentleman had read on from where he left off, because what he quoted was: Second, we ought to aim at making our individual services pay for themselves. That suited his argument. This may not always work out, but, at least, it ought to be our aim, because only if we try to make our various services viable are we under a compulsion to get our methods and techniques right. He did not go any further, and, because we did not have the document, we could not shout that he should do so.

I propose to read the last five lines of this hand-out, because they are most apposite, and are another example of the right hon. Gentleman choosing to use a document to back up his point of view without putting the other side of the case. It says: Registered post is a good example of this. We said to ourselves 'Here we are losing money every year. How can we avoid losses and yet give the public the right kind of service?' The answer is Recorded Delivery which will give the public an acceptable and cheaper alternative service for documents and papers but which at the same time should reduce our losses. The right hon. Gentleman might possibly have strained himself to the limit and read those last five lines. The House would then have had a fuller picture of what the document actually said.

Sir D. Glover

Selective quoting.

Mr. Cooke

As my hon. Friend says, this is selective quoting.

Mr. Randall

We have been listening very carefully to the hon. Gentleman, and have now heard him read the sentences which he alleges were not read by my right hon. Friend. What is the purpose of this? What is the argument which the hon. Gentleman is putting before the House?

Mr. Manuel

He does not know.

Mr. Cooke

The hon. Gentleman's intervention is not particularly helpful to the furtherance of our business, because I made it clear in my remarks, to which he was not listening because he was so bent on getting up and making an intervention, that the Postmaster-General used the first part of the paragraph because it helped his argument, but suppressed the second part of it because it damned his case.

I propose now to say a few words about some of the splendid progress which was made under the previous Administration. There has been a lot of talk about White Papers. Perhaps it would be rather helpful if the House were to consider the last published Report and Accounts, those for the year ended 31st March, 1964. I shall not bore the House by reading out page after page from this document. I shall refer only to some of the pictures here. It shows the Preston Telephone Exchange, one of 126 new telecommunications buildings completed in 1963–64. It shows a magnificent building costing £3 million for the Savings Bank Department. There is a picture of the new Satellite Ground Station. There are pictures of splendid designs for postage stamps, of people laying transatlantic cables, and so on. I suggest that on the next occasion when the right hon. Gentleman is holding forth he lets the House into the secret that the previous Administration were responsible for many splendid achievements, as shown in the Report and Accounts published by his Department.

Ridicule has been poured on the firm of consultants to be called in from America, and I shall not pursue that point, except to say that the Postmaster-General has committed himself heavily to future expenditure in detail, but now perhaps he is not so sure, because he is calling in experts to advise him. This is a favourite technique of the present Administration. What will happen if the consultants advise the right hon. Gentleman that some of the plans which have been put in hand, and which he cannot go back on, are wrong? The right hon. Gentleman is asking American consultants to advise him what to do, because he is not quite sure. He is not prepared to tell the House the full facts so that we can make suggestions. Perhaps the consultants will tell him that he is wrong, and that the letter rate need not go up.

I have no doubt that when the right hon. Gentleman gets his money he will splash it about in an orgy of publicity. There will be great headlines about multimillion pound projects of one kind or another. This is typical of the Government's approach—soak the public and use the money to try to win back their faith and create a great impression of activity—and is in sharp contrast to all the brave words of the past.

I shall end by referring to the speech which the right hon. Gentleman made before he was Postmaster-General. The heading of the newspaper report is, "Benn On The 'Wilson Age'". I quote from the Bristol Evening Post: 'The regeneration of Britain by the next Labour Government will need more than the new men and new policies. It will need fundamental structural re-organisation,' he said … 'We must reform Parliament so that it can be a real instrument for social change and offer better safeguards for the rights of the individual".

Mr. Benn

Hear, hear.

Mr. Cooke

"Hear, hear," says the right hon. Gentleman. What about last week?

Mr. Speaker

Order. I do not find anything about the reform of Parliament in the Motion or the Amendment. The hon. Member must keep within the rules of relevance.

Mr. Cooke

I am greatly obliged. I was just about to make my final reference and to conclude my speech. According to the newspaper report, the right hon. Gentleman said—and this speech refers to a more efficient Civil Service and Government machinery: '… we shall need idealism, dedication and a new mood of toughness'"— We have seen that at Question Time from the right hon. Gentleman— Future historians will look back on the Wilson administration as having been an age of adventure and reform' ". What is the right hon. Gentleman's contribution to this age of adventure and reform? The 4d. stamp.

7.42 p.m.

Mr. Dennis Hobden (Brighton, Kemp town)

I listened to the speech of the hon. Member for Bristol, West (Mr. Robert Cooke) with rapt fascination. It seemed to me that all he could say was that he could get no coherent answers from anybody on the Government side. I thought, and I am sure that my hon. Friends on this side thought, how much more helpful it would be if we had some coherent questions. I have sat through this debate from the beginning, and until the hon. Member for Bristol, West got to his feet I felt quite fresh. I must confess now that my head is spinning from the way in which he has gone backwards and forwards on all kinds of topics connected with the Post Office.

The hon. Member started by putting his foot in it by drawing attention to the comparison between the Post Office van driver and the lorry driver in private industry. If that is the only contribution which he can make to an important debate of this kind, it would have been far better if he had said nothing at all. There will be many loyal employees who have been suffering in the Post Office service in recent years who will see those remarks which have been made about them and will believe that there are Members in the House who still have certain views about the people who are employed in the publicly owned industries.

Mr. Cooke

Will the hon. Member give way?

Mr. Hobden

Not yet. I have to recover first.

The one constructive contribution which the hon. Member made to the debate was when he was talking about what the previous Administration had done. He could not give us a description; he could only describe pictures which he had in a hand-out in front of him.

Mr. Cooke

Will the hon. Member give way?

Mr. Hobden

Not yet. I have not recovered yet.

The hon. Member was describing pictures in this pamphlet. He described buildings which were going up under the previous Administration. It is difficult not to find buildings in some towns which have resulted from 13 years of Conservative rule. Odd buildings went up here and there. None went up in Brighton, but I am glad to know that some went up in Bristol. He gave us a description of a satellite station. That was progress. Then we were told about a picture of the laying of a transatlantic cable, and, of course, transatlantic cables only began to be laid under Conservative rule.

It is absolutely absurd to talk in these terms. These pictures were taken during the previous Administration. I can give him some more realistic pictures. Until last October I was employed in the Post Office for 30 years, and I have seen the struggle in recent years which the uniformed grades have been having over their wages. It has been hinted at by other hon. Members. I know of postmen who have done 40 hours a week overtime. This is not unknown; it is quite common up and down the country for members of the uniformed grades in the Post Office.

One by-product of this in my town is that postmen who are working 40 hours' overtime a week, obviously, receive an increased income. Under the wonderful Conservative town council which we have in Brighton, when they reach a certain income group, people are not allowed to go on the housing list. There are a number of postmen who have been excluded from the housing waiting list by Brighton Town Council, because their earnings are too high. Of course, postmen are among the lowest basic wage earners in the country.

So when we hear about these enthralling pictures which the hon. Member shows, I can tell him that there is a far different side to the coin than the one which he has shown.

Mr. Cooke

The hon. Member challenged me on two points. On the first point, about the Post Office van drivers, will he bear in mind that the three drivers who serve our house in the country and who have regularly, for over five years, called in at three o'clock in the afternoon for a cup of tea, are absolutely livid at the prospect of striking or going slow, and are satisfied with their lot.

On the second question, which is much more vital, will he bear in mind that I was quoting from the Post Office Report and Accounts, the official annual report of the G.P.O., I only referred to the interesting pictures to save time and so as not to read all the details out to the House.

One last point—Brighton is specifically mentioned on page 88.

Mr. Hobden

I do not think that the hon. Member need have bothered with that interjection.

Mr. Harry Howarth (Wellingborough)

It has put my hon. Friend off again.

Mr. Hobden

Yes, it has put me off again. I hope that the hon. Member does not do it again, as I want to deal during the remainder of my speech, with points which he has mentioned, particularly the van drivers who, allegedly are quite satisfied with their lot.

We have not had a constructive word from one hon. Member opposite. They have talked of having had a look at the parcels service, having had a look at this and a look at that. If we had looked at those services and made some alterations in the numbers of those services, they would have been complaining about that. They do not know what they are doing half the time. They have no coherent policy, or any idea where they are going. Hon. Members opposite have no answers to the questions which have been raised by my right hon. Friend about their responsibility for the Post Office services and finance in recent years. Hon. Members opposite have come along here with a lot of codswallop about the increase of a ld. on the postage. The fact that we have a ld. on the postage is the only thing which they can attack. They must attack something, but they are not doing it in a constructive way.

Surely the debate today is either about productivity, prices or subsidy. It is one of these three, and hon. Members opposite have not said what their alternative is to any of those proposals. What they are, in effect, doing is attempting to deny to the Government the right to increase their revenue for the Post Office so that we can develop an efficient Post Office service. If they deny us that right, how are we to meet the deficit? Is anybody seriously suggesting that postmen's wages should be depressed below the level at which they are at present?

The members of the uniformed grades in the Post Office have been victims of the political battle which has been a result of the failure to take a decision in the last few years. They are the victims of the lack of policy which has been evident.

The hon. Member for Bristol, West said that some postmen were satisfied with their lot. I should like to draw his attention to the fact that for the first time, I think, in its history, a post office union, not normally a militant union, but a responsible union under magnificent and responsible leadership, was forced last year into a strike. When we find an organisation of responsible people forced to take such action we must seriously consider what is at the bottom of their complaint.

We know that for the uniformed grades it is the vital question of wages. The strike was 100 per cent. effective. Outside the Post Office no one thought that it would be effective, but the feeling engendered as a result of the decision of the previous Government caused a tremendous resentment among Post Office employees which ensured that industrial action would be 100 per cent. effective, coupled as it was with the leadership of the executive and officers of the Post Office workers at that time.

Mr. Manuel

Including Bristol.

Mr. Hobden

Yes, including Bristol.

We should remember that this industrial action was carried out in the face of one of the dirtiest threats ever made to civil servants—that if they took industrial action some action would be taken about their pension rights. In my opinion, it is a tribute to them that not only did they completely ignore that threat, but they demonstrated in no uncertain manner the contempt they had for that kind of thing.

My hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead, West (Mr. Randall) spoke earlier about the manner in which the intake into the Post Office has changed over the years. I remember that when I first started work in the Post Office, in 1934, in almost any post office in the country one was not surprised to find employees with similar names. It was a family affair. Fathers wanted their sons to work in the Post Office, brothers came in. This family affair was one of the strengths of the Post Office in those days.

That no longer exists, I am sorry to say. There is the greatest difficulty in retaining staff in the uniformed grades. Obviously, we cannot depress wages in order to meet the financial problems of the Post Office. Last October, I found myself a Member of the House, after rather unusual circumstances.

Mr. Randall

Five votes were enough.

Mr. Hobden

It was seven, I think.

That is an experience which I do not wish to repeat. The only experience which I have found to be similar was when I was listening to the speech of the hon. Member for Bristol, West. If they had seen the number of Post Office workers who turned out in the Kemptown constituency last October because of the feeling about the general set-up in the country at that time, hon. Members opposite would have taken warning and not have spoken in the way in which they have spoken in this debate.

If we cannot have the wages and salaries of Post Office workers depressed we must look for other means of balancing Post Office finances, but does anyone seriously suggest that the taxpayer should subsidise businesses which use the parcel and printed paper services to the extent to which those services are used at present?

The right hon. and learned Member for Epsom (Sir P. Rawlinson) spoke about monopolies and their danger, and about increasing prices. It is remarkable to me that no mention has been made of the monopoly, or the "ring", which exists among the suppliers of Post Office equipment for the telephone section. Some hon. Members may remember the document which was produced by the general Secretary of the Post Office Engineering Union about the prices for goods which the Post Office had to pay as a result of the "ring" which supplies telephone equipment. We heard no word about that monopoly this afternoon.

Surely Post Office tariffs must have some relation to the costs of the service. There is a social service element in the Post Office set-up. Outlying areas get postal services which are uneconomic and telephone kiosks are uneconomic. The telegraph service is uneconomic, so we can say that the Post Office has done its share in providing social services but that is not sufficient to cure the financial problems.

It has been said that the Post Office should be worked on the roundabouts and swings principle, but we cannot commit the profits made by the telephone side to assist the postal side. That money is required for investment for expansion. The only other alternative is to borrow money from the Treasury which would impose a still larger financial burden on the industry. The Government have reaffirmed that the Post Office, like other publicly-owned industries, should aim at a fixed return on capital of 8 per cent.

A few days ago there was an onslaught on the Postmaster-General in a newspaper which complained at the way the Post Office was being run and that there should be an 8 per cent. return on its profits. I replied to the newspaper pointing out that this is not an uncommon principle in respect of publicly-owned industries in other countries. In the Soviet Union, as recently as last December, Mr. Kosygin said that the return on capital there should be 13.2 per cent.; and that is a country where all industry is publicly owned. What crime have we committed by saying that the return on our capital should be a mere 8 per cent.?

When we look at other things which have gone up in previous years would anyone in his right mind suggest that the cost of postage is out of proportion to the general inflation which has taken place over the years? That is the basic weakness in the arguments advanced by hon. Members opposite. The price of a popular newspaper today compared with the price in 1914 indicates that it has gone up by 800 per cent.; in other words, twice as much as the increase in the first-class postage rates.

Mr. Randall

There are fewer pages in the newspapers today.

Mr. Hobden

My hon. Friend is quite correct.

We have to find a sound basis for the financing of public services, including the Post Office. I get the feeling that hon. Members opposite are playing politics with the situation. Having failed to deal with it at the approach of a General Election they left this "hot potato" for the incoming Labour Government to handle.

I welcomed the statement by my right hon. Friend that he will deal, I hope generously, with the question of wages in the Post Office—for this is certainly a matter which should be dealt with between the Postmaster-General and the leaders of the union concerned. I am sure that negotiations of that sort will be conducted in an admirable way.

I hope that my right hon. Friend will give an assurance that never again in the history of the Post Office will the uniformed grades be kept waiting for such a long time for a solution to their just pay claims. It must always be remembered that in the Post Office—where we are dealing with and operating under the fair comparisons principle—we follow the trend of outside industry. In other words, there is always a time lag between the application being made for an award and its receipt. The time taken on the occasion about which I have spoken—through no fault of the leaders of the Union of Post Office Workers—must never happen again.

I also welcomed my right hon. Friend's statement that within the existing set-up of the Post Office the social aspects will be borne in mind; in other words, the covering of the uneconomic services by the more economic ones within certain sections. I have the feeling that there will be an improvement in relations among the staff, the trade unions and the Postmaster-General.

