Commons Sitting of 14 June 1971

Preamble
The House met at half-past Two o'clock
PRAYERS
[Mr. SPEAKER in the Chair]
ORAL ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS
  TRADE AND INDUSTRY

    Cabora Bassa Dam
    Mr. Wallasked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry to what extent there are governmental limitations on British firms tendering for contracts concerned with the Cabora Bassa dam project.
    The Minister for Trade (Mr. Michael Noble): We do not impose any special limitations. As with any contract, British companies should ensure that they do not contravene the sanctions legislation relating to Rhodesia.
    Mr. Wall: Will my right hon. Friend take it that that reassurance will give
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    great satisfaction, in view of this imaginative programme which will raise the standard of living of over one million Africans?
    Mr. Alexander W. Lyon: Why should we prejudice the amount of trade which we have with black Africa, which is infinitely more important to us than the trade which we have with white Africa, by engaging in investment in this highly controversial scheme which is designed to continue racialist oppression in Southern Africa?
    Mr. Noble: The hon. Gentleman makes several suppositions which at present have no substance. We have no investment, and at the moment we have no involvement, in any of the consortia concerned.
    Mr. Biggs-Davison: While at present our trade with black Africa and with white Africa is roughly equal, is it not a fact that in black Africa many of our assets are being expropriated, and in Southern Africa none? As regards the Cabora Bassa project, is it not extraordinary that those who think that the so-called liberation movements will succeed want to stop the scheme? Why should they not want to inherit a scheme which will enrich all the peoples of all races in this area?
    Mr. Noble: As the Minister particularly charged with duties in connection with exporting, my task is to try to maximise exports in any way which is legal and sensible.

    Tariff Protection
    Mr. Sillarsasked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry which industries the Government have assisted over the past year by imposing or increasing levies or tariffs on imported products.
    The Secretary of State for Trade and Industry (Mr. John Davies): No new or increased duties were imposed under the Import Duties Act, 1958. Anti-dumping duties under the Customs Duties (Dumping and Subsidies) Act, 1969 were imposed on certain imports of dolls' eyes, new potatoes, zirconium dioxide and certain nitrogenous fertilisers. Under the Agriculture and Horticulture Act, 1964, minimum import prices, maintained when necessary by means of levies, were increased on shell eggs.
    Mr. Sillars: The Secretary of State could have added that on 1st July we shall have import levies on certain food products from New Zealand. Can he explain the logic of Government policy in giving protection to agriculture by the imposition of import levies and at the same time offering a threat to the workers in the car industry unilaterally to remove the barriers against imported cars?
    Mr. Davies: As the hon. Gentleman knows, my keen desire is, wherever possible, in the consumer's interest, to accentuate the forces of competition; and this was what was in my mind in relation to the motor car industry.
    Mr. Tom Boardman: Does my right hon. Friend agree that levies and tariffs will seldom in the long term assist in the way the Question implies but are more likely to slow down investment and development and to reduce our competitiveness overseas?
    Mr. Davies: I entirely agree with my hon. Friend. The whole movement of tariff disarmament since the war is proof of it.
    Mr. William Hamiltonasked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry if he will make a statement on the progress of his studies of the possibilities of removing tariff protection from certain industries.
    Mr. Carterasked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry if he has
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    completed his consideration of the economic and employment effects of the abolition of import duty on foreign cars; and if he will make a statement.
    Mr. John Davies: As I told the House on 17th May, the Government will continue to keep under review the possibility of a unilateral change in the tariff in relation to motor cars and to other products enjoying substantial tariff protection. After careful consideration, I have decided not to make any immediate unilateral change in the tariff on motor cars. If, however, circumstances arise either in this or in any other industry enjoying substantial tariff protection, where it appears useful to abate, tariffs unilaterally, in order to improve competition, or to deter excessive wage settlements, I shall not fail to do so. In any such case, I will consult those concerned before I reach a conclusion.
    Mr. Hamilton: Is the Secretary of State aware that Bromsgrove is behind us now? Does not he recognise that his ill-judged statement at the Tory Party conference in Scotland, which will now be very much smaller even than in the past, created a good deal of uncertainty? How comprehensive is his examination of the problem? Does it cover all industries which are now protected? If not, on which criteria does he base his assessment of which shall be protected and which shall not?
    Mr. Davies: The level of tariff protection is separately considered, and it can be considered within the framework of international arrangements. As regards the industry that the hon. Gentleman particularly has in mind, I and many others were concerned with the wage settlements which seemed too easily to be passed on to consumer prices. I was therefore taking that industry as an example. I wish to watch any industry which, behind a high tariff wall, can find means of passing high price increases resulting from high wage settlements.
    Mr. Carter: Is the Secretary of State aware that the electors of Bromsgrove, near-neighbours of the hon. Member for Worcestershire, South (Sir G. Nabarro), have recently given a very clear verdict on the right hon. Gentleman's views about tariff barriers? Does not he agree that it would be madness for Britain to

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    remove tariff barriers on cars when British car manufacturers have to export to countries that impose penal barriers to our exports?
    Mr. Davies: I am not certain to which countries the hon. Gentleman is referring. He is certainly not referring to any of those with which we trade extensively in motor cars. I shall continue to keep the matter very much under review if I think that the case justifies it.
    Sir R. Russell: Will my right hon. Friend also bear in mind that the complete removal or tariff protection also removes any preference that may exist in favour of Commonwealth countries, which is often the subject of reciprocal agreements that it might be difficult to abolish?
    Mr. Davies: I am very well aware of the case affecting Commonwealth countries. The import of motor cars built in the Commonwealth is minimal.
    Mr. Benn: Would it not have been better if the right hon. Gentleman had been frank with the House and told us that he made a gaffe, that he was thinking aloud on a matter which had not been the subject of consultation? He now says that there will be consultations and that the initial statement was not well-considered. That is why, when pressed, he has nothing constructive to say on the matter.
    Mr. Davies: No, Sir, I do not accept that at all. The right hon. Gentleman seems to be in a poor position to comment on those who think aloud.
    Mr. Biffen: Is my right hon. Friend aware that his candour on this and other subjects is very much welcomed? Can he say whether he ascertained from his right hon. and learned Friend the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster that in the negotiations at Brussels we were preserving for ourselves the option of unilateral adjustments of tariffs, irrespective of the common external tariff?
    Mr. Davies: The abatement of tariffs unilaterally is open to us, on our own decision. When no tariffs exist between ourselves and the Community, the problem will not arise. As regards the C.E.T., we shall undoubtedly be within the framework of our agreements and arrangements within the Community.

    Restrictive Practices (Agricultural Organisations)
    Sir R. Turtonasked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry whether he will introduce legislation to amend the Restrictive Practices Acts, 1956 and 1968, so as to permit agricultural organisations to give advice and to make recommendations regarding the marketing of livestock and to recommend the prices to be paid for agricultural machinery.
    The Under-Secretary of State for Trade and Industry (Mr. David Price): The National Farmers' Union has recently sent my right hon. Friend a memorandum calling for changes in the legislation in its application to agriculture. We are giving careful consideration to the matter.
    Sir R. Turton: Is my hon. Friend aware that, since the finding of the Restrictive Practices Court, the National Farmers' Union is debarred from supporting the Government's agricultural policy to ensure market stability and that, unless he takes action, it will mean also that the small producer is at the mercy of the big buyer, in contradistinction to what is happening in countries overseas with which we are in competition?
    Mr. Price: My right hon. Friend will understand that while we are studying the matter it would not be proper for me to comment. However, I am sure that it will be regarded as wholly proper if I congratulate him, on behalf of the whole House, on his recent honour.
    Hon. Members: Hear, hear.

    Companies (Donations)
    Mr. Marksasked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry if he will introduce legislation requiring companies making donations to political parties and pressure groups to make public those donations at the time they are made.
    Mr. John Davies: No, Sir. I see no advantage in such a change.
    Mr. Marks: The right hon. Gentleman will be aware that donations made before the 1970 election need not be made public until 1972. In view of the Government's leaning towards the interests of brewers and others, does not the right hon. Gentleman think that it would be for the

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    honour and reputation of his Government and of Parliament if they were made public immediately?
    Mr. Davies: No, Sir. The extreme delay to which the hon. Gentleman refers is exceptional in any case, but I can see no particular advantage in accelerating publication of the information.
    Mr. Biggs-Davison: Does my right hon. Friend know whether the trade unions are required to publish their contributions to organisations proscribed by the Labour Party?
    Mr. Davies: No, Sir. I am not aware of that.

    Banking (Competition and Credit Control)
    Dr. Gilbertasked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry if, in the light of the Bank of England's new proposals to allow the clearing banks to compete for deposits, he will now refer the other cartel arrangements of the banking industry to the Monopolies Commission.
    Mr. John Davies: I propose to await the response of the Clearing Banks to the Bank of England's paper "Competition and Credit Control" before deciding whether to adopt the hon. Member's suggestion.
    Dr. Gilbert: I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for that answer. Does he accept that in the light of the proposals of the Bank of England paper there should now be no obstacle to the banks' relinquishing their collusive arrangements in other fields?
    Mr. Davies: That will no doubt be a matter raised by the banks themselves in response to the paper.
    Mr. Douglas: Would the right hon. Gentleman care to comment on the difficulties of the Scottish joint stock banks in view of the Bank of England statement, in that their lines of credit might be restricted because of the Bank of England's discussion document?
    Mr. Davies: I take that point into consideration, but I think that it is more a point for my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

    Electricity Boards (Utilisation Activities)
    Mr. Palmerasked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry if he will make a statement on the progress so far of his discussions with the electricity boards on the possibility of removing from their ownership and control showrooms, contracting and similar other activities in the electrical utilisation field.
    The Minister for Industry (Sir John Eden): I have received the Electricity Council's views and am now considering them.
    Mr. Palmer: Is the hon. Gentleman aware that that rather pointless investigation has been going on for a long time, and is causing great worry and uncertainty to staff, and that the electricity supply industry is facing the keenest possible competition? Should not the investigation be dropped and the industry allowed to get on with its job?
    Sir J. Eden: There is a general understanding in the industry that these things need to be properly studied before any decisions are reached.
    Sir G. Nabarro: Will my hon. Friend give me an assurance that his consultations have not been one-sided? If he is receiving the observations of the electricity authorities in the publicly-owned sector, will he seek the views of private enterprise traders, notably electrical contractors and appliance distributors, who have views widely removed from those of the nationalised electricity industry, including my own view, also widely removed?
    Sir J. Eden: I have been receiving the views of other interests concerned, including the private traders. It is because of this that the study is taking some time.

    Civil Aircraft Programmes
    Mr. Michael McNair-Wilsonasked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry what financial assistance is being given by his Department to civil aircraft programmes other than the Concorde and the RB211.
    Mr. David Price: About £1 million will be spent this year in completing launching aid for the Trident 3B aircraft.
    Mr. McNair-Wilson: Is my hon. Friend aware that some sections of the aircraft and avionics industry are of the opinion that a disproportionate amount of assistance is going into the Concorde and 211 programme, to the detriment of research and development in other projects which may well hold the key to the future prosperity of those industries? Can he give me an assurance that those projects will be given favourable consideration by the Government, and financial assistance if it is sought?
    Mr. Price: I can reassure my hon. Friend best by reminding him that my right hon. Friend the Minister for Aerospace and I have always made clear at this Dispatch Box that we would take very seriously any proposal by any aircraft manufacturer for launching aid for a new project, but we have none before us.
    Mr. McMaster: How much is being spent on research and development into a short take-off, inter-city, 150- to 200-seat airliner? In view of its potential, could not this be expedited?
    Mr. Price: As I have explained to the House on a number of occasions, neither we nor our competitors have yet reached a position of having a precise definition of the parameters of a short-haul, civil, S.T.O.L. aircraft. Conversations and discussions on this matter are going on.

    Central Electricity Generating Board (Plant)
    Mr. Thomas Coxasked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry if he will seek powers to enable him to contribute to the extra cost involved in modifying and repairing new Central Electricity Generating Board generating plant which has not worked properly because of design faults, thereby relieving the Board of those costs.
    Sir J. Eden: No, Sir. The C.E.G.B. lays down the performance specifications for its plant and is responsible for ensuring that its contractors meet them.
    Mr. Cox: How does the Minister attempt to justify that answer? Why should a State industry be called upon to pay what is estimated to be between £35 million and £40 million towards the repair and modification of this generating plant, which was supplied to it by private industry? Is this yet another example of the way in which the Government intend to hamper and hinder the activities of State industries?
    Sir J. Eden: These are largely matters for the contractual relationship between the C.E.G.B. and its main suppliers of plant. They are working it out together.
    Sir R. Thompson: Can my hon. Friend tell me any good reason why the State enterprise should not pay for its mistakes as the rest of us do?
    Sir J. Eden: The plant manufacturers enter into a contract with the C.E.G.B., and I am sure that it is right that the two parties to the contract should resolve these difficulties.
    Mr. Palmer: Will the Minister draw the attention of the Board to the very useful Report on the subject prepared by the Select Committee on Science and Technology?
    Sir J. Eden: I am aware of that Report.

    Medical Products (Price Increases)
    Mr. Frank Allaunasked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry if he will refer the medical products industry to the Monopolies Commission, in view of recent price increases of up to 30 per cent.
    Mr. David Price: If the hon. Member will say more precisely which products he has in mind, we shall consider the case for a reference to the Commission.
    Mr. Allaun: Is the hon. Gentleman aware that Glaxo and Unigate have raised their prices of baby milk food by 30 per cent. and that Boots, which made a profit of about £30 million last year before taxation, has raised the price of nearly all its products by 15 per cent.? Does the hon. Gentleman propose to do nothing about that?
    Mr. Price: The hon. Gentleman did not specify a particular product in his Question. He will realise that the phrase

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    on the Order Paper, "medical products", can cover everything from wheelchairs to new drugs, and that I therefore could not be more specific in my answer.
    Mr. Allaun: The Minister should know that an hon. Member is not allowed to specify in that way. I was told so when I put down the Question.

