SACHSENHAUSEN

HC Deb 05 February 1968 vol 758 cc107-70

7.0 p.m.

The Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (Mr. George Brown)

I beg to move, That this House takes note of the Third Report of the Parliamentary Commissioner for Administration (House of Commons Paper No. 54). I first want to pay tribute to the determination with which the hon. Member for Abingdon (Mr. Neave), my right hon. Friend the Member for Easington (Mr. Shinwell) and other hon. Friends who have been supporting him have pursued this matter. I find myself dealing with the Report of the Parliamentary Commissioner with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I applaud the office which he holds and would like to take some credit for having helped to bring it into existence. On the other hand, I now find myself dealing with a Report which is critical of the Department for which I am responsible. I have strong feelings about Ministerial responsibility which I would like to touch upon later.

Hon. Members will have read the Report, so I will not go over it or try to recapitulate it. I would, however, ask the House to spend a few minutes looking at the case through the eyes of the Ministers in the Foreign Office who have had to deal with it over a large number of years. The case did not begin with me. I came to it, and I admit it quite frankly, predisposed towards the view of the claimants, and there is a Minute from me on the file which has been made available to the "Ombudsman" as we call him, which is quite clear. I wished to be generous and I questioned at that point whether the Foreign Office was being over-legalistic but, having started from that position, I am prepared to accept the responsibility for being satisfied that all the information I needed was supplied to me.

This is one of the grounds on which disagree with the Parliamentary Commissioner. I was satisfied that all the information I needed was supplied to me. I read every piece of paper on the file and I came to my conclusions by my own processes of judgment. That these conclusions were the same as the Department's does not, of course, invalidate them, and that they were the same as every previous Minister's does not invalidate them. I want to make it quite clear that every Minister who has looked at these things has come by his own processes of judgment to the same conclusion.

I believe that all who have handled this case and other similar cases—and I repeat that I am but one of several successive Ministers—have looked at it in two lights; first, in the very human terms of tragedy and suffering which, as we all know, were associated with all Nazi concentration camps and, secondly, in the light of having to administer fairly, and be seen to administer fairly, a scheme for compensation very tightly drawn in cases of great complexity and difficulty, where it was essential that clear rules should be applied.

This particular case was not a matter which could be judged simply by looking at the human side in conditions of suffering which were immeasurably severe, nor by looking solely at the circumstances of Sachsenhausen. The Foreign Office was dealing with applications from thousands of people who had suffered most cruelly in many ether Nazi camps. It was that terrible backcloth which gave not only the Foreign Office but each of us who has looked at the case a perspective of horror which could not be fully revealed by just assessing the conditions in one camp alone, much less by trying to assess it by reference to one sector of one camp alone.

This difficult problem was further complicated by the need imposed upon U3 by what I call the "Butler" rules—the rules which the then Foreign Secretary kid down which arose from the Anglo-German Agreement which obliged us to distinguish between, on the one hand, those who were held to have suffered the full brutality of Nazi persecution and, on the other hand, those many gallant men and women who were ill treated, and grievously ill treated, as prisoners of war or civilian internees but were not under the rules so regarded.

We must make it quite clear, as I regard, unfortunately—but I was not responsible for it—that under the terms of the Agreement to which I have referred prisoners of war and civil internees were excluded. There are those, including the hon. Member for Abingdon, my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Park (Mr. Mulley) and other hon. and right hon. Members, who can themselves contribute to the body of knowledge we have about this, and throughout the period when I have been dealing with this I have, in 'act, had the immediate evidence of my right hon. Friend, who knows at first hand what went on.

This vital distinction which the Agreement makes between what is called "Nazi persecution", which is related to the concentration camps, and the ill treatment of prisoners of war that is held to be a separate thing and is specifically rued out, underlies the argument, if that is the right word to use, which the hon. Member for Abingdon, my right hon. Friend and others and I have had.

The Anglo-German Agreement of 1964, negotiated by Mr. Butler, as he then was, the Foreign Secretary, provided £1 mil- lion for the United Kingdom victims of Nazi persecution, defined in the very limited terms to which I have just referred, who had suffered loss of liberty or damage to their health or who had died in consequence of such persecution. Whether the Agreement could have been negotiated on any wider basis it is not for me now to say but, of course, I am now in my present office bound by the terms of that Agreement.

In order to distribute the money in this country, the term "Nazi persecution" had to be defined, and Lord Butler, as he now is, decided then that a claimant must satisfy one of two conditions: either he must have been detained in a concentration camp or he must have been in an institution where the conditions were comparable. But, in the very same Agreement, he went on to exclude a large number of institutions where a very large number of prisoners held by the Nazis existed.

We have endeavoured to carry out that Agreement with due regard to its letter and the spirit. I cannot speak for my predecessors but only for myself, but it was always recognised that there would be anomalies. For example, some people who, by good fortune, escaped the worst rigours of a concentration camp, were nevertheless qualified for compensation simply because they had been in such camps.

The Foreign Office took the view—and, speaking for myself, I believe quite rightly—that it would be better to be generous in the small number of such cases rather than risk denying compensation to genuine victims. What I hope the House will understand is that I myself know that life must have been hell on earth for anybody who was kept in a concentration camp, even those who escaped the worst horrors. So compensation has been paid to those to whom we could, without doing damage to the rules, keep inside them.

Cases of Nazi persecution outside concentration camps were also provided for. The Notes for Guidance which the then Foreign Secretary, Lord Butler, approved in 1964—after, as I understand it, discussing them with the hon. Member for Abingdon and others —provided that anybody who had been in an institution where the conditions were comparable with those of a concentration camp would be eligible. Claimants from such institutions had to justify their claims by detailing the actual conditions in their place of detention. Claimants who were held in a concentration camp did not have to do this.

This requirement was made not from any wish to discriminate against one category of applicant as opposed to another, but I understand, rather to cast the net as widely and as fairly as possible, and I would like to emphasise, in view of some of the things written in the newspapers, that officials in the Foreign Office went right out of their way to help applicants. They helped them to make the best of their case. They helped them to get information which they did not themselves have, which also enabled them to make the best case they could.

Having filled in that background, I come to the Parliamentary Commissioner's Report. I would like first to deal with the allegation that there were defects in the procedure by which the Foreign Office reached its decisions on these claims. I have examined this with all the thoroughness at my command and I say quite frankly that I do not believe that I was misled by officials. I regard it as a Minister's job to see that he has all the necessary information. If he does not have it, that is a very severe mark against him. If, having got it, he does not take it aboard, that is an even severer mark against him, and I reject completely the Parliamentary Commissioner's allegation that officials did not submit the evidence that Ministers right up to and including me should have had.

I want to say something else, and I think that the House had better accept this. [Interruption.] I said I think the House should accept this. Of course, it may accept what it likes but I am entitled to say what I think. Hon. Members are entitled to disagree with me, but I must say what I think. I think that the House had better accept this, and before it disagrees with me it had better think seriously about it. It is that we will breach a very serious constitutional position if we start holding officials responsible for things that are done wrong.

In this country, Ministers are Members of Parliament. That is not true of many countries. I think that we have the best Parliamentary democratic system in the world and one of the reasons for this is that our Ministers are responsible to Parliament. If things are wrongly done by Ministers and I think that it is tremendously important to hold to that principle.

If things have gone wrong, then Ministers have gone wrong and I accept my full share of the responsibility in this case. It happens that I am the last of a series of Ministers who have looked at this matter and I am the one who got caught with the ball when the lights went up. But I accept, I repeat, my share of the responsibility. I could not possibly do other. I read every page of all the information. It is Ministers who must be attacked, not officials.

The Office of Parliamentary Commissioner was intended to strengthen our form of democratic Government, but let me say that if that Office were to lead to changing this constitutional position so that officials got attacked and Ministers escaped, then I think that the whole practice of Ministers being accountable to Parliament would be undermined. I think that the morale of the Civil and Diplomatic Services would be undermined and I am sure that many experienced right hon. and hon. Members want to think twice about that situation.

Mr. Douglas Houghton (Sowerby)

How does my right hon. Friend relate this doctrine to the existence and practice of the Comptroller and Auditor-General and the Public Accounts Committee?

Mr. Brown

I think that I can quite easily relate it to them. What I am trying to say is that we should not extrude, as it were, that we should not carry, the doctrine of these Committees any further. I think that they are already open to objection, as a matter of fact, but I certainly believe that we in this House should not take them any further and we should stay with Ministers and should deal with Ministers where we think that things have gone wrong. Ministers must, in my view, remain responsible to Parliament, and I am willing to do so. Officials must remain responsible to their Ministers.

Mr. Grant-Ferris (Nantwich)

Can the right hon. Gentleman tell us where in the Report the Parliamentary Commissioner attacks the doctrine of Ministerial responsibility?

Mr. Brown

No. What he does—because he had to, otherwise he could not have made a report—is to obtain this on the doctrine of maladministration.

Mr. Grant-Ferris

That was the Minister.

Mr. Brown

I am sorry. The hon. Gentleman must read the Report. This is one thing I am trying to get at, and one of the things I want the House to consider is that the Parliamentary Commissioner was set up as the Parliamentary Commissioner for Administration. He cannot, therefore, deal with Ministers; he can deal only with officials. I think that this is bad. [HON. MEMBERS: "Why establish the office?"] I am not scoring any party points; I am talking to the House as the House of Commons, and I think that the House ought to think about this in that light. Personally —and I am now speaking personally and not for the Cabinet—I happen to feel that if this Report is to be the forerunner of a new doctrine, both sides of the House will regret it very much. I was trying to draw attention to some of the things which the House should consider.

Ministers are responsible to the House, and must be; officials in Departments are responsible to their Ministers, and must be. I assure the House that in so far as there are lessons to be learned from this case, I have ensured that the Foreign Office has learned them. I have issued to the Department the instructions which seemed to me to follow. They will be carried out. It is for the House to hold me responsible for that and not try to hold responsible any officials for whom I speak in the House.

I come now to whether, having considered the Parliamentary Commissioner's Report, as I have, very seriously and very carefully, compensation should be paid. I say straight away that the ill-treatment of these gallant men has never been at issue. One of them, a very gallant man, purported on television to remember something which he said he thought that I had said. His recollection and mine are at odds, but I must say that the record of that meeting does not bear out what he said. Leaving that on one side, everybody who has been in any of these discussions knows that I have made it absolutely plain that the gallantry of these men has never been at issue.

What the Parliamentary Commissioner has not found is that the conditions of these men, bad as they were, were as bad as those suffered by many other gallant men in many other German camps. The Parliamentary Commissioner concentrated exclusively on Sachsenhausen—[HON.MEMBERS: "Those were his terms of reference."] Those were the terms of reference, but because he concentrated on that, he, unlike me and unlike my predecessors, did not have also to take into account the thousands of other cases of other people who suffered even more than these gallant men suffered. He concentrated his report on the narrow issue, the very much narrower issue, and that I was not allowed to do. 1 had to take into account the wider issue.

He concentrated his attention on the very much narrower issue of whether the special camp, the Sonderlager, or the Zellenbau, the cell block, formed part of the concentration camp. I had that in my mind when I came into this office and no doubt my predecessors had it in theirs, but we also had to take into account the wider issue. Whether the Sonderlager or the Zellenbau were inside the perimeter of Sachsenhausen was always an arguable issue. All the Ministers—and there are many of us—who have dealt with this case—and I ask the House to understand that it has been dealt with the utmost compassion and the utmost desire to do the right thing and the fair thing—all the Ministers who have dealt with this case on the basis of the "Butler Agreement" have come to one conclusion, which was that technically speaking they were not inside the perimeter.

Mrs. Anne Kerr (Rochester and Chatham)

I am one of those hon. Members who have been in this wretched place and I have seen where our men were imprisoned. Would not my right hon. Friend now agree that, in fact, what our men were subjected to was at least as bad as what men outside had to submit to? For instance, they had to see men hanged by a hook and die slowly and men dropped done a hole who had to die slowly.

Mr. Brown

We have taken all that into account. What I am trying to say is not that they were not ill-treated, but that I believe and that all my predecessors believed that there are many others who were much more ill-treated, and we found it very had to find in favour of these men.

Mrs. Renée Short (Wolverhampton, North-East)

Irrelevant.

Mr. Brown

It is no good saying that it is irrelevant. May I tell my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, South-West—

Mrs. Short

North-East.

Mr. Brown

The wind blows colder up there. There will be many people—and I shall be surprised if there are not some living in Wolverhampton—who, after we decide what I shall propose tonight, will ask, "Why not me?". The House may well find that some people, who have not had the advantage of the advocates whom these men have had, will now emerge and ask, "Why am I not getting compensation for conditions in which I was treated much worse?".

Mrs. Short rose—

Mr. Brown

I think that I ought to get on. I have just said that all the Ministers who have looked at this have all separately on the basis of the "Butler Rules" reached one conclusion. The Parliamentary Commissioner, on the other hand, has come to another conclusion.