Until last October the staff relations in the Post Office had been built up over many years by the patient work of many responsible men and women in the Post Office. All that was thrown away virtually overnight. I am glad to know that, with hindsight, the Sunday Express stated that the former Postmaster-General had thought of resigning at one time. It is a great pity that he did not, because he could have retrieved his personal situation with some honour. As it was, the trend of events resulted in things throughout the Post Office going downhill. It will take a long time to build them up again to the peak we knew some time ago.

I believe that the responsibility which now exists on the official and staff sides will result in that peak being reached again. It is time that the page was turned on this miserable chapter in Post Office history.

8.3 p.m.

Mr. Stratton Mills (Belfast, North)

It is rather difficult for me to speak in the debate following speeches by the Postmaster-General, a former Assistant Postmaster-General and two former Post Office employees. Taking part in a debate on an extremely complicated subject is difficult enough, so I hope that hon. Members will not take me too seriously when I say that perhaps the shortage of postal staff, to which the Postmaster-General referred, is due to the fact that the cream is being drained off on to the benches behind him.

I will begin by mentioning the deterioration in the service which has undoubtedly taken place in recent years. It should be emphasised, however, that this is an entirely non-political point and it is not the fault of the Postmaster-General of the day. There has been a great breakdown in the service since the strike of July, 1964. I was reinforced in this view to hear on "Radio Newsreel" the other evening one of the directors of Gamages describing the difficulties which that company had had with the parcel post. He said that it largely followed the strike of last year.

I have personally suffered from this, because on the eve of the poll at election time I sent to my local evening paper what I thought was a very subtle speech for appearance on the evening of polling day. However, I learned the following day that the document had been delayed in the post; so my biting eve-of-poll speech was missing from the Belfast Telegraph on polling day.

The point which strikes one when considering Post Office staff is the tremendous variety of abilities with which one is dealing. Some of the staff are of extremely high ability and one always thinks that many of these people are too intelligent—I do not wish to be derogatory—for this and could have gone much further in the service, while others seem not fully up to the job. One is also struck by the dropping standards in the postal service, which is apparent particularly in the London area.

The Postmaster-General's remarks about mechanisation, the standardising of envelopes and the McKinsey survey are to be welcomed. However, the crucial point in the debate—which is on a Motion of censure on the Government—is whether the Postmaster-General has justified the increase in postal rates which he has presented and whether he has justified the shape of the increase. These are the two main points.

When looking at the figures—the 1963–64 Post Office Report and the recent White Paper—one is forcibly struck by their complexity, and in the analysis of the situation which I shall give I should not be at all surprised to find that I have taken up some of the figures incorrectly. I suggest that we should not accept the White Paper entirely as bible and gospel because a lot of the right hon. Gentleman's figures are only estimates Indeed, I suggest that some of them are fairly pessimistic.

On 10th November, 1964, the right hon. Gentleman said that the shortfall over the next five years, 1967–68, would be £120 million. In his statement to the House on 25th March last the shortfall had become £150 million. That demonstrates in one area the danger of accepting entirely on their face value some of the forward estimates of the Postmaster-General.

Sir D. Glover

Is my hon. Friend for getting that the reason for the Postmaster-General's change of estimates was that in the meantime the Government had put up the charges for the Post Office by £5 million a year, representing £25 million over the five-year period?

Mr. Stratton Mills

My hon. Friend may be right, but it is nevertheless true that, while the estimated shortfall was £120 million, it went up to £150 million and one still does not know whether that estimate is right.

Again, forward estimating should be considered. In answer to Parliamentary Questions the Postmaster-General's forward estimates went as far as 1967–68, but in the White Paper he was not prepared to go beyond 1965–66—a further factor to prove why we should treat the White Paper with some reserve. The most devastating third factor is that in the White Paper there is no break-up of the detailed profit and loss figures for 1964–65. The Postmaster-General has broken them up between the postal services and telecommunications, but he has not at this stage been able to break them inside these sectors.

The former Postmaster-General was able to do that in the accounts for 1963–64 in respect of the profit and loss figures of each of the various sectors. We are told, for example, that letters made a profit in 1963–64 of £8.6 million; that printed papers, samples and household deliveries lost £2.6 million; that newspapers lost £1.6 million, and that there was a loss on parcels of £8.5 million. It would have been very useful to the Postmaster-General in presenting his case to the House had he been able to give those figures for the current year, and also to project them forward. As he has not done so, I am not prepared to accept his forward estimates in the White Paper as being absolutely valid—very big question marks must be put again them.

It is apparent to me that the Postmaster-General has indulged in the classic practice of the public monopoly of saying that economies cannot be made, that efficiencies are not forthcoming, and that the only alternative is an increase in price. He has certainly not proved the necessity by either his White Paper or his speech today. If he has faith in his case, let him put it to the price review body set up by his right hon. Friend the First Secretary. Let that body go into the facts and the details.

As I have said, we understand that the first-class letter post is still making a profit, but that the parcels post is incurring a substantial loss. Why did the Postmaster-General shy away from the subject of increasing the price of the parcels post? It is because, as he says——

Mr. Joseph Slater

I wonder whether the hon. Gentleman has read the White Paper? Perhaps he will look at parcels in the list.

Mr. Stratton Mills

I was about to deal with exactly that point, because it is most instructive as to the mind of the right hon. Gentleman the Postmaster-General. About one-third of the way down, I think, page 3 of the White Paper—it is not only the Prime Minister who has a good memory—the Assistant Postmaster-General will find that it says that there will be a decline in the number of parcels going through the Post Office. The reason for that is the very bad parcels service, and the reason why the Postmaster-General has not put up the price of the parcels service which lost £8.5 million in 1963–64 is that he knows that people have alternative methods of sending parcels. There is no monopoly there.

That is why it has been decided to put the increase right across the board. The Post Office has a monopoly in the 3d. post. It can put it up to 4d., or to 5d. because it can say that there is no alternative; that there is no more efficient way of providing the service. But the public has always ultimately to pay, and this is why the Post Office has put this increase right across the board——

Mr. Joseph Slater

Is the hon. Gentleman being fair to my right hon. Friend and to the White Paper? I would refer him to the point about the range of increase to take place in the parcels services.

Mr. Stratton Mills

That is my point—that the trend has been away from the parcels post because of the poor service given, and because there the Post Office does not have a captive public.

The Postmaster-General separated the postal side and the telecommunications side and said that both must show the return of 8 per cent. on net assets, but if I have read the accounts for 1963–64 correctly, the net assets on the postal side amount to only about £57 million while on the telecommunications side' they amount to £1,089 million—about 20 times as much. The Postmaster-General is trying to confuse the issue in order to get away from this point——

Mr. Randall

I accept that the hon. Gentleman is pointing to the difference in the sum of money associated with the telecommunications as compared with the postal side, but he should recognise that the telecommunications side is expanding very rapidly, and that if any inroads were made into the profits there in order to subsidise the postal side it would hold back development on the telecommunications side.

Mr. Stratton Mills

I take that point entirely, but I say that it is wrong for the Postmaster-General to compartmentalise these two services; that the essential unity of the Post Office in relation to the 8 per cent. on net assets is fair, but that I see no reason why it should be split into two separate groups for assessment.

Perhaps the Government spokesman who replies to this debate can answer this question: are there any other industries in the public sector that have part of their activities divided up? Is it said of B.E.A., for instance, that there must be a return of x per cent. on net assets on the domestic routes and also a return of x per cent. on the overseas routes—or, breaking it up even further, that there must be a return of x per cent. on B.E.A.'s Belfast route and also a return of x per cent. on its routes to the western parts of Scotland? No—I do not believe that there are any other industries in the public sector which are divided in this way, and I think that the Postmaster-General himself is guilty of cooking the books on this heading——

Mr. Randall

We do not have to go to other nationalised industries in order to make this comparison. This pattern of separating telecommunications and postal services was set by the previous Postmaster-General.

Mr. Stratton Mills

The hon. Member is probably right in part—the accounts are broken up on that basis—but I do not accept that the return on net assets was historically done in the same way. The overall pattern is of 8 per cent. on the total net assets of the Post Office. If we take the hon. Gentleman's argument to its logical conclusion it means that if we separate, let us say, coin-operated telephone machines, we should group those together and say that there is an investment by the Post Office of, say, £100 million—although I have no idea what the figure is—and that, therefore, as well as its profit the Post Office must show 8 per cent. on net assets on the public call-office system. That is a ridiculous argument, and has not, in fact, been argued from the Treasury Bench today.

I believe that the Postmaster-General has pushed the Government into this position. In November, he said that he hoped to announce an increase soon—an alteration in prices—yet it took him 4½ months to push it through the Cabinet and browbeat the First Secretary. I suspect that he has had a very tough job to justify his case. The Assistant Postmaster-General shakes his head, but the Postmaster-General himself said that he had had a very tough fight——

Mr. Joseph Slater

It has not been so much a question of the present Government pushing my right hon. Friend to this position, but of the previous Government. It is because of the previous Government's action that the Post Office now finds itself in this serious position.

Mr. Stratton Mills

I shall not follow up that point—it has been covered this afternoon—but I would emphasise my view that the Postmaster-General has not made out his case today.

The right hon. Gentleman says that the increase will have only a very small effect on the cost of living—007 per cent.; the number by which James Bond is known—"licensed to kill". That is the Postmaster-General's attitude. He says that this will have only a small effect, but if he had been able to get a few minutes of the First Secretary's time, although that is always now very difficult, he would have been told that the cost of living index is made up of different items all of which combine, and we get an increase in the cost of living when a number of these factors come together. Like the housemaid's baby, this is only a little one; but little ones add up!

The Postmaster-General has a responsibility for the Post Office and to the public, and I believe that he has been careless in his guardianship of the public interest Eighteen months ago we had the great train robbery. This time the situation is being reversed. It is the Postmaster-General who is robbing the public and for that he deserves our censure this evening.

8.31 p.m.

Mr. James Dempsey (Coatbridge and Airdrie)

I am inclined to follow the argument of the hon. Member for Belfast, North (Mr. Stratton Mills), but he stoops to low levels in accusing my right hon. Friend of robbery, for he was here on the occasion when the Postmaster-General, in answer to a legitimate question, announced the substantial deficit which had appeared in the Post Office accounts. That was within one month of the result of the last General Election.

Obviously, this was the fault of the previous Government and it had been suppressed for electoral reasons. It must be remembered that the Government at that time were operating at a very low ebb and that increases in the postal charges would have resulted in a greater degree of unpopularity for them at the last General Election.

In listening to these arguments tonight I am surprised that not a single Tory Member has offered an alternative or shown some other practical way of meeting this deficit. We have to be frank. We have in Scotland a saying that "Facts are chiels that winna ding". These are facts and how does one meet them? Obviously, there is only one source of revenue, the postal rates.

Sir D. Glover

I know the hon. Member very well. He always tries to be fair, but we are not dealing only with deficits at the moment, but with forecasts.

Mr. Dempsey

It was clear that a deficit had been forecast this year and in live years' time. Apparently, in face of an economic problem of that nature one cannot wait until the house has been consumed by fire. One must be prepared to meet the challenge when it arises. It would be silly to lock the door after the horse has been stolen.

Mr. Stratton Mills

The hon. Gentleman is basing his argument on the premise that one accepts the Postmaster-General's forecasts. One cannot accept them, particularly when one bears in mind that in November last his estimate was a deficit of £125 million and in March his estimate was £150 million. How can one be certain that any of his figures can be accepted?

Mr. Dempsey

A Minister has a staff in his Department and they work on the basis of estimates of income and expenditure. By that yardstick this is the deficit which they anticipate will arise in due course, and it would be silly for us to be unprepared to deal with such economic adversity when it arises. It would place a stranglehold on our postal service if we were inordinate in tackling this problem and failed to ensure that we did so in a manner which no way impairs Post Office service.

When the hon. Member for Belfast, North began his speech with a reference to monopoly I thought that he was going on to tell us about a private monopoly which has its machinations and tentacles within the public sector of our enterprise. He spoke of the enthusiasm and dynamic approach of our new Postmaster-General. I believe that my right hon. Friend will require all these qualities in tackling all the problems of the postal service at present.

Within this public sector we are much concerned with telecommunications. I am glad to hear from hon. Members opposite that the telecommunications side is a profitable undertaking. In fact, they are so jealous of the profits being made that they want them to be transferred to the postal side. As far as I can understand, the telecommunications system is badly in need of capital investment. I do not know of a single town in the United Kingdom which is not calling for additional telephones. Nor do I know of any part of the realm where the Postmaster-General is able to say he has met the present need for telephone installation. As long as there are new housing developments, new and expanding industrial estates and new hospitals being built, there will be a tremendous avenue for expansion in this field of capital investment in so far as telecommunications are concerned.

I would like my right hon. Friend to look at the unfairness of the system under which telecommunications are in many respects being provided. I am speaking of the system whereby contracts for telephone manufacture are administered by the Department. That is a legacy of the previous Tory Government. When hon. Gentlemen opposite, and especially the hon. Member for Bristol, West (Mr. Robert Cooke), spoke of the achievement and accomplishments of the previous Government and the previous Postmaster-General they should have mentioned, also, the accomplishments of the ring which operates within that Department. I come from an area of growth and development which does not seem to matter much here, for the contracts are still allocated to other parts of the country with little or no unemployment whatever.

We were successful in obtaining one last year. We obtained it because we were competitive and a development area. What a struggle we had. Under the present system, the ring gets 75 per cent. of the orders. The remaining 25 per cent. will go to a firm which is not a member of the ring. Incidentally, that firm will get lower rates than those enjoyed by firms in the ring. If the hon. Member for Belfast, North wants further economies, why does he not advocate reducing the rates which firms in the ring enjoy over firms which are not members of the monopoly?

Areas which are badly in need of public enterprise because private enterprise has failed them are dependent upon my right hon. Friend's Department for the provision of employment. However, all the privileges operate in favour of the private monopoly. When firms in the ring get a contract, they get it for five years. When a firm which is not in the ring gets a contract, it is for one year only. A classic example occurred in a town which I represent, Airdrie. A firm got a contract for one year. The firm tooled up a whole new bay. It provided training for 100 additional jobs. At the end of the year it lost the contract. There was this inordinately high cost, with overheads and on-costs, for the sake of a one-year contract, whereas firms in the monopoly enjoy the same contract for five years. Those firms can guarantee their workers five years' employment, but a non-ring firm in a development area is allowed only a one-year contract.