    Natural Gas Conversion (Charges)
    Mr. Biggs-Davisonasked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry whether he will issue a general direction to the chairmen of gas boards not to impose charges for repairs arising from conversion to natural gas.
    Sir J. Eden: No, Sir. I am informed that gas boards already repair, free of charge, all defects clearly attributable to conversion.
    Mr. Biggs-Davison: I pay tribute to the manner in which conversion, in general, has been done in my constituency, but is my hon. Friend aware that old-age pensioners and people without much money have been charged, not once, but twice—and this is the case also in South-East Essex—for repairs which, by any reasonable interpretation, arise from the teething troubles of conversion? Will the Department issue a suggestion to chairmen to be a little more accommodating in this matter?
    Sir J. Eden: A full post-conversion service is normally carried out by the teams of conversion specialists over a period of eight weeks after conversion, but if my hon. Friend has any particular points that he would like to bring to my notice I shall look into them further.
    Mr. Thomas Cox: The hon. Member for Chigwell (Mr. Biggs-Davison) has hit on a crucial point, because the kind of thing to which he referred is happening in my constituency and also, I assume, in the constituencies of many hon. Members. May I ask the Minister to look at another problem concerning gas conversion? It is a growing problem for many retired people. It is the need for them to purchase new gas cookers, which may often cost £40 or £50, to do which they receive no help whatsoever.
    Sir J. Eden: Those are matters largely for the area boards concerned. Repre-
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    sentations can be made direct to them, or to the consultative councils which exist to serve consumers in these matters, but I shall be happy to look again into the matters that have been raised.
    Mr. John Hall: Is my hon. Friend aware that the problem is a little more serious than he appears to think? In many cases repairs subsequent to conversion go on for many months—not just a few weeks—and these are due entirely to the problems arising from conversion. Is it fair that people with limited means should be expected to meet the cost of these repairs?
    Sir J. Eden: I am sure that, generally speaking, repairs directly attributable to conversion are met by the boards but, arising out of this afternoon's exchange, I will look into these matters again.
    Mr. J. T. Price: Does the hon. Gentleman realise that his Department is not without responsibility in this matter? The functions of the area boards have been hived off under our legislation, but is the hon. Gentleman aware that two years ago it was revealed to the Select Committee on Nationalised Industries that it was the purpose of the industry to wipe out the capital value of all the town gas plant, which was valued at £300 million, and to do it quickly? The consumer is to be charged unreasonably because of these operations, merely to cover up the cost of conversion to natural gas, and thus the bonanza which natural gas was supposed to represent has become a mixed blessing to many of our constituents.
    Sir J. Eden: I think that the hon. Gentleman's question takes us into wider issues.

    Ship Wreck (Thames Estuary)
    Mr. Braineasked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry when the last inspection was made of the wreck of the munitions ship "Richard Montgomery" in the Thames estuary; what estimate was made of the condition and safety of its cargo; and whether further thought has been given to methods of neutralising the effects of any explosion.
    Mr. Noble: Following the last diving survey in 1965 it was decided that the best and safest course was to leave the

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    wreck and its cargo undisturbed. A recent close survey over the wreck and a study into the feasibility of a protective barrier are being evaluated. We shall tell interested parties our conclusions later this year. There does not appear at present to be a feasible method of neutralising the effects of any possible explosion in the wreck.
    Mr. Braine: Is my right hon. Friend aware that, in regard to this major hazard to shipping in the Thames Estuary, and the communities on both sides, I was told by the previous Government, in 1969, that the cargo could not be moved because of the possible danger to life of the salvage teams, but that the feasibility of putting a protective barrier round the wreck would be considered? That was two years ago. It is not time that some definite progress was made to deal with what is clearly a serious matter?
    Mr. Noble: The survey is being carried on. It is not simply a question of danger to the salvage teams. If this weight of explosives were to go up, the damage would be much greater than that. We are hoping to get the results of the survey later this year, and we shall communicate them to the people concerned.
    Mr. Moate: Will my right hon. Friend recognise the danger to the town of Sheer-ness and the thousands of people living there if there were to be an explosion? Is he aware of the considerable alarm created recently by reports of ships sailing through the Channel in areas marked to show recent wrecks? Will he recognise that there is considerable urgency in the need to reassure the public that there is no danger of a collision occurring with this wreck in the Medway?
    Mr. Noble: I recognise the possible danger to people living near a wreck of this sort. If my hon. Friend will let me have details of vessels sailing near the wreck, I should look into the matter, because this will help in considering which steps we can take in the future.

    Oil Supplies (Nigeria)
    Mr. Cordleasked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry what steps he is taking to foster the purchase of oil from Nigeria and to reduce Great
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    Britain's present dependence on Middle East oil supplies.
    Sir J. Eden: This is a commercial matter for the companies concerned.
    Mr. Cordle: Would not my hon. Friend agree that this is something that we should pursue with the utmost vigour, especially in view of the recent negotiations in the Middle East, and also because of the need to secure for British goods a full share in expanding Nigerian markets?
    Sir J. Eden: I agree with my hon. Friend that diversifying our sources of oil supplies is important, and in this respect what we get from Nigeria is quite significant.

    Exports to Bulgaria and Romania
    Mr. Rostasked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry what credit facilities are being extended by the Export Credits Guarantee Department for British exporters to Bulgaria and Romania.
    Mr. Noble: The full range of E.C.G.D.'s facilities is available for both markets.
    Mr. Rost: I welcome all measures that will help to improve trade between this country and the Iron Curtain countries, but would not my right hon. Friend agree that before offering fresh credit facilities to Romania and Bulgaria, in particular, and before encouraging those countries to borrow again from European capital markets, the Government should make some effort to get a settlement of previous sterling debts to British shareholders who have been kept waiting many years for their money?
    Mr. Noble: I think that my hon. Friend's supplementary question raises a slightly wider issue than is dealt with in his Question but, as long as British exporters are allowed to trade with these countries, I see no reason why they should be deprived of the full insurance facilities which the Department provides.
    Mr. Leadbitter: Will the Minister say to what extent, to encourage trade between East and West, his Government are prepared to take the initiative to reduce the embargo list?
    Mr. Noble: That is an entirely different question.

    European Economic Community
    Mr. Moateasked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry what is his latest estimate of the short-term adverse effects on the United Kingdom balance of visible trade if Great Britain should join the European Economic Community.
    Mr. Martenasked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry what quantitative estimate he has made of the appreciable down-turn in the United Kingdom's external trading relationships he expects during the first years of membership of the Common Market.
    Mr. John Davies: I cannot add anything to the estimate given by my right hon. Friend, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, on 16th December last. Two separate sets of forces will be at work: on the one hand the impact of changes in tariffs and costs, and on the other the beneficial effects of integration into a wider market. All these effects will build up gradually, over a number of years, and I am sure that in the outcome the gains will greatly predominate.
    Mr. Moate: I thank my right hon. Friend for the candour with which he recently admitted that in the short term there would be an appreciable down-turn in trade. Can he say how, if we have to carry this extra burden, he is able to forecast that the Government expect a rate of growth of 4 to 4½ per cent. during the transitional period of four years?
    Mr. Davies: As I said in response to the Question, the dynamic effects will not only emerge much later in the game but will certainly start pretty early. I am convinced that the impact of membership can be counted upon from a relatively early stage to have a dynamic, stimulating effect on the economy generally.
    Mr. Marten: Does my right hon. Friend realise that, if any terms are finally presented to the House, the remarks he has made about being sure that there will be a dynamic effect will be totally unacceptable, and that the Government in their White Paper must give a balance sheet and state the pros and cons, so that they can be properly analysed by economists all over the country?
    Mr. Davies: My hon. Friend is being as dogmatic as he reproaches me for being. The truth is that there will be dynamic effects, whether he likes it or not. His judgment of the balance of them is, of course, his own affair.
    Mr. Heffer: Does the right hon. Gentleman think that the upper limit figure of £670 million in the White Paper issued by the Labour Government is now a realistic figure, or should it be higher or lower? Will he give the House information on what the actual cost is likely to be?
    Mr. Davies: As yet it is impossible to give an alternative figure. An alternative figure will be put forward, I feel sure, at the appropriate time. The evidence, such as it is up to date, indicates that the estimates made at that time give an unfavourable situation as compared with those that might be made today.
    Sir D. Walker-Smith: With regard to the so-called dynamic effects, will my right hon. Friend repeat in this House and to this country what he said with such admirable candour in his Press conference in Stockholm to the effect that these so-called dynamic effects were not capable of assessment or measurement?
    Mr. Davies: I have never failed to say so. It is clear at this time that they are not capable of accurate forward assessment; but that they are powerful and will predominate, I have no doubt.
    Mr. Paget: Will the right hon. Gentleman tell us why the process of penalising our world trade for the benefit of a close Western Europe bloc should be described as widening our market?
    Mr. Davies: I do not think that it is so described. What is described as widening our market is abating existing barriers between ourselves and this great, growing market across the Channel.
    Mr. Michael Foot: Will the right hon. Gentleman say which are the factors which have led him to say at the Dispatch Box today that the figures he believes would be accurate are different from those that were earlier presented?
    Mr. Davies: One factor, which the hon. Gentleman will himself have in mind, is the time scale. The years in which the February, 1970, White Paper was cast

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    were quite different from those which are now within the transitional arrangements.
    Sir G. Nabarro: If my right hon. Friend persists in his reply that the economic effects of entry are incalculable, how does he arrive at the conclusion that there will be this dynamic upsurge in the economy?
    Mr. Davies: It is a matter of taking all the factors into account and making the best judgment that can be made. That is my judgment.
    Mr. Biffen: On a point of order. In view of the unsatisfactory nature of that reply, I beg to give notice that I shall raise this matter on the Adjournment at the earliest opportunity.
    Mr. Arthur Lewisasked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry whether he will publish in the OFFICIAL REPORT a detailed statement giving particulars in tonnage, sterling or description in goods of the estimate of the improvement or worsening of the United Kingdom's trade with each of the East European countries if Great Britain enters the European Economic Community on the terms known and available for entry on Friday, 21st May, 1971.
    Mr. Noble: No such detailed estimates are available.
    Mr. Lewis: Is it not strange that the right hon. Gentleman cannot answer such Questions as No. 17 or No. 22 or my own, or indeed any question which asks for facts and figures on how entry will improve our trade? Is it not obvious that the Government are trying to sell the people of this country a pig in a poke over the Common Market?
    Mr. Noble: Whether it is possible to give figures in reply to any question must depend upon the question. If the hon. Gentleman would like to know, the present figures for the European Economic Community's trade with Eastern Europe are six times greater than our figures—
    Mr. Lewis: That is not my question.
    Mr. Noble: As to the annual rate of growth of trade with Eastern Europe, on both imports and exports the Common Market countries have been growing very much faster than we have.
    Mr. Lewis: The Minister has failed to give an answer to my original Question and then he starts answering a question which he puts to himself and which is not relevant to my Question. Are we not now used to this from the Government, trying to kid and bluff and lie to the people?
    Mr. Noble: The hon. Gentleman put down a Question which anyone who studies it for a second would realise had no sensible answer. I know perfectly well the hon. Gentleman's continuing interest in trading with Eastern Europe, and therefore I gave him the facts about the greatly increased trade between the E.E.C. and Eastern Europe compared with what we have been able to do in the past because I thought that that might help him in his argument.
    Mr. Biggs-Davison: Is my right hon. Friend aware that some of us are concerned at the adverse balance of trade with Eastern European countries? Can my right hon. Friend say whether the Government's prospective partners in the European Community are doing better or worse than us in achieving a reasonable balance of trade with Eastern Europe?
    Mr. Noble: At the moment there is a balance in favour of Eastern Europe largely because of considerable quantities of diamonds and other things from Russia. I have not exact figures for the Eastern European countries, but the E.E.C. are trading at a higher level and are, I believe, in better balance than ourselves.

    Coal (Imports)
    Mr. Skinnerasked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry if he will now reverse his decision to allow imported coal into this country, in view of the build-up of indigenous stocks.
    Sir J. Eden: No, Sir. The stocks position has improved but the time has not yet come to review imports, which continue to provide a useful degree of flexibility for consumers and merchants.
    Mr. Skinner: Is the Minister aware that, as a result of the recent increased productivity in the British coalfields, and of the Government's deliberately induced economic slump, stocks have risen much

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    more rapidly than estimated? Does not the importation of foreign coal at £5 a ton more than the cost of British coal make nonsense of the Tory promise about free competition?
    Sir J. Eden: Stocks have been improving, as I said, but they are still much lower than desirable and well below the end-May levels in recent years. As for the price paid for imported fuels, that is a matter for those who import them.

    Exports (U.S. Companies)
    Mr. Douglasasked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry what proportion of United Kingdom exports is now accounted for by United States companies.
    Mr. Noble: About 16 per cent.
    Mr. Douglas: Will the right hon. Gentleman concede that this figure is likely to increase, and will he give the House the figure of imports by American companies? Might there not in the future be an adverse balance of trade position which would be detrimental if we were to enter the European Economic Community?
    Mr. Noble: I do not think that there is any reason to think that these figures are likely greatly to increase. United States firms in this country represent about 12 per cent. of the manufacturing capacity, and, as I told the hon. Gentleman, they are exporting at the rate of 16 per cent. I see no reason why this rather good trend should increase. If the hon. Gentleman wants to know the position about imports, I hope that he will put down a Question.
    Mr. Laurance Reed: Although I welcome foreign investment in the United Kingdom, does not my right hon. Friend agree that the degree of our dependence upon United States wholly-owned companies in Great Britain is a matter of concern? Does he not also agree that the best way to reduce this dependence would be for this country to gain access to the Common Market?
    Mr. Noble: I have always felt that there was a great deal to be gained, particularly by the development areas, in increasing American investment, and it has been extremely valuable to these
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    areas. In reply to the second part of the supplementary question, if we join the Common Market the investment will be in both directions, and this is probably to the benefit of everybody.
    Dr. Gilbert: Surely one of the main reasons for going into the Common Market is to make it more attractive for American firms to invest here, and the inevitable consequence must be an increase in the trend to which my hon. Friend has drawn attention?
    Mr. Noble: This has been one aspect of American business over here, but in the past American business has found extremely valuable markets in E.F.T.A. and other countries with which we have special relationships.

    Concorde
    Mr. Sheldonasked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry if he will make a further statement on the progress of Concorde.
    Mr. John Davies: Since my statement on 10th May Concorde has made a number of further flight tests. In addition it has flown to Dakar and appeared at the Paris Air Show where it attracted considerable interest.
    Mr. Sheldon: Continued interest is not enough. Is not the right hon. Gentleman aware that what causes concern is that the Government are continuing to pour out millions of £s while the decision has not been made? What is the minimum number of firm orders he requires before deciding to go ahead with the production of this aircraft in proper production numbers, and why is he not setting a deadline for the receipt of such orders?
    Mr. Davies: I do not agree with the expression "a decision has not been made". A decision has been made to press ahead with the development of this aircraft. On the question of production and orders, there is a great interest by the airlines. This interest cannot be converted into orders until the full details of performance guarantees are available, as they are not at the moment. I cannot reasonably be expected to reach any conclusion until I have in front of me the full details which my ultimate examination will bring out.
    Mr. Adley: Would my right hon. Friend accept that many of us look to him as "our man in the Cabinet" over Concorde? Is he aware that not only have numerous French Ministers, including the French President, flown in the plane but also the United States Secretary for Transportation? Does he realise that if he visits Bristol or Fairford and takes a flight in the aeroplane many thousands of people employed on the project will be delighted to give him an enormous welcome?
    Mr. Davies: Nothing would give me greater pleasure but my right hon. Friend the Minister for Aerospace has priority over me and will in due course, I hope in the near future, take such a flight.
    Mr. Palmer: Will the right hon. Gentleman bear in mind that whatever other considerations there may be, if at any stage the Concorde project is cancelled it will add enormously to the already serious unemployment in the Bristol area?
    Mr. Davies: The employment question is very much in my mind. As yet there is no question of this.