Mrs. Short

It is the Foreign Office.

Mr. Brown

It is nothing to do with the Foreign Office; it is a group of Ministers. When the Ombudsman has made enough decisions, perhaps we shall have an Ombudsman to look at the Ombudsman's decisions, and if he gets 100 per cent. right, I shall be surprised.

However, all the Ministers who have looked at this quite separately have come to one conclusion and the Parliamentary Commissioner has come to another. I repeat that no one has ever disputed that this was a borderline case. I am bound to say that I do not see any reason for thinking that the judgment of the Parliamentary Commissioner is necessarily better than that of all of us. [HON. MEMBERS: "Then why appoint him?"] I must be allowed to make my own case.

However, I have always wanted to be not only fair but generous in the case of these officers. They performed courageous exploits as escapers from prisoners-of-war camps, and their fortitude under duress was famous. Their gallantry, their honour and their integrity have never been in question.

Having established the office of Parliamentary Commissioner, whether I think his judgment is right or wrong, I am certain that it would be wrong to reject his views. I think that public opinion would be outraged if I rejected his views on an issue which affects personally a few very gallant men.

Having quite firmly, and I hope quite honestly, explained my own view, I have nevertheless decided that compensation will be paid on the appropriate basis to all these claimants or, in a case of those who have died, to their dependants. I want the House to understand that in doing so I am probably being unfair to quite a number of gallant men who have suffered very badly, but who are outside the compensation scheme. It is precisely this difficulty which contributed to my original decision. In applauding the decision that I am announcing tonight, the whole House must accept with me any unfairnesses that flow from it.

In a matter of this kind—[InterrputionIt is no good asking "Why?" It is the Butler rules that establish this. In a matter of this kind there can be no absolute certainty as to what is the right answer. Wherever the dividing line is drawn, there are bound to be hard cases on the wrong side of it. For practical purposes tonight, the question must be decided one way or the other, and I have decided to settle it in the way that the Parliamentary Commissioner suggested. All the points at issue between the Parliamentary Commissioner and the Foreign Office, and all the available evidence has since then, been submitted to me.

I have issued the required instructions in the office as to how cases like this should be dealt with in the future. I hope that the House will agree with me that there is no useful purpose to be served by prolonging a controversy which has caused distress and resentment to some very honourable, very gallant and most deserving people. I hope too, that the House will feel that justice has been done to them by the decision I have made and that I have taken all the care I can to ensure that we do not have another problem like this.

Before I sit down let me say this. Newspapers talk about bungling and blundering. It is imperative for me to say that no one has blundered or bungled. This was an issue of judgment. The Parliamentary Commissioner's view is that our judgment was wrong. I am willing to accept that. I have therefore reviewed and revised my decision, but this remains a matter of judgment and on a matter of judgment on an issue as narrow as this anyone can be wrong. I would have wished, since it has come out this way. that I had taken this decision earlier. I did not, but there it is. I have taken the decision now, and I hope on this basis we can end what for me is a very unhappy story.

7.34 p.m.

Mr. Airey Neave (Abingdon)

The House will be glad that two and a half years after this case was first raised the right hon. Gentleman has at last agreed to alter his decision. In his final words he said that he was sorry that he had not taken this step before. If he had listened to hon. and right hon. Gentlemen on both sides of the House who saw him 12 months ago and asked for an impartial inquiry into this matter, we would not be here today and the claimants would not have to suffer from the anxiety and trouble that they have. if he had listened to the points put to him and other Ministers at that time, this would not have happened.

The right hon. Gentleman has proposed some rather unusual constitutional doctrines tonight with regard to the position of the Parliamentary Commissioner. I do not propose to refer to them, but I dare say that other hon. Members will wish to raise them. It is my duty to give a factual account to the House of this case as I saw it.

The right hon. Gentleman has given the impression to the House that this is a borderline case and that there are a lot of other people outside who may be fairly close to it. This was a cast-iron case from the start. This is the whole point, and it is why the right hon. Member for Easington (Mr. Shin well) and many of my hon. and right hon. Friends took it up. The point was, and I do not think that the right hon. Gentleman understands it, that these men were in the cellblock, in the main compound of the camp, and when we come to that part of the Parliamentary Commissioner's report I should like to refer to it.

This is a very important matter for the House and its power to remedy injustices. The public expect us to see that injustice remedied by searching and full inquiry. It is not for me to say anything about the duties of the Select Committee, to which I do not belong, but it does exist for that purpose. We could not have got the Government to change their mind without the assistance of Sir Edmund Compton, the Parliamentary Commissioner. The Leader of the House is quite right, I could not even with all the assistance that I had from so many hon. and right hon. Members on both sides of the House, have achieved that result of reversing a decision with regard to these claims without Sir Edmund. He made a really thorough and searching report, and the thanks of the whole House are due to him for unearthing what really happened in this case, about which the right hon. Gentleman has not really told us.

I will now give an account, which I think shows what happened, and that very bad blunders indeed were made, not only by Ministers but by officials. I do not want to talk about officials here; there is another place to do so. Maladministration can be both by Ministers and officials, and in this case the Ministers were shown the detailed facts and plans. The right hon. Gentleman has referred to the gallantry of these men, Group Captain Day, Colonel John Churchill and Mr. Sydney Dowse. I have made no personal contact with the others, but it was because these men were of the highest quality and courage, and we owe so much to them, that the attitude described in paragraph 68 of the Report dealing with the Foreign Office was all the more disgraceful.

In a moving passage, the Parliamentary Commissioner refers to their distinguished and gallant war record. He says: For these men it is essential as part of a distinguished and gallant war record that they were held in a concentration camp and suffered Nazi persecution there. Further he says: Further, this was exceptional treatment which they incurred because of the exceptional bravery and resource that they had shown in working for their country and damaging the German war effort. It is all the more reason why it makes this case so unfortunate and so tragic.

Group Captain Day was an Albert medallist. He won the Distinguished Service Order while he was a prisoner of war for his escaping activities. Colonel Churchill was a well known Commando leader and Mr. Dowse was the organiser of the great escapes from Stalag Luft 3, as a result of which two-thirds of the officers who escaped were shot on Hitler's orders. The right hon. Gentleman referred to my experiences. It was as an official of the Nuremberg Tribunal that I learned a great deal about Sachsenhausen and the nature of the operation of the concentration camps.

I have an advantage here. I was convinced from the start that the decision was wholly wrong on the facts. The important point was that from the first time that I took this up with the present Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, in October 1965, I asked for an independent inquiry. I have been asking for that ever since. That was what the Motion on the Order Paper was about in April last year. I asked for an independent inquiry at a time when the Foreign Office was saying that its system was adequate and that it had reliable evidence about the treatment. It is quite clear from the nature of the Parliamentary Commissioner's Report that it did not have reliable evidence about the treatment that these men had suffered. I am not sure that the right hon. Gentleman is seized of the point that the Foreign Office had got the story wrong and that the men were in the cells in the main compound of the camp.

1 met a blank wall of incomprehension, and so I sought the advice of the right hon. Member for Easington and many other distinguished hon. Member on the point about the-cells and the Sonderlager to which the Foreign Secretary referred. It is clear from the reply that no homework had been done on this point. The Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, then Minister of State at the Foreign Office, said to me on 28th February, 1966: The cells in which the men were held, although adjoining the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, were quite separate from it and the conditions and treatment in these cases were not comparable with those within the main camp."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 28th February, 1966; Vol. 725, c. 890.] Did not the Ministers read any documents at all? They already knew that the men were in the cells as a result of our interrogation reports.

There is one damning thing concerning the Ministers and officials. I sent the Foreign Office an aerial photograph of the camp. If the Select Committee wished to do so, it could see the correspondence. The photograph showed the Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations where these cells were. If hon. Members look at Appendix E of the Commissioner's Report—this is of the greatest importance as a matter of fact—they will see where the cells were marked in black, where the Sonderlager was, where the execution spot was and where the crematorium was. No one in his right mind could have suggested that those enclosures were other than in the concentration camp. One has only to look at the plan.

I supplied not only the aerial photograph but German documents and plans of the camp. The suggestion that in some way this was a borderline case is wholly unfounded. This was an absolutely certain case. It appeared that certain people concerned with it had not looked at the plans and were not aware of the facts. It is clear from the Parliamentary Commissioner's Report that the men were in cells, that people had been taken out from these cells and shot and that commandos from Lieut. Colonel Churchill's own commando were shot while he was in the cells, because the Foreign Office compensated their dependants. We also know that in the main compound there were two other British subjects who were compensated. We know from the investigation by the Parliamentary Commissioner, which was detailed and impartial—Irepeat"impartial"—that the treatment accorded in the main compound of the camp was less severe than that accorded in the cells. This is the real point. This is what the right hon. Gentleman has not dealt with in his explanation.

These are the factual matters about which the House wants to know. It knows that this maladministration occurred, but it wants to know why, and why these decisions were made, because Ministers were not personally informed on all the facts. It was not only officials. My right hon. Friend the Member for Kinross and West Perthshire (Sir Alec Douglas-Home) and other of my right hot and hon. Friends had the advantage of seeing the men ourselves. As the right hon. Member for Easington knows, we did our own interrogation of the men. That was not done in the Foreign Office. The Foreign Office never saw these men. It never asked them any question about the detailed position and location of the cells. We as an all-party group asked the men these questions and were satisfied that they were telling the truth.

Mr. George Brown

I am sure that the hon. Gentleman would not want to be unfair. Before I came to my decision, which has been held to have been wrong and which I have reversed, I saw the men.

Mr. Neave

The less I say about our discussions on that, the better, because we did not go into any details about where the men were cited in the camp, as far as I remember. The issue at all times was whether the men in the cells were in a concentration camp within the definition of the agreement. The Parliamentary Commissioner found that they were. It is obvious that they were all along. My case has not differed at all over the last two and a half years. It is exactly the case which I put across the Floor of the House to the Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations in February 1966. The right hon. Gentleman knows that. I have not changed my ground one inch.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Kinross and West Perthshire severely questioned the Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations about the position in the camp. We did not get anywhere as a result of that exchange, and we decided to take the men to see the then Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, now the hon. Lady the Minister of State at the Welsh Office. We were not at all successful. I received a very discour aging letter before I even got there. I was told by her private secretary: A negative decision has been arrived at in this case. There is thus no question of reopening it, but as agreed with you she will willingly assure the gallant gentlemen concerned that no doubt is cast upon their good faith. Paragraph 64 of the Parliamentary Commissioner's Report suggests that it was. That is a very serious matter which I draw to the attention of the House. I do not say anything more about it, but there is a clear implication in the Report.

A further all-party group worked on this matter for some months. I thank the hon. Members for Penistone (Mr. Mendelson), Ealing, North (Mr. Molloy), Dewsbury (Mr. Ginsburg), the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr. Grimond) and my hon. Friend the Member for Macclesfield (Sir A. V. Harvey) for their great help. This has been a very difficult and long case and without their help I could not have got as far as I did.

We saw the men in November, 1966. As a result, we decided to see the Foreign Secretary. On that occasion, on 20th December, 1966, I had the aerial photograph with me and 1 gave it to him. He remembers that. 1 gave him the plans of the camp. Those plans are identical with the plan in Appendix E. There can be no doubt in anyone's mind, as a result of looking at those plans, that a big mistake had been made at the very beginning of this issue in October. 1965. The evidence is clear. The Parliamentary Commissioner, an impartial judge, has found the Foreign Office guilty of maladministration. The issue was much simpler than the right hon. Gentleman suggests.

The right hon. Gentleman's reply to me of 30th December, 1966, is very significant. He said that he would not be able to ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer for an ex gratia payment, but he said: We are agreed that these officers were imprisoned in a special camp and cell block which were within the general administrative perimeter of the Sachsenhausen complex. But I cannot accept, on the basis of the evidence which has been assembled.…, that they suffered treatment in any way comparable to that endured by the inmates of the main camp at Sachsenhausen…. We know that the evidence was there and that it was not properly investigated. We know that the evidence was that the treatment in the main camp was less severe than the treatment in the cells. There was a failure to make a proper investigatiton.

Mr. George Brown indicated dissent.

Mr. Neave

The right hon. Gentleman says "No", but this is not what the Parliamentary Commissioner found. He took six and a half months to go into this case. One must admit that Ministers have a lot to do and that they have a lot of papers to read, but this servant of the House was engaged entirely on this case for six and a half months.

Mr. Brown

The hon. Gentleman is making very heavy weather of this. [Horn. MEMBERS: "No."] I have already reversed the decision. If the hon. Gentleman is trying to say that what happened to the men in the Sonderlager or Zellenbau even compared with what happened to the major part of the people who were in Sachsenhausen concentration camp proper, he is trying to prove far too much. The Parliamentary Commissioner never got himself into that. I recommend the hon. Gentleman to rest content with his victory and not get too far.