The former Government and the former Postmaster-General operated this system. When does my right hon. Friend intend to review it? When will we get fair play? My constituency is very much concerned about this situation. Substantial economies could in all probability be affected in this sphere. We are very much alive to this problem. I understand that a review is taking place. I am convinced that my right hon. Friend—a dynamo, as he was described by the hon. Member for Bristol, West—will ensure that there will be fair play for the areas which are very much in need of public enterprise employment at the moment. I represent a constituency which has the lowest rate of unemployment ever, under the present Labour Administration. We have the lowest rate of school-leaver unemployment ever, under the present Government.

Mr. Randall

Thanks to Labour.

Mr. Dempsey

It is still 4 per cent. I am confident that my right hon. Friend will play his part in ensuring that this 4 per cent. is reduced much further. I appeal to the Minister to bear in mind, when he is operating this very vexed section of his Department, with all its complications and complexities, that there are areas which require an injection of public enterprise under the direction of the new Labour Government. We are the party of social change, and we are proud of it. My right hon. Friend is radically changing the Post Office, and more power to his elbow in doing so.

8.33 p.m.

Sir Richard Thompson (Croydon, South)

I do not often intervene in Post Office debates, but I want to comment on one or two of the extremely interesting remarks which the Postmaster-General made. I ask the Minister who is to reply to the debate to say something more about the appointment of McKinsey and Company, Inc. to carry out this far-reaching review of the postal side of the Department's activity, as referred to in paragraph 16 of the White Paper. When considering every means of balancing the books of the Post Office, it is appropriate to bring in the services of outside consultants to see if we have missed anything.

This makes sense to me. Will the right hon. Gentleman give an assurance that he will publish the report of these consultants, whether it is to be implemented or not? This is very important, because we should know what this costly and expert advice is, whether a successor Government, or perhaps the right hon. Gentleman himself, proposes to implement it or not.

It seems to me that the actual scope for economies in the postal part of the service is somewhat restricted, and we know from the record of these consultants that they are pretty ruthless and drastic people. This is the firm which I understand helped to reorganise the Shell Company. Nobody could suggest that the Shell Company was not already an efficiently managed company, and yet I am told that the impact of these people's advice on that concern led to the redundancy of about 10,000 people. I think I have the figure right.

That suggests to me that when these people look into the postal services they may quickly find that it is in heavy reductions of personnel that perhaps the main opportunities for economy lie. I do not know whether we are prepared to accept the implications of that kind of advice. That is why I am anxious that the right hon. Gentleman should undertake to publish this advice, whether or not it is taken, because it seems to me we ought to know what suggestions are made.

Looking through the White Paper one is immensely struck by the contrast between the progress and the profitability of the telecommunications side of the service, where very great technical advances are being made and yet are being financed out of the productivity of the very advances themselves. That is on the one hand, and on the other there is the largely static character of the postal side of the service which, because of the nature of the work, because if its labour-intensive character, is really not susceptible to a high degree of mechanisation. Nobody has found a way of providing a mechanical substitute for the man who tramps the streets, climbs the stairs and delivers the letters.

It seems to me that the right hon. Gentleman was right when he referred to the postal services and seemed to imply that the greatest scope for economy there lay in the standardisation of the size of envelopes and generally in operations connected with the sorting end of the exercise.

Mr. Benn

Since the hon. Gentleman has asked me a specific question, may I make it clear that the employment of consultants is quite different from the appointment of a Royal Commission. It is not the case that a report is made by these people and then they go away. A consultant's advice is on a continuous basis. We do not have it in mind to publish a report in that sense, because unlike a Royal Commission they are to advise us on management problems and not to report on the position.

Sir R. Thompson

I was in no doubt at all about the position. I was not confusing the firm of consultants with a Royal Commission. All I was saying was that, if the report of these consultants was to be crucial to the future of the service and the way it was operated, then whether or not the report was acceptable to the Department we ought to know what the outside experts suggest should be done. Perhaps we would not accept it either, but I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will have it in mind that this document should be published.

I was making the point of the great difference between the telecommunications side of the business and the postal side; the one so forward-looking and prosperous and the other, by its very nature, rather static. I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will do his utmost to develop the telecommnunications side of the business, because the scope for large economies on the other side of it seems to me to be restricted.

A considerable further investment in telecommunications could solve many of our current problems with which we are not getting to grips at all. I have in mind, for instance, the immense congestion in our cities and the efforts which other Departments of State are making to prevent so many people crowding into places like London because so much office work is done there. If we used all the technical resources at our disposal it would be possible for industry in places like London to maintain quite small establishments and to be in contact by these means with large office staffs who could be decentralised in other parts of the country, just as at present manufacturing processes are not carried on in London but are decentralised outside. By putting more money into the telecommunications side of the Post Office it should be possible to decentralise clerical staffs away from London to a still greater extent. The Government should look at this matter carefully because they have a Bill now going through the House by which they hope to achieve by other means this kind of objective.

I should have thought that anything that the Postmaster-General could do to encourage the Datel system about which he spoke today would also be welcome. I should have thought that it would be possible to hold conferences with all those taking part visually present on television screens and not actually in the boardroom, and it should be also possible to look up references and files by these means and to eliminate the need to keep large staffs in London and other great centres of population.

The right hon. Gentleman says quite candidly in paragraph 21 of the White Paper that Although the quality of the telephone service is satisfactory in many places, it is not everywhere as good as it should be, notably in London and the South-East. Whoever drafted that paragraph must have had in mind the municipal exchange in Croydon about which I have put Questions to the right hon. Gentleman in the past.

This is a new exchange which was built to serve a great upsurge of new business activity in that borough. The commercial development there is one of the finest carried out in England since the war. It has served Government policy because it has acted as a great magnet to draw business away from London and build outside its centre another great centre of commercial activity. It is very disappointing to the professional business people who have come to Croydon in pursuance of this policy to find when they get there that the telephone communications on which they largely rely are defective and not up to the standard which they are entitled to expect.

We cannot expect the general public to look in the same way as we do here at the manner in which the Post Office accounts are divided up. They lump the accounts together and say, "It is extraordinary that we have an increase in postal charges coming and we cannot have an improvement in our telephone service." I agree that that is unfair but that is how they lump things together. I ask the Postmaster-General to act in the spirit and intention of his words in paragraph 21 of the White Paper that Improvements are nevertheless being made and are expected to continue in 1965–66. I ask him to put some real energy and drive behind those words. It is a serious matter if a large business community which has left the centre of London finds, on arriving at its new place of business, that the services are such that businessmen seriously wonder whether they ought to have made the change at all. People are bound to feel this increasingly at a time when they see the postal charges going up. As I say, they lump the two things together and reckon that they are all part of the service which they receive, or should receive, from the Post Office, and they are not satisfied.

I conclude on this note. The great improvement and stride forward in our telecommunications services to which many speakers today have paid tribute owes more, in my view, to one man than anyone else, that is, to my right hon. Friend the Member for Wallasey (Mr. Marples). As the hon. Member for Gateshead, West (Mr. Randall) recognised, I think, my right hon. Friend is the one who really initiated this great technical revolution in the Post Office and was there to see a good deal of it put through. When hon. Members talk, as some have today, as though nothing good was done in the Post Office during the past 13 years, they should recognise from what source most of the technical advance has come. When I look at the Post Office Tower in Tottenham Court Road, now nearing completion, and I recall that it was conceived and designed entirely under the previous Administration, I feel that we have much to thank that Administration for, and there is nothing about which we need feel sorry or ashamed today.

8.46 p.m.

Mr. John Rankin (Glasgow, Govan)

I enter the debate with a little diffidence because one or two important engagements which I had to attend during the course of the day kept me from the contact I should like to have had with a debate in the House on a matter of this importance.

It may interest the House to know that I have just been preparing a Question to the Postmaster-General and, when I had finished it, I thought that I might have the opportunity of delivering it personally to my right hon. Friend. This is the Question which, I trust, will in due course appear on the Order Paper against my name and marked with the asterisk which indicates that a personal reply would be much appreciated. The Question asks the Postmaster-General whether he will consider reducing the new rate for the Railex letter from 20s to 12s. in view of its penal effect on small newspapers.

In putting down that Question, I must declare a personal interest. Every Monday evening, I despatch from this building a most important contribution, on many occasions a startling contribution, to a comparatively small newspaper. I have been doing this for all the 13 years of misery under the Tory Government, revealing to the great wide world, which depends on the words I put on that piece of notepaper, the sins committed by the party opposite.

I have paid 6s. every Monday night for this postal letter. Of course, it goes into my expenses and I get it back. Now, however, I discover that, after 17th May, I shall have to pay £1. I do not mind paying £1. [An HON. MEMBER: "It is worth it."] Yes. My article is worth more than that. But my problem is that the newspaper which shows the world what I am thinking and what the Tories were not doing will have to pay me back £1 every week.

Mr. Rhodes

I submit a similar contribution to the English counterpart of the journal to which my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Govan (Mr. Rankin) is referring. He should solve the problem by doing what I do—writing the article on Friday and posting it on Saturday.

Mr. Rankin

That might be a solution, but I like to be up to date. I always like to hit the nail right on the head and, therefore, I have always waited until Monday night, until the last sin was committed by the Tory Government. The news has to be hot if it is to live. While I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, East (Mr. Rhodes) for his suggestion, to me it is not "with it". I shall continue with Monday night's task and I ask my right hon. Friend to think of this particular case and make the increase 100 per cent. rather than 350 per cent.

I do not want to depress my right hon. Friend, but I would say that the total sum involved will be very small, for I imagine that not many Railex letters go from this House or any other place. I know that some other hon. Members use it. It is an excellent service and I pay tribute to it. It has never failed me in the years I have used it and I hope that I shall be able to go on using it for many years. I will get an answer in due course from my right hon. Friend and I am sure that it will be kindly and thoughtful.

Mr. Benn

I had not expected that part of the postal deficit would be appearing in person during this debate. But it would be hard to justify subsidising a service, used for special cases of this kind, which costs a great deal more than is now charged.

Sir William Robson Brown (Esher)

The hon. Gentleman's arithmetic is not right, either.

Mr. Rankin

It may not be quite right, but it is spontaneous at least. There has not been time for me to reply and think about it as the hon. Member for Esher (Sir W. Robson Brown) has had.

We are looking forward very much to the advent of the Post Office Savings Bank in Glasgow. I assure my right hon. Friend that everyone in Glasgow will give the Post Office employees concerned a very warm welcome. They will find Glasgow one of the noblest cities in the United Kingdom. They will find its housing conditions rapidly improving with the help we are getting from the Government. They will find it a much different city from the way it has been publicised in many parts of the country. They will find that it has sports facilities as widespread as in any other part of the United Kingdom and that its football clubs are able to meet any others in the land and emerge with credit. We have everything waiting for them and we look forward with interest to their arrival in the city.

Mr. Edward M. Taylor (Glasgow, Cathcart)

To help hon. Members to appreciate the benefits of coming to Glasgow, would the hon. Gentleman care to indicate precisely which measures the Government have taken to help with Glasgow's appalling housing problem? I would like to know what they are. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman would be glad to tell us.

Mr. Rankin

I do not expect much help from the hon. Gentleman. I know that he is interested in this matter, but he must appreciate that it would be presumption on my part to try to tell him what the Postmaster-General is thinking. If he has any questions of that nature, he knows that I am not the person to reply to them. He can address them to the proper quarter and get the answer he deserves.

Mr. Rhodes

I am sorry that I am in some disagreement with my hon. Friend this evening, because we agree on so much, but would he bear in mind that although there is a great need for the development of employment, and so on, in the Glasgow area, and although facilities are awaiting the Post Office employees when they arrive, precisely the same facilities and economic problems exist in the North-East? Would he not agree that it would have been better to give way to the wishes of the employees of the Post Office Savings Bank and send it to the North-East Coast?

Mr. Rankin

But once they imbibe the air of Glasgow, they will find it to be superior to anything which they could find in any part of the United Kingdom. I refer to a great author, the author of Macbeth, Shakespeare, an Englishman, who praised the air of Scotland as no other individual has praised it: This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself Unto our gentle senses What was true of Inverness is equally true of Glasgow, and the Post Office people will echo the sentiments of King Duncan, expressed at Inverness, when they smell the beautiful air of Glasgow.

Sir Knox Cunningham (Antrim, South) rose——

Mr. Rankin

I cannot give way. I am a lover of choral music, but I do not believe in choral speaking. I have had many helpers in my pilgrimage and I thank them all, but I have only one or two minutes to go and I have not yet started my speech.

May I briefly state the problem of the Post Office as I see it? I hope that it has not been said too often during the evening that the postal services are in the red. That is the primary problem. I know that there are people who turn over the page of the White Paper and say, "But look at the money lying in the telecommunications account; let us grab some of that and use it to meet the deficit on the postal services."

That is a fatal line of policy. The telecommunications is a service in which we want to create surpluses for expansion. We should not subtract from a developing service to sustain a service which is essential to all of us. The most co-operative individual I know is the Post Office official who has been carrying my letters for the last 20 years.

I do not need to worry about my engagements when I am heading for London. As he approaches my house he will tell me, "It is all right, Mr. Rankin. You have only three meetings at the end of the week, so you can take it a bit easier when you come back". He knows all my engagements, and he is so friendly and co-operative that when I am leaving Glasgow he tells me, from the other side of the road, what awaits my return at the end of the week.

I want to see that co-operation extended. I want these people to be paid the money which they should be getting and which they are not getting. The trouble in July last was due to the fact that Post Office servants were not being rewarded as they should have been for their contribution to the development and carrying on this great service. The Post Office is short of workers. We want many of the post offices in the little villages of Scotland to be improved. I do not say that there is any harm in selling "sweeties" and, at the same time, carry on Post Office business. But I think that the post office should be a place in its own right and not a "sweetie" shop at the same time.

My time is up. I never imagined when I rose that I would speak for as long as I have. I have not said half of what has come into my mind. My hon. Friend the Member for Ebbw Vale (Mr. Michael Foot), who, I hope, has come in to support me as a fellow journalist, knows that when we write about affairs every week we are storing up in our minds more thoughts than we ever realise and value them only when we can address at a moment's notice such a distinguished audience as this.

9.2 p.m.

Mr. Iain Macleod (Enfield, West)

The Postmaster-General, at the beginning of his speech, sought to find some common ground between the two sides of the House. After that, his speech became steadily more political. But there is a good deal of common ground, and I echo some of the things which he said. It is even possible that my speech will take the same course. It was good to hear in the debate from the hon. Member for Gateshead, West (Mr. Randall), in particular, who has more knowledge about these problems than any of us on either Front Bench. It was also good to hear from the hon. Member for Brighton, Kemptown (Mr. Hobden).