    Motor Cars (Imports)
    Mr. Edelmanasked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry what was the percentage of registrations of foreign-made cars in 1964 in respect of the total number of cars registered in that year; what was the comparable percentage in 1970; and what was the percentage for the first three months of 1971.
    Mr. John Davies: Foreign cars represented about 5 per cent. of registrations in 1964 and about 14 per cent. in 1970. In the first four months of 1971 they were 18 per cent. or 75,000, compared with 12 per cent. or 47,000 in the corresponding period of 1970.
    Mr. Edelman: Are not these figures alarming? Combined with the forecast of the president of Volkswagen that the imports of foreign cars into Britain may rise before long to 50 per cent., do they not prove the absolute unwisdom of the right hon. Gentleman's original proposal to make unilateral tariff cuts? Apart from that, is it not reprehensible on his part to use the suggestion that there
    22
    should be tariff cuts to threaten the living standards and wages of British motor car workers?
    Mr. Davies: I think it was the president of B.M.W. who made that statement. He carried on to say that in due course the penetration of the other markets within the Community would in all cases amount to as much as 50 per cent. and this would give us as great a potential market as, if not greater, than, the penetration which would take place at home.
    Mr. Geoffrey Finsberg: Do these figures not bear out conclusively the fact that many unofficial strikes will close the British motor car industry and that the public will buy the cars which are obtainable, that is, foreign cars, made in countries where there are no strikes?
    Mr. Davies: There is certainly good reason to believe that the rather exceptionally high figures in the early part of this year owed something to the strike situation at Ford.

    Aircraft Manufacture (Take-off and Landing Techniques)
    Mr. Onslowasked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry what requests he has now received from British aircraft manufacturers for assistance in funding a feasibility study of reduced take-off and landing techniques; and what replies he has sent.
    Mr. David Price: We have had proposals from the British Aircraft Corporation and we expect some from Hawker Siddeley Aviation. We will reply to them when they have been studied in depth.
    Mr. Onslow: How soon does my hon. Friend expect that to be? Will he take this opportunity of reassuring the British aircraft industry that he sees no danger that this area, in which Britain still has a lead over the rest of the world, is one in which we may be overtaken by competitors for the lack of necessary Government stimulation and support?
    Mr. Price: I can assure my hon. Friend that there will be no lack of Government interest and support for appropriate projects, when they can be clearly defined. We have to look at the

    23
    possibilities of international collaboration in the whole of this area.
    Mr. Dalyell: In the light of the recent American-Italian project, should this not be taken up very urgently indeed?
    Mr. Price: The hon. Gentleman must realise that there are many reasons other than purely designing aircraft, namely, the question of the economic operation, the noise level, planning considerations and above all the market. It is important to try to get these things right before starting on a particular project.
    Mr. Wilkinson: When taking an interest in "appropriate projects" could my hon. Friend tell me exactly which sort of project he believes is appropriate? Is it the type of airliner such as the 100-seater medium-haul class, because this House and the country and, above all, the British aircraft industry would like to know.
    Mr. Price: This is exactly what my hon. Friend's original Question was all about, the feasibility study phase to define this matter precisely.

    Industrial Espionage
    Mr. Hugh Jenkinsasked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry if he will seek to amend the Companies Act to compel firms to disclose their financial support to organisations engaged in industrial espionage.
    Sir J. Eden: I think that this is a matter which would be best considered after the Committee on Privacy, set up by the Home Office in 1970 under the chairmanship of Mr. Kenneth Younger, has reported.
    Mr. Jenkins: Is the hon. Gentleman aware, for example, that Common Cause is an organisation which combines support for the Conservative Party with industrial espionage? Will he include in the OFFICIAL REPORT a list of organisations which combine political contributions to the Conservative Party with industrial spying?
    Sir J. Eden: I am sorry, but I have very little information indeed about industrial espionage and have made no detailed study of the subject.

    Rolls-Royce Limited
    Mr. Barnettasked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry if he will make a statement on Rolls-Royce.
    Mr. John Davies: No, Sir. I have nothing at present to add to statements made previously.
    Mr. Barnett: Since, despite even the incredibly inept handling of this affair by the Government, it still seems likely that the unsecured creditors will receive in excess of 10s., will the right hon. Gentleman confirm that it is still the Government's intention to try for a composition rather than a liquidation? In the circumstances, as the ordinary shareholders are to get nothing, what is the Government's intention about worker shareholders, which they promised to look into?
    Mr. Davies: The question of a composition with the creditors is for the company and the Receiver, and not for me. We are still looking into the question of worker shares. I am not yet able to give any definitive answer.
    Mr. Michael McNair-Wilson: Can my right hon. Friend say whether there is any truth about the likelihood of Rolls-Royce requiring further finance for the M45 engine?
    Mr. Davies: If my hon. Friend tables that question, I will let him know the answer. I am not in a position to give it now.
    Mr. Walter Johnson: The whole House will hope that the guarantee of the bank loan to Lockheed will be approved by Congress, but there is a suggestion that it will be delayed until Congress has its Summer Recess. If that is so, may we have an assurance from the Minister that further aid will be forthcoming to Rolls-Royce to enable it to continue work on the RB211?
    Mr. Davies: The date which has been put about as being the terminal date when the Government would stop the support to which the hon. Gentleman refers, namely, 8th August, was, broadly speaking, agreed between all the parties, including the American Government, as being reasonable in the circumstances. If

    25
    it proved not to be possible, a new situation would arise which would then have to be discussed between all the parties.
    Mr. Dalyellasked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry if he will make a statement on the latest position of unsecured creditors of Rolls-Royce Limited, in relation to the negotiations on the price to be paid for the assets acquired by Rolls-Royce (1971) Limited.
    Mr. John Davies: The position of the unsecured creditors is a matter for the receiver. The receiver issued a Press statement last week which gives some information, and there is nothing that I can add.
    Mr. Dalyell: Why does the Cabinet hesitate to carry out a composition, which is within its powers?
    Mr. Davies: The question of a composition with creditors is a matter for the Receiver and the company, not for the Cabinet.
    Mr. Rost: In negotiating the price for the take-over of the assets, what consideration is being given to the goodwill and research and development expenditure already incurred on the RB211 contract without which future profits would be unobtainable?
    Mr. Davies: All these matters are fully considered within the framework of the negotiation and discussion which is now currently going on.

    Cold Rolled Coil Steel
    Mr. Hardyasked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry what, according to information available to him from international sources, is the most recent price per ton charged for cold rolled coil steel in West Germany, France, the Netherlands, the United States of America and Japan.
    Sir J. Eden: Published home trade prices are respectively: £75·05: £76·10: £67·10: £88·50: £51·20. Actual prices may, however, differ from these. Except from Japan these prices include an element for the average cost of delivery.
    Mr. Hardy: Does the Minister agree that those figures suggest that the Corporation's position concerning the product
    26
    mentioned in the Question is very competitive? Its competitiveness in other products is even greater. Would he therefore provide for its competitiveness to be maintained by giving early encouragement to the future development of the steel industry and by giving adequate and early assurances about the rather restrictive regulations of the Coal and Steel Community?
    Sir J. Eden: The last point was fully covered at Question Time the other day. As the hon. Gentleman knows, we have promised to make statements as soon as they are ready on the subject of the future of the industry.
    Mr. Michael Foot: Were these figures available to the Prime Minister and the Cabinet when they decided to make their intervention about the Corporation's prices a few weeks ago? Do not the figures show that the Prime Minister's statement that the Corporation's claim was unjustified was false?
    Sir J. Eden: Consideration of the Corporation's original price proposals the other day concerned the level of consumer products in this country. It was that aspect at which we had to look most closely.
    Mr. Foot: Is the Minister admitting that the Corporation's prices are considerably lower than those being charged on the Continent of Europe? Should not that matter have been taken into account when the Corporation asked for the right to charge what it thought was a proper price?
    Sir J. Eden: The allocation of prices between particular products is a matter for the Corporation, and no doubt, in making its proposals, it took into account the level of its competitors' prices.

    Industrial Development Certificates
    Mr. Strangasked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry how many industrial development certificates were applied for in Scotland in the first four months of 1971; and how this compared with the corresponding figure for the previous year.
    Mr. David Price: Fifty-seven industrial development certificates were granted in Scotland from 1st January, 1971, to 30th April, 1971, for projects of 10,000

    27
    sq. ft. and over. The corresponding figure for 1970 was 54.
    Mr. Strang: Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the Scottish people are being asked to bear an unfair share of the social hardship caused by the present industrial recession? Are the Government satisfied with the effect which their policies are having on the level of employment in Scotland?
    Mr. Price: The employment estimated by the applicants to arise from the industrial development certificates issued in the two relevant periods when the projects are manned is about 3,400 for a year ago and 5,200 for the current period. That suggests to me an improvement.
    Dr. Dickson Mabon: Surely the hon. Gentleman cannot be satisfied with the progress in view of the fact that there is an unemployment figure of 10 per cent. in Scotland? The situation is particularly bad in the West of Scotland, we are about to hear a disastrous announcement concerning Upper Clyde Shipbuilders and there is still the threat of the closure of Rolls-Royce in the West of Scotland. Surely the creation of special development areas was supposed to meet the situation. The figures which the hon. Gentleman has given are not adequate to meet the challenge presented by the position in Scotland.
    Mr. Price: I am talking about Scotland as a whole. For May, the unemployment figure was 5·6 per cent. compared with 4 per cent. the year before. That is very different from the 10 per cent. which the hon. Gentleman quoted.
    Mr. Clark Hutchison: Can my hon. Friend say whether the Government will put Edinburgh on the same basis as the rest of Scotland?
    Mr. Price: I do not know what my hon. Friend means by that. Edinburgh, Leith and Portobello now have development area status. But it is not suggested that they should have special development area status.
    Mr. Maclennan: The hon. Gentleman will acknowledge that the level of male unemployment in West Central Scotland and in Glasgow, in particular, is substantially above the figure he has given, and he has not given any indication of the effectiveness or otherwise of the Govern-
    28
    ment's measures. How many industrial development certificates have been issued in West Central Scotland?
    Mr. Price: The Question on the Order Paper was about Scotland as a whole. There are later Questions about Lanarkshire and the West of Scotland.

    Shipbuilding (Orders)
    Mr. Blenkinsopasked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry what proportion of orders for new ships has been placed during 1970 by British owners with British yards; and how this compares with previous years.
    Sir J. Eden: About 25 per cent. by value in 1970 compared with between 33 per cent. and 50 per cent. in the previous four years, but the estimated value of orders for United Kingdom registration placed in United Kingdom yards in 1970 at £287 million was the highest for over ten years.
    Mr. Blenkinsop: Does not that answer, showing a declining number of ships on order in our own yards, disclose a disquieting position? In view of the situation in other countries, will the Government see what more can be done to put us at least on an even keel compared with other countries?
    Sir J. Eden: In recent years the annual value of all orders for United Kingdom registration has been well above the value of the annual output of the shipbuilding industry.
    Mr. McMaster: Will my hon. Friend ensure that the British shipbuilding yards are not at a disadvantage compared with French and Italian yards, which are their immediate competitors? The French and Italian yards get a 15 or 16 per cent. direct subsidy which is not available to British yards.
    Sir J. Eden: The British yards are in an extremely strong position and benefit from the shipbuilding credit facilities.

    M.R.C.A. Aircraft (Exports)
    Mr. Warrenasked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry what facilities are available from the Export Credits Guarantee Department to give cover to British companies exporting

    29
    components and equipment to Panavia for the M.R.C.A. aircraft.
    Mr. David Price: E.C.G.D. is prepared to consider applications for normal cover for this business.
    Mr. Warren: I welcome the facilities made available since I tabled my Question, but does my hon. Friend feel that Panavia, with a capital of only £10,000 and 60 per cent. owned by West German interests, has the capital structure and financial resources to look after a £2,400 million programme?
    Mr. Price: My hon. Friend knows as well as I do that Panavia is a get-together of a number of principal companies which have very substantial financial backing, and the fact that it is not highly capitalised does not mean that there are not great resources in support of its activities.

    Oil Pollution
    Mr. Leadbitterasked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry if he will specify arrangements made by his Department to deal with oil slicks within the territorial waters of the United Kingdom; what financial support is given to local authorities which deal with the problem; how research into the matter has progressed; and if he will make a statement.
    Mr. Noble: The Department is equipped to deal with serious spillages within territorial waters and beyond, using hired vessels and its own equipment, and has done so successfully several times. The Department of the Environment makes grants of 50 per cent. towards approved expenditure by local authorities on dealing with oil pollution. Research into new methods continues. I will, with permission, circulate a fuller statement in the OFFICIAL REPORT.
    Mr. Leadbitter: Will the Minister take into account that the expenditure of local authorities in dealing with oil slicks has increased rapidly in the last four years, and will he further take into account that there has been plenty of industrial indiscipline in this matter, and take steps to deal with oil waste?
    Mr. Noble: The first part of the hon. Gentleman's supplementary question is for the Department of the Environment. I will take note of what he said in the second part.
    Following is the statement:

    Oil Pollution

      DEPARTMENT OF TRADE AND INDUSTRY ORGANISATION FOR DEALING WITH OIL AT SEA
      1. The Department of Trade and Industry is responsible for arranging and paying for any action by the Government required for the clearance of oil at sea that threatens the coast. The task falls into two parts: (i) reporting and observation; and, (ii) clearance. The first is centred on H.M. Coastguard with assistance from the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force. The second is mainly the responsibility of the principal officers in charge of the Department's marine survey offices in the major ports.
      2. All United Kingdom ships and aircraft, whether civil or military, are asked to report any accident or casualty to a ship which is causing or is likely to cause oil pollution, any ship seen discharging oil and the position, nature and extent of any oil slick which is seen on the sea, however caused. Fishing vessels and private yachts also participate in these arrangements. The arrangements ensure that both H.M. Coastguard and the Maritime Headquarters of the Ministry of Defence are informed of significant oil pollution incidents. The Coastguard is responsible for informing the appropriate principal officer and, if there is an immediate risk of the oil coming ashore, local authorities and the Natural Environment Research Council. The Maritime Headquarters are the focal point for action by the Navy and the R.A.F. They can assess the likely speed and movement of oil slicks and can arrange for service aircraft or vessels to keep spillages under observation. The responsibility for deciding whether further action (either reconnaissance or clearance) is needed in a particular case rests on the Department's principal officer in the area, in consultation with the Maritime Headquarters.
      3. For clearance action, principal officers have arranged to hire at short notice suitable vessels, mainly sea-going tugs, for spraying oil at sea with a dispersing agent. Spraying equipment, of simple design and easily fitted to and removed from a ship, has been specially designed by the Warren Spring Laboratory and sets of this equipment have been acquired together with stocks of a dispersing agent of low toxicity. To give full coverage of the coast some 50 vessels are available, with a set of spraying equipment for each, at strategic points. These vessels can be quickly fitted with the spraying equipment, loaded with dispersant and on their way to the scene of an oil pollution incident. For greater efficiency some vessels are being converted for the permanent carriage of dispersant in bulk. The Department's spraying vessels have been in action a number of times in recent months to deal with oil spilt as a result of casualties to ships and have successfully averted major coastal pollution.
      4. Arrangements have been made to obtain expert advice on areas where particular methods of treating oil would be harmful. The local authority pollution officer is required to consult the local fisheries officer (Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food), the Nature Conservancy regional officer (Natural Environment Research Council) and also asked to

      31
      consult others knowledgeable of the area. Regional maps of natural and fish resources (including nurseries) have been prepared for their guidance. Treatment with dispersing agents is the most efficient way of dealing with oil pollution available at present, and the development of low toxicity dispersants has reduced some of the objections to this method, but other methods are being explored.
      5. These plans will normally be brought into action only for a substantial spillage from an identified source, i.e. a spill resulting from a casualty to a tanker or a similar incident, or exceptionally, a spillage without an indentified source the presence of which on the sea is well authenticated and which threatens serious coastal pollution. It would not be practicable to deal with the many minor oil slicks reported which either disperse harmlessly, or are never seen again.
      6. Research into the techniques for containing or dispersing oil questions is the responsibility of the Department's Warren Spring Laboratory. The laboratory's work includes research into new methods of dealing with oil at sea and on beaches, into the behaviour of oil on the sea, into methods of detecting illegal discharges of oil and into equipment for preventing or controlling the discharge of oil from ships. It keeps in close touch with work done in other countries and within the United Kingdom shipping and oil industries and co-operates with scientists of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food in work to test the toxicity of oils and of the substances used for dispersing them. The Natural Environment Research Council is responsible for research into the biological effects of oil, or of dispersed oil in the marine ecosystem. The Nature Conservancy (a component body of the Natural Environment Research Council) has identified populations of sea birds which are most at risk from oil spills in coastal waters.