Mr. Neave

I am not prepared to accept that. The House wants to look at this matter factually. I was referring to what the Parliamentary Commissioner said in respect of these men. There may have been worse cases—I do not dispute that—but the failure of the investigation by the Foreign Office was to differentiate one from another and to treat each case on its merits. The Foreign Office never did that. It never got its facts right. It did not do its homework. That has been proved.

Eventually, on 20th February, with the hon. Member for Ealing, North, I took the men to see the right hon. Gentleman. All that he could tell them was that the fund was exhausted. He said that the money had all gone. In case the impression is given that we went there and started our representations too late in the day, it must be remembered that the case was taken up a long time ago before the registration of claims was complete.

Finally, after several meetings with the Under-Secretary of State, before whom all the facts were laid and the arguments and details were put before him, as a last resort I asked the Prime Minister to receive a deputation consisting of my right hon. Friend the Member for Kinross and West Perthshire, the right hon. Member for Easington, the right hon. Member for Devon, North (Mr. Thorpe) and others. The Prime Minister replied on 6th April. His reply is very revealing in regard to whether people were or were not misled. He replied in this way: I have examined very carefully the questions raised in your letter of 22nd March about the personnel who were in prison outside the main compound of Sachsenhausen concentration camp. As late as 6th April last year, therefore, it was being maintained by someone, in face of all the evidence to the contrary, that the men were outside the main compound. The Prime Minister continued: I am bound to say, however, that I find myself in complete agreement with the views expressed to you by the Foreign Secretary. That was what the Prime Minister said.

We not only did our best not to make it a party matter, but we bent over backwards to try to get an independent inquiry. In our letter, which was signed by representatives of all parties, we asked the Prime Minister for a barrister to be appointed from the Department of the Judge Advocate General, with war crime experience, to look into the case. That was refused. That was why we have landed up in this mess and with this serious case of injustices. We then tabled on the Order Paper a Motion for inquiry which attracted the signature of more than 350 hon. Members.

I do not propose to go on any further. The Report showed that the case was very much worse than we thought. In my view, it was a cast-iron case from the first. The facts that the Foreign Office had before it were wrong, because the Department never fully investigated the matter but used evidence in the form of books by other prisoners which were partial and irrelevant. There has been a bad failure of administration.

Nothing that we can do can make up for what happened in Germany 25 years ago, when there were so many cruel deaths and ruined lives, but at least the House should—and I hope will—exercise its power to do justice to those who survive.

7.53 p.m.

Mr. E. Shinwell (Easington)

Even my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary will agree that the hon. Member for Abingdon (Mr. Neave) deserves our congratulations for his advocacy and, in particular, his persistency. What appeared to be an act of injustice was brought to his attention. He took appropriate action, which is what Members of Parliament are for. That is our duty. We have a responsibility to those who approach us and allege injustices. That was what the hon. Member for Abingdon did.

I do not propose to follow the hon. Member in the details of this affair. The newspapers were full of it. apparently much to the consternation of my right hon. Friend, and we now have the Report of the Ombudsman. One thing on which I agree with my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary is that whatever inappropriate action is taken by officials in any Government Department, whatever errors of judgment there may be, it is the Minister who is responsible.

This, however, is a rather singular case, because my right hon. Friend was the last of the Mohicans. There had been several predecessors of his who had had the matter brought to their attention and they had come to a judgment not dissimilar from that exercised by my right hon. Friend. But although Ministers are to blame, I have not the least hesitation in saying, because I have been a member of several Governments myself, that I would not be the least surprised if—perhaps it is a surmise but I express it in my own fashion; I want to be generous and fair on this occasion—the officials in the Foreign Office were responsible for an error of judgment. I rate it no higher than that.

When my right hon. Friend postulates that in the modern, new-fangled concept of Parliamentary constitutional procedure a senior official, whether in the Foreign Office or any other Department, should never be subjected to criticism, he is going a bit too far.

I have read the Reports of the Estimates Committee. There have been occasions when I have been in opposition, with no measure of responsibility on my shoulders, when I have had to interrogate officials, and often I have thought that they had made mistakes. My right hon. Friend will not be surprised at the nature of the debate this evening, because it is quite possible that some of my hon. Friends who have been keenly interested in this matter—indeed, much more so than myself; my contribution was a most modest one and I will explain it presently—may wish to go into further detail.

I rather imagine that this is not the end of the story, much as my right hon. Friend desires it to be, because the Reports of the Ombudsman have, apparently, to be considered by the Select Committee. Back benchers must not be blamed for the creation of Select Committees. Select Committees are created by the Leader of the House. He will not be alarmed, therefore, if the Report of the Ombudsman is referred, as it must be, to the Select Committee, which may concern itself not with detailed investigations, but with asking questions.

This is what I am concerned about, and I will explain why I played a very modest part. What happened was that the hon. Member for Abingdon approached me. I was sceptical about it, and I shall tell hon. Members why. Almost every hon. Member from time to time is the recipient of communications from men who fought in the First World War and who claim that they were unjustly treated, either because they did not receive the appropriate pension or for some other reason. I know from experience at the War Office back in 1929, when I was Financial Secretary in that Department and had to deal with cases, and again as Secretary of State for War, that a whole host of cases is revived. There is a sort of resurrection of cases every time a new Government is elected. That is what happens, and we are bound to deal with them'.

So I was sceptical. I thought, "This is one of the cases where people come along and say they have suffered, and they submit documents in order to substantiate their claims." But after I examined the evidence—and my hon. Friends behind me who also have examined the evidence will concur with this view—I had not the least doubt that there was the utmost validity in the claim which these men were making; there was every justification for it. I was confirmed in my view when we met the men and interrogated them. I am not without some—I will not say ability—capacity to put questions. My right hon. Friend knows that. I can be very persistent. and I indulged in some interrogation. I wanted to know, and I was completely satisfied, at the end of the interrogation and our meeting with the men, that they had a case. That is why I ventured to assist my hon. Friends and hon. Members on the other side of the House. too. Now my right hon. Friend has come along and said that after all this palaver, all this controversy, all the arguments, he is prepared to provide a solatium in the form of £25,000.

He made a kind of debating point—I thought he made a bit too much of it—when he said in effect that as he gives way on this there will be a lot of others coming along with many other demands.

Mr. Ben Whitaker (Hampstead)

On this point of establishing a precedent, which has obviously worried the Foreign Office all along, may I say that I personally think it not only just but also necessary that any other cases are treated with equal generosity? I feel sure that a lot of other people who like myself were too young to be called upon to make such a sacrifice in the last war. would be prepared to forego something in their standard of living in order to see these men recompensed generously.

Mr. Shinwell

My hon. Friend goes a bit further than I was about to go. I am not prepared to go to that length. What I do say is this. I want to put it in a logical and rational fashion. If a number of others come along and submit similar claims, what is to he done about them? I understand that the function of the Ombudsman will continue. Is it really suggested he shall he dismissed because he has submitted a report which my right hon. Friend did not care very much about? The Ombudsman is going to remain where he is and I see no reason why he should not. If somebody comes along with a claim similar to this one which is now recognised by my right hon. Friend and the claim goes to the Ombudsman, can anybody really object? After all, if somebody comes along to a Member of this House and asks that his claim should he considered and it is referred to the Ombudsman, we go through the whole process again. We shall just have to put up with it. What else can we do? Otherwise we shall be accused of rendering aid to only a number of men now being treated more or less fairly after a long period of time because of the persistent advocacy of the hon. Member for Abingdon.

Suppose that the hon. Member to whom the case is brought is not so persistent as the hon. Member opposite. Then there will be injustice and no relief. If the hon. Member is persistent it will go to the Ombudsman. So I am afraid my right hon. Friend will have to put up with it, so long as he is Foreign Secretary. How long he will be Foreign Secretary is in the lap of the gods. I do not know. Perhaps he will not be long enough for another case to be brought to him, and somebody else will be there instead and will refer to what his predecessor—my right hon. Friend—did.

I am satisfied that these men are to get some relief. After all, what is our objective? After a long argument and quarrel and controversy at the end of the day we have met with success—a remarkable success, if I may say so, for which the hon. Member opposite is very largely responsible. So I think we might leave it where it is.

My right hon. Friend, naturally, is a bit incensed about it. I can understand what his position was. Let us imagine the position of a Minister. A submission is made to him. He refers it to his officials. That is what I used to do. I did not come to a decision at once. I referred the case to the Permanent Under-Secretary. He referred it to the Deputy Under-Secretary. He referred it to some Principal. It goes down the line. It comes up again—back to the Minister. The Minister is told, "There is no case". That is precisely what happened to my right hon. Friend. I am certain that when the submission was first made to my right hon. Friend he did not go into all the detail at once; he would not have had the time he referred it to his officials.

Mr. George Brown

I do not want there to be any misunderstanding. I accept total responsibility for this. I accept responsibility for this office from the time I went to this office. When this case first came to me I minuted it. When the Parliamentary Commissioner had seen it I minuted saying that I did not like the previous stance of the Department, and I asked that it might be resubmitted, and would they please resubmit it with all the papers. I then read every single paper on the file. If thereafter there was a mistake, it is mine.

Mr. Shinwell

Of course, I accept what my right hon. Friend says. It is not unlike the impression I was trying to create. It was that when the first submission was made to him he did not examine all the details but just read the document and then asked for a further opinion, and it was on the basis of that opinion that his original view was confirmed. He did no: indulge in a minute examination at the beginning.

Now, we find that these men are to get this measure of relief. I am very glad. I have not the least doubt or question about my right hon. Friend's integrity, but sometimes there are errors of judgment—and that goes all along the Treasury Bench and my right hon. Friend is not singular in that respect. I do not worry about that. I hope the Leader of the House is not disturbed because I have said that. Of course, I could disturb him if it were necessary.

So there it is. I think the House is to be congratulated, along with the hon. Member for Abingdon, because we have remedied what appeared to be an act of injustice. Having done that, we can congratulate ourselves.

8.8 p.m.

Sir Arthur Vere Harvey (Macclesfield)

The right hon. Gentleman the Member for Easington (Mr. Shinwell) has, as usual, made an effective speech, but I rather detected in it an attempt to bring the temperature down a bit. Without wishing to bring in party politics, I think that if this party had been in the Government and a Member on this side had been the Minister in this case and had spoken for 25 minutes, and then in the last few minutes admitted that there had been a mistake, the right hon. Member for Easington would have had a good deal more to say than he has. But I agree in the main with what he has said.

I hope the Foreign Secretary is coming back, because I have several point I wish to address to him. But first of all, I am very glad that the Leader of the House has kept his pledge of last autumn when he promised that there would be a debate about this matter. Now we are having the debate and I am indebted to him.

We are all indebted to my hon. Friend the Member for Abingdon (Mr. Neave) for his persistence, because, as has been said, it is as a result of it that these men are now to get some money; and, as a result, their honour, which has been in question for some time, is saved. We are indebted to him enormously.

As for the Parliamentary Commissioner, I had my doubts when the Government introduced the Bill to establish the Parliamentary Commissioner. I confess I had my doubts, but now, if he has done one thing which justifies his existence, it is this. He has gone into this matter and produced this Report. He has done it very thoroughly, and it took his six and a half months to go into this matter. He was able to do it, unlike a Minister, without distractions, without trips abroad on Government business, without having to make speeches in this House. He has gone into the matter wholeheartedly and thoroughly, and personally accept his Report wholeheartedly—every word he has said in it.

What does the Foreign Secretary mean by saying that thousands suffered more than these gallant men? Of course, one can pick out some who suffered more than they did, but these men were in a concentration camp, and they suffered, as I shall try to show in the course of my speech.

The right hon. Gentleman then said that the Parliamentary Commissioner's judgment is no better than ours, but who is the Foreign Secretary to question the Parliamentary Commissioner's judgment? We have his Report before us.

Reluctantly, the Foreign Secretary agrees that the Government should pay up £25,000 and says, "Now let us all be friends and forget it." However, Parliament does not look at these matters like that.

Mr. Houghton

The Parliamentary Commissioner is not allowed to substitute his judgment for that of a Minister. The Parliamentary Commissioner is asked to report on matters involving alleged maladministration. Those are the conditions leading to the Minister's judgment. That is an important distinction which we have to keep in mind.

Sir A. V. Harvey

I take that point, but, with my hon. Friend and others of my hon. Friends, I had the privilege of seeing the Foreign Secretary, and we know exactly how this worked over 18 months. I am satisfied that there was maladministration by the Foreign Office, The right hon. Gentleman said that the controversy should not be prolonged. Having been in this House for 23 years, he must know that Select Committees are set up to go into these matters. They can summon anyone to give evidence before them. I have no doubt that this matter will be gone into further.