The Post Office White Paper, which is an annual event, has irrupted into the political arena rather earlier than usual this year and indeed featured in a series of charges on 10th November following a statement by the Postmaster-General that afternoon. I am particularly glad that the Leader of the House has come into the Chamber, because I want to take further the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Mr. Mawby). He challenged the point about whether the previous Postmaster-General exorcised something and whether he was or was not right to do so.

I want to quote exactly the words of the Leader of the House. On 10th November he said: May I deal with the issue raised by the right hon. Member for Bexley? He would be well advised to discuss this matter with his former colleague the previous Postmaster-General and ask him why paragraphs 10 to 15 —he has paragraph 9 of the Post Office Accounts—were not printed when the accounts were published."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 10th November, 1964; Vol. 701, c. 962.] Quite apart from whether the previous Postmaster-General was right or wrong, I want to challenge straight away the utter impropriety of such a revelation at all. I ask this question of the Leader of the House: who told him this? If it was the Postmaster-General, who told the Postmaster-General?

One of the most carefully guarded traditions of our public life is that in no circumstances do we ever see the papers or minutes of a previous Administration. In all my time at many Ministries—and there were many things that I would have liked to have seen—I never saw a single document which was the concern of a Minister in the previous Administration, and indirectly the Prime Minister confirmed that doctrine at Question Time this afternoon, so I take this as a serious constitutional point. I do not know whether the Leader of the House would like to reply to it. If he would, I will give way to him straight away. He is, of course, seized of the importance of the point that I am making, and he will recognise the importance of the tradition which I have drawn to his attention.

The Lord President of the Council (Mr. Herbert Bowden)

Of course I recognise the importance of this tradition. It is a well-known tradition that a Government never see the private papers of a previous Administration, but these were not private papers. They were paragraphs which were not included in the published accounts of the Post Office. The accounts of the Post Office are public accounts, and not private papers.

Mr. Macleod

What the right hon. Gentleman is saying is that either he or the Postmaster-General saw previous drafts of a White Paper. The First Secretary of State says that he will not allow my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes to see these papers so that we can confirm for ourselves our belief that there is nothing in this point at all, and I am very much afraid that the point made by the Leader of the House is not valid. He should not have seen even the previous drafts. If it had happened by accident, and I had been given that explanation, I would have accepted it at once, because it sometimes happens that a file is not winnowed. The explanation which the right hon. Gentleman gives is very unsatisfactory to us on this side of the House.

I turn now to the question whether this matters at all, because the charge, passing from the point of propriety, is that the position in relation to the postal services was in some way disguised by Mr. Bevins. Paragraph 10 of the Report and Accounts says: Total income from the Postal Services was £262.0 million … thus producing a loss of £7.8 million compared with a loss of £8.1 million in 1962–63. Nothing can be franker than that. Paragraph 12 says: The inland letter post continued to be profitable but the profit … was lower …. The overseas letter post also made a profit … but the other main sectors of business all showed a loss …". On the question of telecommunications and the postal service, during the last main debate that we had in the House, Mr. Bevins said: It still remains the case that there is only limited scope for profitable investment in the postal services. As I see it, even on the favourable postulates to which I have referred, the tendency will be for costs, and especially wages, to outpace improvements in productivity."—[OFFICAL REPORT, 6th December, 1963; Vol. 685, c. 1512.] Finally, the White Paper of March, 1964, set out on page 7 the return on net assets in the postal field, which were as follows: 1962–63—minus 13.2 per cent.; 1963–64—minus 10 per cent.; 1964–65—minus 11.9 per cent. Nobody could have been franker, therefore, than Mr. Bevins in laying these facts before the House, and if it is added—and this is the only charge that can be made—that he did not put in a projection of losses, I am bound to say that I would not have put in such a projection, because what we ought to realise is that we are not, as somebody from the other side of the House said, talking about facts—"Facts are chiels that winna ding". This is not true of forecasts, and it is forecasts that we are considering here.

It is possible to give many instances, but if we take this one instance alone of the deficit on the postal services—the Postmaster-General will agree with these figures because I have taken them from his statement to the House—the loss given last March for the current year was £12 million. Last November he gave the estimate at £16 million. In the White Paper which he presented last week it was £19 million. In other words, a difference of 50 per cent. I am not challenging any of the figures. What I am saying is that I am sure that they were based on the best information available at the time, and it only shows how utterly misleading it is to include forecasts in these figures.

So this charge—I say this flatly—was an improper charge in both senses of the word. It should never have been made, especially by the Leader of the House. It has been proved, by the figures which I have given, to have been without substance. It was a child conceived in ignorance and nurtured, I am afraid, in malice, and we can now say that it has been well and truly strangled. The most interesting sentence in the White Paper, I think, is in paragraph 5, which has been the heart of the debate, and the one to which I would invite the attention of the Chief Secretary. It says: It would not make economic sense for the postal services to be subsidised by the telecommunication services or vice versa: the right pricing policy should be adopted for both. Of course, the doctrine of the 8 per cent. stems from the 1961 White Paper. The Postmaster-General asked we whether I accepted that. The answer is, "Yes, I do". I was, of course, a member of the Cabinet at that time. I accept that doctrine. I think that we should add that it is a return of net assets averaging 8 per cent. over a period, but this is not in dispute between us.

What is in dispute is the new doctrine which has been enunciated that somehow this 8 per cent. has to apply not only to the postal services as a whole but to the telecommunications and the postal services within it. I think that it was this error—because error I believe it to be—which led the Postmaster-General into his statement on 10th November, which was destroyed by my right hon. Friend the Member for Bexley (Mr. Heath) the same evening. My right hon. Friend said: He"— that is to say, the Postmaster-General— has made a five-year forecast on one aspect only of the Post Office … If he wants to make a statement of this kind he should put the full picture before the House and let us judge."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 10th November, 1964; Vol. 701, c. 959.] The point is that if the Postmaster-General now says that each of the two main branches of the Post Office should earn 8 per cent., he is putting a heavier financial task upon the Post Office. I welcome financial disciplines being applied in this way, but it is ironic, if I may refer the Postmaster-General to it, that in the debate on 6th December, 1963, which I have mentioned, the hon. Member for Barnsley (Mr. Mason), who is now Minister of State at the Board of Trade, ended up by saying: I am worried about just one thing. I say this directly to the Postmaster-General. Control this development of commercialism, or soon it will stifle the public service attitude of the Post Office."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 6th December, 1963; Vol. 685, c. 1531.] It is a very different and, to me at least, a very much more welcome approach which has been made today.

I ask the Chief Secretary if he will address himself to these points. If he accepts the doctrine that each of the two great sectors of the Post Office should bear this proportion, does he necessarily stop there, or does he go on to argue that, within the postal services, and, for that matter, within the telecommunications service, the same principle should apply? in that case, the burden would become formidable indeed. Letters make a big profit and air mail, I think, a tiny profit. I am taking the 1963–64 accounts. Postcards, printed matter, parcels and overseas services all lose, and I am not clear whether the same doctrine is supposed to apply to each.

What is astonishing about the Postmaster-General is that he said—I thought that it was a joke at first, but he repeated it today—last Thursday when he made his speech and he was asked for the answer, that: If the hon. Member studies the Press handout, handed out by the Conservative Central Office when Mr. Bevins first assumed office, he will see that it said: 'We ought to aim at making each individual service pay for itself.' He added helpfully—as he always is— I can refer the hon. Gentleman to that hand-out."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 25th March, 1965; Vol. 709, c. 749.] Indeed he did so at great length this afternoon. I find this a very strange doctrine coming from a Socialist Govern- ment, that they have to do something because a Conservative Central Office hand-out said that it was the right thing to do. At least that would comfort hon. Members opposite below the Gangway, because it would explain what has happened to the Government's defence policies. They certainly were not in the Socialist manifesto, but it is quite true that they were in a hand-out from the Conservative Central Office, and it is an admirable thing that this has now been introduced.

I think the Chief Secretary would agree that it is difficult to follow the doctrine why we should treat, say, the letter post which is profitable and the parcel post which is not in exactly the same way. The parcel post has other competitors, British Railways and private enterprise. How does he justify why this should be subsidised by the letter post?

It is true that there is a real element of social service within the Post Office and none of us would wish to see it go. The hon. Member for Kemptown spoke particularly on this point—kiosks, service to the rural areas, and so on. I should like the Chief Secretary to consider this. I have always thought—and I expect that he would agree as a general principle—that when a thing is being subsidised it is a great advantage to know and to identify exactly where the subsidy goes. I wonder whether he would like to consider the possibility of identifying the services which have to be subsidised—and which nobody would object to being subsidised—and putting them into a No. 2 account, or some other appropriate account, so that in future years the House would know which part of the Post Office services is fully competitive in terms of the 1961 White Paper and which part is not.

I return for a moment to the question on which I base this part of my argument. Does it make economic sense to have different parts of a great business less profitable than others? I should have thought that even within the telecommunications service there is not uniformity and that profitable trunk routes could do a good deal to subsidise unprofitable local routes. I ask the Chief Secretary whether that has been a new Treasury directive and, if not. whether there is a new interpretation of the agreement reached following the 1961 White Paper, because I can understand the Minister's different statements only in the light of assuming that somewhere there has been a Treasury directive of a different nature from the one which existed a short time ago.

I have already referred to the statement of the Postmaster-General at the beginning of this Parliament. I wish to ask the Chief Secretary whether the premise that governed Post Office finances before—I will explain briefly what I mean—are now the same as they were then. Again, on 6th December, immediately before the quotation which I have given, Mr. Bevins said: For the future, if the expansion of the economy is 4 per cent. and the growth of personal incomes is 3¼ per cent., as postulated by N.E.D.C., the outlook will be a good deal better."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 4th December, 1963; Vol. 685, c. 1512.] What are the assumptions which lie behind the White Paper and the statements that are made? I am sure that the Chief Secretary can answer that question and it would be helpful if he could. That prospect was a realisable one at the end of December, 1963, but it may be a good deal further away now.

The other point I wish to put to him relates to contingencies. When we see the figures given for current account prospects we see that the figures for 1964–65 and 1965–66 include contingencies. Will he explain that? Are these figures at constant prices, or is there an assumption of a price increase? Does it or does it not assume a wage advance in the coming year?

More than one person has said, following a leader in The Times a short while ago, that the background to this debate is in part a service that is deteriorating. Of course, this is not the Minister's view and more than one hon. Member, including my hon. Friend the Member for Belfast, North (Mr. Stratton Mills), made this point. However, I genuinely believe that we have all had evidence in our postbags over the last two years—and I would guess, particularly in the last year—to show that the volume of complaint, justified or not, has gone up.

If that is so, then this is something which must concern not only the Postmaster-General but all hon. Members. I simply say that I believe it to be true. I know from my experience that I have indulged in more correspondence about Post Office affairs in the last few months than in all the previous years. The only success I have had so far is to obtain a telephone for the local Labour Party agent to pursue his work, which does not seem to me a very good return on my net assets from that point of view.

The key to this anxiety is surely contained in two very startling figures on page 4 of the White Paper which we are discussing. It is stated in paragraph 7: In that period"— that is, the last 10 years improvements in pay and conditions of service of staff have cost the postal services about £83 million … £83 million"— precisely the same amount was met by increased charges to the customer. That is not, however, the figure on which I wish to concentrate. I want to concentrate on the difference between the £83 million by way of improvements in pay and conditions of service and the £5 million—one-sixteenth of the figure over the whole 10 years—by increased productivity. I recognise that this is a problem easier to state than to resolve, but the difference between those two figures is startling indeed and it must worry, to put it mildly, not only the Postmaster-General but the First Secretary of State as well.

I hope that not only the McKinsey Report, when it comes out, will be a success, which I am sure it will be, but also—and in many ways this may be more important; and the hon. Member for Gateshead, West will no doubt agree with this—that if we can genuinely get co-operation in increased productivity in this sphere, even if the margin for it may be small, from the unions, I believe that this would do more than anything else to reduce the very remarkable difference in the figures I have indicated.

Now I must ask this question: how does all this fit in with the activities of the First Secretary of State? I will read a sentence from the Postmaster-General's statement of last Thursday, something which strikes me as very remarkable indeed. He said: The extent of this increase has been decided in the light of the Joint Statement of Intent on Productivity, Prices and Incomes."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 25th March, 1965; Vol. 709, c. 746.] That seemed a strange statement. I take it that 33⅓ per cent. is not to be the not m for future advance. I take it therefore—and perhaps the Chief Secretary, if he has carried out this exercise personally, will deal with this point—that the Government are now satisfied, from an examination by the Treasury, that they have no alternative to raising prices. I would draw the attention of the House to the fact that the First Secretary said that there was a much smaller and identifiable number of prices which were of special importance; and various instances were given of that. This Government have a genius, sometimes, for putting up prices that not only have an individual effect but run through the whole of the economy. Petrol, of course, is an example of this—and so. indeed, are these postal charges.

It was suggested—a terrible suggestion —that the Conservative Government might have been playing politics by holding back from July, when these forecasts that I have shown to be so inaccurate were known, no doubt, to Mr. Bevins, until the election. I might ask what has been happening since last November, because on 11th November we read in the Daily Mail: The price of an ordinary letter is to go up from 3d. to 4d. in the New Year. On January 1st the Daily Mail said: The Government is having second thoughts about increasing postal charges. What has been happening in all these months until we had last week's announcement?

Talking of playing politics, was it pure coincidence that we got this statement, at last, the day after two by-elections had been fought.—[HON. MEMBERS: "Cheer up."] We did not lose a deposit, anyway. I ask the Chief Secretary specifically to say whether Mr. Aubrey Jones will be allowed to look at this particular increase, or whether it is held by the Government that his activities in relation to this make a satisfactory substitute.

One of the difficulties always in having a consistent debate with the right hon. Gentleman the Postmaster-General is the somewhat Jekyll-and-Hyde character in which he comes before the House. He will remember his statement of 10th November. He will remember the way in which he answered Questions the first time on 17th November—he even asked people not to put down Questions which it was within his competence to answer. But the next time he appeared, the image man had got at him. It was Dr. Jekyll —margarine would not have melted in his mouth.

Today, we have had Dr. Jekyll first and a bit of Mr. Hyde later—this sunny optimism of the right hon. Gentleman when he has actually quoted twice to this House the fact that 64 per cent. of the people last year would have welcomed postal increases provided that some part went towards making advances in the postmen's pay. I wonder whether he has any more up-to-date public opinion polls on the effect of these charges—[HON. MEMBERS: "Roxburgh."] Maybe we did not do so good, but it was hardly a vote of confidence in the Labour Party.