UPPER CLYDE SHIPBUILDERS
The Secretary of State for Trade and Industry and President of the Board of Trade (Mr. John Davies): Last Wednesday the Chairman of Upper Clyde Shipbuilders came to tell me that his company would not be able to pay wages beyond the end of the present week and expected to be between £4 and £5 million in deficit by the end of August. Accordingly, his board considered that the unions must be told of this situation on the day after he saw me—that was Thursday—and that, on the following day, Friday, they would petition for the appointment of a provisional liquidator. He gave me further details of the company's finances and indicated that an immediate injection of £5 to £6 million alone could save the company, and this substantially in the form of equity or grant.
32
The Government realised the serious consequences of a collapse in relation to the already high level of unemployment on the Clyde and it was therefore right that the Government should have time to examine the position fully. On the following day, therefore, I requested him to seek his board's agreement to hold their hand even for a few days and gave him an assurance that as far as wages were concerned the Government would ensure their payment for at least a further week. This he undertook to do.
He saw me again yesterday, Sunday, and told me that it now seemed unlikely that funds were available even to pay the current week's wages and unless the injection of funds to which I referred could be guaranteed today, Monday, his board felt it had no alternative but to petition for a provisional liquidator.
The board have told me that they still have hopes of attaining viability in the future, but that they are quite unable to forecast when the present excess of liabilities over assets might be reversed. The Government's judgment is that this company in its present grouping, saddled as it is with debt and dogged by deficit since its inception, having absorbed and lost some £20 million lent and granted to it under arrangements made by the former Government, is unlikely to achieve a state of stability and prosperity without having repeated recourse to Government aid. Only such a state will ensure the confidence in the future that is needed by workpeople, customers and suppliers alike. The Government have decided, therefore, that nobody's interest will be served by making the injection of funds into the company as it now stands.
Hon. Members: Shame. Resign.
Mr. Faulds: Disgraceful. Bloody disgraceful. You are a disastrous Minister.
Hon. Members: Order.
Mr. Davies: Nobody's interest will be served by making the injection of funds into the company as it now stands. The chairman has been told, and I understand that the U.C.S. board has decided to petition at once for the appointment of a liquidator.
Mr. Faulds: Bloody resign.
Mr. Rankin: On a point of order. Owing to the interruptions the last few sentences of the right hon. Gentleman's statement have not been heard here. Would he repeat them?
Mr. Lipton: From "disastrous".
Mr. Davies: The Government have decided, therefore, that nobody's interest will be served by making the injection of funds into the company as it now stands. The chairman has been told, and I understand that the U.C.S. board has decided to petition at once for the appointment of a provisional liquidator.
On the other hand, it is clearly right that, without prejudice to the creditors' interests, the Government should seek to ensure the minimum dislocation of current production and the preservation of as much employment as possible and as many of those assets as can be expected to have a viable and prosperous future. I propose, therefore, to seek the liquidator's co-operation with a view to bringing about a reconstruction in whatever groupings may prove to be most expedient. To this end, I am proposing to consult with him to determine what funds might be necessary to enable him in carrying out his rôle as provisional liquidator to assist me in my objectives.
Meanwhile, in consultation with a small group of expert people whom I propose to nominate, I intend to consider what action may be best devised to achieve the reconstruction I propose.
In the first instance, any moneys required by the Government in connection with the liquidation of Upper Clyde Shipbuilders will be obtained from the Civil Contingencies Fund, but Estimates will be submitted to the House in due course.
Mr. Benn: The Minister has announced to the House a massive and wholly characteristic betrayal—[HON. MEMBERS: "Oh."]—wholly characteristic and massive betrayal—of 7,000 men directly involved and 20,000 others whose employment depends on U.C.S., and, with total disregard for the human factors, is using unemployment in pursuit of this Government's economic policy in an area where there is already 10 per cent. male unemployment, constituting a major tragedy for Scotland. Is the right hon. Gentleman aware—he must be—that since the stern warning which it fell to me
34
to give the company in 1969—since those warnings were given—the labour force has been cut by 3,500 in co-operation with the unions, steel productivity is 87 per cent. up in the last year, and there is a £90 million order book for Upper Clyde, with the prospects of a possible £100 million for its standardised carriers, and that the problem confronting the group is a cash flow problem, for which the Government bear a heavy part of the responsibility by denying payment of the creditors from November to February, without any statement in the House whatsoever? Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that the House will want an immediate debate and is only grateful for one thing—that he did not venture any expression of sympathy? For had he done so it would have been an act of odious hypocrisy.
Hon. Members: Oh.
Mr. Davies rose—
Hon. Members: Resign.
Mr. Davies: I really think that the odious hypocrisy comes from the other side. May I read to the House what the right hon. Gentleman himself said in December 1969? He said:
"After giving the most careful consideration to these proposals, the Government have regretfully concluded that, having regard to the need to contain Government expenditure, there is not sufficient priority to justify the investment of further public funds in this enterprise in the face of the many competing demands on national resources.—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 2nd December, 1969; Vol. 792, c. 1305.]
In view of that, I am horrified at what the right hon. Gentleman has just said.
Mr. Benn: Is the right hon. Gentleman not aware that the improvement in productivity, the move towards viability, the reductions in the labour force, and the development of the order book, all came in part because it was necessary for us to make clear to the group that we would not support it unless it moved towards viability, which is now within its grasp?
Secondly, would the right hon. Gentleman now be honest with the House and say why it was that last winter, from November to February, he held back moneys due to the company under the Shipbuilding Industry Act, which largely explains the present cash flow difficulties?
Mr. Davies: As for the second question, I am required, in order to discharge my duties under shipbuilding credits, to have regard not only to the validity of the ship owners themselves, but to the likelihood and certainty of the ships being delivered to them. It was in the light of this that I had to reserve for a period of time the credits concerned. However, on the first part of the right hon. Gentleman's question, I have pressed the chairman of this company repeatedly over the last few days, and particularly yesterday, to give me a clear statement as to the time in which he expected to be able to reverse the position of asset versus liability deficit in the future. He was unable to tell me.
Mr. Joha Hall: Would my right hon. Friend not agree that, from the time of its first organisation, the U.C.S. never had a chance of success unless it was in receipt of continuing Government subsidy?
Mr. Faulds: When did you last visit Glasgow?
Mr. Hall: Would my right hon. Friend tell the House why it was not until a week ago that the chairman was unable to tell him of the very serious state in which the company found itself? Secondly, was the chairman able to give to my right hon. Friend some estimate of the continuing subsidy that would be required year by year to keep the company in being?
Mr. Davies: It is indeed surprising, after having given me assurances at the end of last year and at the beginning of this as to the likelihood of the company failing or getting into liabilities so that I need have no further preoccupations, that he should leave it until within 48 hours of the date on which he was to declare his inability to pay wages to inform me of the situation. As regards further liabilities which the Government might well have in regard to this business, I am bound to say that the existing liabilities are in excess of £9 million and, although an initial injection of the order of £5 to £6 million was requested, I had little confidence that that would be the end of the story.
Mr. Rankin: The right hon. Gentleman may or may not recollect that before he was in office he used to tell
36
the House that it was in the national self-interest to exercise humanity in these matters. In view of his previous attitude, how can he now come to the House and make this statement, which means that the Government are displaying inhumanity by denying to thousands of people in the Govan division and other parts of Glasgow the right to work? Those men have been working well and have been producing goods which were selling. How can the right hon. Gentleman's previous remarks be explained, in view of the horrible message which he has today sent to the city of Glasgow?
Mr. Davies: Since I have spoken of the Government's desire and determination to bring about a reconstruction of this whole operation and to try hard to devise means, in the face of what are not easy legal considerations, to achieve the kind of results the hon. Gentleman mentioned, I feel it unjust that he should now charge me with inhumanity. Indeed I have in mind his very purposes, but I do not believe they will be achieved within the framework of the existing enterprise.
Mr. Galbraith: Is my right hon. Friend aware that to all fair-minded people his statement, which must have taken a great deal of courage to make, is a realistic way of dealing with the great industrial and human problem which has existed ever since this unnatural company was set up as a result of Socialist legislation? In their talks with employers, did the unions come forward with any specific proposals?
Mr. Davies: Certainly there were talks at the end of last week between the management and the unions with a view to trying to find some arrangement whereby the unions themselves, in one form or another, would recommend a contribution towards the salvation of this concern. It proved impossible for the unions to subscribe to any such arrangement.
Mr. Grimond: Could the Secretary of State make clear that this is a crisis of liquidity due to liabilities taken on in the very early days of this rather ill-starred consortium and that it is not due

37
to the likely unprofitability of current orders? Secondly, when he talks about reconstruction, would he also reassure the House that this means that the current orders will be completed and that it is intended to keep shipbuilding going on the Upper Clyde? That surely can be the only meaning of the word "reconstruction".
Mr. Davies: On the first point, I must correct the right hon. Gentleman. In fact, it is not just a cash flow problem that is involved. There is a problem of a continuing deficit where the end cannot yet be seen. On the second question, it is with a view to seeing what are the possibilities of continuing shipbuilding on the Clyde, particularly in regard to ships now under construction, that these consultations will now proceed.
Mr. Bruce-Gardyne: Could my right hon. Friend confirm that the right hon. Member for Bristol, South-West (Mr. Benn), when responsible for the shipbuilding industry, told the House that no Government—and his Government in particular—could be responsible for undefined and continuing losses for firms like U.C.S. or any other shipbuilding firm? In these circumstances, how does my right hon. Friend explain the right hon. Gentleman's reaction today except as an attitude of pure, mindless mischievousness?
Mr. Davies: In the light of my statement, I found the right hon. Gentleman's remarks incomprehensible, illogical and grossly unfair.
Mr. McCartney: I realise that the Secretary of State faces serious hazards on this question in view of his "lame duck" speech some time ago. Would he clearly indicate to the House that the Government will work conscientiously to ensure the well-being of the people involved? It is not just a question of 7,500 or 30,000 people; there are something like 120,000 human beings affected by this disaster on Clydeside, including the families of the people affected. Could he indicate, apart from all the devious things he has indicated he will do with regard to reconstruction, what protection he will give to these families?
Mr. Davies: There is a grave risk of escalating beyond reason at the moment
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the problem in regard to unemployment and the impact on suppliers and families. I believe that this was the case in the Press over the weekend. I do not anticipate that the kind of figures which have been mentioned are the figures with which we shall be faced, but it is the Government's firm intention to achieve that that shall not be so.
Mr. Biffen: Is the Secretary of State aware that only economic dinosaurs would wish that the shipbuilding industry should be locked into what the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr. Grimond) called an ill-starred consortuim? Could he say whether, in the Government's objectives about reconstruction, he has in mind the availability of public funds and what limits he will set to such amounts?
Mr. Davies: In the immediate future the limit is itself set by the limitations under which the provisional liquidator is bound to operate under Scottish law. Therefore, the duration of time will depend on when the provisional liquidator is in a position to approve. It is during that period that the Government clearly will have to put out funds to try to sustain the position until they can see what solution is possible. Therefore, it is reasonable to suppose that the immediate liability will not be very great. What may subsequently transpire as a result of these discussions I cannot at present foresee; but clearly I will inform the House as soon as I know.
Mr. Ross: Does the Secretary of State, and particularly the Prime Minister, realise that this is one of the blackest days in the history of Scottish industry? Does he realise that in the area concerned there are already nearly 30,000 men unemployed and that the male unemployment rate is 9·6 per cent.? Is it not strange that the right hon. Gentleman should talk about people seeking to scare the country about escalating figures? Is he aware that many people in Scotland feel that this was a question either of saving the right hon. Gentleman's face or of saving Upper Clyde Shipbuilders? Scotland will not forgive him for what he has done today. What will be the immediate effect of this announcement? Many of us would perhaps have had more sympathy for the right hon. Gentleman if he had said what were his proposals