The House of Commons is a generous and very forgiving institution. If someone realises that a mistake has been made and has the courage to come and say so, the House will forgive him. Instead, the Foreign Secretary chose to prevaricate for 25 minutes in defence of his officials. while agreeing that this was wrong and that was wrong. If he had spoken for 10 minutes and said, "I am sorry. The decision was wrong, but I accept full responsibility", that would have been the end of it. He has brought this trouble on himself.

Of course, in the first place, I blame the Conservative Government for getting only £1 million out of the German Government. It is true that it was an exgratia payment, but it was not enough to make up for the suffering of these people, and they are concerned about their honour and integrity, which have been in question for a very long time. This is a clear case of maladministration on the part of the Foreign Office, although I do not propose to mention the names of any officials. The Select Committee can make further inquiries at a later date, if it so chooses.

When we saw the Foreign Secretary a year ago last December, he had been in his post for a matter of weeks. It may be that the Christmas spirit was in the air, but that did not stop us from going into the matter in detail. We showed him an aerial photograph, and the plan of the camp which was appended to the Parliamentary Commissioner's Report. At the end of our interview, he said, "I am very sorry. All the money has been spent, and there is no more left. It is bad luck ".

However, I want to be fair, 1 hesitate to repeat a private conversation, but I saw him afterwards and, in the course of a conversation, 1 said, "I do not think that you have heard the end of this, George. There will be more. "He replied," We shall see. There is no more money". I had the impression that he was acting on the brief of his advisers. Somehow, one can always tell when a Minister is acting on a brief and when he is using his own judgment. The right hon. Member for Easington said that when he was Minister of Defence, he used to take advice but frequently ignored it. I can remember many occasions when he did not act on the advice that he was given in his Department, and I gave him full marks for it.

Much has been said tonight about the suffering of these very gallant officers, and I want to give the House one or two examples of what happened. Group Captain Day was one of the bravest R.A.F. officers ever to serve. He was flying on operations at the beginning of the war when he was a good deal older than the average officer in charge of an aircraft. Today, he is a comparatively old man in very poor health, and this matter has caused him tremendous distress. He was a persistent escaper. There must have been hundreds of Germans searching for him all over Germany at one time or another when they should have been pursuing the war against the Allies. After recapture, he was returned handcuffed to Sachsenhausen. He was put in a condemned cell, handcuffed and chained to the floor. He was in solitary confinement with the lights on day and night for weeks on end. Next door to him, people had committed suicide, and there was blood still on the floor when others were put in the cell. The Foreign Office says that these men did not suffer as much as many others did. I do not know how much suffering a man has to endure to satisfy the Foreign Office.

Eight other prisoners, some of whom had been in the Zellenbau for two or three years, were suddenly executed. One can sec from the appendix that the cells were next door to the punishment blocks. The Foreign Office argues that they were outside the camp compound, but it is clear that they were close to the punishment blocks.

Particularly bad treatment was meted out to Colonel Churchill. Because of his name, the Germans thought that he was related to Sir Winston Churchill, and he was held as a hostage and treated very badly.

There was Mr. Dowse, another R.A.F. officer. He was given solitary confinement on recapture, had a ball and chain placed round his ankle and his hands handcuffed behind his back. There was Mr. James; also Colonel Stevens, who was handcuffed day and night for six months and chained to the wall of his cell at night. There was Captain Payne Best, whose weight dropped from 12 stone to eight stone. There was Mr. Falconer whose weight dropped from 11½ stone to six stone.

When these men were released at the end of the war, they were asked by various Intelligence officers to write reports on their captivity. However, they were in no fit state of health to write about what had gone on. They ought to have gone on six months' convalescence before being asked to write their reports. However, frequently the Foreign Office has quoted from the reports which they produced the day after they came out of the camp.

Mr. William Molloy (Ealing, North)

We are examining a cruel and heartrending case. The way in which these officers were almost pounced on by people with pens in their hands asking them to tell them what had happened is a matte:- of which note should be taken when one considers the condition that they must have been in.

Sir A. V. Harvey

I agree entirely. Let us hope that the occasion will not arise again. Unfortunately, the world is not at peace.

Later, the Foreign Office was inconsistent in accepting the statements of some claimants as wholly reliable while rejecting others as untrustworthy and exaggerated. Naturally enough, Mr. Dowse and others were incensed at the slur cast on their honour and integrity. Their friends knew about the treatment that they had received, and the attitude of the Foreign Office was quite wrong.

According to paragraph 40 of the Report, the Foreign Office accepted evidence without corroborating it. Why did officials of the Department not see the officers? They were never interviewed.

It is true that the Foreign Secretary saw them at a later date in company with my hon. Friend, but that was merely to say, "We are very sorry, but there is nothing for you. The money has been spent. Good luck, and goodbye." I am sure that he did it very well, but that was not a very satisfactory way of handling the case. It is unbelievable that the Foreign Office officials looking into this affair maintained that these men were not in a concentration camp. If they were not, where were they? They were never interviewed.

Last year, 350 hon. Members on both sides of the House put down a Motion. It was probably the strongest Motion to appear before the House for several years. The right hon. Gentleman the Leader of the House was one of the few to take note of it. No doubt, he was anxious to clear up the matter, and I can understand that because he is a good Parliamentarian in these respects. But it was surprising that no other Minister took note of it and did anything about it.

My hon. Friend referred to the letter from the Prime Minister, who is so active in all these matters. In the course of it, the right hon. Gentleman said: As I am sure you know, Mr. Brown has gone into this matter personally and in very great detail on three separate occasions, and it has also been studied independently on other occasions by no less than three Ministers. In the circumstances, I am afraid that I do not think there would be any advantage in our meeting to discuss this further. In the face of a Motion signed by 350 hon. Members, the Prime Minister should have received a delegation, because he might have been able to clear up the matter in the course of discussions. He chose not to do so.

My hon. Friend the Member for Abingdon saw Ministers on eight different occasions. He certainly showed extreme patience in dealing with the whole affair. The Foreign Secretary can say what he likes, but he must bear the responsibility. I do not want to blow this up into a great issue, but other Ministers in the past—in the case of Crichel Down and so on—have had to accept full responsibility. If the Foreign Secretary wants to excuse officials in the Foreign Office, then, he, and he alone, is to blame. The Foreign Secretary knows that he could have judged this matter 18 months ago.

The Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons (Mr. Richard Crossman)

Of all the things of which one can accuse the Foreign Secretary, surely not taking the blame is not one. Did he not make it quite clear that he totally and absolutely assumed personal responsibility?

Sir A. V. Harvey

I do not think that he did. He spent 25 minutes querying and questioning the Parliamentary Commissioner's Report, and at the end of his speech rather reluctantly said, "I accept the blame."

Mr. R. W. Brown (Shoreditch and Finsbury)

Nonsense.

Sir A. V. Harvey

If hon. Members are in doubt, perhaps they will read HANSARD tomorrow and see for themselves.

Dr. M. P. Winstanley (Cheadle)

Would the hon. Gentleman accept that what the Foreign Secretary said was that if there was any blame he accepted it?

Sir A. V. Harvey

There is a great deal of blame, but that will be gone into at a later date.

Mr. Charles Pannell (Leeds, West)rose—

Sir A. V. Harvey

I will not give way. i have nearly finished.

The right hon. Member for Easington talked about other possible claimants. I hope that if another 12 come along the Government will deal with them equally generously. The sum involved is £25,000. We hand out over £200 million a year in aid, with which agree in many respects, but why are we so niggardly over £25,000 when it comes to dealing with our own people who have served and fought for this country? It is a nonsense. I hope we shall deal with the men fairly and that they will get their money quickly. I hope that when the Select Committee gets to work it will look into the matter in more detail than we have done tonight.

8.22 p.m.

Mr. Douglas Houghton (Sowerby)

In one respect, the statement of the Foreign Secretary will give complete satisfaction to the House. He has decided to put this matter right, and we applaud his candour and his courage in doing so. What dismayed me about my right hon. Friend's speech was his animadversions on the office of the Parliamentary Commissioner and his relationship to Ministerial responsibility and the relationship between Ministers and the House. It seems to me that we shall have to be clear where the Parliamentary Commissioner stands, what are the duties and responsibilities of the Select Committee, and how we are to order our affairs.

My right hon. Friend claimed to have some share in setting up the Parliamentary Commissioner. So do I. I was Chairman of the Cabinet Committee on the Parliamentary Commissioner, and I drafted the White Paper. It was made clear throughout our deliberations on the institution of the Parliamentary Commission that we would put him in a position comparable with that of the Comptroller and Auditor General and we would create a Select Committee to which his reports should go.

There is one dissimilarity, one must admit, between reports of the Comptroller and Auditor General to the House and reports of Parliamentary Commissioner, namely, that the Parliamentary Commissioner is dealing with a matter referred to him by an hon. Member of this House to whom he is under a duty to report his findings. But in this case the Parliamentary Commissioner decided that, in view of the public interest in the matter, he should make a special report to the House. That is why we are discussing the Third Report of the Parliamentary Commissioner. However, I am sure it is a mistake for a debate to take place on the Floor of the House before the Select Committee has examined the report of the Parliamentary Commissioner. We are prejudging the issue, but I sincerely hope that the Select Committee—I see the chairman in his place on the benches opposite—will not regard this debate as in any way prejudicing its right to pursue its investigations into this matter to its own satisfaction and to report back to the House. That is the proper procedure and I hope that it will be followed.

I recall a report made to the House by the Comptroller and Auditor General on what was known as the Ferranti affair. Immediately it came to the notice of the Government the then Chancellor of the Exchequer decided to appoint a committee of his own to look into certain disturbing aspects of that report, but the Public Accounts Committee was not diverted from its duty by that action in pursuing its own inquiries and making a special report to the House.

We have to get very clear in our minds the rights and duties of the Select Committee that has been appointed not by the Leader of the House, but by the House. Although it is appropriate in such circumstances as these for a Minister who is ready to make redress for maladministration to announce it to the House without delay so there need be no uncertainty, it. is enough, with respect, that such an announcement be made and the rest of the matter left to the Select Committee to make its report upon to the House in due season.

My right hon. Friend in his, I think, ill-judged remarks about the Parliamentary Commissioner seemed to have mistaken the function of the Parliamentary Commissioner. That is why I intervened a short time ago in the speech of the hon. Member for Macclesfield (Sir A. V. Harvey). When the Foreign Secretary says that he thinks that his judgment is as good as that of the Parliamentary Commissioner, he is mistaking the function of the Parliamentary Commissioner. It is expressly clear that the Parliamentary Commissioner may not substitute his discretion for that resting with a Minister and he may not substitute his judgment for that properly exercisable by a Minister, unless in either case the discretion or the judgment rested upon an element of maladministration.

The point is that in Paragraph 53 of the Report, the Parliamentary Commissioner says: I am obliged to report that there have been defects in the administrative procedure by which the decisions on these claims were reached in the first place, and defended when subsequently challenged. That is the genesis of the criticism of the Parliamentary Commissioner. The House and the Select Committee should know how these defects in administrative procedure arose, how they came to be tolerated for so long, and how they appeared to sustain Ministerial judgments right up to the Minister himself. I submit that that is the job of the Select Committee.

I hope that my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House will consider what has been said about the position of the Parliamentary Commissioner, because it will be very disturbing if, on future occasions of this kind, we are plunged into a debate in this House, the Minister comes down and says that he is going to remedy the grievance, at the same time asks the House to call it a day, and makes some comments about the relative merits of his own judgment and that of the Parliamentary Commissioner. We must sustain the Parliamentary Commissioner, and we must sustain the Select Committee which we have appointed. I think that this is the right procedure.

Before the debate began 1 thought that we might be making a mistake. Now, 1 am sure that we are, and I think that it will disturb those of my hon. Friends and hon. Gentlemen opposite who have a duty as members of the Select Committee. I hope that nothing has been said in the debate so far, or will be said later. which will deflect them from that duty.

8.30 p.m.

Mr. Richard Wood (Bridlington)

I hope that 1 may be forgiven if I make an intervention, which I assure the House will be brief, but I feel that in a matter of this great importance something should be said on behalf of the Opposition, although I assure all hon. Members that nothing is further from my thoughts than to reduce in any way the serious and impartial consideration which the House has been giving to the claims of a number of very brave men.

As has been pointed out by my hon. Friend the Member for Abingdon (Mr. Neave), the anxiety which has been felt on this matter has been felt by Members of all parties, and anxiety about certain aspects of it continues to be felt by Members of all parties. In no sense does this seem to me to be a party matter. The concern of Parliament, as it was the concern of the Parliamentary Commissioner, is primarily to see that justice is done. and it is clear, from what I have heard in this debate, that in the light of the Report the House of Commons and the country will be satisfied only if the claims which were formerly rejected are now, as they have been, accepted and discharged in full.