The Government will be going into the Lobby tonight in support of all their pledges of the General Election that they would keep steady the cost of living, and they will do this, in part, by putting 33⅓ per cent. on the cost of the letter. They will then be able to put a coping stone—[Interruption.]—it was a greater achievement last week, I dare say, to talk all through the night in order to prevent a Private Member's Bill being discussed the next day. [Interruption.] They will do all these things at the behest of the Patronage Secretary, their dumb slave driver, who will put the sheep—and "sheep" is the right word—through the Lobby when the time comes.

The case we make is this. This is a White Paper produced by a Minister whom we have reason to believe is arrogant, and whom we think is inefficient as well. It shows quite clearly, over and over again, that both the Minister and the Government have got their priorities wrong, and we shall condemn them both in the Lobby tonight.

9.30 p.m.

The Chief Secretary to the Treasury (Mr. John Diamond)

I, too, had hoped that there would have been a good deal of common ground between us in the closing hours of this debate as there had been through the rest of the debate, because until the right hon. Gentleman made his speech I was not aware whether there was to be a Motion of censure. I was not even aware whether there was to be a vote of any kind, because all the speeches were co-operative and productive and were aimed at improving the Post Office in our joint interests.

The hon. Member for Totnes (Mr. Mawby) who, as the right hon. Gentleman said, knows a good deal more about this than anybody else on the Opposition Front Bench, made it perfectly clear that he wished my right hon. Friend all the best in the future in carrying on his good work at the Post Office.

Mr. Mawby

I accept everything that the right hon. Gentleman has said, but I am still waiting to see whether the First Secretary of State is prepared to come here and withdraw the statement that he made.

Mr. Diamond

I should not have given way, for I quoted the hon. Gentleman absolutely accurately, as he himself has confirmed.

The right hon. Gentleman the Member for Enfield West (Mr. Iain Macleod) has now brought a rather different atmosphere into the debate. I hope that I may answer his questions, draw the conclusions and put them frankly to him. First, we have to deal with the position that was put before Parliament and the nation on the basis of which no further action was taken by the previous Administration in putting to rights the finances of the Post Office.

I gather that there is this common ground between us at all events; that it is accepted that the Post Office ought to be, by and large, an organisation which is run by the Postmaster-General, which has considerable independence, which has all the inducements to make of itself an efficient organisation, which is not interfered with unduly and which, provided that it makes an adequate return out of its undertaking, is entitled to borrow reasonably from the Treasury, from the Exchequer, sufficient money to modernise and provide a satisfactory service. That figure has been agreed at 8 per cent. by the previous Administration over a number of years and this Government have accepted that figure and that principle—a figure of 8 per cent. and the principle of a financial target with the financial independence that goes with it. Thus, we are on this common ground. So far as figures are concerned, the right hon. Gentleman quoted those which had been published. The dispute is not about those which have been published, but about those which could and should have been published but which it was thought better not to publish.

Mr. Iain Macleod

If the hon. Gentleman thinks that the figures should be published, why does he not let us see them? Why does not he publish them?

Mr. Diamond

I am going to give the right hon. Gentleman and the House all the figures, on which they can make up their minds. That is the only way to deal with the problem. I will give the whole of the figures for the five-year period, which the previous Government said was the target period. I should make it absolutely clear that the policy is not simply 8 per cent. return per annum. That would be a foolish policy. One year must be taken with another. Equally, it cannot be left indefinitely, otherwise one could go on making losses for ever and say, "In 50 years' time, we will think of turning this into a profit". So the previous Administration decided, and we have adopted, the formula of a five-year target period—8 per cent. on average over five years. That is the common ground between us. This the basis on which right hon. and hon. Members on both sides are putting the figures before the nation.

Let us see what the figures were as far as they were published. I will deal now with some of the figures out of the five-year period. The previous Government's White Paper, Cmnd. 2302, which the right hon. Gentleman quoted, gave for 1963–64, which is the first year of the five-year period, a minus return on net assets of 10 per cent., instead of a positive 8 per cent. I realise that there is the question of two parts to the Post Office. I will come to that later. [HON. MEMBERS: "Oh."] It is no use saying "Oh". I ask hon. Members to wait until I have given all the figures.

Hon. Members have not had all the figures before. The right hon. Gentleman did not think it appropriate to give the House all the figures. It has been left to us to do that. I shall do it. I intend to make my speech in my own way. I shall answer all the questions the right hon. Gentleman put to me, as far as I can in the order in which he put them. It was minus 10 per cent. for 1963–64 and minus 11.9 per cent for 1964–65.

On that basis, it was already clear that the postal services were making a loss. Everybody knows that the postal services inevitably incur increased costs which, by the nature of the service provided, cannot be absorbed out of increased productivity. It is the kind of service where there are so many hands and so little horse power that increased productivity cannot be produced out of mechanisation so as to enable the whole of the increased costs in wages and prices to be absorbed. This cannot be done. Therefore, it was known, and the previous Administration knew, that on this basis the losses on the postal services would mount. They already had warning that the revenues were inadequate and they did nothing about them.

What I am saying to the right hon. Gentleman is that he had a five-year target and the figures for the five years were prepared. Does he want to assert that a responsible Government and a responsible Cabinet looked at this problem without looking at it over the five years, when we have just agreed that this was the whole basis of their approach to the figures? Of course, they had a five- year programme.

I shall tell the House what the five-year programme was, because this deals with a number of questions which the right hon. Gentleman put to me. I shall show what the five year out-turn of the figures is. The figures may vary by a little one way or the other when the end of the period is reached. One cannot forecast exactly, but one can forecast with considerable nicety.

I will deal, first, with the part which is not subject to a proposed increase in charges—that is, the telecommunications service. I can give figures for each of the years, if that is required. To cut it short, for the five years from 1963–64 to 1967–68, the former Government's own chosen five-year target period, they laid down a target of 8 per cent. and the figures are likely to produce 8.1 per cent. So it is spot on target for the telecommunications service. Therefore, there is no need to argue about one service subsidising another service. There is no need to go into such abstract academic questions, The fact was that the right hon. Gentleman and his Cabinet colleagues knew that the likely out-turn on the telecommunications service was that they would cover the target for the target period laid down under their policy, which we have adopted.

I come to the postal services. The postal services were showing a loss. an achieved loss for 1963–64 and a prospective loss for 1964–65, under the administration of the Conservatives. They carried the figures forward for that, too. My right hon. Friend the Postmaster-General indicated to the House what those figures are. I can give the precise figures. If the tariff were not to be altered, the figures would show, instead of plus 8 per cent., minus 26 per cent. over the five years. One had not to go as far as to look forward one week. One knows that money was being lost on the postal charges.

One knows that there was no alternative source from which to subsidise the postal losses, even if that was a proper policy. One knows that it was one's duty to look forward. This is what the right hon. Gentleman has forgotten. He has done a lot of homework, but he has not done quite enough. I will draw his attention to the White Paper Cmnd. 1337, the Financial and Economic Obligations of the Nationalised Industries, which was published in April, 1961, page 9, paragraph 28: Thus inability or prospective inability to meet the requirements in paragraph 19(a)"— perhaps the right hon. Gentleman would take it from me that the requirements in paragraph 19(a) are the target to which we have just been referring and the method of calculating it— would be regarded as falling so far short of the objectives that the undertaking would be required to propose specific measures for righting the situation: This does not say only "inability"; it goes on to say "prospective inability".

The right hon. Gentleman and his Cabinet colleagues knew that there was prospective inability to meet the situation. He knew that under his own policy he had an obligation to deal with the matter. He had exactly the same objectives as we have. He had the compulsion to make the thing right according to his own policy and he avoided doing it. Why did he avoid doing it? I will say why—because he had not got the guts. There is no other answer.

Sir P. Rawlinson

Is not the hon. Gentleman doing exactly the same thing over and over again? He is splitting the whole of this particular industry and then trying to balance it one against the other and then presenting it to the House.

Mr. Diamond

I very much hope—and I want to be as courteous as I can to the right hon. and learned Gentleman—that he is the only Member in the Chamber who has not followed my arguments on this, because it is boring for everybody to have to go over exactly the same point. I have demonstrated that there are the two halves: that there is no point in considering whether you are subsidised out of one half if there is not any balance there wherewithal to subsidise, therefore you are left with the other half, which is the postal services, which go on increasing in cost faster than you can absorb the cost, as the right hon. Gentleman pointed out in his own speech.

Mr. Robert Cooke rose——

Mr. Diamond

I will give way in a minute.

The right hon. Gentleman pointed out in his own speech that out of £100 million increased costs over the last 10 years during that Administration—and I am not saying necessarily that they could have done more about it, because I have not inquired into it; I am just stating a fact, as he did—£5 million was absorbed by increased productivity. Five million pounds over 10 years—one half of 1 per cent., which, incidentally, is exactly the same rate as the increased productivity in the United States of America.

Sir Ian Orr-Ewing (Hendon, North)

Five per cent.

Mr. Diamond

Five million pounds over the 10 years out of £100 million increased costs: one-half of 1 per cent. per annum.

Mr. Robert Cooke

Perhaps I could help the hon. Gentleman out of his difficulties. Paragraph 30 of the Command Paper states: Increased prices would not be the only way in which nationlised undertakings could carry out the prescribed financial obligations. I would draw his attention to that.

Mr. Diamond

The hon. Gentleman has gone to an entirely different part of my speech. I am doing my level best to answer the questions put to me by the most senior Member winding up this debate on behalf of the Opposition. I think that it is my duty to give him all the information he has asked for and, therefore, say why we are on all fours in regard to the target, knowledge of the figures, and so on. There is only one difference between us: they did not put up the charges and we did. They had not got the guts and we had, and that is the end of that episode. I would be only too glad to come on to answer a variety of further questions.

Mr. Stratton Mills rose——

Hon. Members

Sit down.

Mr. Diamond

The right hon. Gentleman asked what was the meaning of the reference to contingencies with regard to the figures, and he asked what items had been cut. I would say to him, as he probably knows only too well, that when one prepares estimates of this kind one tries to make them as objective as possible and one tries to take account of developments and increases in costs and wages which are likely to take place, and the figures are based on that assumption. He then went on to say what a tragedy all this was. Here were a Government pledged to maintain as far as possible stability in the economy and here we were not only putting up prices but prices, as he put it, which would "go right through the economy".

We have looked at this, too. As he knows, because the figures have been quoted, the effect of these increases on the cost-of-living is 0.07 per cent. or seven hundredths of 1 per cent., something like half a farthing in the £. This is half a farthing in the £ increase in the cost-of-living, the burden which the right hon. Gentleman is complaining about so much, and which his right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Epsom had mentioned as a burden on the old and the widows or something of that sort in his opening speech. The right hon. Gentleman did the heart-searching stuff as well. It would cost every housewife an additional 1d. on the total of her housekeeping bill for a week. That is the amount that is in question to carry out a policy which is common policy between the two sides.

Hon. Members

What about industry?

Mr. Diamond

I am now asked about industry. Earlier, somebody mentioned £25 million. I do not accept that figure. I do not deny it. I assume and I work on it.

I have done my best to find out what effect this will have on costs in industry. I regret to say that they are so small as not to be measureable. We have been through to the statistical office and have tried to help the right hon. and learned Member for Epsom who asked this question in the first place and his hon. Friends now. It is so immeasurably small a figure, this £25 million or so on to the total costs of the whole of industry—manufacturing, commercial, distributing, the lot—that it just cannot be measured.

Sir John Rodgers (Sevenoaks)

The hon. Gentleman speaks about this sum spread over the whole of industry, but this increased postal charge will fall very heavily on certain types of commercial enterprise.

Mr. Diamond

The first allegation was that it would be on the widows, or whoever it was. No, it was not the widows, it was the old people who have all the writing of letters, and so on, and now hon. Members say "especially industry". I have given the answers to both and perhaps I could be excused if I now turn from the Opposition Front Bench to some of the questions asked by hon. Members and try as quickly as I can to give whatever answers I can to the various points raised in the debate.

My hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead, West (Mr. Randall), who is known to have such a vast knowledge and experience and who speaks with such authority on these subjects, asked me whether attention has been paid to the need for more buildings because of the conditions in which some of the staffs have to work, which he likened to slums. I can tell my hon. Friend that this is a point which we do not ignore. We are building at a far greater rate than previously. In 1962–63, for example, the building programme was £7½ million. In 1965–66, it is £15½ million, more than twice as much in three years. This will give my hon. Friend some indication of the importance we attach to that particular matter.

The hon. Member for Hereford (Mr. Gibson-Watt) asked whether the experiment in East Anglia was to be developed and continued and brought into his part of the country, which, incidentally, is not so far from my own part. The answer is that the East Anglian road parcels service was introduced experimentally and has had the good fortune to lead to a new parcels agreement with British Railways. This agreement will result in parcels being sent by rail and kept off the road and will save us £4 million a year, as well as providing safeguards for a better parcels service. The hon. Gentleman will understand, therefore, that it has achieved its object very fully and satisfactorily.

My hon. Friend the Member for Lichfield and Tamworth (Mr. Snow) asked several most interesting questions. He wanted to know whether the Datel services would go to the development districts. Yes, they will. Indeed, they will go wherever there is need for them. We are most anxious that these modern services should be provided and that manufacturers everywhere should be encouraged to modernise their plant and their attitudes. We shall do everything in our power to make these Services available to them.

My hon. Friend asked also whether we would provide more telephone kiosks for new estates. I cannot give him such a clear, affirmative in reply to this question. [Laughter.] I shall come back to it. It leads on to the next question which my hon. Friend asked, namely, how other countries compare with us in general performance in their postal services. There is no other country which has as many kiosks as we have. We have 75,000, which is far more per square mile than anywhere else. I hope, therefore, that my hon. Friend will feel that we are doing everything we could reasonably be called upon to do as regards kiosks, which, incidentally, lose a considerable sum of money.

My hon. Friend asked how we compared in our charges with other countries. I do not wish to bore the House with a lot of detail, but the short answer is that the proposed 4d. charge is the same or less than is charged in most other countries. In round figures, the equivalent charge in Austria is 5d.; in Belgium 5d.; in France 5d.; in Germany 4¼d.; in Norway 6d. Clearly, my right hon. Friend has been able to establish that the charges he proposes, which I have shown do not come as an unnecessary burden on anyone's shoulders, are fully justified; and they are competitive, in the best sense of the term, that is, competitive in relation to what other countries do.