39
for re-grouping, and if he had said that he had seen experts and the trade unions about this matter. However, he obviously has nothing in mind at all. Will he tell the House exactly what this will mean for the 7,500 people employed in U.C.S. and for the 20,000 others who are employed in the supplying industries? Finally, could he say whether the Secretary of State for Scotland shares his judgment as to his interest in this concern?
Mr. Davies: I would have understood it had the right hon. Gentleman's remarks been addressed to those who left the matter until about five days ago to warn me of a sudden and absolute proposal which they had made. To imagine that in that period of time it is possible to create a complete reconstruction programme is to fly in the face of all reasonable knowledge.
Mr. Kenneth Baker: Would the Secretary of State not agree that the appointment of a provisional liquidator will give some breathing space in this crisis, and that the immediate result will not be unemployment of anybody until the liquidator has sorted out the true position—which would appear to be very confused and probably more grave than a cash flow position? Would he also agree that this problem of crisis has been inherited in its entirety from his predecessor, the Minister of Technology?
Mr. Davies: That is undoubtedly correct. On the earlier point, the position of a provisional liquidator is one in which he is bound by law to concern himself with the interests of the creditors, and them alone. It is on his co-operation that I must largely rely. I shall seek it, and hope to obtain it.
Mr. Small: What guarantees will the Secretary of State give for those who are now employed and for how long? Secondly, if in any reconstructed company there is a request for Government aid or largesse, is the Secretary of State prepared to recommend the amount required—whether it be £5, £9 or £10 million?
Mr. Davies: I cannot anticipate what may be the result of the work which we shall now undertake. On the question of guarantees of employment, I have at the moment done what seems to be the most
40
urgent thing, which is to guarantee immediate employment, subject to seeing what is the feasible future.
Mr. McMaster: In discussing with the liquidator the future shape of the Upper Clyde shipyards following reconstruction, will my right hon. Friend bear in mind that Britain's principal shipbuilding competitors in Europe—France, Spain and Italy—are subsidised to the extent of 16 per cent. to 17 per cent. and that the Japanese have built up their shipyards behind a heavy protective tariff—a 15 per cent. import duty? Will my right hon. Friend bear in mind not only that fact but the fact that this maritime nation cannot afford any further reduction in its shipbuilding capacity after the reductions which followed the Report of the Geddes Committee?
Mr. Davies: I am conscious of the reputed advantage which certain other countries give to their shipbuilding industries. I will take these things into account in seeking to determine the future shape of this concern.
Mr. Harold Wilson: In face of the outrage that has been announced by the right hon. Gentleman—[Interruption.] There is nothing to cheer about on these benches this afternoon. Does the right hon. Gentleman recall that he was the Minister responsible for carrying through the House the legislation to end I.R.C. and other reasonable measures for handling industrial problems? Is he aware that his only substitute for these is the Official Receiver? In view of this, will the right hon. Gentleman recognise that every decision now taken affecting the employment of our people is decided on the basis of ideological obsession by himself and the Prime Minister? Does he realise that what we want is not the Official Receiver but an official psychiatrist?
Will the right hon. Gentleman now consult the right hon. Gentleman the part-time Prime Minister and the Leader of the House and recognise that the House must now have an urgent debate on this question? No doubt there will be hon. Members who will ask Mr. Speaker for an emergency debate under Standing Order No. 9, but does the right hon. Gentleman recognise that there should be a full day's debate this week, and will he give an assurance that there will be immediate talks through the

41
usual channels to arrange a debate on the decision we have had this afternoon?
The Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons (Mr. William Whitelaw): Further to what the Leader of the Opposition has said, Mr. Speaker. Of course I am prepared to have immediate discussions through the usual channels to decide how best this matter might be handled in debate in the House.
Mr. Harold Wilson: I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his ready response.

ORDERS OF THE DAY

  EDUCATION (MILK) BILL
  Order for Second Reading read.
  3.59 p.m.
  The Secretary of State for Education and Science (Mrs. Margaret Thatcher): I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
  I had not expected to introduce the Bill against the background of the statement that we have heard to-day. It shows in one way that all Governments are faced with similar problems, especially problems relating to the level of public expenditure, which includes central and local government expenditure; the level of taxation, the awareness of which is shown by people who always quote their net take-home pay rather than their gross incomes, but a situation in which nevertheless inadequate provision is found in some sectors for which the Government are responsible. We all of us, wish to find more moneys for certain sectors in the education and other spheres.
  The purpose of the Bill is partly, therefore, to enable us to switch our priorities to fill some of the gaps in educational provision, particularly to improve and replace old primary schools, but at the same time to ensure that those who have a medical need for milk at school should continue to receive their milk free. More generally, the purpose is to implement the proposals relating to school milk announced in the White Paper "New Policies for Public Spending".
  At present local education authorities have a duty to provide milk to pupils in primary schools including nursery schools, pupils who are junior pupils up to the age of 12 in middle schools, and also pupils in special schools. Under the Bill the duty towards children in special schools remains unchanged. In primary schools, including nursery schools, children will continue to receive free milk until the end of the summer term in which they reach the age of seven. Other children in primary schools and junior pupils in middle schools will continue to receive milk free if the school medical officer so recommends.

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  It might be helpful if I say why the end of term after the age of seven was chosen as the date upon which the supply of free milk to a pupil should cease. It is different in Scotland because the legislative arrangements and the practice are different. There the date 1st August has been chosen, which, I understand, is a date which always occurs in the school holidays. For England and Wales we chose this time so that it would be unnecessary for the schools to monitor the date upon which the children reach the age of seven during the school term and also so that supplies of milk to a school should be virtually constant during the term itself. It means that many children will receive free milk until they are aged 7½ or more.
  I should like to say a few words about the medical grounds upon which the supply of free milk will continue to those in primary schools and some children in middle schools. The responsibility for authorising free milk will be that of the school medical officer. At school a number of medical records are kept, and when this provision comes in I would expect those records to be gone through to see if children who perhaps were at risk need to have a further examination to see if the continued supply of free milk is advisable. Otherwise, the family doctor, welfare officers or teachers can always refer pupils to the school medical officer for his opinion on whether further free school milk is necessary.
  There is a difference between the Bill and the White Paper. The White Paper said this in paragraph 19:
  "Pupils up to 12 who have a medical requirement will not be affected. The pracical arrangements will be discussed with the local education authorities."
  During discussions with the authorities they had pointed out the difficulties which would arise if medical milk were given up to 12 years in every case, as this would mean reintroducing title to free milk into secondary schools where there is no present administration to cope with it.
  Therefore, for medical milk the Bill follows the arrangements for free milk made by the last Government when they restricted title to free milk to primary school children: that is, medical milk will be available at primary schools even
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  though the child is over 12 and it will be available at middle schools up to the twelfth birthday but will not be available at secondary schools.
  The previous Government when withdrawing supplies of free milk from secondary schools asked the Committee on the Medical Aspects of Food Policy for its views. The Committee was unable to say whether the withdrawal of milk would be prejudicial to the health of any particular group of children. Free milk in secondary schools was withdrawn nearly three years ago and no adverse effect has been observed on the nutrition of that age group. This time, because there was provision for milk on health grounds, there was no formal prior consultation, but the Chief Medical Officer was consulted informally and subsequently his Committee endorsed his advice that it was not possible to predict whether or not harm would result from the withdrawal of further free milk but that careful monitoring would detect the effects, if any, at a stage when they were mild and reversible.
  Our proposals for milk on health grounds themselves are designed to protect children who might otherwise be at risk, but as an additional safeguard the Chief Medical Officer's Sub-Committee on Nutritional Surveillance is making plans to monitor the position generally to ensure that any effects would be detected early.
  Further, the Department of Health and Social Security, with the approval of C.O.M.A., is initiating a dietary and clinical survey of children in each of the areas Croydon, Bristol and Sheffield, and initial data has already been collected in schools in those areas.
  Mr. James Hamilton: Will any of the schools to be monitored be in Scotland? Scotland is referred to in the Introduction to the Bill.
  Mrs. Thatcher: My hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Education, Scottish Office tells me that the answer is "Yes". I am responsible for schools in England and Wales. I understand that schools in Scotland will be monitored. Indeed, I believe that this point was raised in an Adjournment debate, as the hon. Gentleman will be very aware.
  Mr. Neil Kinnock: The right hon. Lady says that she has responsibility for England and Wales. I took it for granted that the Secretary of State for Wales would be making a separate announcement, but this is obviously not to be the case. Why has she not included at least one school in Wales in the list of schools to be surveyed?
  Mrs. Thatcher: The general monitoring under C.O.M.A. is one aspect of the safeguard. The special dietary survey under D.H.S.S. is a further additional safeguard. The general monitoring will apply to schools in Wales. I am sorry that the three of us cannot speak from the Front Bench in this debate, but the general monitoring applies more widely than the special survey relating to the three areas.
  Mr. Bob Brown: If schools are to be monitored, would it not be much more sensible to monitor schools in places like Tyneside and Merseyside, in the developing areas, where the full impacts of this policy will be felt?
  Mrs. Thatcher: The general monitoring will take place widely. There is a special survey in selected schools in the three areas I have mentioned, one of which—Sheffield—was chosen fairly far north. The special survey could not be held everywhere. I hope that hon. Members will be satisfied that reasonable safeguards will be taken, both in the general monitoring and in the special survey.
  I expect reference will be made during the debate to the survey carried out last year by a team headed by Dr. Lynch—not a medical doctor—of Queen Elizabeth College, London University. This was a questionnaire survey sponsored by the National Dairy Council. Over 4,300 school children, more than half from primary schools, were asked by the team to recall everything they had eaten in the 24 hours preceding the interview. The nutritional intake thus gauged was then related to modified versions of the recommended intakes of nutrients for the United Kingdom published in 1969 by the Department of Health and Social Security. On this basis a number of preliminary findings were announced at a conference last September. So far no further report has been issued.
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  The Department of Health and Social Security was asked about the survey by my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Devonport (Dame Joan Vickers) on 19th May, and my hon. Friend gave the following reply:
  "The survey was said to suggest that the dietary pattern of numbers of children could give rise to much concern. To the best of my knowledge, Dr. Lynch has not yet published his full report. However, I understand that his survey was made without any clinical or physical examinations and, if this is so, its finding could not be considered adequate evidence of undernourishment."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 19th May, 1971; Vol. 817, c. 323.]
  No further information has been forthcoming on that particular survey, but it is clear that the Department of Health and Social Security would require clinical evidence of undernourishment before it could accept the findings in the report.
  It is right that I should be asked about the effect on the poorest children of the withdrawal of free milk in schools. Again, I stress at the outset that if there is a medical need in the primary schools children will receive free milk whatever their parents' income. We believe that this was the right way to tackle special needs which may arise concerning individual children.
  For those parents on social security payments the withdrawal of free milk occurs within a short time of increases in social security benefits. [An HON. MEMBER: "Disgraceful."] It would be more disgraceful if there were no increases in social security when this withdrawal took place. The withdrawal will occur at a time when increases in social security will have a number of effects.
  For a married couple with three children of school age on social security there will be an increase of £2. Increases in social security benefit automatically raise the income scales for free school meals yet further. The net income for remission of charges for school meals will also go up by £2 for a family of this size, and there will be corresponding increases in the net income scale for families of other sizes. This means that many families who applied for free school meals earlier this year and were disappointed because their net income was £1 or £2 over the scale

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  will qualify from next September. In the case of families with more than three children, the net income scale qualifying for some entitlement to free school meals will rise by more than £2 a week—in some cases by considerably more. So there will be those arrangements for children whose parents are on social security benefit.
  For those who unfortunately are on unemployment, sickness or widows' benefits, increases will also come into effect on 20th September. For a married couple with three children of school age on unemployment and sickness benefit there will be an increase of £2·50 and an increase of the same amount for a widow with three children of school age. These increases will take effect on 20th September, within a short time of the withdrawal of free milk from certain of the age groups.
  For those families on low wages or salary who have young children there will be the family income supplement of up to £4 a week starting on 5th August. The increases in social security, unemployment, sickness and widows' benefits and the family income supplement are concentrated on those who need them most and will enable families to purchase milk, or other food should they prefer it. Indeed, I believe that it is probably the most comprehensive protection to help the most needy groups concerning any withdrawal that there has ever been.
  For those above the tax threshold with children, the child tax allowances have recently been increased and will shortly take effect. The withdrawal of universal free milk between the ages of seven and 11 has been accompanied by a concentration of provision on those who need it most.
  The Bill also provides for the sale of milk in schools. At present local educational authorities have no power to sell milk, although they can sell other drinks. This is an anomaly arising from the 1968 legislation. Even if there had been no change in duties regarding free milk, we would have taken the first possible opportunity to amend the law to enable local education authorities to sell milk in schools. The power in the Bill applies to pupils of all ages. Milk can
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  therefore be sold in secondary as well as in primary schools. This is an increase in the powers of local education authorities.
  Mr. Alfred Morris: May we assume that local authorities which wish to supply milk free of charge out of their own resources will not be prevented from doing so? Will the right hon. Lady also tell us what is the anticipated net saving to public funds from this nasty little Bill? In giving her answer, will she take into account that the anticipated saving of £4 million from cancelling school milk in secondary schools has in the end boiled down to a derisory £1·2 million?
  Mrs. Thatcher: I hope to deal with the local authority point later in reasonable detail. The saving in a full year would be £9 million, leaving £5 million still on free school milk. That should also be set alongside the £75 million per year subsidies on school meals.
  Sir Gerald Nabarro: Will my right hon. Friend allow one question on behalf of milk producers, such as those in South Worcestershire? What will be the effect of the Bill, measured in terms of diminution of demand for liquid milk, over the whole of the milk producing industry in this country? If she has not got that figure readily available, will she arrange for the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food to give it before the end of the debate?
  Mrs. Thatcher: The, reduction in demand is expected to be about 1 per cent. It is not possible to give a more accurate figure because, by giving power to local education authorities to sell milk in schools, particularly in secondary schools where there is no power to sell milk at present, it is hoped that in those schools consumption may go up.
  Sir G. Nabarro: That is a splendid reply.
  Mrs. Thatcher: May I again point out—
  Mr. Fred Evans: Has the right hon. Lady had any preliminary consultations as to what administrative machinery will be set up for receiving the milk, arranging for the collection of money for milk supplies, and has any