The right hon. Gentleman the Foreign Secretary took a long time, as it seemed to some of my hon. Friends and to some hon. Gentlemen opposite, to say the one thing that we wanted to hear. I do not intend, if he will forgive me, to follow the right hon. Member for Sowerby (Mr. Houghton) in his important comments on the whole theme and duty of the Parliamentary Commissioner and the Select Committee. I would like to concern myself with the sentences which seemed to matter most in the Foreign Secretary's speech, and they were the concluding ones.

Most of us, I suppose, find daunting the problems which were implicit in the definition of Nazi persecution, contained in paragraph 9 of Rule I of the Anglo-German Agreement. The subsequent attempt to differentiate between the purpose and the quality of the ill-treatment meted out in the main compound of Sachsenhausen, on the one hand, and in the Sonderlager and the cell block on the other, seems to me almost beyond the range of human wisdom, and I do not find it the least surprising that this attempt to differentiate completely failed.

Had it been clearly recognised that the Sonderlager and the cell block, although separated from the main compound, were integral parts of the camp, within its main perimeter, and under the same S.S. management, perhaps the differentiation would never have been attempted and the case would have been immediately admitted. But the attempt to differentiate was made, and a judgment was reached which included Sergeant Kemp and Captain Starr, imprisoned in the main compound, but excluded those in the Sonderlager and the cell block, notwithstanding that they were under constant threats of execution and continued uncertainty of their fate, and notwithstanding the branding of Group Captain Day as an enemy of the Reich and a criminal. Having listened to the debate, and having thought about the Report, I do not think that it is the basis of this judgment which causes us the greatest disquiet, because the judgment was based, originally, on a set of criteria sincerely designed to implement the intentions of the 1964 Agreement, even though those criteria inevitably involved harsher tests of past suffering for those who were not in a recognised concentration camp than for those who were, and even though that basis of judgment led, in the words of paragraph 61, to the actual case of the main compound claimant awarded compensation who was more leniently treated than Zellenbau claimants refused compensation. I believe that the disquiet which we feel flows from the defence of this judgment, once it was made, when it was questioned, by reliance on evidence which was favourable to it, and disregard of evidence less favourable. For example, Captain Churchill's acceptance of the Foreign Office's decision was urged in defence of this judgment even though he had had no experience whatsoever of the cell block, and Sergeant Kemp's vivid account of his seven months in the main compound was widely accepted as evidence of the cruelty there, but it was wrongly taken to refute other accounts of events in Sachsenhausen which was described as "fantastic".

In this grim and unhappy consequence of the Nazi inhumanities of two decades ago, I find it hard to think that anything can be gained now by attempts to apportion blame, either in the near-impossible tasks of judgment which were posed by the 1964 agreement itself or in the misjudgments which have since been made and the attempts to defend those wrong judgments on incomplete evidence. We must all owe a great debt of graitude to the Parliamentary Commissioner for his careful evaluation and admirably lucid Report. Above all, we owe a debt to my hon. Friend the Member for Abingdon (Mr. Neave) and a great many other hon. Gentlemen for the persistence of their advocacy of these claims.

Most important of all, as the Foreign Secretary recognised in his speech, is the need to discharge the debt, as far as it can be discharged, to a few very brave men, both in financial terms and in terms of any damage to their integrity and reputation which they have suffered. I hope that, in the light of the right hon. Gentleman's announcement tonight, that debt will be discharged fully and generously without delay.

8.36 p.m.

Mr. David Ginsburg (Dewsbury)

This is a short but very important debate on an issue which has moved me personally as much as any since I have been a Member of the House, and it is, for many reasons, a significant Parliamentary occasion. Most important of all, restitution has been made. The Foreign Secretary has announced that the detainees are to be compensated and the House has shown that, even when mighty Ministers like the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister have behaved unreasonably in a case affecting ordinary citizens, the citizens, through the exertions of hon. Members, can have their grievances redressed. I think that, on further reflection, both my right hon. Friends would admit that this is no bad thing, that it has done good for Parliament and for democracy.

The second reason why this is an important occasion, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Sowerby (Mr. Houghton) and the right hon. Member for Bridlington (Mr. Wood) both said, is that the matter which we are resolving has been a major achievement and vindication of the Parliamentary Commissioner. Although we have amongst us here a very determined group of campaigners, my colleagues and I would all admit that, without the Parliamentary Commissioner and his very special powers, but also without his great personal skill on this occasion, we might never have broken through.

Perhaps, if it is not too embarrassing to him, I might add a word of praise to the Leader of the House. He is the guardian of hon. Members' rights as well as the manager of Government business, and I think that he appreciated far earlier than most Members of the Government the political significance of this case and the part which the Parliamentary Commissioner could play in resolving our dilemma.

Lastly, the occasion is important because it involves the wider issue of public administration as such. I speak as one who has been a civil servant, and even, for a short period, adviser to a political party, and now is a Member of Parliament. It is important that we should have a just and efficient public administration. Properly handled, our Civil Service can emerge stronger from this case and not weaker, as some Ministers fear.

I. urge those colleagues who have not done so to read or re-read the Parliamentary Commissioner's Report, because it is a classic of narrative and detection. In particular I would urge them to read paragraphs 64, 65 and 66. This brings me to the point of my right hon. Friend the Member for Sowerby. One can see here the shrewd way in which the Commissioner drew a line between administration and politics—

Mr. Crossman

Policy.

Mr. Ginsburg

Policy and politics. He has been concerned to examine the administrative processes whereby Ministers, and, in the circumstances of this case, particularly the Foreign Secretary, reach their decisions. Quite rightly, the Commissioner does not—this is important—pass judgment on Ministers. One ought to have in mind the precedent of Lord Denning and the Report of the Profumo affair in saying that that is surely for us in this House. But, having said that, we as Members of Parliament have a duty to say things about Ministers, and to say them frankly but, I hope, without any vindictiveness.

I am sorry that the Foreign Secretary is not in his place at the moment, because there are some things which I want to say about him and his colleagues. Despite the question of maladministration which the Parliamentary Commissioner rightly brings out, he was not set up to question the judgment of Ministers, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Sowerby said. I was amazed at Ministers' judgments in this case. As the hon. Member for Abingdon indicated, none of us was making party points. None of us was seeking a Ministerial scalp. All that hon. Members were saying, for months and indeed for years, was that we believed that a mistake had been made. We simply asked for an inquiry, and we asked for it time and time again.

I have here letters from the Secretary of State, as well as letters from the Under-Secretary of State, who is in his place. The Under-Secretary of State will remember that on 6th March, at the Foreign Office, with the hon. Members for Abingdon (Mr. Neave) and Ealing, North (Mr. Molloy), I specifically put to him a suggestion that even at that very late hour someone from the Judge Advocate-General's Department, within the Government machinery, responsible to the Lord Chancellor, could examine this case. He will recollect that suggestion, and he knows that, subsequently, the answer was, "No". The point came up again in the letter from the hon. Member for Abingdon to the Prime Minister, and once again the answer was "No".

Ministers were warned in letters and orally, time and time again, by many hon. Members—and the Under-Secretary of State will remember the time that the hon. Member for Abingdon and I spent with him—that on the facts, their advisers were wrong. I should like to read to the House a personal letter which I wrote to the Foreign Secretary. I also submitted it to the Parliamentary Commissioner. Although it was written in almost indecipherable handwriting, I wrote to him because I wanted him to read it instead of it going through his official machinery. I wrote: I am indeed grieved that we seem to be on a collision course over the Sachsenhausen affair. May I earnestly put the following item to you. Squadron Leader Dowse has stated that he was in the Cell Block ' for some time —the neighbouring cells were occupied by Thällman (leader of the German Communist Party, allegedly killed in an air raid but presumably murdered by the Nazis) and the Bishop of Munster, arrested by the Gestapo for his anti-Nazi sermons and made a cardinal before his death, in recognition of his suffering and courage. Surely incarceration with such people must constitute Nazi persecution as defined in the Notes for Guidance. These are the crucial words: I do not know whether you were aware of this fact but would be glad if you would give it full weight. I still hope you will see your way to appointing someone to conduct an independent inquiry as to the facts in these cases which are in dispute. I received no personal reply from the Foreign Secretary but I received a reply from the Under-Secretary of State in which the point was totally ignored. In his reply, the Under-Secretary of State made one extraordinary statement to which I must draw the attention of the House. On the subject of the Notes for Guidance he said: Our legal advice is that the Notes for Guidance upon which the distribution of compensation was based were administrative instructions authorised by the Foreign Secretary at the time. As such they were not creative of rights and only the authority issuing them is competent to say what they mean. I am frankly staggered that the Minister could sign a statement of that kind, at least without satisfying himself that no mistakes were made. I have today been re-reading the regulations and notes for guidance. They are so complicated that it must have entered Ministers' heads that it might be possible for errors in the rules to have arisen. Why did not the Minister, even at this very late stage, insist that the officers be interviewed?

The hon. Member for Abingdon, my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North and I were so staggered at the obduracy of Ministers—at their conviction that they were right—that, in the end, we began to think that perhaps the Government had some hard facts and information which we did not have and that perhaps we had weighed the whole thing up in the wrong way. At one interview, in the interview rooms downstairs, we spoke to three of these gallant officers. It could not have been pleasant for them because we went over their statements as if we disbelieved them. However, at the end of the interview, we had no reason to doubt their words. When we saw the interrogation reports at the Foreign Office—on which that Department was resisting the claims—we saw very little by way of inconsistency but very much to confirm what these gallant men had told us and were telling us.

Many interrogation reports were compiled after the war. They were essentially intelligence documents and were never used in evidence in war crime trials or at courts-martial. They were, so to speak, pointers or clues to be followed up; and that follow-up work had to be done by the appropriate judicial processes and interviewing. We still do not know why interviewing was not done by the Department. Once we wrote to the Foreign Secretary and he knew that there had been no interviewing—we wrote to him about this and told him of it on enumerable occasions—he should have given firm instructions for it to be done.

To sum up on the Ministerial aspect, although one is pleased at the outcome in this case, this has been, in a sense, an unnecessary crisis because I still believe that the Foreign Secretary could have saved the day far earlier by ordering an inquiry. I am not saying that, unaided. the Foreign Secretary would necessarily have detected subtle acts of maladministration by his officials, but that there was no need for the matter to have got as far as it did.

As for the officials concerned, I will not say much about them tonight, except that I was disturbed at some of the tendentious—I use the word advisedly—material emanating from the Foreign Office. I say with regret that the facts in this case were being over-manipulated to make out a certain case. Perhaps in a controversial matter that might sometimes be excusable, but it cannot be excused in this case.

I recall that after 1 asked Questions in the House, in November 1966, I was sent a memorandum by the then Minister of State at the Foreign Office, my hon. Friend the Member for Flint, East (Mrs. White)—I have given her notice of my intention to raise this matter tonight—arid I feel that she, apart from the officials, must accept a degree of responsibility. She wrote to me a short letter and sent me a memorandum on the case in question. The memorandum was not sent to the hon. Member for Abingdon, presumably because, by that stage, he was regarded as being past redemption. Perhaps I was not so regarded.

I was surprised at the picture of a concentration camp which appeared in the words of that memorandum. Considering the experiences of these gallant officers, the memorandum referred to Red Cross parcels, cigarettes, music, walks, bridge and so on. The examples were quite fantastic. There was no reference to the atmosphere of fear, of sudden death, in which these men lived all that time. Anyone looking at the memorandum would agree that it should not have been drawn up in quite that way; and that the Minister concerned should not have sent it out.

Again, using Parliamentary gamesmanship, in order to try to make our case I put down Written Questions which were answered by the Minister of State. In regard to Group Captain Day, I asked her specifically … by what branch of the German armed forces he and his colleagues were administered when to Sachsenhausen concentration camp • The argument was that where they were in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp was not a concentration camp. That was the Foreign Office argument, and the reply that was given by my hon. Friend the Member for Flint, East was that the Sonderlager was administered by units of the Waffen SS, a part of the German armed forces. In my opinion, that was special pleading.

The point is that neither the Sonderlager nor the main camp ever came under the German armed forces at any time, and the Foreign Office Ministers should have known it. The concentration camp, as many hon. Members know who have experience of the matter, came under Himmler and under the senior officers serving under him who were concerned with these matters—first, the Lord President of the Council will remember, Heydrich and subsequently Kaltbrunner.

The SS units concerned were subordinated to the State Security Organisation. And even, of course, if it is true that many SS men served in fighting formations, the Waffen SS, and even if it is true, as the Parliamentary Commissioner reports: The Waffen SS absorbed the…Death's Head units… what the Minister was trying to say was totally academic. All concentration camps —whether Sonderlager, Zellenbau or the main camp at Sachsenhausen, or any of the others—Dachau, and Buchenwald were all guarded by these Death's Head units. So if it is argued that the guards of the Sonderlager which guarded these men were part of the German armed forces then, too, it would follow that the guards of all the concentration camps were part of the German armed forces. I put it to the Ministers that that, of course, would make nonsense of all their arguments and rules that they have applied in the notes for guidance.