The hon. Member for Croydon, South (Sir R. Thompson) asked whether the McKinsey report would be published. The answer it, not as at present advised. The report will be a management report. It will be a tool to enable management to improve its own situation, and one hopes that the consultants will be as free as possible to be as forthright as can be in their report. [Interruption.] I did not hear what the hon. Gentleman said, but all of us on this side place great hopes on this report. What the right hon. Gentleman called lack of productivity is what has prompted it. I have no doubt, having regard to its ancestry, that the report will come to be known as the "American McKinsey Report on the British Mails".

The right hon. Member for Enfield, West asked how this ties up with the policy of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Economic Affairs and why there has been an alleged delay. He proved his allegation by reference to the Daily Mail. He does not like government by Tory hand-outs, but government by the Daily Mail. We will not argue too much about that. I can be very frank with him.

In one's capacity as the watchdog of the Treasury, one does not associate oneself with increases in charges unless one is satisfied that they are absolutely necessary and that no possible alternative could be taken. The position of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Economic Affairs is precisely the same. It is unfortunate that we inherited the position here, just as we inherited similar positions in many other respects.

This is shown by the figures which the late Government themselves put forward, as I have demonstrated. It is unfortunate that there was an accrued need to increase prices which had arisen and been dodged and ducked and avoided by right hon. Gentlemen opposite before we took office. Nevertheless, we did not at once say that there was no alternative and that the 4d. post which had been discussed for at least two years must now take place. We went in to the thing very thoroughly indeed to see whether there was any possible alternative to an increase in charges.

We investigated, for example, whether the consumer who is asked to pay for this would approve a reduced service at a reduced price. We considered all these matters very carefully and it was only when it was absolutely clear that there was no alternative, and my right hon. Friend the Postmaster-General was so satisfied, that, in conjunction with the appointment of consultants, arrangements were made for the increase in charges to take place. That is the answer to the right hon. Member for Enfield, West.

Mr. Stratton Mills

Why did the Government, who pride themselves on their hard work, take four and a half months to reach this decision?

Mr. Diamond

For the same reason that it took the previous Administration 13 years to have no effect on the unemployment figures in Northern Ireland.

Mr. Iain Macleod

I am grateful to the Chief Secretary for what he has said. Does this mean that Mr. Aubrey Jones will not look at this and that the Government are satisfied with the examination they have made?

Mr. Diamond

I have already explained that to the right hon. Gentleman. I have already said what has happened as regards the alleged delay. I have made it perfectly clear that the proposed increases in charges have been subjected to the most careful scrutiny. Indeed, I wish, as the Government wish, that, in every single case in which a private manufacturer proposes to increase his charges, he would subject himself to the same scrutiny.

Mr. Mawby

The hon. Gentleman has not—[Interruption.] On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. [Interruption.]

Mr. Speaker

Order. I do not understand what the hon. Member for Totnes (Mr. Mawby) wishes to do. If he desires to make another speech he will require leave of the House. I did not hear him ask for it.

Question put, That the words proposed to be left out stand part of the Question:—

The House divided: Ayes 291, Noes 312.

Division No. 78.]	AYES	[10.0 p.m.
Agnew, commander Sir Peter	Dean, Paul	Hunt, John (Bromley)
Alison, Michael (Barkston Ash)	Deedes, Rt. Hn. W. F.	Hutchison, Michael Clark
Allan, Robert (Paddington, S.)	Digby, Simon Wingfield	Iremonger, T. L.
Allason, James (Hemel Hempstead)	Dodds-Parker, Douglas	Irvine, Bryant Godman (Rye)
Amery, Rt. Hn. Julian	Doughty, Charles	Jenkin, Patrick (Woodford)
Anstruther-Gray, Rt. Hn. Sir W.	Douglas-Home, Rt. Hn. Sir Alec	Jennings, J. C.
Astor, John	Drayson, G. B.	Johnson Smith, G.
Atkins, Humphrey	du Cann, Rt. Hn. Edward	Jones, Arthur (Northants, S.)
Awdry, Daniel	Eden, Sir John	Jopling, Michael
Baker, W. H. K.	Elliot, Capt. Walter (Carshalton)	Joseph, Rt. Hn. Sir Keith
Bainiel, Lord	Elliott, R.W.(N'c'tle-upon-Tyne,N.)	Kaberry, Sir Donald
Barber, Rt. Hn. Anthony	Emery, Peter	Kerby, Capt. Henry
Barlow, Sir John	Errington, Sir Eric	Kerr, Sir Hamilton (Cambridge)
Batsford, Brian	Farr, John	Kilfedder, James A.
Beamish, Col. Sir Tufton	Fell, Anthony	Kimball, Marcus
Bell, Ronald	Fisher, Nigel	King, Evelyn (Dorset, S.)
Bennett, Sir Frederic (Torquay)	Fletcher-Cooke, Charles (Darwen)	Kirk, P.
Bennett, Dr. Reginald (Gos & Fhm)	Fletcher-Cooke, Sir John (S'pton)	Kitson, Timothy
Berkeley, Humphry	Forrest, George	Lagden, Godfrey
Berry, Hn. Anthony	Foster, Sir John	Lambton, Viscount
Biffen, John	Fraser, Rt. Hn. Hugh (St'fford & Stone)	Lancaster, Col. C. G.
Biggs-Davison, John	Fraser, Ian (Plymouth, Sutton)	Langford-Holt, Sir John
Bingham, R. M.	Galbraith, Hn. T.G. D.	Legge-Bourke, Sir Harry
Birch, Rt. Hn. Nigel	Gammans, Lady	Lewis, Kenneth (Rutland)
Black, Sir Cyril	Gardner, Edward	Litchfield, Capt. John
Blaker, Peter	Gibson-Watt, David	Lloyd,Rt.Hn. Geoffrey(Sut'nC'dfield)
Bossom, Hn. Clive	Giles, Rear-Admiral Morgan	Lloyd, Ian (P'tsm'th, Langstone)
Box, Donald	Gilmour, Ian (Norfolk, Central)	Lloyd, Rt. Hn. Selwyn (Wirral)
Boyd-Carpenter, Rt Hn. J.	Gilmour, Sir John (East Fife)	Longbottom, Charles
Boyle, Rt. Hn. Sir Edward	Glover, Sir Douglas	Longden, Gilbert
Braine, Bernard	Glyn, Sir Richard	Loveys, Walter H.
Brewis, John	Godber, Rt. Hn. J. B.	Lucas, Sir Jocelyn
Brinton, Sir Tatton	Goodhart, Philip	McAdden, Sir Stephen
Bromley-Davenport, Lt.-Col. Sir Walter	Goodhew, Victor	Maclean, Sir Fitzroy
Brooke, Rt. Hn. Henry	Gower, Raymond	Macleod, Rt. Hn. Iain
Brown, Sir Edward (Bath)	Grant, Anthony	McMaster, Stanley
Bruce-Gardyne, J.	Grant-Ferris, R.	McNair-wilson, Patrick
Bryan, Paul	Gresham-Cooke, R.	Maginnis, John E.
Buchanan-smith, Alick	Grieve, Percy	Maitland, Sir John
Buck, Antony	Griffiths, Eldon (Bury St. Edmunds)	Marples, Rt. Hn. Ernest
Bullus, Sir Eric	Griffiths, Peter (Smethwick)	Marten, Neil
Burden, F. A.	Gurden, Harold	Mathew, Robert
Butcher, Sir Herbert	Hall, John (Wycombe)	Maude, Angus
Buxton, R. C.	Hall-Davis, A. G. F.	Maudling, Rt. Hn. Reginald
Campbell, Gordon	Hamilton, Marquess of (Fermanagh)	Mawby, Ray
Carlisle, Mark	Hamilton, M. (Salisbury)	Maxwell-Hyslop, R. J.
Carr, Rt. Hn. Robert	Harris, Frederic (Croydon, N.W.)	Maydon, Lt,-Cmdr. S. L. C.
Cary, Sir Robert	Harris, Reader (Heston)	Meyer, Sir Anthony
Channon, H. P. G.	Harrison, Brian (Maldon)	Mills, Peter (Torrington)
Chataway, Christopher	Harrison, Col. Sir Harwood (Eye)	Mills, Stratton (Belfast, N.)
Chichester-Clark, R.	Harvey, Sir Arthur Vere (Maccles'd)	Miscampbell, Norman
Clark, Henry (Antrim, N.)	Harvey, John (Walthamstow, E.)	Mitchell, David
Clark, William (Nottingham, S.)	Harvie Anderson, Miss	Monro, Hector
Clarke, Brig. Terence (Portsmth, W.)	Hastings, Stephen	Munro-Lucas-Tooth, Sir Hugh
Cole, Norman	Hawkins, Paul	More, Jasper
Cooke, Robert	Hay, John	Morgan, W. G.
Cooper, A. E.	Heald, Rt. Hn. Sir Lionel	Morrison, Charles (Devizes)
Cooper-Key, Sir Neill	Heath, Rt. Hn. Edward	Mott-Radclyffe, Sir Charles
Cordle, John	Hendry, Forbes	Murton, Oscar
Corfield, F. V,	Higgins, Terence L.	Neave, Airey
Costain, A. P.	Hiley, Joseph	Nicholls, Sir Harmar
Craddock, Sir Beresford (Spelthorne)	Hill, J. E. B. (S. Norfolk)	Nicholson, Sir Godfrey
Crawley, Aidan	Hirst, Geoffrey	Noble, Rt. Hn. Michael
Crowder, F. P.	Hobson, Rt. Hn. Sir John	Nugent, Rt. Hn. Sir Richard
Cunningham, Sir Knox	Hogg, Rt. Hn. Quintin	Onslow, Cranley
Curran, Charles	Hopkins, Alan	Orr, Capt. L. P. S.
Currie, G. B. H.	Hordern, Peter	Orr-Ewing, Sir Ian
Dalkeith, Earl of	Hornby, Richard	Osborn, John (Hallam)
Dance, James	Hornsby-Smitth, Rt. Hn. Dame P.	Osborne, Sir Cyril (Louth)
Davies, Dr. Wyndham (Perry Barr)	Howard, Hn. G. R. (St. Ives)	Page, John (Harrow, W.)
d'Avigdor-Goldsmid, Sir Henry	Howe, Geoffrey (Bebington)	Page, R. Graham (Crosby)
Pearson, Sir Frank (Clitheroe)	Sharpies, Richard	van Straubenzee, W. R.
Peel, John	Shepherd, William	Vaughan-Morgan, Rt. Hn. Sir John
Percival, Ian	Sinclair, Sir George	Vickers, Dame Joan
Peyton, John	Smith, Dudley (Br'ntf'd & Chiswick)	Walder, David (High Peak)
Pickthorn, Rt. Hn. Sir Kenneth	Smyth, Rt. Hn. Brig. Sir John	Walker, Peter (Worcester)
Pike, Miss Mervyn	Spearman, Sir Alexander	Walker-Smith, Rt. Hn. Sir Derek
Pitt, Dame Edith	Speir, Sir Rupert	Wall, Patrick
Pounder, Rafton	Stalnton, Keith	Walters, Dennis
Powell, Rt. Hn. J. Enoch	Stanley, Hn. Richard	Ward, Dame Irene
Price, David (Eastleigh)	Stodart, Anthony	Weatherill Bernard
Prior, J. M. L.	Stoddart-Scott, Col. Sir Malcolm	Webster, David
Pym, Francis	Studholme, Sir Henry	Wells, John (Maidstone)
Quenneil, Miss J. M.	Summers, Sir Spencer	Whitelaw, William
Ramsden, Rt. Hn. James	Talbot, John E.	Williams, Sir Rolf Dudley (Exeter)
Rawlinson, Rt. Hn. Sir Peter	Taylor, Sir Charles (Eastbourne)	Wills, Sir Gerald (Bridgwater)
Redmayne, Rt. Hn. Sir Martin	Taylor, Edward M. (G'gow, Cathcart)	Wilson, Geoffrey (Truro)
Rees-Davies, W. R.	Taylor, Frank (Moss Side)	Wise, A. R.
Renton, Rt. Hn. Sir David	Teeling, Sir William	Wolrige-Gordon, Patrick
Ridley, Hn. Nicholas	Temple, John M.	Wood, Rt. Hn. Richard
Ridsdale, Julian	Thatcher, Mrs. Margaret	Woodhouse, Hn. Christopher
Robson Brown, Sir William	Thomas, Sir Leslie (Canterbury)	Woodnutt, Mark
Rodgers, Sir John (Sevenoaks)	Thomas, Rt. Hn. Peter (Conway)	Wylie, N. R.
Roots, William	Thompson, Sir Richard (Croydon,S.)	Yates, William (The Wrekin)
Royle, Anthony	Thorneycroft, Rt. Hn. Peter	Younger, Hn. George
St. John-Stevas, Norman	Tiley, Arthur (Bradford, W.)
Sandys, Rt. Hn. D.	Turton, Rt. Hn. R. H.	TELLERS FOR THE AYES:
Scott-Hopkins, Jamee	Tweedsmuir, Lady	Mr. McLaren and Mr. MacArthur.
NOES
Abse, Leo	Davies, S. O. (Merthyr)	Harper, Joseph
Albu, Austen	de Freitas, Sir Geoffrey	Harrison, Walter (Wakefield)
Allaun, Frank (Salford, E.)	Delargy, Hugh	Hart, Mrs. Judith
Aldritt, Walter	Dell, Edmund	Hattersley, Roy
Allen, Scholefield (Crewe)	Dempsey, James	Hayman, F. H.
Armstrong, Ernest	Diamond, John	Hazell, Bert
Atkinson, Norman	Dodds, Norman	Healey, Rt. Hn. Denis
Bacon, Miss Alice	Doig, Peter	Heffer, Eric S.
Bagier, Gordon A. T.	Donnelly, Desmond	Henderson, Rt. Hn. Arthur
Barnett, Joel	Driberg, Tom	Herbison, Rt. Hn. Margaret
Baxter, William	Duffy, Dr. A. E. P.	Hill, J. (Midlothian)
Beaney, Alan	Dunn, James A.	Hobden, Dennis (Brighton, K'town)
Bellenger, Rt. Hn. F. J.	Dunnett, Jack	Holman, Percy
Bence, Cyril	Edelman, Maurice	Horner, John
Benn, Rt. Hn. Anthony Wedgwood	Edwards, Rt. Hn. Ness (Caerphilly)	Houghton, Rt. Hn. Douglas
Bennett, J. (Glasgow, Bridgaton)	Edwards, Robert (Bilston)	Howarth, Harry (Wellingborough)
Binns, John	English, Michael	Howarth, Robert L. (Bolton, E.)
Bishop, E. S.	Ennals, David	Howell. Denis (Small Heath)
Blackburn, F.	Ensor, David	Howie, W.
Blenkinsop, Arthur	Evans, Albert (Islington, S.W.)	Hoy, James
Boardman, H.	Evans, loan (Birmingham, Yardley)	Hughes, Cledwyn (Anglesey)
Boston, T. G.	Fernyhough, E.	Hughes, Emrys (S. Ayrshire)
Bottomley, Rt. Hn. Arthur	Finch, Harold (Bedwellty)	Hughes, Hector (Aberdeen, N.)
Bowden, Rt. Hn. H. W. (Leics S.W.)	Fitch, Alan (Wigan)	Hunter, Adam (Dunfernline)
Boyden, James	Fletcher, Sir Eric (Islington, E.)	Hunter, A. E. (Feltham)
Braddock, Mrs. E. M.	Fletcher, Ted (Darlington)	Hynd, H. (Accrington)
Bradley, Tom	Fletcher, Raymond (Ilkeston)	Hynd, John (Attercliffe)
Bray, Dr. Jeremy	Floud, Bernard	Irvine, A. J. (Edge Hill)
Brown, Hugh D. (Glasgow, Provan)	Foley, Maurice	Jackson, Colin
Brown, R. W. (Shoredltch & Fbury)	Foot, Sir Dingle (Ipswich)	Janner, Sir Barnett
Buchanan, Richard	Foot, Michael (Ebbw Vale)	Jay, Rt. Hn. Douglas
Butler, Herbert (Hackney, C.)	Ford, Ben	Jeger, George (Goole)
Butler, Mrs. Joyce (Wood Green)	Fraser, Rt. Hn. Tom (Hamilton)	Jeger,Mrs. Lena(H'b'n&St.P'cras,S.)
Cailaghan, Rt. Hn. James	Freeson, Reginald	Jenkins, Hugh (Putney)
Carmichael, Neil	Galpern, Sir Myer	Jenkins, Rt. Hn. Roy (Stechford)
Carter-Jones, Lewis	Garrett, W. E.	Johnson, Carol (Lewisham, S.)
Castle, Rt. Hn. Barbara	Garrow, A.	Johnson, James (K'ston-on-Hull, W.)
Chapman, Donald	George, Lady Megan Lloyd	Johnston, Russell (Inverness)
Coleman, Donald	Ginsburg, David	Jones, Dan (Burnley)
Conlan, Bernard	Gourlay, Harry	Jones,Rt. Hn. Sir Elwyn(W. Ham, S.)
Corbet, Mrs. Freda	Greenwood, Rt. Hn. Anthony	Jones, J. Idwal (Wrexham)
Cousins, Rt. Hn. Frank	Gregory, Arnold	Jones, T. W. (Merioneth)
Craddock, George (Bradford, S.)	Grey, Charles	Kelley, Richard
Crawshaw, Richard	Griffiths, David (Rother Valley)	Kenyon, Clifford
Cronin, John	Griffiths, Rt. Hn. James (Llanelly)	Kerr, Mrs. Anne (R'ter & Chatham)
Crosland, Anthony	Griffiths, Will (M'chester Exchange)	Kerr, Dr. David (W' worth, Central)
Crossman, Rt. Hn. R. H. S.	Grimond, Rt. Hn. J.	Lawson, George
Cullen, Mrs. Alice	Gunter, Rt. Hn. R. J.	Leadbitter, Ted
Dalyell, Tam	Hale, Leslie	Ledger, Ron
Darling, George	Hamilton, James (Bothwell)	Lee, Rt. Hn. Frederick (Newton)
Davies, G. Elfed (Rhondda, E.)	Hamilton, William (West Fife)	Lee, Mrs. Jennie (Cannock)
Davies, Harold (Leek)	Hamling, William (Woolwich, W.)	Lever, Harold (Cheetham)
Davies, Ifor (Gower)	Hannan, William	Lever, L. M. (Ardwick)