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  calculation been made, if teachers and head teachers are not to do this, as to how much ancillary help will be needed and what it will cost?
  Mrs. Thatcher: This power is being given to local education authorities. How they use it is a matter for them. They will have latitude in deciding how they shall use the power. We do not expect any extra duties to be put upon teachers, although there will be consultations with the teachers before any regulations are made.
  Mr. Fred Evans: Not yet?
  Mrs. Thatcher: Under the Bill local education authorities are given fresh powers and latitude as to how they shall use those powers and, indeed, whether they should use them. I am not certain whether the hon. Gentleman is pleased or not about that increase of powers and discretion to the local education authorities.
  Dr. Shirley Summerskill: What administrative arrangements have been made concerning the medical officers who are in charge of these schools? The right hon. Lady has talked about medical milk, which is a new term to me. I should have thought that milk was physiological rather than medical if one is going to concentrate on preventive medicine rather than giving milk after a disease has occurred. What diseases or conditions have been authorised as requiring "medical milk"?
  Mrs. Thatcher: They have not been authorised. This is a matter left to the school medical officer to certify whether, in his opinion, a child needs a future supply of free milk after the ordinary title to free milk has ceased. We shall leave it to the school medical officer to decide how and when that certification shall be made.
  Mr. Peter Hardy: While the right hon. Lady can still remember the intervention of my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Wythenshawe (Mr. Alfred Morris) on costs, since she claimed that £9 million would be saved from public funds, would she say whether she believes that six, seven or eight times as much milk is now drunk in primary schools as was drunk in secondary schools before that
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  milk was stopped, since the total saving when secondary milk ceased was less than £1½ million?
  Mrs. Thatcher: I have given the best estimate which we can make at present. No doubt our estimate will be tested in due course.
  The Bill specifically provides that regulations with regard to the sale of milk require the expense of providing milk in the exercise of the power to be defrayed by pupils or their parents. A nominal charge is not within the terms of the Clause. Indeed, if it were, the Bill would be reintroducing cheap or virtually free milk into secondary schools, and its purpose of containing public expenditure would be not merely defeated but reversed.
  This is because the power to sell is introduced into secondary schools as well as into primary schools. The regulations will not impose any new responsibility on the teachers, but, as I said in answer to an interruption, as they have a special interest in all arrangements in schools, their associations will be consulted over the revised regulations.
  In non-maintained schools free milk up to the end of the summer term after the age of seven will be provided, but there will be no milk on medical grounds. In answer to the hon. Member for Halifax (Dr. Shirley Summerskill), I would point out that I used the term "medical milk" as a kind of shorthand for that longer phrase. The difficulty of administering any such charge would be out of proportion to the number who are likely to become affected. Non-maintained schools can already sell milk to their pupils.
  The point of the hon. Member for Manchester, Wythenshawe (Mr. Alfred Morris) has been raised in a number of papers and by the right hon. Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne Central (Mr. Edward Short)—about a possible discretion for local authorities. There has been a suggestion that the Bill should include a provision to give authorities discretion to continue to supply milk free to those primary school pupils who will no longer receive it, provided that all the expenditure is rate-borne.
  I want to put a number of arguments to counter that suggestion. First, money spent from the rates is just as much public expenditure as money spent from

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  taxes or a combination of both. Part of the purpose of the Bill is to contain the increase in public expenditure and to switch the destination of some public monies in accordance with new priorities. It would entirely defeat the larger purpose of the White Paper if, having cut down on milk to give more for primary school buildings, family income supplement and so on, and to reduce taxes, one were to put the milk burden back on the rates, thereby increasing total expenditure once again. It is the total public expenditure for which central Government have responsibility.
  The second point is that when rates go up in any area, from whatever cause, local authorities tend to ask for more rate support grant and to blame the Government if more is not forthcoming. The Government, therefore, would indirectly have to provide more central moneys to counter the rise in rates, from whatever cause—[Interruption.] The right hon. Gentleman intervenes from a sitting position, but he knows full well that this is true. When we come to the rate support grant negotiations, local authorities are always anxious not only to increase the grant but to increase the proportion of local expenditure which is met by the rate support grant.
  Third, although the expenditure could be excluded from relevant expenditure for rate support grant purposes, this by itself would not guarantee that the cost would fall on the rates of the individual authority concerned. This is because each authority's actual expenditure is taken into account in the distribution of the resources element which, as the right hon. Gentleman knows, is the equalisation factor in the rate support grant.
  Thus any authority which qualified for a resource element grant and chose to give free milk to the 7–11 age group would be eligible for a larger share of that grant at the expense of other authorities. Therefore, it is not possible, as the law stands, for the expenditure to be totally rate-borne. Even if it were, we still have to counter the problem that one of the aims of the Bill is to reduce total public expenditure and to switch resources from expenditure on one item to expenditure on another.
  Mr. Reginald Freeson: Would the right hon. Lady tell the House of any other heading of expenditure where the Government have decided to withdraw or to cut down their contribution to local government spending, where, following on such withdrawal or reduction in Government contribution, a Bill has been introduced telling local authorities that they may not spend any of their local rate money in substitution for the Government's spending?
  Second, how does she reconcile this petty little Bill with all the talk about greater freedom for local government to embark on their policies to benefit their people according to the judgment of the locally elected authorities?
  Mrs. Thatcher: On the first part of the question, an example is the hon. Gentle man's own Government's Bill abolishing the supply of milk to secondary schools—
  Mr. Freeson: The right hon. Lady has misunderstood the question.
  Mrs. Thatcher: I have not misunder stood the answer. There was no power in that Bill either to substitute milk for sale or to give milk to the children who had a need for it on medical grounds. Instead, the answer was that it was either free milk or no milk at all. And that was a Bill of a kind in which the powers of local authorities were reduced. Certainly, no power was given, or no residual power, under which—
  Mr. Freeson: The right hon. Lady is deliberately misleading the House.
  Mrs. Thatcher: I am not deliberately misleading the House. Will the hon. Member listen?
  There was a Bill, which was not called the Abolition of Milk in Secondary Schools Bill, but I hope that he is not denying that his Government abolished free milk in secondary schools and gave no corresponding power to sell milk, and that there was no residual power for the local authorities to supply milk on the rates? If there were, the hon. Member would not have needed to ask his question because that residual power would exist now—
  Mr. Freeson: Now answer the second part.
  Mrs. Thatcher: Would the hon. Gentleman remind me of it?
  Mr. Freeson: I do not accept the misleading answer which the right hon. Lady gave to my first point—[Interruption.] It is a twisted answer. The second point was, how do she and her colleagues reconcile this petty little Bill with all the talk about giving local government greater freedom to exercise their powers, to pursue policies on behalf of their local people, by whom they have been elected?
  Mrs. Thatcher: I have just said that the Bill gives an increased power, which does not exist at the moment—a power to sell milk in secondary schools as well as primary schools. Immediately I announced that that power was contained in the Bill an hon. Member asked precisely what discussions I had had about it, as if he wished certain conditions to be attached to the power.
  The hon. Member knows, as do others on his Front Bench, that total public expenditure is a matter for the Government. Also, if he had listened or had worked it out, he would have discovered that at the moment there is no such thing in some authorities as expenditure which is totally rate-borne. If an authority receives the equalisation factor of the rate support grant, it receives money from the Exchequer as a contribution towards the actual expenditure of that local authority, regardless of the destination of that expenditure.
  Mr. Dick Leonard: Is the right hon. Lady aware of the logic of what she has just said? Surely it is that no local council shall ever have the option to introduce any policy which has not previously been authorised by the Government Front Bench.
  Mrs. Thatcher: I should be grateful if the hon. Gentleman would ask my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for the Environment about this matter because I am not wholly responsible for it.
  There is a section in one of the local government Bills which gives the power to spend up to the product of an old penny rate, but that power cannot be used, I believe, to extend powers already given by virtue of legislation. So there is a discretion under that, but it is a
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  discretion within very carefully controlled limits. For obvious reasons, Governments wish to have control over the total of Government expenditure and the amount of rate support grant, which, in the areas of some authorities, amounts to as much as 90 per cent. of local expenditure, although the average is about 57½ per cent.
  Mr. Fred Evans rose—
  Mrs. Thatcher: I think I should continue. I am generous in giving way but the result is that sometimes I make a longer speech than I would wish because I do not occupy anything like all of it.
  Dame Irene Ward: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. May I ask my right hon. Friend, as she has said that she would finish—
  Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Robert Grant-Ferris): I cannot accept a point of order asking something of a right hon. Friend. A point of order must be addressed to me.
  Mrs. Thatcher: I give way to my hon. Friend.
  Dame Irene Ward: I beg your pardon, Mr. Deputy Speaker. If I may say this to you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, it was the hon. Gentleman opposite who got the pledge from my right hon. Friend, but his Front Bench colleague intervened—
  Mr. Deputy Speaker: There seems to be a misunderstanding as to how we ought to proceed. I think that the right hon. Lady would gladly have given way to the hon. Lady if the hon. Lady had asked for that. That might be, perhaps, the best way to deal with this.
  Mrs. Thatcher: I will gladly give way to my hon. Friend.
  On the question of extra discretion on this particular point, on the understanding that the expenditure was rate-borne, I wanted to give the arguments against that and some indication that for some authorities, as the law stands at present, there could be no such thing as totally rate-borne expenditure which did not rank in some way or other for rate support grant.
  Dame Irene Ward: I am grateful to my right hon. Friend. I was trying to indicate to her that it was the hon. Gentleman opposite to whom she gave

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  the pledge and his priority seemed to be interfered with by his Front Bench. I thought that my right hon. Friend would like to know that she had given a pledge to the hon. Gentleman. I was only trying to be fair to the hon. Gentleman for once.
  Mrs. Thatcher: Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker.
  To return to the Bill, there are four Clauses. Clause 1 retains the free milk for special schools, primary school pupils aged 5, 6 and 7, those with a medical need above that age and generally up to 12 years, except in secondary schools. It also contains the power to sell milk. Together with similar powers for Scotland in Clause 2, but modified according to Scottish practice, altogether some £9 million in a full year will be saved on free school milk. The third Clause is in common form and makes the necessary adjustments to rate support grant.
  We are not arguing about the nutritional value of milk—that is accepted—nor about whether it should be available in the schools—that is accepted; indeed, the Bill gives powers to make it more available in secondary schools than it is now. The argument is about how much should be paid by the parent and how much by the taxpayer, who, of course, in part, is all other parents.
  At present free school milk to primary schools costs £14 million a year. Concerning primary school children, we are spending twice as much on milk as on school books. This seems to indicate another area in which we need more expenditure.
  This short Bill is designed to implement the proposals relating to school milk announced in the White Paper "New Policies for Public Spending". The proposals form part of the Government's plans for establishing more sensible policies for public expenditure and for ensuring that users of social services who can afford to pay more for them should be asked to do so, while those who need more help should be given it. The savings to be effected by the changes in the arrangements for school milk amount to £5·9 million this year but about £9 million in a full year. They are small by comparison with those being achieved in other ways but they nevertheless will help
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  to find the extra resources for improving or replacing our old primary schools.
  On that basis and in that context I commend the Bill to the House.
  4.36 p.m.
  Mr. Edward Short: I have been a Member of the House 20 years this year, 14 of them, unfortunately, with a Tory Government in office. This is the meanest, most unworthy Bill that I have seen in the whole of that time—taking the milk away from the nation's young children. It is mean, squalid and unworthy of a great country. But it is typical of the philosophy of this astounding, pre-Disraeli Government. However, I shall talk about the Government and the Bill later in my speech.
  First, I should like to say a word about the historical background of school milk. It started 49 years ago with an experiment in Birmingham. A pint of milk a day was given to 50 under-nourished children for two months. At the end of that time they had all increased in both height and weight a great deal more than the children without milk. This created very great interest in the early twenties and led to larger-scale experiments, especially those of Boyd-Orr and Cory Mann, and their results confirmed the earlier results.
  In 1927 the National Milk Publicity Council for England and Wales started to provide one-third of a pint a day at a penny per one-third pint, including the straw. By 1933 1 million children were having milk. In 1934 the Milk Act transferred the scheme to the newly-formed Milk Marketing Board, which was subsidised by the Government. That was 37 years ago. One-third of a pint a day was provided at one half-penny for all the children in elementary schools in this country, and it was given free to those from poor homes. So the legislators in this House of 37 years ago were more forward-looking than the present Tory Government.
  Dame Irene Ward: I was here then.
  Mr. Short: By 1939 half the children in State-aided schools were getting milk, and during the Second World War the scheme was extended to private schools.
  The 1944 Act, which is still the bulk of our education law, in Section 49 gave

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  the Minister power to make regulations imposing on local authorities the duty to provide milk. It is this section which this miserable little Bill seeks to amend.
  It is true, as the right hon. Lady has said, that my predecessor in 1968 withdrew milk from the secondary schools. As she has quite rightly said, he consulted the Committee on the Medical Aspects of Food Policy, and it was not able to advise that the withdrawing of milk from secondary schoolchildren would result in any nutritional detriment. But what the right hon. Lady did not say was that the Committee advised that to withdraw it from children below the age of 11 certainly would.
  The right hon. Lady talked about monitoring to the outcome of her Bill. We wonder why the inquiry or monitoring was not done before the decision to withdraw milk was taken. I make two points about this. First, child deprivation in this country is largely concentrated in the old industrial areas of the North. Why has no area north of Sheffield been chosen? Sheffield is in South Yorkshire, in the Midlands. Why have no schools in Tyneside or Mersey-side or elswhere in the North been chosen? We shall not regard it as valid monitoring if no schools from the Northern development areas are included.
  Second—perhaps the Minister who is to reply will give direct attention to this—will the Government give an undertaking to reinstate free milk if the monitoring shows that general standards of nutrition are affected by the withdrawal of milk? Will the Government report to Parliament after a reasonable period of monitoring, and will they undertake that, if the monitoring shows that nutritional standards among children between the ages of 7 and 11 have suffered, free milk will be reinstated? We want a direct answer to that question.
  The hon. Member for Worcestershire, South (Sir G. Nabarro) asked about the quantities of milk consumed. At present, 36 million gallons are consumed in a school year. If the Bill is passed, that figure will be reduced to 15 million gallons. The right hon. Lady said that the cost to the farmer was 1 per cent. The Milk Marketing Board has estimated that the cost to the farmer will be £5 million a year. The Tory proposals will reduce the number of children receiving
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  free milk from the present 5 million to 2·1 million, a reduction of 2·9 million among 7 to 11-year-olds, in order to save £9 million.
  I repeat what I said in the last debate on this subject this amount, together with the increased charge for school meals, saves exactly the £38 million which is needed for tax relief on higher earned incomes. The source of that is col. 1391 of HANSARD of 30th March, 1971, the Chancellor's Budget Statement, in which he gave that figure. The higher earned incomes, be it remembered, are incomes in excess of £4,005 a year. I shall quote several passages from the Tory document, "A Better Tomorrow"—I am a constant reader of it—but at this point I take these words:
  "We will reduce taxation…. These reductions will be possible because we will cut out unnecessary Government spending."
  Sir G. Nabarro: Hear, hear.
  Mr. Short: Here is a reduction of £38 million in taxation on earned incomes of £4,000-plus a year, paid for entirely by withdrawing milk from primary schools, and increasing the price of school dinners.
  There is another reason why the Government have withdrawn milk from primary schools which may have escaped a great many people, and I shall come to that later. What it amounts to is that in Tory philosophy, the philosophy of this astounding Government, the provision of milk to 7 to 11-year-olds is unnecessary public expenditure.
  How unnecessary is it? The right hon. Lady said that this debate was not about the nutritional value of milk. On the contrary. It is precisely about the nutritional value of milk. I shall quote the comments of a number of people, and the hon. Member for Worcestershire, South need not scoff at that because I shall include a quotation from his weekend speech.
  Professor John Yudkin, of the University of London, said:
  "The simplest and most economic way of ensuring that children contain the diet necessary to promote health is to make sure that they get a good supply of milk each day".
  In July, 1960, in the House of Lords, Lord Hailsham—in his previous incarnation—said:
  "One of the main reasons perhaps, for the remarkable improvement in children's health in recent years has been the access of children