I believe that there has been maladministration—the Commissioner says so—and it cannot be a very happy story. But we should be charitable. The compensation fund was inadequate. Let us say that officials got into a muddle and were never able to make a fresh start. They just got deeper and deeper into this administrative mess. Perhaps, therefore, we can hear a little more from my right hon. Friend of what the Foreign Secretary has in mind in the administrative instructions he has given.

I urge the Government to conduct an administrative review. Let them appoint someone who would command respect, not only at the Foreign Office but outside the Foreign Service. In due course, that gentleman could report to the Foreign Secretary, and his administrative report could then be available to the Parliamentary Commissioner and the Select Committee. As other hon. Members have said, the Committee must retain the right to crossexamine officials—that is a vital safeguard for our administrative process —but I do not believe that the House wants any scalps that those who fought the case so hard did so to get redress and to vindicate the honour of some gallant men. This has been done, and we are well content.

8.55 p.m.

Sir David Renton (Huntingdonshire)

My connection with the subject of the debate started on a lovely afternoon during the General Election of 1964. I was going along a country road, and spoke to a party of roadmenders. One of them, with a broad Irish accent, drew attention to the Anglo-German compensation agreement of which he had seen mention in the newspaper. He asked me whether I could do something about it. He saw me after the election, and told me his story.

The man was Gunner J. Spence, the last name in Appendix A. He was an Irishman who, fairly early in the war, volunteered—he did not have to, for he was living in Ireland—to serve in the British Army. He joined the Gunners and was captured. The Germans apparently tried to persuade him, as they tried to persuade many Irishmen, but Gunner Spence, like the others, remained loyal. This annoyed the Germans very much and he was put into Sachsenhausen. Mr. Spence tells me, incidentally, that although it is not mentioned in Appendix A, he was put into the cell block for some months.

In Sachsenhausen his health suffered badly. He has been able to do only very light work recently. When I said that I would take up his claim, he told me that he was not looking for a lot of money and did not expect it but that it would be nice to have some compensation to give him some of the comforts in life that he lacks. I put his case fairly early in 1965, when I wrote to the then Minister of State rather than to the Foreign Secretary. The Minister of State saw me. I spent a lot of time with him. Shed ding tears he said, in effect, that my constituent had not got his facts right about himself—which I took a bit hard—and, secondly, that if he had got them right he was not qualified because he had not really been in the concentration camp.

Now the Parliamentary Commissioner records that Mr. Spence was in Sonderlager A from November, 1943 to April, 1945, and, as I have said, my constituent maintains that he was in the cells. The fact that his version of what had happened to himself was not accepted draws my attention to one of the more deplorable things said by the Foreign Secretary tonight.

The right hon. Gentleman had the face to say that the gallantry, honour and integrity of these men had never been in question, but I think to have questioned them and doubted their word—men who went through this experience—was in fact calling their integrity into question. But for the efforts that have been made on their behalf—and the major credit must go to my hon. Friend the Member for Abingdon (Mr. Neave)— this gross injustice would never have been put right.

Another thing which I thought extremely aggravating in the Foreign Secretary's speech was the way in which he accused my hon. Friend of making heavy weather when deploying his case. That was below the standard we expect of the Foreign Secretary and, to be fair, to him I must say I think that the whole of his performance tonight was uncharacteristic of the man himself because I think all of us who have known him know that he is a man who does not bear grudges, that, whether one agrees with him or not, he is the type of man to remain friendly. But tonight he made a speech which was in every way inappropriate and grudging.

The right hon. Member for Sowerby (Mr. Houghton) was quite right in drawing attention to the remark made by the Foreign Secretary when comparing his own judgment with that of the Parliamentary Commissioner. It misses the whole point of having a Parliamentary Commissioner if a Minister, as soon as the Parliamentary Commissioner has reported and even before his report has been considered by a Select Committee, makes a remark of that kind on the Floor of the House, and I hope that, when the time comes, the Select Committee will heed the words of the right hon. Member for Sowerby.

We have to get this interrelationship between the House, the Government and the Parliamentary Commissioner right. In a way, it is a very good thing that fairly early in his experience and in our experience of him, the Parliamentary Commissioner has been able to fasten his attention on such a glaring case as this, and ore only hopes that out of the misfortune which this case first appeared to be, some good will come.

I can hardly find a word to express my dislike of something the Foreign Secretary said. He said that one day we might have to have an Ombudsman to survey the Ombudsman. If ever there has been a more complete defiance of our own attitudes towards the Parliamentary Commissioner and the desire of both sides of the House to see the Parliamentary Commissioner serving the House and serving our constituents in the way we all hope, it is not easy to find, and that remark was most regrettable.

As so much that is wise has already been said, it would not be right for me to take up the time of the House further, but I am sure that my constituent would like me on his behalf to express thanks to all those who have fought this matter for these 12 men of whom he is perhaps about the humblest. I should like especially to thank my hon. Friend the Member for Abingdon and the right hon. Gentleman the Leader of the House—and I am sure that he will not take it amiss—for ensuring that this matter is properly dealt with and ventilated on the Floor of the House.

9.2 p.m.

Mr. Charles Pannell (Leeds, West)

I have been touched, as most of us have been, by these stories when people in our constituencies have told them to us, so that we have become part of the wider story which has had its culmination this evening.

The Foreign Secretary is not now here and so l will address my remarks to the. Minister of State, who will know of my long personal association with the Foreign Secretary. The last thing I want the Foreign Secretary to do is to read in cold print something which I could have said far better to his head, and I would far sooner that he had been here. The Foreign Secretary did himself an ill turn this evening. I could follow the argument in the early part of his speech, and the rationalisation of his position was impeccable, but my right hon. Friend sometimes betrays himself in parentheses and goes off at half-cock, which he did this evening.

The difficulty about this matter is that by his attitude this evening the Foreign Secretary has made a reference to the Select Committee a "must". There is no question about that; that is the way it turns. In paragraph 61 of his Report the Parliamentary Commissioner said: The Foreign Office have represented to me, I think correctly, that as Parliamentary Commissioner I am not authorised to question the merits of the rule. What he was really saying was that while in the last resort policy must rest with Ministers, he was questioning how the rule came about; he accepted that position.

I know the Foreign Secretary as well as anybody in the House does, and certainly far better than anybody in his Department does. He has a vein of quixotry in his nature. He is a gallant man and is very loyal, and I can honestly say that he would never have been as loyal to himself as he has been to his civil servants. He would have come cleaner on his own trouble, but he spoke as he did because he was caring for his civil servants.

We really did not want that long lecture upon him accepting responsibility. In a notable speech my hon. Friend the Member for Dewsbury (Mr. Ginsburg) made it perfectly clear that the course of events was not as the Foreign Secretary set them out. I can remember the present Commonwealth Secretary giving his analysis. I was a Minister at the time, sitting beside him on the Front Bench, and his words carried to me a complete lack of conviction. The Foreign Secretary has followed this course all the way.

He really does not seem to understand the contradiction in terms. He continually referred to these "hon. and gallant men" but did not seem to appreciate that it had been a denial that they had been hon. and gallant all the way through the piece. Their veracity had been questioned, they had almost been accused of mendacity. They had never been given the benefit of the doubt. Take one small example from the Foreign Secretary's Parliamentary replies, through which I was browsing this afternoon. There was one thing in which he must have been betrayed. He said in one of them: To my knowledge these men certainly received Red Cross parcels …"—[OFFICIAL REPORT. 7th November, 1966; Vol. 735, c. 978.] That is not true. That is a careless statement. I want to deal with this on a narrow basis and, because the Foreign Secretary is absent, I must address my remarks to the Leader of the House. Whatever the procedures that we envisaged, after this the argument about the demarcation line between the Foreign Secretary and the Parliamentary Commissioner and any future Minister must be a matter to be settled once and for all.

Mr. Crossman

I made it clear in the business statement that the fact that we would debate and take note of this Report now had absolutely no effect whatever upon the investigations of the Committee. This cannot possibly affect its decision. It has its own powers and terms of reference.

Mr. Pannell

I take my right hon. Friend's point, but he will not mind me pointing out to him that there are some of my colleagues who thought that we could dispose of this here. The right hon. Member did not. Whatever doubts I have had on this have been resolved by the Foreign Secretary.

What is the cause of this thing? We have been through correspondence and representations, we have been through the Parliamentary Questions. We have been through an appeal to the Prime Minister, and at that stage someone said that the Parliamentary Commissioner should inquire into this. Acting within his terms of reference he does so. If I had been the Foreign Secretary I should have said, "The buck stops with the Parliamentary Commissioner" and we would call it a day. The House would have accepted that, without any denigration of the Foreign Secretary, and would have left the Foreign Office alone. But what the Foreign Secretary has put up is the curious false proposition that the buck does not stop at the Parliamentary Commissioner but "the buck stops with me." We do not intend to accept that. The arguments about the Auditor General and the Public Accounts Committee are correct, because we must not put the Parliamentary Commissioner in this position in future. There must be no argument at the end of the day.

This is almost like a judicial procedure, when one calls in an arbitrator. One cannot argue afterwards. All of us, certainly those of us who have been Ministers, accept the idea of Ministerial responsibility. At no time did the Foreign Secretary say, "I dealt with my civil servants". It is his job to deal with maladministration in his own Department. The anonymity of the Civil Service is always preserved, and it is the Minister at the end of the day who has to take it, as the unfortunate Sir Thomas Dugdale took it, on very insubstantial grounds. But, having done that, it is for the Minister to turn on the Department. What are the administrative class for in the Civil Service if they are not to protect the Minister? That is the question which we must ask. They have failed to protect their Minister, and I hope that the Select Committee will do a good job when the time comes.

9.10 p.m.

Dr. M. P. Winstanley (Cheadle)

I shall be very brief since we have been reminded that this is a short debate and other hon. Members wish to speak. In any case, the Foreign Secretary has made a statement about which 1 think we would all want to think carefully before we finally expressed our opinions. I welcome the opportunity to place one or two points on record.

First, I should like to add my congratulations, and those of my hon. and right hon. Friends, to those which have been conveyed to the hon. Member for Abingdon (Mr. Neave) for the diligence, pertinacity and energy with which he has pursued this matter and on the manner in which his diligence and energy have finally and rightly been rewarded. I do not wish to dwell particularly on the merits of the case, which have been made absolutely clear to hon. Members by the hon. Members for Abingdon, Macclesfield (Sir A. V. Harvey), Dewsbury (Mr. Ginsburg) and others so familiar with the details of the case. They have convinced every one of us, I think, that no other action could have been taken than that which the Foreign Secretary has announced.

I endorse what the right hon. Member for Easington (Mr. Shinwell) said about this not being a party matter. It certainly is not a party matter. The doings and activities of the Parliamentary Commissioner and the way in which he works must concern all hon. Members. At some time there may be another Government. There will be other Ministers. There will certainly be other complaints. There may indeed be other Parliamentary Commissioners. But the way in which the Parliamentary Commissioner deals with these cases will be of great importance to every Member wherever he sits in the House.

I felt that after we passed the Bill dealing with the Parliamentary Commissioner there would be some difficulties. I did not expect things to go smoothly. One seldom expects anything to go smoothly in the House of Commons. We knew that complaints would be investigated and that, in some cases, the Parliamentary Commissioner would uphold them and that in others he would not. In the cases in which he upheld the complaint, clearly a Minister sooner or later would have to give an answer. There was nothing in the Act to compel the Minister to follow the directions of the Commissioner. Therefore, we knew that in some cases the Minister would accept the Parliamentary Commissioner's findings and that in others he might not accept them.

What I should not have thought would happen, however, was that a Minister would come along to the House, as the Foreign Secretary did today, and both accept them and reject them. It seemed to me that the right hon. Gentleman's speech could be understood only if he concluded it by saying that he would not accept the recommendations of the Commissioner. Having virtually argued that the findings were wrong, he went or, to tell us what he would do about the matter—in other words, that he proposed to accept the recommendations. The point has been put very eloquently by the right hon. Member for Leeds, West (Mr. C. Pannell) that it would have been better if his right hon. Frend had merely said, "Very well; a mistake has been made, and I accept it".

The Foreign Secretary made much of the point that it was not only he as Foreign Secretary but his predecessors also who were concerned. Surely this is the whole point of the Ombudsman. When a decision has been taken there is a tendency for the decision to be perpetuated by future Ministers, and the fact that two or three successive Ministers take the same decisions does not add to its validity; it is merely a repetition of a decision which has already been taken. It is because a cycle of this kind can be set in motion that we need an officer of the kind we have now in order, sooner or later, to break the vicious circle.