Lewis, Arthur (West Ham, N.)	Oswald, Thomas	Soskice, Rt. Hn. Sir Frank
Lewis, Ron (Carlisle)	Owen, Will	Spriggs, Leslie
Lipton, Marcus	Padley, walter	Steel, D.
Lomas, Kenneth	Page, Derek (King's Lynn)	Steele, Thomas
Loughlin, Charles	Paget, R. T.	Stewart, Rt. Hn. Michael
Lubbock, Eric	Palmer, Arthur	Stonehouse, John
Mabon, Dr. J. Dickson	Pannell, Rt. Hn. Charles	Stones, William
McBride, Neil	Pargiter, G. A.	Strauss, Rt. Hn. G. R. (Vauxhall)
McCann, J.	Park, Trevor (Derbyshire, S.E.)	Summerskill, Dr. Shirley
MacColl, James	Parker, John	Swain, Thomas
MacDermot, Niall	Parkin, B. T.	Swingler, Stephen
McGuire, Michael	Pavitt, Laurence	Symonds, J. R.
McInnes, James	Pearson, Arthur (Pontypridd)	Taverne, Dick
Mackenzie, Alasdair (Ross&Crom'ty)	Peart, Rt. Hn. Fred	Taylor, Bernard (Mansfield)
Mackenzie, Gregor (Rutherglen)	Pentland, Norman	Thomas, George (Cardiff, W.)
Mackie, George Y. (C'ness & S'land)	Perry, Ernest G.	Thomas, lorwerth (Rhondda, W.)
Mackie, John (Enfield, E.)	Popplewell, Ernest	Thomson, George (Dundee, E.)
McLeavy, Frank	Prentice, R. E.	Thornton, Ernest
MacMillan, Malcolm	Price, J. T. (Westhoughton)	Thorpe, Jeremy
MacPherson, Malcolm	Probert, Arthur	Tinn, James
Mahon, Peter (Preston, S.)	Pursey, Cmdr. Harry	Tomney, Frank
Mallalieu, E. L. (Brigg)	Randall, Harry	Tuck, Raphael
Mallalieu,J. P. W. (Ruddersfield,E.)	Rankin, John	Urwin, T. W.
Manuel, Archie	Redhead, Edward	Varley, Eric G.
Mapp, Charles	Rees, Merlyn	Wainwright, Edwin
Marsh, Richard	Reynolds, G. W.	Walden, Brian (All Saints)
Mason, Roy	Rhodes, Geoffrey	Walker, Harold (Doncaster)
Maxwell, Robert	Richard, Ivor	Wallace, George
Mayhew, Christopher	Roberts, Albert (Normanton)	Warbey, William
Mellish, Robert	Roberts, Goronwy (Caernarvon)	Watkins, Tudor
Mendelson, J. J.	Robertson, John (Paisley)	Weitzman, David
Mikardo, Ian	Robinson, Rt. Hn. K. (St.Pancras, N.)	wells, William (Walsall, N.)
Millan, Bruce	Rodgers, William (Stockton)	White, Mrs. Eirene
Miller, Dr. M. S.	Rose, Paul B.	Whitlock, William
Milne, Edward (Blyth)	Ross, Rt. Hn. William	wigg, Rt. Hn. George
Molloy, William	Rowland, Christopher	Wilkins, W. A.
Monslow, Walter	Sheldon, Robert	Willey, Rt. Hn. Frederick
Morris, Alfred (Wythenshawe)	Shinwell, Rt. Hn. E.	Williams, Alan (Swansea, W.)
Morris, Charles (Openshaw)	Shore, Peter (Stepney)	Williams, Mrs. Shirley (Hitchin)
Morris, John (Aberavon)	Short, Rt. Hn. E. (N'c'tle-on-Tyne, C.)	Williams, W. T. (Warrington)
Mulley, Rt. Hn. Frederick (SheffieldPk)	Short, Mrs. Renee (W'hampton, N. E.)	Willis, George (Edinburgh, E.)
Murray, Albert	Silkln, John (Deptford)	Wilson, Rt. Hn. Harold (Huyton)
Neal, Harold	Silkin, S. C. (Camberwell, Dulwich)	Wilson, William (Coventry, S.)
Newene, Stan	Silverman, Julius (Aston)	Winterbottom, R. E.
Noel-Baker, Francis (swindon)	Silverman, Sydney (Nelson)	Woodburn, Rt. Hn. A.
Noel-Baker, Rt. Hn. Philip (Derby, S.)	Skeffington, Arthur	Woof, Robert
Norwood, Christopher	Slater, Mrs. Harriet (Stoke, N.)	Wyatt, Woodrow
Oakes, Gordon	Slater, Joseph (Sedgefield)	Yates, Victor (Ladywood)
Ogden, Eric	Small, William	Zilliacus, K.
O'Malley, Brian	Smith, Ellis (Stoke, S.)
Orbach, Maurice	Snow, Julian	TELLERS FOR THE NOES:
Orme, Stanley	Solomons, Henry	Mr. Sydney Irving and
		Mr. George Rogers.

Question put, That the proposed words be there added:—

The House divided: Ayes 310, Noes 286.

Division No. 79.	AYES	[10.14 p.m.
Abse, Leo	Bowden, Rt. Hn. H. W. (Leics S. W.)	Crossman, Rt. Hn. R. H. S.
Albu, Austen	Boyden, James	Cullen, Mrs. Alice
Allaun, Frank (Salford, E.)	Braddock, Mrs. E. M.	Dalyell, Tam
Aldritt, Walter	Bradley, Tom	Darling, George
Allen, Scholefield (Crewe)	Bray, Dr. Jeremy	Davies, G. Elfed (Rhondda, E.)
Armstrong, Ernest	Brown, Hugh D. (Glasgow, Provan)	Davies, Harold (Leek)
Atkinson, Norman	Brown, R. W. (Shoreditch & Fbury)	Davies, Ifor (Gower)
Bacon, Miss Alice	Buchanan, Richard	Davies, S. O. (Merthyr)
Bagier, Gordon A. T.	Butler, Herbert (Hackney, C.)	de Freitas, Sir Geoffrey
Barnett, Joel	Butler, Mrs. Joyce (Wood Green)	Delargy, Hugh
Baxter, William	Callaghan, Rt. Hn. James	Dell, Edmund
Beaney, Alan	Carmichael, Neil	Dempsey, James
Bellenger, Rt. Hn. F. J.	Carter-Jones, Lewis	Diamond, John
Bence, Cyril	Castle, Rt. Hn. Barbara	Dodds, Norman
Benn, Rt. Hn. Anthony Wedgwood	Chapman, Donald	Doig, Peter
Bennett, J. (Glasgow, Bridgeton)	Coleman, Donald	Donnelly, Desmond
Binns, John	Conlan, Bernard	Driberg, Tom
Bishop, E. S.	Corbet, Mrs. Freda	Duffy, A. E. P.
Blackburn, F.	Cousins, Rt. Hn. Frank	Dunn, James A.
Blenkinsop, Arthur	Craddock, George (Bradford, S.)	Dunnett, Jack
Boardman, H.	Crawshaw, Richard	Edelman, Maurice
Boston, T. G.	Cronin, John	Edwards, Rt. Hn. Ness (Caerphilly)
Bottomley, Rt. Hn. Arthur	Crosland, Anthony	Edwards, Robert (Bilston)
English, Michael	Lawson, George	Redhead, Edward
Ennals, David	Leadbitter, Ted	Rees, Merlyn
Ensor, David	Ledger, Ron	Reynolds, G. W.
Evans, Albert (Islington, S. W.).	Lee, Rt. Hn. Frederick (Newton)	Rhodes, Geoffrey
Evans, Ioan (Birmingham, Yardley)	Lee, Miss Jennie (Cannock)	Richard, Ivor
Fernyhough, E.	Lever, Harold (Cheetham)	Roberts, Albert (Normanton)
Finch, Harold (Bedwellty)	Lever, L. M. (Ardwick)	Roberts, Goronwy (Caernarvon)
Fitch Alan (Wigan)	Lewis, Arthur (West Ham, N.)	Robertson, John (Paisley)
Fletcher, Sir Eric (Islington, E.)	Lewis, Ron (Carlisle)	Robinson, Rt. Hn. K. (St.Pancras, N.)
Fletcher, Ted (Darlington)	Lipton, Marcus	Rodgers, William (Stockton)
Fletcher, Raymond (Ilkeston)	Lomas, Kenneth	Rose, Paul B.
Floud, Bernard	Loughlin, Charles	Ross, Rt. Hn. William
Foley, Maurice	Lubbock, Eric	Rowland, Christopher
Foot, Sir Dingle (Ipswich)	Mabon, Dr. J. Dickson	Sheldon, Robert
Foot, Michael (Ebbw Vale)	McBride, Neil	Shore, Peter (Stepney)
Ford, Ben	McCann, J.	Short, Rt, Hn. E. (N'c'tle-on-Tine, C.)
Fraser, Rt. Hn. Tom (Hamilton)	MacColl, James	Short, Mrs. Renée (W' hampton, N. E.)
Freeson, Reginald	MacDermot, Niall	Silkin, John (Deptford)
Galpern, Sir Myer	McGuire, Michael	Silkin, S. C. (Camberwell, Dulwleh)
Garrett, W. E.	Mclnnes, James	Silverman, Julius (Aston)
Garrow, A.	Mackenzie, Alasdair (Ross&Crom'ty)	Silverman, Sydney (Nelson)
George, Lady Megan Lloyd	Mackenzie, Gregor (Rutherglen)	Skeffington, Arthur
Ginsburg, David	Mackie, George Y. (C'ness & S'land)	Slater, Mrs. Harriet (Stoke, N.)
Gourlay, Harry	Mackie, John (Enfield, E.)	Slater, Joseph (Sedgefield)
Greenwood, Rt. Hn. Anthony	McLeavy, Frank	Small, William
Gregory, Arnold	MacMillan, Malcolm	Smith, Ellis (Stoke, S.)
Grey, Charles	MacPherson, Malcolm	Snow, Julian
Griffiths, David (Rother Valley)	Mahon, Peter (Preston, S.)	Solomons, Henry
Griffiths, Rt. Hn. James (Llanelly)	Mallalieu, E. L. (Brigg)	Soskice, Rt. Hn. Sir Frank
Griffiths, Will (M' chester, Exchange)	Mallalieu, J. P. W. (Huddersfield, E.)	Spriggs, Leslie
Grimond, Rt. Hn. J.	Manuel, Archie	Steel, D.
Gunter, Rt. Hn. R. J.	Mapp, Charles	Steele, Thomas
Hale, Leslie	Marsh, Richard	Stewart, Rt. Hn. Michael
Hamilton, James (Bothwell)	Mason, Roy	Stonehouse, John
Hamilton, William (West Fife)	Maxwell, Robert	Stones, William
Hamling, William (Woolwich, W.)	Mayhew, Christopher	Strauss, Rt. Hn. G. R. (Vauxhall)
Hannan, William	Mellish, Robert	Summerskill, Dr. Shirley
Harper, Joseph	Mendelson, J. J.	Swain, Thomas
Harrison, Walter (Wakefield)	Mikardo, Ian	Swingler, Stephen
Hart, Mrs. Judith	Millan, Bruce	Symonds, J. B.
Hattersley, Roy	Miller, Dr. M. S.	Taverne, Dick
Hayman, F. H.	Milne, Edward (Blyth)	Taylor, Bernard (Mansfield)
Hazell, Bert	Molloy, William	Thomas, George (Cardiff, W.)
Heffer, Eric S.	Monslow, Walter	Thomas, Iorwerth (Rhondda, W.)
Henderson, Rt. Hn. Arthur	Morris, Alfred (Wythenshawe)	Thomson, George (Dundee, E.)
Herbison, Rt. Hn. Margaret	Morris, Charles (Openshaw)	Thornton, Ernest
Hill, J. (Midlothian)	Morris, John (Aberavon)	Thorpe, Jeremy
Hobden, Dennis (Brighton, K' town)	Mulley, Rt. Hn. Frederick (SheffieldPk)	Tinn, James
Holman, Percy	Murray, Albert	Tomney, Frank
Horner, John	Neal, Harold	Tuck, Raphael
Hougnton, Rt. Hn. Douglas	Newens, Stan	Urwin, T. W.
Howarth, Harry (Wellingborough)	Noel-Baker, Francis (Swindon)	Varley, Eric G.
Howarth, Robert L. (Bolton, E.)	Noel-Baker, Rt. Hn. Philip (Derby, S.)	Wainwright, Edwin
Howell, Denis (Small Heath)	Norwood, Christopher	Walden, Brian (All Saints)
Howie, W.	Oakes, Gordon	Walker, Harold (Doncaster)
Hoy, James	Ogden, Eric	Wallace, George
Hughes, Cledwyn (Anglesey)	O' Malley, Brian	Warbey, William
Hughes, Emrys (S. Ayrshire)	Orbach, Maurice	Watkins, Tudor
Hughes, Hector (Aberdeen, N.)	Orme, Stanley	Weitzman, David
Hunter, Adam (Dunfermline)	Oswald, Thomas	Wells, William (Walsall, N.)
Hunter, A. E. (Feltham)	Owen, Will	White, Mrs. Eirene
Hynd, H. (Accrington)	Padley, Walter	Whitlock, William
Hynd, John (Attercliffe)	Page, Derek (King's Lynn)	wigg Rt. Hn George
Irvine, A. J. (Edge Hill)	Paget, R. T.	Wilkins, W. A.
Jackson, Colin	Palmer, Arthur	Willey, Rt. Hn. Frederick
Janner, Sir Barnett	Pannell, Rt. Hn. Charles	Williams, Alan (Swansea, W.)
Jay, Rt. Hn. Douglas	Pargiter, G. A.	Williams, Mrs. Shirley (Hitchin)
Jeger, George (Goole)	Park, Trevor (Derbyshire, S. E.)	Williams, W. T. (Warrington)
Jeger, Mrs. Lena (H 'b'n & St. P'cras, S.)	Parker, John	Willis, George (Edinburgh, E.)
Jenkins, Hugh (Putney)	Parkin, B. T.	Wilson, Rt. Hn. Harold (Huyton)
Jenkins, Rt. Hn. Roy (Stechford)	Pavitt, Laurence	Wilson, William (Coventry, S.)
Johnson, Carol (Lewisham, S.)	Pearson, Arthur (Pontypridd)	Winterbottom, R. E.
Johnson, James (K'ston-on-Hull, W.)	Peart, Rt. Hn. Fred	Woodburn, Rt. Hn. A.
Johnston, Russell (Inverness)	Pentland, Norman	Woof, Robert
Jones, Dan (Burnley)	Perry, Ernest G.	Wyatt, Woodrow
Jones, Rt. Hri. Sir Elwyn (W. Ham, S.)	Popplewell, Ernest	Yates, Victor (Ladywood)
Jones, J. Idwal (Wrexham)	Prentice, R. E.	Zilliacus, K.
Jones, T. W. (Merioneth)	Price, J. T. (Westhoughton)
Kelley, Richard	Probert, Arthur	TELLERS FOR THE AYES:
Kenyon, Clifford	Pursey, Cmdr. Harry	Mr. Sydney Irving and
Kerr, Mrs. Anne (R'ter & Chatham)	Randall, Harry	Mr. George Rogers.
Kerr, Dr. David (W'worth, Central)	Rankin, John