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  to reasonable supplies of fresh liquid milk."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, House of Lords, 14th July, 1960; Vol. 225, c. 327.]
  Lord Boothby, discussing the Budget proposals in November last year, said:
  "What is beyond dispute is that, as a result of these proposals "—
  that is, the Chancellor's Budget—
  "a great deal less milk is going to be drunk by a great many more children in this country. Nobody can tell me that that will be a good thing for the rising generation."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, House of Lords, 17th November, 1970; Vol. 312, c. 1005.]
  Winston Churchill said:
  "There is no finer investment for any community than pushing milk into babies".
  This weekend, the hon. Member for Worcestershire, South said:
  "Spend less on booze and more on the kids".
  Sir G. Nabarro: No, not this weekend, and the right hon. Gentleman has the terminology wrong, too. I said:
  "Spend less in the boozer and more on the kids".
  I said it in the House of Commons, and then I went and broadcast in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, in the right hon. Gentleman's constituency, and repeated it for good measure.
  Mr. Short: I am obliged to the hon. Gentleman. I have repeated it again for good measure in the House of Commons.
  Sir G. Nabarro: A splendid maxim.
  Mr. Short: Milk is the most nearly perfect food because it has a better balance of all the essential nutrients than has any other single food. The right hon. Lady referred to the published recommendations of the Department of Health and Social Security regarding nutrients for various age groups. That report said that foods supplying one-sixth of one's daily requirements of a nutrient were a reasonable source of nutrients, and it went on to say that a pint of milk a day supplied to 7 to 9-year-old boys or girls provided 18 per cent. of the calories, 34 per cent. of the protein, 136 per cent. of the calcium, 4 per cent. of the iron, 55 per cent. of the vitamin A, 25 per cent. of the thiamine, 47·5 per cent. of the niacin, 85 per cent. of the riboflavine, and 42 per cent. of the vitamin C, of the recommended daily intake, according to the Government's own figures. Milk, therefore, is a major source of the daily intake
  60
  of nutrients which the Government themselves say are necessary.
  The right hon. Lady referred to the inquiry being carried out at Queen Elizabeth College in the University of London. It is true that this is an inquiry being carried out on behalf of the National Dairy Council into the feeding habits of children, but I do not think that the right hon. Lady or the members of the Department who commented on it would wish to impugn the integrity of researchers of the competence and experience of Dr. Lynch and Dr. de la Paz. They interviewed 4,382 children in 21 local education authority areas, and their interim report, as the right hon. Lady said, was published in September last year.
  That report revealed many gravely disturbing facts about the dietary pattern and health of our children. It said, for example—the right hon. Lady did not cite this or any of these figures—that 18 per cent. of 10 and 11-year-old children have diets deficient in calcium. This Bill, when it becomes law, will, it is estimated, increase the extent of that deficiency to 34 per cent. Further, 28 per cent. of children aged 10 and 11 have deficiencies in riboflavine. If the Bill becomes law, it will, it is estimated, increase the extent of that deficiency to 39 per cent. of all our children.
  Out of the 4.300 children, only 32 per cent. had satisfactory diets; 57 per cent. had unsatisfactory diets; and 11 per cent. had extremely poor diets. This interim report should cause great concern to all of us, but not the kind of concern which was expressed in the arrogant comments last Thursday at Question Time by the hon. Member for Derbyshire, South-East (Mr. Rost), who has left the Chamber. I see that the hon. Gentleman got into the "Sayings of the Week" in the Observer newspaper on Sunday.
  Mr. Raphael Tuck: Is not my right hon. Friend surprised that the Government are allowing even children up to the age of seven free school milk in view of that astounding statement by the hon. Gentleman, with which the Secretary of State had the audacity to agree; namely, that if people could not feed their own children they should not have them?
  Mr. Short: That is what the hon. Gentleman said. It does not surprise me.

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  Nothing surprises me about this Government. I think that the present schemes for both milk and dinners are on their way out.
  I have talked about the results revealed in the interim report, but what should be appreciated by the right hon. Lady is that the pattern of malnutrition is changing in this country and in western countries generally. Increased affluence over the years may—indeed does—make more nutritional foods available, but we live in the age of the ad-man, so popular with the Conservative Party, the man who can sell the inferior product by persuading people that it is a superior product. That is how the Tory Government got elected. It is the ad-man who dominates our society, using modern media, highly sophisticated advertising techniques and modern psychological discoveries. People are persuaded by the adman to buy nutritionally less desirable foods. Professor Yudkin has pointed out that part of the problem of child nutrition today is "the malnutrition of affluence"—not of poverty—and it reveals itself in obesity among children, in Billy Bunters, rather than in the rickets in which it revealed itself when I was a young teacher in the 1930s.
  With 800,000 unemployed, and probably 2 million of the nation's children just above the bare subsistence level under this Government, there is the 1930-type of malnutrition as well. We have the malnutrition of poverty, the inability to buy the highly nutritional foods available. The Bill leaves them completely untouched. Poverty is not one of the entitlements to free milk under the Bill, as in the case of dinners.
  Mrs. Thatcher: Entitlement goes wider, to any child who has a medical need for a supply of free school milk whom the school medical officer certifies as being in need. So it goes wider than poverty.
  Mr. Short: Is the right hon. Lady saying that the medical officer can use poverty as one of the criteria for deciding? That is not what the Bill says. All I am saying is that poverty in the home is not one of the two criteria for free milk under the Bill.
  Let me return again to that very revealing document, "A Better Tomorrow". It says:
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  "A better tomorrow for all; for the families that are homeless … for the unemployed, for the children still in poverty."
  Then the Minister takes away their milk. A better tomorrow for our children who are still in poverty indeed! How cynical, how unprincipled can the Government get—putting that kind of stuff out in an election manifesto and then taking away the milk for children of seven? The right hon. Lady says that she is doing something new and grand that the Labour Government never did, enabling children to buy milk in schools.
  Mr. Raphael Tuck: Those who can afford it.
  Mr. Short: I will tell the right hon. Lady the true position. The average family is rather more than two, but let us assume that it is two. I remind the right hon. Lady that there are 800,000 unemployed, and after what we have heard today there will be many more in the near future. If the unemployed family with two children at primary school wishes to have the milk, it will have to pay 20p, 4s., a week. That is taking the Milk Marketing Board figure of 2p. Today, in Tory Britain, hundreds of thousands of families cannot afford another 4s. a week. There is no margin at all. Four shillings a week is a fortune; it would upset the weekly budget completely.
  Mr. Raphael Tuck: The Tories do not understand.
  Mr. Short: No, but the Government must save this money to provide incentives for the man with more than £4,005 a year. There has never been a better example of Robin Hood in reverse, of taking money from the poor and giving it to the affluent.
  The only answer to both kinds of malnutrition among children—the malnutrition of affluence and the malnutrition of poverty—is to ensure that our children get more nutritious food, and in a free society, about the only way public action can do this is by encouraging them to take more milk and nutritious, well-balanced school dinners, and it is wrong to encourage sugar-rich drinks which I understand the right hon. Lady wants to encourage, and stodgy, unsuitable, makeshift mid-day meals. We know all about those in the House. What a pity that

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  the right hon. Lady, or the Prime Minister, did not tell the electorate last June that pop and chips were to be the staple diet for millions of our children in the "better tomorrow"!
  I want to talk about another aspect of this matter—an extremely disquieting one—before I say a word about the Bill. "A Better Tomorrow" says:
  "We will create a climate for free enterprise to expand."
  You're telling us! We have heard a great deal about hiving off, the sale of Thomas Cook, and so on, and the shameful payoff to the brewers for their donation to the Tory Party funds, by handling over to them the pubs in Carlisle. Has it occurred to hon. Members that what is being done in school meals and milk is a part of the same pattern, the same plan?
  Clearly, the Secretary of State has set out deliberately to end the school meals service run by the local education authorities. There can be no other conclusion. The right hon. Lady shakes her head, but she confirmed to me last Thursday that it is her intention eventually to charge the economic cost for school dinners. A few weeks ago she told me that the cost was 17p., 3s. 4d. Eventually the school dinner is to cost 4s. or 5s. Does she think that anybody except the most affluent members of society will buy the school dinner at that price? She confirmed that, and told me that she had told me before that she would do it. She repeated it last Thursday. She has said that she will charge the full economic cost for school dinners. In my view, with a fair bit of experience of school dinners, that will end the service as we know it.
  Now we have the ending of free milk for all, except the under-sevens. Does not this open up vast opportunities for private enterprise to step in? Of course it does. This is not very fanciful. I have in my possession a report prepared by Maynard Potts Associates, which says:
  "That gradual withdrawal of State support for milk and meals in school could have grave consequences for the nation's children if the business world fails to recognise the opportunities being offered for participation in the services."
  It goes on to quote the right hon. Lady:
  "… recently in a speech by the Secretary of State there was an invitation to education committees to combine with commercial caterers
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  in supplying a much wider variety of meals and snacks."
  I missed that one. Do I understand that the right hon. Lady has invited local authorities to combine with commercial caterers?
  The report goes on to make elaborate proposals about the cost of the meals, about the variety of meals, from snacks to super meals, at a variety of prices to suit a variety of pockets. That is the "better Britain", the "better tomorrow".
  It then says:
  "From the publicity point of view these proposals could be presented as an attempt to save the children of the country from the effects of the gradual disintegration of the school milk service."
  Goodness gracious me! The standards of morality of some sections of private enterprise leave one staggered.
  It goes on to say:
  "Financially there is a total market of some hundreds of millions of pounds … if local authorities accept a commercial solution to milk and meals in schools, they might be equally willing to consider using the same suppliers for milk and meals in the hospital service."
  How nice! Is that what the right hon. Lady was talking about last Thursday when she said that the whole meals service was under review—to see what other pickings there were in the schools for the friends of the Tory Party? Is that what she was talking about?
  This mean, nasty little Bill is being introduced, first, to give more money to the £4,000-a-year-plus taxpayer, and second, to create more commercial opportunities for the people who finance the Tory Party. Let me deal with this Measure for a moment. I shall not discuss its details, because we shall have some weeks and months in Committee to do that.
  The Bill will make the supplying of free milk by a local education authority unlawful for children over seven unless they are in a special school, or unless a medical officer of the authority signs a certificate to say that "their health requires it". There are two things that I should point out. First, only a local authority which is a local education authority is forbidden to supply free milk. Therefore, there is nothing to prevent a local authority which it not a local education authority from doing so. It follows from that that all the Inner London

  65
  boroughs, the county districts, and the G.L.C., on behalf of the Outer London boroughs, may use their free penny powers under the 1963 Act—which is what the right hon. Lady was referring to—to supply free milk. That being so, on behalf of my right hon. and hon. Friends on this side of the House I invite all those local authorities to continue to supply free milk after 1st September, to pay for it in that way if the Bill becomes law, and to explain to their ratepayers why they are being forced to finance it in that way.
  In view of the mass of evidence about the nutritional needs and feeding habits of children, it could now surely be held that all children between the ages of 7 and 11 need this milk. I hope, therefore, that there will be found medical officers who are prepared to certify all children between the ages of 7 and 11 in their areas as being in need of milk.
  The Under-Secretary of State for Health and Education, Scottish Office (Mr. Edward Taylor): Shocking.
  Mr. Short: It is shocking to stop the supply of free milk to children. I remember the speeches of the hon. Member for Glasgow, Cathcart (Mr. Edward Taylor). This is the most shocking Bill brought in by a shocking Government in their first year of office.
  Mr. Taylor: Will the right hon. Gentleman explain why, when the Labour Party abolished the supply of milk for all children in secondary schools, no provision of any kind was made for children who might need it on medical grounds?
  Mr. Short: If the hon. Gentleman had been listening to my speech, he would have known the answer to that. We consulted the committee which exists to advise the Government on this issue. The Tory Government did not do that. It is no good the right hon. Lady saying that she had consultations. She did not have consultations with the committee before announcing this Measure.
  Mrs. Thatcher: We took into account the advice received informally from the Chief Medical Officer, which was confirmed by his committee on 3rd November, 1970.
  Mr. Short: The right hon. Lady seems to forget that I was in her chair a year
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  ago. I know that she invites all kinds of people into her room in Curzon Street and gets her advice from them. I am talking about the independent committee which is there to advise the Government, not about one of her paid officers.
  Local authorities have been pressing the Government—if they intend to persist in this legislation—to amend it to allow them to continue to supply milk and pay for it from the rates. The right hon. Lady has refused to allow that. I wrote to ask her whether she would allow that to be done, and she replied that she would not. The Association of Education Committees has joined in. Sir William Alexander, its secretary, who is not unknown to the right hon. Lady, said:
  "The fact that the Government has decided that it is not prepared to finance the provision of milk for children of 7 surely does not mean that it must forbid a local education authority to do so at its own expense."
  But that is precisely what the Government are doing. So much for a "better tomorrow."
  In "A Better Tomorrow" the Government said:
  "The Government in Whitehall is overloaded, and as a result people in the regions grow increasingly impatient about the decisions being made in London which they know could be better made locally. Under our new style of government, we will devolve government power so that more decisions are made locally."
  Local authorities want to decide whether to supply free milk, or not. Why does Whitehall know better than the town hall? If local authorities are prepared to go to their electors and levy a penny rate, or whatever it is, to pay for this milk, why should they not be allowed to do so?
  "A Better Tomorrow" goes on to say:
  "The independence of local authorities has been seriously eroded by Labour Ministers. On many issues, particularly in education and housing, they have deliberately overridden the views of elected councillors. We think it wrong that the balance of power between central and local government should have been distorted, and we will redress the balance and increase the independence of local authorities."
  I shall not embarrass the right hon. Lady by quoting all the things that she said in the same vein during the debate on Circular 10/65 and during the debate on school dinners, but, clearly, this promise to local authorities was another