What I was even more concerned about was the fact that the Foreign Secretary seemed to cast doubt on the whole concept of maladministration. He said, very clearly, that "if things have gone wrong, then Ministers have gone wrong." He returned constantly to the point that the Minister was always responsible. In other words, he appeared to reject utterly the concept that the Commissioner must deal only with maladministration. The Foreign Secretary seemed constantly to tell us that the only thing that could arise was a Ministerial decision. In other words, he seemed to be rejecting the terms of the Act. This clearly is a matter which must be looked into carefully, not only by the Select Committee, but by the House. It seemed that in his statement the Foreign Secretary was rejecting the basic idea underlying the whole work of the Parliamentary Commissioner.

I was interested, too, in the point made by the Foreign Secretary that, "We have opened the door. There may be other cases like these in which there is just as much injustice. Other people will say, 'Why not me?' ". Why indeed?

Sir Douglas Glover (Ormskirk)

Why not?

Dr. Winstanley

If there are too many of those cases, and if, in some way, people who do not have a valid claim are now induced by these proceedings to make a claim, the Foreign Secretary has nobody but himself to blame. If he stresses that some kind of compensation is being paid which should not really have been paid but that since the Parliamentary Commissioner has recommended it he will agree to it, that almost amounts to an invitation to other people to make a claim.

Would it not have been better for the Foreign Secretary, and for the House, for him to have said that the Parliamentary Commissioner has made his decision, has looked at all the papers, decided that proper consideration was not given and has made his recommendation, and then fully to accept it? Had the Foreign Secretary said that, he would have had much more of the sympathy of this part of the House than he now has.

I would like to make a brief point concerning the holding of this debate. As a member of the Select Committee dealing with the Parliamentary Commissioner, I was inclined, like other hon. Members, to wonder about the wisdom of deciding to hold a debate of this kind before the Select Committee had an opportunity of discussing the matter. I took the view, and I still do, that, in general, the proper thing when a report of this kind has been made is for the Minister to come to the House and make a statement, on which there can be the normal exchange of questions. That would be valuable and there would be valuable further information for the Select Committee to consider. I was inclined to take that view and, in many ways, I still take it.

At the same time, I would like to say to the Leader of the House that in view of the nature of the statement made by the Foreign Secretary, it is not surprising that he decided that the statement should have been made to the House in this form. Certainly, it was not a statement in the ordinary sense. It was not the kind of statement which could have been answered by the normal exchange of questions. It was an unusual statement to make on the kind of report which is being considered. I hope that on future reports of the Parliamentary Commissioner, we do not have that kind of statement from Ministers, no matter to which side they belong.

Mr. George Brown

What was so difficult about my statement?

Dr. Winstanley

Perhaps the right hon. Gentleman was not here when I began my speech. I said that it seemed to me to be a surprising statement in that it both rejected the findings of the Parliamentary Commissioner and, at the same time, accepted his recommendations. This seems to me to be a curious procedure. Whilst Ministers might from time to time reject a report and at other times they might accept it, to do both seems to be unusual and certainly requires the kind of debate which would not normally follow a statement.

Mr. Brown

I thought that that was what the hon. Member meant. There is no difficulty about this. I made it plain and gave my own judgment that I thought that the Parliamentary Commissioner was wrong. [HON. MEMBERS: "Oh."] I said that earlier. Nevertheless, having helped to establish his position, I said that I would accept his judgment even though I thought that it was wrong. I cannot see anything surprising about that. I think that it is the right thing to do. So I have accepted his judgment. I have, therefore, authorised payment to people—

Mr. Paul Hawkins (Norfolk, South West)

What makes the right hon. Gentleman think that the Parliamentary Commissioner's judgment was wrong?

Mr. Brown

I personally think it is wrong, but the Ombudsman thinks it is right, and I do not propose to start him off with a situation in which I argue against his judgment. So as the Minister—

Mr. Michael Jopling (Westmorland) rose—

Mr. Speaker

Order. We cannot have an intervention upon an intervention.

Mr. Brown

As a Minister I have agreed to accept the view of the Parliamentary Commissioner. I cannot understand why the hon. Gentleman thinks that is so ridiculous.

Mr. Speaker

Mr. Molloy.

Dr. Winstanley rose—

Mr. Speaker

Order. I understood that the hon. Member had made his peroration and challenged the Foreign Secretary to comment. He has made his comment.

Sir D. Glover

On a point of order. If the hon. Member for Cheadle (Dr. Winstanley) had made his peroration, the Foreign Secretary was out of order in his interjection.

Mr. Speaker

Order. The hon. Member ought to accept the Chair's guidance on what is in order.

9.23 p.m.

Mr. William Molloy (Ealing, North)

For those of us who have been very closely concerned over the past eighteen months, nearly two years, with this issue, this evening has been a notable milestone in a continuing story. This may not be the end of the story, but I think it is the happiest part of it—if that is the word to use in these circumstances. Back benchers, led so ably by the hon. Member for Abingdon (Mr. Neave), have been campaigning against the administration by both parties, the previous Conservative Government as well as this Government. I think it is right and proper that hon. Members on both sides who have been concerned with this case should express our thanks to my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House for allowing this debate. I think we should also say a word of thanks to the hon. Members on both sides who signed the Motion which, I believe, contributed to pointing out to the Leader of the House the desirability of having this debate.

The facts of this matter are redolent of the degrading filth associated with all the evils of Nazism, and the terms used in this debate are terms which caused terror, anger, annoyance to millions of people all over the world, and not only to those British officers who were involved in this case—terms such as concentration camp, extermination camp, gas chambers, torture chambers, the S.S. They are all horrid and repugnant terms which caused annoyance and deep anger all over the world. To quality for treatment in any of those places was simply to have opposed the Nazi regime.

We have to be fair in examining this question at the stage which it has reached. I hope that the Select Committee will continue its examination of the matter by examining all the points which have been made in this debate as well as other matters which will be laid before the Committee, and I hope it will take note of this, and that the House will take note of it, too, that those of us who campaigned for these British Service men who suffered this sort of treatment felt ourselves tightly restricted when we realised the implications of what I would call the "Butler Agreement", which was too narrow, which was too mean, which was too hastily devised. It was an appalling agreement, and it placed shackles upon our endeavours to try to get justice for these people. That has to be acknowledged. Instead of drawing up these nice, tidy, legalistic documents, all that was necessary was to say that anyone who suffered the vile and barbarous behaviour of Nazism should be entitled to consideration for some form of compensation, irrespective of where they suffered it. That is something of which cognisance should have been taken early on, when the Butler Agreement was negotiated.

Mr. Michael English (Nottingham, West)

Would my hon. Friend agree that it would have been sufficient to say that any prisoner who was not treated in accordance with the Hague Convention was entitled to full compensation, instead of the Foreign Office inventing an agreement of its own?

Mr. Molloy

My hon. Friend has missed my point. I am of the opinion that any British national, in or out of uniform, who suffered at the hands of these barbarians should have had the right to compensation after the war.

Those of us who have been involved in this case are mindful of the fact that there are thousands of cases which are just as horrible and thousands of people who suffered in the service of their nation, as my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary said. The agreement and the formula which had to be devised to suit it made it very difficult for anyone to be generous. There were Servicemen who were taken prisoner and shot out of hand. Their relatives will not qualify under the formula. Prisoners were put underground in solitary confinement for seven or eight months at a time, with hardly any food. According to the Butler Agreement, they were not in a concentration camp.

We have arrived at a situation where the officers concerned are to receive some measure of justice. Without it, it seemed that the only possible way of convincing the Foreign Office would have been to get the guards who locked them up to come and tell the Foreign Office about the treatment these men received. That is how absurd the situation was.

For those who qualify under the Agreement, this is a test case. If there are others who believe that they qualify, I hope that they will make representations to have their case re-examined. However, I do not believe that this is a test case to end all test cases. Surely that cannot be.

What has happened this evening is a compliment to Parliament as a whole. We hear so much these days from gentlemen who write to the Press, but they are not involved in the private and personal problems of our constituents, who tell us in confidence about them. On this occasion, I hope that the gentlemen of the Press will acknowledge that Parliament has done a good job, but it must not be forgotten that our success has been contributed to in large measure by the establishment of the Parliamentary Commissioner. Without it, we would have got nowhere.

Fundamentally, the reason for our success tonight is the tenacity and courage of the hon. Member for Abingdon, who started this off and has seen it through to the end. Above all—the Parliamentary Commissioner, the Foreign Office, and the rest—he has upheld the great traditions of the House. The Parliamentary Commissioner was appointed to establish where injustice had been done because of maladministration and, inevitably, to expose it. If it were otherwise, we should have to accept a blank cheque from him. I believe that it was right for him to act as he did. I know full well that if this could have been done solely by my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary—if he was given almighty power—not only these officers, but thousands of others would have been compensated by as much as he could have given them.

I know his true feelings on the matter. He has taken a gallant stand concerning his officials, but at the same time I think that one can be too loyal. He has even taken the risk of damaging his own name in defending officials of his Department. But he has to reconcile, somehow or other, that he, too, can share the credit in establishing the Parliamentary Commissioner whose job it is to winkle out the sort of cases that we have had in this instance. I hope that he will recall this.

This case had another aspect; namely, that in years to come the record will no doubt be examined. If it had gone the wrong way, historians and people in the future might have said: "Were these men telling the truth? After all, they put up a good case. We believe they did, but the fact of the matter was that in the end they were turned down." I believe that would have impugned their honour. I know this from personal contact with these officers. The aspect which was giving them concern and worry more than anything else was that the future record might have doubted their story. They have been living with this agonising frustration for many months indeed.

Under the most able leadership of the hon. Member for Abingdon, I believe we have made two contributions. First, we have made a contribution in re-establishing the authority and dignity of Parliament and, secondly, we have cleared these gallant officers of any doubt that might have hung about their names. If there was any doubt, it has now been removed. This exercise has been worth while, if only for that.

I know that the Leader of the House wishes to wind up the debate. I would add, however, that this has been not so much a triumph, but a mark of approval by the House of Commons and the British people of the efforts of the hon. Member for Abingdon, of those who supported him, of the whole procedure of the House of Commons, Parliament itself, and, last but not least, what we have added to the power of investigation of the Parliamentary Commissioner to defend individuals. This is not so much a triumph as a vindication of gallant men whose service to the nation was never in doubt. It has shown that they were right to engage upon this issue and, in my estimation, it was right and proper that we should make our contribution to ensuring their success in clearing their honour for evermore.

9.22 p.m.

Dame Irene Ward (Tynemouth)

I have but a few minutes, because I know that the Leader of the House wishes to rise at 20 minutes to 10, and we are all wanting to hear what he has to say.

I would like to have one thing put on record. Criticism was made of the Butler Agreement that was obtained from the Federal German Government. It should be pointed out that it was my hon. Friend the Member for Abingdon (Mr. Neave), when the Conservative Government were in power, who started the original agitation to get a substantial contribution from the Federal German Government to deal with this kind of case. That arose from his knowledge and experience of what certain people had to face during the time of the German war. But it was a very long time before the House of Cornmons realised how necessary and essential it was to obtain such an agreement from the Federal German Government. It is a long time ago, but I think I am right in saying that though the Treaty was made between the Conservative Government and the Federal German Government, the actual conditions for distribution were laid down by the present Government when they took office. In other words, the Conservative Administration sent out all the advertisements to get people to put in their applications to be considered when the fund was allocated but the present Government had the responsibility of distributing the funds. It is important to get the record straight on this, because we do not want any inaccuracies creeping into our debate.

I am glad that I am a member of the Select Committee on the Parliamentary Commissioner, because I hope that this whole matter will be fully discussed by it. I would like to say, because it has not been said in specific terms, despite all the congratulations which have been offered to my hon. Friend and those who have supported him, that if it had not been for him, and if there had not been a Parliamentary Commissioner, whatever the Foreign Secretary might have thought about it, we should never have won the case.

I listened carefully to the opening remarks of the Foreign Secretary when he was discussing the constitutional position. Originally, I was not particularly in favour of having a Parliamentary Commissioner, but after this success I see all sorts of possibilities for extending his powers. However hard my hon. Friend worked, if we had not had the Parliamentary Commissioner we could not have obtained the decision of the Foreign Secretary to compensate these men who were in this portion of the camp. This proves that even in this great Parliamentary democracy of ours we can sometimes improve our constitution to the benefit of the public whom we are supposed to serve.

9.37 p.m.

The Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons (Mr. Richard Crossman)

This has been an extremely interesting, and for once one can justifiably use the cliché unprecedented, debate, because this is our first debate on a well-known case presented to the House in a special Report from the Parliamentary Commissioner.

I say right away to the hon. Lady the Member for Tynemouth (Dame Irene Ward) that she is right about the facts. The actual distribution of the fund was carried out by this Government, but I think the hon. Lady is also right to emphasise that the principle was laid down by our predecessors in two particulars, and they were two vital particulars. I shall deal with the one about policy later. One principle was that we should, broadly, compensate those who were in concentration camps, without much criticism or discussion, but those outside should be subjected to the suffering test. That was the first Butler principle. The second was that we should do it administratively, that we should speed it up and not hand it to the War Claims Commission which would look at it judicially and spend years on it. We should take the risk of not being quite so meticulous, and distribute the money quickly to those involved. These are the two principles which we inherited. These are the principles on which the actions took place which were criticised by the Parliamentary Commissioner.