NOES
Agnew, Commander Sir Peter	Farr, John	Lloyd, Rt. Hn. Geoffrey (Sut'nCdfield)
Alison, Michael (Barkston Ash)	Fell, Anthony	Lloyd, Ian (P'tsm'th, Langstone)
Allan, Robert (Paddington, S.)	Fisher, Nigel	Lloyd, Rt. Hn. Selwyn (Wirral)
Allason, James (Hemel Hempstead)	Fletchcr-Cooke, Sir John (S'pton)	Longbottom, Charles
Amery, Rt. Hn. Julian	Forrest, George	Longden, Gilbert
Anstruther-Gray, Rt. Hn. Sir W.	Foster, Sir John	Loveys, Walter H.
Astor, John	Fraser, Rt. Hn. Hugh (St'fford & Stone)	Lucas, Sir Jocelyn
Atkins, Humphrey	Fraser, Ian (Plymouth, Sutton)	Maclean, Sir Fitzroy
Awdry, Daniel	Galbraith, Hn. T. G. D.	Macleod, Rt. Hn. Iain
Baker, W. H. K.	Gammans, Lady	McMaster, Stanley
Balniel, Lord	Gardner, Edward	McNair-Wilson, Patrick
Barber, Rt. Hn. Anthony	Gibson-Watt, David	Maginnis, John E.
Barlow, Sir John	Giles, Rear-Admiral Morgan	Maitland, Sir John
Batsford, Brian	Gilmour, Ian (Norfolk, Central)	Marples, Rt. Hn. Ernest
Beamish, Col. Sir Tufton	Gilmour, Sir John (East Fife)	Marten, Neil
Bell, Ronald	Glover, Sir Douglas	Mathew, Robert
Bennett, Sir Frederic (Torquay)	Glyn, Sir Richard	Maude, Angus
Bennett, Dr. Reginald (Gos & Fhm)	Godber, Rt. Hn. J. B.	Maudling, Rt. Hn. Reginald
Berkeley, Humphry	Goodhart, Philip	Mawby, Ray
Berry, Hn, Anthony	Goodhew, Victor	Maxwell-Hyslop, R. J.
Biffen, John	Gower, Raymond	Maydon, Lt.-Cmdr. S. L. C.
Biggs-Davison, John	Grant, Anthony	Meyer, Sir Anthony
Bingham, R. M.	Grant-Ferris, R.	Mills, Peter (Torrington)
Birch, Rt. Hn. Nigel	Gresham-Cooke, R.	Mills, Stratton (Belfast, N.)
Black, Sir Cyril	Grieve, Percy	Miscampbell, Norman
Blaker, Peter	Griffiths, Eldon (Bury St. Edmunds)	Mitchell, David
Bossom, Hn. Clive	Griffiths, Peter (Smethwick)	Monro Hector
Box, Donald	Garden, Harold	More, Jasper
Boyd-Carpenter, Rt. Hn. J.	Hall, John (Wycombe)	Morgan W. G.
Boyle, Rt. Hn. Sir Edward	Hall-Davis, A. G. F.	Morrison, Charles (Devizes)
Braine, Bernard	Hamilton, Marquess of (Fermanagh)	Mott-Radclyffe, Sir Charles
Brewis, John	Hamilton, M. (Salisbury)	Munro-Lucas-Tooth Sir Hugh
Brinton, Sir Tatton	Harris, Frederic (Croydon, N. W.)	Murton Oscar
Bromley-Davenport, Lt.-Col. SirWalter	Harris, Reader (Heston)	Neave, Airey
Brooke, Rt. Hn. Henry	Harrison, Brian (Maldon)	Nicholls, Sir Harmar
Brown, Sir Edward (Bath)	Harrison, Col. Sir Harwood (Eye)	Nicholson, Sir Godfrey
Bruce-Gardyne, J.	Harvey, Sir Arthur Vere (Maccles'd)	Nugent, Rt. Hn. Sir Richard
Bryan, Paul	Harvey, John (Walthamstow, E.)	Onslow Cranley
Buchanan-smith, Alick	Harvie Anderson, Miss	Orr, Capt. L. P. S
Buck, Antony	Hastings, Stephen	Orr-Ewing Sir Ian
Bullus, Sir Eric	Hawkins, Paul	Osborn John (Hallam)
Burden, F. A.	Hay, John	Osborne, Sir Cyril (Louth)
Butcher, Sir Herbert	Heald, Rt. Hn. Sir Lionel	Page, John (Harrow, W.)
Buxton, R. C.	Heath, Rt. Hn. Edward
Campbell, Gordon	Hendry, Forbes	Page, R. Graham (Crosby)
Carlisle, Mark	Higgins, Terence L.	Pearson Sir Frank (Clitheroe)
Carr, Rt. Hn. Robert	Hiley, Joseph	Peel, John
Channon, H. P. G.	Hill, J. E. B. (S. Norfolk)	Percival, Ian
Chataway, Christopher	Hirst, Geoffrey	Peyton, John
Chichester-Clark, R.	Hobson, Rt. Hn. Sir John	PiKe, Miss Mervyn
Clark, Henry (Antrim, N.)	Hogg, Rt. Hn. Quintin	Pitt, Dame Edith
Clark, William (Nottingham, S.)	Hopkins, Alan	Pounder, Rafton
Clarke, Brig. Terence (Portsmth, W.)	Hordern, Peter	Powell, Rt. Hn. J. Enoch
Cole, Norman	Hornby, Richard	Price, David (Eastleigh)
Cooke, Robert	Hornsby-Smith, Rt. Hn. Dame P.	Prior, J. M. L.
Cooper, A. E.	Howard, Hn. G. R. (St. Ives)	Pym, Francis
Cooper-Key, Sir Neill	Howe, Geoffrey (Bebington)	Quennell, Miss J. M.
Cordle, John	Hunt, John (Bromley)	Ramsden, Rt. Hn. James
Corfield, F. V.	Hutchison, Michael Clark	Rawlinson, Pt. Hn. Sir Peter
Costain, A. P.	Iremonger, T. L.	Redmayne, Rt. Hn. Sir Martin
Craddock, Sir Beresford (Spelthorne)	Irvine, Bryant Godman (Rye)	Rees-Davies, W. R.
Crawley, Aldan	Jenkin, Patrick (Woodford)	Renton, Rt. Hn. Sir David
Crowder, F. P.	Jennings, J. C.	Ridley, Hn. Nicholas
Cunningham, Sir Knox	Johnson Smith, G.	Ridsdale, Julian
Curran, Charles	Jones, Arthur (Northants, S.)	Robson Brown, Sir William
Currie, G. B. H.	Jopling, Michael	Rodgers, Sir John (Sevenoaks)
Dance, James	Joseph, Rt. Hn. Sir Keith	Roots, William
Davies, Dr. Wyndham (Perry Barr)	Kaberry, Sir Donald	Royle, Anthony
d'Avigdor-Goldsmid, Sir Henry	Kerby, Capt. Henry	Russell, Sir Ronald
Dean, Paul	Kerr, Sir Hamilton (Cambridge)	St. John-Stevas, Norman
Deedes, Rt. Hn. W. F.	Kilfedder, James A.	Sandys. Rt. Hn. D.
Digby, Simon Wingfield	Kimball, Marcus	Scott-Hopkins, James
Dodds-Parker, Douglas	King, Evelyn (Dorset, S.)	Sharples, Richard
Doughty, Charles	Kirk, P.	Shepherd, William
Douglas-Home, Rt. Hn. Sir Alec	Kitson, Timothy	Sinclair, Sir George
Drayson, G. B.	Lagden, Godfrey	Smith, Dudley (Br'ntf'd & Chiswick)
du Cann, Rt. Hn. Edward	Lambton, Viscount	Smyth, Rt. Hn. Brig. Sir John
Eden, Sir John	Lancaster, Col. C. G.	Spearman, Sir Alexander
Elliot, Capt. Walter (Carshalton)	Langford-Holt, Sir John	Speir, Sir Rupert
Elliott, R.W (N'c'tle-upon-Tyne, N.)	Legge-Bourke, Sir Harry	Stainton, Keith
Emery, Peter	Lewis, Kenneth (Rutland)	Stanley, Hn. Richard
Errington, Sir Eric	Litchfield, Capt. John	Stodart, Anthony

Stoddart-Scott, Col. Sir Malcolm	Turton, Rt. Hn. R. H.	Williams, Sir Rolf Dudley (Exeter)
Studholme, Sir Henry	Tweedstmuir, Lady	Wills, Sir Gerald (Bridgwater)
Summers, Sir Spencer	van Straubenzee, W. R.	Wilson, Geoffrey (Truro)
Talbot, John E.	Vaughan-Morgan, Rt. Hn. Sir John	Wise, A. R.
Taylor, Sir Charles (Eastbourne)	Vickers, Dame Joan	Wolrige-Gordon, Patrick
Taylor, Edward M. (G'gow,Cathcart)	Walder, David (High Peak)	Wood, Rt. Hn. Richard
Taylor, Frank (Moss Side)	Walker, Peter (Worcester)	Woodhouse, Hn. Christopher
Teeling, Sir William	Walker-Smith, Rt. Hn. Sir Derek	Woodnutt, Mark
Temple, John M.	Wall, Patrick	Wylie, N. R.
Thatcher, Mrs. Margaret	Walters, Dennis	Yates, William (The Wrekin)
Thomas, Sir Leslie (Canterbury)	Ward, Dame Irene	Younger, Hn. George
Thomas, Rt. Hn. Peter (Conway)	Weatherill, Bernard
Thompson, Sir Richard (Croydon, S.)	Webster, David	TELLERS FOR THE NOES:
Thorneycroft, Rt. Hn. Peter	Wells, John (Maidstone)	Mr. McLaren and Mr MacArthur
Tiley, Arthur (Bradford, w.)	Whitelaw, William

Main Question, as amended, put and agreed to.

Resolved, That this House deplores the failure of the previous Administration to take the necessary measures to meet the mounting deficit forecast for the postal services of which it was well aware; welcomes the plans for modernisation contained in the White Paper on Post Office Prospects (Command Paper No. 2623), and accepts that the tariff increases proposed in it are now required in order to permit the efficient development of these services.