Title (Hansard, 20 January 1970)

§ Dr. Ernest A. Davies
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time.
We have had a good deal of discussion on various aspects of the Bill; it has been thoroughly considered both in Committee and in the House. The important Point now, I think, can be put shortly: whatever disagreement there may be on detail, the House is entirely in agreement with the central purpose of the Bill. I hope that it will, therefore, accept it.

§ Mr. Ridley
The passage of the Bill has been expedited by the Opposition, and it has been improved—or, at least, it; was improved in Committee. We had only one sitting in Committee, and, as the Parliamentary Secretary has suggested, we are keen that the Bill should become law. We disagree on some of the detail. The Bill puts a patch on a very shabby pair of trousers, but we are keen to have the trousers patched as quickly as we can.
The whole investment grant system is under heavy strain. Publication yesterday of the need for another £30 million, largely due to shipping, added to the £100 million Supplementary' Estimate before Christmas, means that the investment grants this year have cost £130 million more than the original Estimate. The Bill is an unhappy measure in that 330 it relies on the administrative decision of the Government, and the test is nothing like as specific as we should like it to be. There is no appeal mechansim. In addition, the Bill adds to the ranks of the bureaucracy and the amount of intervention in industry. For all these reasons, we have been chary of it, and we have tried to amend and improve it, though, I repeat, we remain in support of the principle.
The Government's treatment of E.F.T.A. and of Crown Colonies is incomprehensible. Either they should both have been excluded or neither excluded; to exclude one and not the other is unjustifiable and has not been justified by the Government. The Parliamentary Secretary has nothing to be proud of in his handling of the last two points. The loopholes which remain through E.F.T.A. will cause concern, whereas the exclusion of Hong Kong will cause an upsurge of antagonism which would have been entirely avoided if the Government had not been so arrogant on the last Amendment which we discussed.
In criticising the Bill and the investment grant system, we have no wish to criticise the British shipping industry. British shipping has had a remarkable recovery. It has shown great enterprise. It has taken advantage of favourable conditions in the world to increase its share of the market, to increase its profits and to enhance its enterprise and skill. We have been among the first to take advantage of the move to bulk carriers and container ships and the boom in passenger liners and cruises.
Nobody wants to criticise the way in which the shipping industry has taken advantage of the help that has been made available to it. In criticising the Bill, we are complaining about the way in which the Government have administered investment grants and about the way in which this extraordinary leak has been allowed to go on unchecked for so long.
We should not forget that the Bill is long overdue and that it has cost perhaps £60 million, which has been spent on subsidising foreign shipowners to build in foreign yards. This is a poor reflection on the administrative ability of the Government, who have allowed this state of affairs to go on unchecked despite having the matter drawn to their attention frequently. It is, I fear, an example of the 331 administrative sloppiness which we are anxious to see stopped.
Thus, in congratulating the shipping industry, we cannot give congratulations on what was a Board of Trade responsibility which is now in the hands of the Ministry of Technology. It is right that we should record our distaste for what has occurred and for what has made this Measure necessary.

§ Mr. Booth
If I were to accept the analogy of the hon. Member for Cirencester and Tewkesbury (Mr. Ridley) —that the Bill is only a patch on a pair of trousers—I would have to question whether the patch was covering the hole.
Whether or not some of my hon. Friends and I can commend the Bill to those who live in constituencies such as mine and to any unemployed worker in Barrow who would have had a job at Vickers' shipyard if additional orders had been placed there, will not depend so much on the terms of the Bill but on the way in which it is implemented, in conjunction with the exchange control facilities which are designed to prevent any more of the British taxpayers' money from being used to build ships in foreign yards.

§ Mr. McMaster
I, too, feel that the Bill will do little to block the leak which it was originally designed to stop up. I refer to the £60 million of orders which, we have been told, were placed outside the United Kingdom in the past year. When one considers that that sum must be deducted from the total of about £91 million worth of orders, one is bound to be alarmed.
332 We have not been told where those orders were placed and how many of them were placed in E.F.T.A. countries. It seems that, despite the efforts of the Government through this Bill and in other ways, there will still be a large leak in the bucket, a leak through which a lot more of the British taxpayers' money may flood out of the country before we finally get some sensible and adequate legislation.
I am surprised that the Treasury, having first amended the Bill to take responsibility, have left it to the representatives of the Ministry of Technology to handle this debate. The Treasury should have begun as it intended to finish. If that Department is to accept responsibility for the control of expenditure of this public money, it should have been prepared to have one of its spokesmen here to answer our questions.
The reason why E.F.T.A. countries have been left free from the provisions of the Bill are of the weakest possible nature. It appears that it was not contemplated by the Government, when they entered into the original undertaking, that that should be so. It therefore remains an important requisite that the relevant agreements should, if necessary, in the light of the Bill and in view of the considerable loss of public money, be considered and, where necessary, altered so that our shipyards, in which a great deal of public money has been invested, do not suffer.