I think we can all agree that the debate this evening demonstrates the effect which an individual back bencher can have. We sometimes say that individuals cannot do anything, but here we have a good example of a few back benchers—I do not know how many formed the nucleus—getting something done. The matter was pushed by back benchers, and, as I was reminded, pushed by Early Day Motions, which have their effect on Leaders of the House. When they are signed by many hon. Members it becomes awkward for him to decide what to do week after week, as I know, and therefore the existence of the Parliamentary Commissioner came as a merciful deliverance to the Leader of the House. He was able to persuade the highly sceptical inner group who said that they wanted justice at once, and doubted the Commissioner's powers, when he staked everything on being able to surprise the hon. Lady by the way he acted.

Before this debate the Parliamentary Commissioner was a figure of fun in some circles. During the debates on his appointment it was fashionable on the Conservative benches to say that we were laying down and limiting his powers in such a way as to make him hopelessly ineffective. In many ways, one became anxious about whether his powers were so limited that he could not be effective. One of the things which the Select Committee will examine is how far his powers extend, and whether Schedule 3 can be used to extend them further. These are all areas for discussion. What we have now admitted for the first time—there were some sceptics on this side as well—is that the Parliamentary Commissioner, when a case falls within his jurisdiction, does a thorough job.

I would remind the House that the powers which he was given—again, something which was not accepted at the time —are unique. He has a power of investigation greater than any back bencher or Minister because he is empowered to look at the most secret documents and all the files, to cross-examine every official and Minister from the top to the bottom, and has in his one personality, greater power of investigation than anyone has ever had before. What we look at in the Report is the top of the iceberg. What he has been able to print is but a fraction of the amount which he obtained, upon the basis of which he built these conclusions.

One must remember, therefore, that he has had an absolutely unique six months, to which British administration has not been subjected previously. We have invented here an instrument of investiga- tion sharper, more precise, going deeper, than ever before. Ministries must now accept the fact that this is a constitutional innovation, that they are subjected to this kind of examination. Of course, when the first examination comes, it produces constitutional innovations. Some back benchers were deeply suspicious of the Parliamentary Commissioner taking their work away, and said that they did not want him because he would do it for them. I hope that these views are reduced, now that we see that there are cases in which the back bencher cannot get through without this kind of deep examination.

For Whitehall and the Government, the existence of a Parliamentary Commissioner with these powers creates constitutional innovations which will take some time to sort out. From time to time, as in this case, a man can say on a well-known case, "I disagree with the Government or with the Foreign Office in certain particulars", and that he thinks that there has been "maladministration", in his own word. That is a constitutional innovation, that any one has the authority and power to say so in something which is printed and put to the House.

Thus, when we are discussing it, we are discussing both our delight—at least my delight—that a redress of grievance has been achieved in this remarkable way and the House can be pleased with that, but I am also interested and delighted that we have now been able, thoughtfully for three hours, to discuss this constitutional innovation, and what should be the proper reaction of the Government and the House to it.

Some members of the Select Committee were critical of me for putting it to debate now. It was done for a simple reason—that anyone who heard the debate would know that the speech which the Foreign Secretary felt it his duty to make, and was proud to make, could not be made as a statement at the end of Question Time. If we were to understand the issue involved and if the Select Committee were to understand whatever maladministration there was, we needed the kind of statement which could not be made at the end of Question Time but only in a debate in the House. We got our general debate to study how we would swallow and assimilate this innovation—

Mr. Buck

On this point of constitutional innovation, perhaps the right hon. Gentleman can assist the House further. The Foreign Secretary implied, on his personal behalf, that he did not accept the conclusions of the Parliamentary Commissioner. Is this the view of the Government, that they do not accept these conclusions, or is it just the personal position of the Foreign Secretary? This also would raise constitutional innovations.

Mr. Crossman

My right hon. Friend deliberately put the matter to the House because the House must face the fact that a Department of State and a Minister have taken a certain view. They have conscientiously done the job and then the Ombudsman says, "You were wrong in these particulars". The view of some hon. Members is that one should automatically accept not only the conclusion hut all the findings as well. It is not my view that this is automatically so. Frankly, the House must proceed by experiment in this relationship between Government, the Parliamentary Commissioner, and the House. It is an innovation, and we shall have to work our way towards a procedure. What my right hon. Friend said was quite clear. He said that he personally did not accept all that was found in the Report. This seems to me to be the logical and sensible position to adopt. No doubt, the Government will consider the Report. Like the Select Committee, no doubt we shall consider the constitutional innovations which arise. It is difficult to do this except in practice, because we need to proceed by experience of how it works in practice.

I have one or two further points to make about the investigation. First, if it is a remarkable constitutional innovation, at the same time its extent is extremely limited. That is a point which the Parliamentary Commissioner emphasied. He said that he could deal only with maladministration; he could not challenge any of the so-called Butler rules. He could not challenge the principle on which the distributions were made, although he made it clear that he thought that the principle led to some extraordinary results. He was not entitled to decide Government policy. He was entitled only to take the narrow question, assuming that the policy was right "Has anybody suffered injustice as a result of the administration of the policy in a false or improper way, or without attention to all the relevant facts?"

He came to the conclusion that even if he accepted the policy—which may in many ways be unacceptable—and accepted that if the distribution were done administratively and not through a court there must be a much greater chance of imperfection, then his view was that there were still two particulars in which there was maladministration; but they were within this narrow limit.

I personally listened to some of the speeches today with some amazement. At the end of the war I spent the last days in opening concentration camps and I saw a great deal of this opening process. I saw it as it actually happened, and I saw the last Nazi concentration camps being destroyed. If anybody tells me that it is easy to know what went on in a concentration camp, I do not believe him. In a concentration camp—and here there were 40,000 people—there were people living in a town which was separated from outside, as it were, by Chinese walls, with a dreadful sense of isolation, one section isolated from another. A point which puzzles me is that the whole principle upon which compensation was paid was the view that everybody in a concentration camp must be assumed to have undergone terrible suffering. But anyone who studied concentration camps knows that inside them there were those who exploited and those who were exploited. These camps were organised systematically by the Germans with the inmates as exploiters and exploited. There were the few rich and comfortable inmates, and there was, on the other hand, the vast mass of suffering. Nothing was simple and no generalisation was true.

Out of this came the difficulty that any simple rule which we made for deciding how to distribute this fund was bound to produce anomalies. Under the rules, anybody in a concentration camp must be assumed to have had a rough time and anybody outside a concentration camp must prove that he had a very rough time, and in a number of cases that produced grave injustice.

A second question concerned the definition of "inside" and "outside". It was on the geographical definition of "inside" and "outside" that the difference of opinion between the Parliamentary Commissioner and the Foreign Office is sharpest. He simply said that in his view they were wrong about Sonderlager, although it was a doubtful case, and that they were certainly wrong about Zellenbau, because that was within the perimeter. It is interesting to note that it is in this area in which he blames the Foreign Office for faulty judgment. It is no more than that because we must remember that we are talking about something 20 years later. We are talking about whether something happened inside or outside a concentration camp.

It is my guess that this faulty judgment, as it has been called, arose because of what I have described as the astonishing variety between the types of life that went on. When one discovers that some people were living, so to speak, in the lap of luxury compared with those who were living inside and were suffering appallingly, one might wish to define them as being outside, but one is inclined not to do so because of saying, "If I define them as such, it will spoil my theory."

I mention this to show that we must see this in a reasonable perspective. It is in this light that we must see the area of difference between the Parliamentary Commissioner and the Foreign Office. It is in that sense that we must consider where these two places, inside and outside were. The judgment is of importance only because of the rule that the people inside are likely to get compensation while those outside are unlikely to get any. Without that rule the distinction would not have been sufficient.

I come to the second point of maladministration, the reaction of the Foreign Office when its initial judgment was challenged by this group of people and the new evidence which they had produced. The Parliamentary Commissioner rebukes the Foreign Office for its disregard of the evidence and for claiming that it knew better. Here we are dealing with a question of judgment. and not of improper motives concerning something that happened 20 years before.

Sir A. V. Harvey

Does not the right hon. Gentleman think that the Foreign Office would have been able to have formed a better judgment if it had inter- viewed these officers personally, rather than for the Foreign Secretary to have done so at the end of the day?

Mr. Crossman

I ran a Department and, in this position, I consider that if a Minister says, "I will do this myself; the Department need not do it", then that Minister must take the decision himself and do the interviewing himself. This is not maladministration in any normal sense. It is merely a Minister saying. "I will take on the job and I will interview them." If a Minister, who is entitled to do so, says that, then it is up to him to make the decision and to do the job.

I come to the remarkable speech of my right hon. Friend the Member for Sowerby (Mr. Houghton). Of course, it is true—I said it earlier when asked—that the Select Committee's right to investigate or examine this Report—which is presented to it as well as to the House—is absolutely unaffected by the fact that we are now taking note of the Report and having an initial discussion here on the role of the Ombudsman. It is a good thing that this is happening. Perhaps the Select Committee, being aware of this discussion, may to some extent profit in the deliberations which it will no doubt have on the Report.

On the whole, what struck me as strange was the reaction of hon. Gentlemen opposite to my right hon. Friend's assertion that, in this particular case—and he was referring to this particular case—he did not feel that there was much to investigate by way of the conduct of civil servants. Why did my right hon. Friend say that? I suggest that he had good reason for saying it, and I say it as a Minister.

My right hon. Friend said that this is one of those cases in which Ministers have been concerned throughout. It is not one of those cases where Ministers are brought in at the last moment. From the start to the end, Ministers—in other words, politicians—have been intimately concerned. They drew up the rules at the beginning. They were Ministers and politicians' rules, with civil servants advising them. We took the whole thing over and the policy was unchanged. Ministers administered the thing in a certain way and, as I said, test cases and anomalies came up. They were anomalies which we inherited from this method of saying, "Everybody in a concentration camp will have the benefit of the doubt." As I explained, a good many did not deserve it, but they got the benefit of the doubt.

The point is that once one observes rules, one gets into a semantic interpretation of. them and those rules become odder and odder—that is, if one keeps to them. And the rules had to be kept for this method of distribution. The Foreign Secretary says, "I give you my ward that throughout this I personally took all the decisions. I took the matter out of the hands of my civil servants. I did it myself." When a Minister says that, then that is what happened. That is why I do not understand why this is being treated as being such an astonishing statement, for it is clearly true in this case.

It was true of the Minister and his team. They took the keenest interest in this case; and if the Minister concerned says, "I came to this decision. It was not the same as the Ombudsman's view, but I am still inclined to think that I have some right on my side ", then that seems a not unreasonable attitude for him to adopt. It does not seem to be constitutionally improper. Indeed, a Minister ought to stand up for his power of decision, especially when he actually took the decision, as there is no doubt my right hon. Friend did on this occasion. He agreed with it. He now says, "Right, I have listened. I have read this Report and I have admired it, but I have to admit that, though I shall pay up, in some ways I still think I am right." That seems to be rational. If we were to take the view that Ministers had automatically to stand on their heads and say the opposite of what they thought directly the Ombudsman came up with a view, we would have an impossible position.

The fact is that the creation of the Ombudsman has produced a complete constitutional innovation here—

Mr. Molloy rose—

Mr. Crossman

No, I am sorry—I want to finish this point.

To say that an official of the House shall, first of all, have powers of investigation greater than those of any Minister or anyone else in this House and, on that basis, shall publish his conclusions about the working of the administration in Whitehall is a revolutionary innovation. We always knew that it would work only if we chose the right man for the job, and only if he did the right kind of work, which is what the Report represents. The Report is a magnificent example of something that has shaken things up, made people think twice, reversed what many hon. Members thought was an injustice, and persuaded the Foreign Secretary to change his mind. Those are good and healthy things to do, but it is also good and healthy for the Government to say that they will not always agree to change their minds—

Mr. F. V. Corfield (Gloucestershire, South)

The right hon. Gentleman is saying that the Foreign Secretary has come to the conclusion that those men did not suffer the degree of hardship that was regarded as necessary. Is it not clear that that is against all the evidence, and against all the conclusions drawn by every hon. Member?

Mr. Crossman

I do not think that the hon. Member was present during most of the debate. That is not what the Foreign Secretary said, and the hon. Member knows it. What the Foreign Secretary said was that these were—heaven knows—border line decisions about things of 20 years ago on which opinions can differ. We have an Ombudsman for the purpose of settling disputes. My right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary says, "Thank you, Ombudsman, for making a difficult decision. I grudge it you a bit, but I give it to you just the same." That seems to be a healthy position.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved, That this House takes note of the Third Report of the Parliamentary Commissioner for Administration (House of Commons Paper No. 54).