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  promise that was never meant to be taken seriously. Just how cynical can the Conservative Party get in the pursuit of power?
  I end as I began. This is a thoroughly mean Bill, brought in by a thoroughly mean and discredited Government who in one short year have lost the support of the nation and are detested by fair-minded people throughout the country. They have no mandate for the Bill. There is not a word in their manifesto about withdrawing the supply of milk to young children. The Bill is a denial of the Government's electoral protestations about protecting the poor and the under-privileged. The Government's stubborn refusal to give local authorities freedom in this manner turns into yet another squalid confidence trick all their talk about freedom for local government. It is just another promise that was never meant to be taken seriously. I ask the House to reject this mean and squalid Bill.
  5.10 p.m.
  Sir Brandon Rhys Williams: I have listened with interest to the remarks of the right hon. Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Central (Mr. Edward Short). I had hoped to hear from him positive solutions to the problems of cash and health that face us. Although he weighed into the Bill, I had hoped to hear from him something more constructive.
  It is likely to be true that we are faced with a nutritional problem among our schoolchildren; it would be surprising if it were not so. Children should be guided in what they consume in the light of the most recent advances of medical knowledge. We must all admit that some, and possibly a high proportion, of the milk sold for school children is not consumed by children. I am not suggesting that there is any malpractice, but one sees outside schools many milk bottles which are not empty, and this suggests that there is a need to persuade children to consume the food which it is in their best interests to consume. I willingly concede that we have a continuing health education problem, and I ask myself to what extent health education is related to the cash background of education, and how the problem should be tackled. No
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  doubt it is a question partly of advice to parents, partly of advice to teachers and partly of supervision.
  The right hon. Gentleman said that this was a little Bill, and, indeed, it covers only a tiny section of the entire welfare State, but it is of great interest to hon. Members on both sides of the House because it once again raises the question of who is paying what to whom and why. I have tried to interest the House—and I am sure I have often bored the House—in the question of the cash relationship between the individual and the State. However much we may shun this question of who is paying what to whom and why, we inevitably come back to it when considering the reform of our social services. We should try to fight our way through to a principle to be applied consistently across the board, not in one sphere or another, and there is no reason why we should not apply it to school milk.
  Is the Welfare State as we wish it to be based on a cash relationship between the individual and the State, or is it based on the old-fashioned principle of truck? Should goods and services be supplied to the recipients, or should people be in a position to purchase them for themselves? In this century of the common man and of universal suffrage, the ideal relationship is one in which everybody is equal. We do not want two classes of citizens, those who are able to pay for themselves and those who are not. There are two solutions to the dilemma of two classes. Everyone can be brought down to the situation in which they have to accept truck, or everybody can be brought up into the situation where they are able to pay for themselves, and that is the right solution in the 20th century. I hope that we shall achieve one nation in which everyone is able to pay his own way. I recognise that that situation has not yet arrived and, therefore, the nation must exercise itself to assist those who are not able to meet their bills. Where will the money come from, and by what routes will it reach its destination? For instance, should the rates be the source of money for education?
  The Allen Report on the Impact of Rates on Households which was published in 1965 contained the interesting comment that in 1939 the yield from rates was substantially larger than the

  69
  yield from National Insurance contributions. But by the time the Allen Committee was considering the figures in the middle-1960s, rates had begun to taper off as a source of revenue, whereas National Insurance contributions were bounding upwards. The reason is that National Insurance contributions are a tax on those who are actively creating wealth at the time they pay the tax, whereas rates are a tax on all sections of the community, including those who are retired and those who are managing on relatively fixed incomes. The rates are not a buoyant source of revenue whereas, using the comparison made by the Allen Report, National Insurance contributions are buoyant.
  The lesson I draw from this is that we are asking local authorities to pay for too much and we must look again at the whole question of local authority finance. Education is one of the largest items in local authorities' bills. In the Royal Borough of Kensington, part of which I have the honour to represent, the average ratepayer pays £100 a year towards the cost of education. This may be exceptional, but, if we are to find more money for the benefit of school children, it shows that it is scarcely possible to raise it from the rates.
  I think my right hon. Friend would confirm that what is at the back of her mind in bringing forward the Bill is that the cash available for the benefit of children of school age is limited, and, therefore, scources of cash must be found. We need to assist local authorities. All over the country there is a sense of dissatisfaction, a sense that local authorities are not spending enough on the environment, on police and on the many things we expect local authorities to do. But we cannot ask local authorities, to increase the rates any more; they have come to a sticking point; their bills are mounting and their sources of revenue are not. I do not think that much more can be done by giving subsidies to local authorities from central Government. We must examine the bills which local authorities have to meet and remove those items which we no longer feel are necessarily the province of the local authorities.
  My specific suggestion is that the cost of education should be taken away from local authorities altogether. Where, then,
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  should that cost go? Parents should no longer be regarded as second-rate citizens who are unable to pay for what they want and, therefore, have to be issued with it in the form of truck. They should be brought to a position where they can pay for themselves. If the money is to come from the parents and not from the rates, any subsidy that is necessary will have to come from the taxpayer.
  We have at least four major forms of child subsidy—and there are many minor ones. The four major ones are tax allowances in the income tax system, family allowances, family income supplements, which start in two months' time, and National Insurance assistance for families who receive assistance under the National Insurance system. These are four major systems of child income support which are largely superfluous. In saying "superfluous", I am not denying that assistance is needed; but am saying that it is not necessary to have the quadruple accounting which we now have. Education, school milk, and so on, provide yet further subsidies for children in the form of truck.
  There is an element of unfairness here, in that those parents who do not draw the benefit of State education for their children are still called upon to make a contribution, although they may be struggling to find the money to pay for the education of their children themselves. I recognise that there will be hon. Gentlemen opposite who would like to see private sector education wiped out altogether, but, if they reflect, they will realise that it cannot be in the interests of education as a whole that the private sector should be wiped out. If they reflect upon this they may also realise that it would be in the best interests of the parents that they should all be first-class citizens and that all of them should be in a position to pay for their children's education.
  It would be a healthy relationship in the long run between parents and teachers if the parents were paying for the services they receive and not receiving them in the form of truck. Various systems have been considered for putting parents in a position to pay their school bills. A voucher system has been canvassed. There are advantages which many have

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  recognised but there are also disadvantages, some of which I admit have some force. There is a growing degree of examination of negative income tax, although I am not specially attracted to the schemes of negative income tax which have been canvassed in this country and the United States. There are systems of positive tax credits, tax allowances for taxpayers and so on.
  It would be stretching matters too far if I were to attempt to examine these questions further under the heading of this Bill, but I was anxious to make this contribution because it would be quite wrong for this small Bill to be regarded as being aside from the whole question of the financing of the social services in future. I do not think that this Bill represents the final solution to the matter. [Interruption.] I knew that I would win agreement in the end from hon. Gentlemen opposite. I do not consider that it ends the matter, and from the remarks of the right hon. Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Central, it seems quite clear that it does not.
  Speaking for myself, I consider it to be a step in a direction in which we must move if we are to establish parents as first-class citizens in all levels of society. It is for that reason that I shall give my support to my right hon. Friend if the House is called upon to divide.
  5.22 p.m.
  Mr. R. C. Mitchell: May I first of all say how pleasant it is to be back in the House after my "sabbatical year." I must point out this is not a maiden speech. As one of my hon. Friends reminded me a minute ago, one cannot be a virgin twice. Because it is not a maiden speech I can be controversial; indeed, I would find it impossible to make a speech on this subject without being controversial. My main difficulty is to find parliamentary language with which to describe the Bill and to remain within the bounds of order.
  Perhaps I may be non-controversial for a moment. It is appropriate that my first speech as Member of Parliament for Southampton, Itchen should be made on the subject of education because both my illustrious predecessors who sat as Members for that constituency were educationists. Older Members of the House
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  will remember the late Ralph Morley, and I know that he, had he been here today, would have been on his feet about this Bill because if anyone fought for children anywhere it was Ralph Morley, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Central (Mr. Edward Short) knows. My immediate predecessor, Lord Maybray-King, whom I remember as a member of Hampshire County Council, fighting on the education committee of that council for improved conditions for children, also has a great love of children.
  I can only describe this Bill as mean and despicable. If the right hon. Lady will look behind her for a moment perhaps she can say where all those young, decent, liberal Tories who used to take part in the education debates in the last Parliament have gone? They are conspicuous by their absence. Quite a large number of her hon. Friends will be reluctant to go through the Lobby tonight in support of the Bill. Most of what I wanted to say has been said in an excellent speech by my right hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Central but there are one or two points I wish to emphasise.
  The first thing that worries me is the provision in the Bill whereby those who are classified by a medical officer of health as being in need of milk are entitled to receive free milk.
  I was watching the right hon. Lady on television one Sunday evening last year trying to explain away how it is possible for children not to know that a child is having free school meals. She came up with this absurd idea of a child putting money into an envelope, handing it over to a teacher and the teacher handing it back with the same coins in it. As a teacher, I have never heard such nonsense. If she really thinks that this sort of thing can occur and that it can be kept from other children, then she does not know anything about children and schools.
  If some child is to have free milk it will be classified as a sick or sickly child, and children, particularly young children can be very cruel, albeit unintentionally. They will see someone having free school milk and say "You must be sick."
  I remember in the last Parliament speeches coming from the then Opposition, accusing the then Government of

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  taking away freedom from local authorities. Yet this Bill contains a Clause which expressly forbids local authorities from providing free school milk if they wish to do so. My local authority is Tory-controlled, and so it would probably not want to, but there are some education authorities which would be only too pleased to pay for school milk out of the rates. If ever there was a Measure reducing the power of local authorities to do what they want to do according to local conditions, then this is it.
  Local conditions do arise here. It is probably more important that free milk should be maintained for children in certain areas of the North and other industrial areas than in some other parts of the country. There may be medical evidence to support this. If so, let us have a compromise. Let us say that those local authorities which wish to continue paying to provide free school milk may do so. I see no objection to this. I hope that the Government will give way on this, at least. In the last year, at school and at home, I have watched this Government make one blunder after another, but I think that this is the silliest and meanest act of all. It is significant that the first piece of educational legislation in this Parliament is a Measure to take away school milk.
  5.28 p.m.
  Mr. Charles Curran: Let me begin by saying something to the hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. R. C. Mitchell) which may shock him.
  If I had to approach this question without any preconceptions I would be in favour of free school milk and free meals to all children in all State schools. I very much wish that when we created our education service we had done exactly that. I would like to see State schools run, in that respect anyway, on very much the same basis as the public schools. The public schools undertake to feed the children and they send the bill to the parents. They do not attempt to put any charge upon meals or milk at the point of consumption. Ideally this is how I should like to see our State education system run. But we do not run it on that basis. We run it on a basis which makes every Opposition speech to which I have listened reek of humbug.
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  The right hon. Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Central (Mr. Edward Short) made a speech which reached a new depth in humbug, and I wish not simply to say so but to point out why I say so. The root fact which underlies this debate—and the right hon. Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Central, who was Secretary of State for Education and Science, should know this—is that we can spend a certain sum on education. That sum is necessarily limited. I suppose it is about £2,500 million a year. Whatever sum we spend on education is bound to be limited. The question must therefore be asked: how can we most effectively allocate this limited sum? If we take from it money to spend on school meals we shall necessarily be able to spend less on other things. If we spend more money on school meals, we must spend less on school buildings or teachers' salaries.
  Mr. Kenneth Marks: By what is expenditure on education limited?
  Mr. Curran: It is limited by precisely the same limitation which applies to every other form of public expenditure—by how rich the country is and how much it can afford to spend on schools, pensions, roads, hospitals or any of the other things on which we spend money. It is idle for us to talk as though the amount of money available for education is limited.
  The right hon. Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Central should have a firm grasp of that fact. He should know better than most of us that the amount of money available for education is limited. He should face more readily than the rest of us the question of the most effective method of using this limited sum. Is it better to use it by increasing the amount of money which we allocate to school meals and milk, or is it better to spend more on teachers' salaries? The right hon. Gentleman knows very well that we cannot have it both ways. If we spend more in one direction, we must spend less in another.
  Mr. R. C. Mitchell: Why not knock £9 million off the cost of Concorde, for example?
  Mr. Curran: The right hon. Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Central made a comparison of that kind to which I want to refer later.
  It is always possible—this is elementary, and we as politicians know it—to say, whatever choice is made in spending money, that a different choice should have been made. Anyone can say, "You should not have done that; you should have done this." That has been the substance of many debates in the House, and no doubt it will be the substance of many more. But we should ignore that sort of debating society argument. I do not employ it, and I hope that nobody else will employ it.
  What is the best way of spending the £2,500 million which we spend on education? Is it better to increase the amount which we allocate to school milk and meals? Before anybody says "Yes", he must face the consequence, which is to reduce the allocations made to other things. There is no escape from that, but the right hon. Gentleman completely ignored it. If he wishes to interrupt, perhaps I can tempt him to do so. We are spending a certain amount of money on school milk and meals. I should like us to spend more. I should like us to spend enough to make school milk and meals free to all children in State schools. How much would it cost? I put that question to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State only last week. The answer was £275 million a year.
  Mr. Marks: Sixpence off income tax!
  Mr. Curran: I suppose that the point, if that is the right word, of the Opopsi-tion's argument is that it is wrong to charge anything for school milk and meals. The underlying assumption is that school milk and meals should be free. Nobody said so, and certainly the Labour Government never dreamed of making them free. But now that the Labour Party is in opposition it is prepared to talk in this way.
  I want the right hon. Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Central to answer a plain question. If he believes that we should spend £275 million, which we are not spending now, on making milk and meals in schools free, in what area of educational expenditure does he suggest we should economise? Would he take it
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  off teachers' salaries or school buildings? It is idle for him to argue the one unless he is prepared to answer the other, and anyone who has been a Minister should not debate in that fashion.
  Mr. Edward Short: I said nothing about £275 million. This Bill aims at saving £9 million. It will impose a charge on the farmers of £5 million. Therefore, we are talking of resources of about £4 million. Anything else is out of order.
  Mr. Curran: I was asking the right hon. Gentleman to face the point of principle underlying this debate.
  Mr. Short: What does the hon. Gentleman know about principle?
  Mr. Curran: The right hon. Gentleman, with his usual courtesy and assumption of moral superiority, seems to be determined to leave Mr. Pecksniff nowhere when it comes to debating and chooses to be discourteous while sitting down. His assumption of moral superiority is nothing less than humbug. I do not regard him as being competent to lay down the law about ethics or behaviour. He has no qualification for doing so.
  Sir G. Nabarro: Hear, hear.
  Mr. Curran: We on this side are just as honest—and perhaps I might even go so far as to say as intelligent—as the right hon. Gentleman. He has no right to assume that he has a monopoly of moral feeling or of compassion about children. Equally he has no right to evade the question of principle and substance which underlies this debate.
  It is proposed by the Bill to save a certain amount on school milk and meals—about £38 million a year. The question which I have put to the right hon. Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Central applies just as much to this limited sum of £38 million as it does to the sum of £275 million. If he says it is wrong to save £38 million by these measures, would he tell us where he would save £38 million in other areas of educational expenditure? Would he knock £38 million off school building? Would he knock it off teachers' salaries? I say again, he really must, as anyone having been a Minister of Education ought to, be prepared to face the financial realities of the matter. So long as the

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  amount of money which is available for education is limited, every Minister of Education must ask, "What is the most effective way in which I can spend it? What is the most effective way, from the standpoint of the children, in which I can spend it?"
  Mr. Ernest Armstrong: The hon. Gentleman must really come to the issue. He said, first, that he believes that all children should have free milk in schools. I leave aside the question of meals. If he really believes that, he cannot argue that because all children cannot have it we should take it away from the over 7 and 8-year-olds. I want to come to what is really his main argument. His right hon. Friend has never said that this Bill is introduced because the Chancellor has given her a limited amount of money. It is being introduced because the Government want to reduce taxation by reducing unnecessary public expenditure. Therefore the hon. Gentleman must address himself to this question, if he believes in free milk for everybody and free meals to children under 11 years old: what unnecessary public expenditure ought to be saved in order to reward the surtax payers?
  Mr. Curran: The hon. Gentleman has really not seized the point. I think my right hon. Friend is entitled to make certain assumptions that we understand certain things and, therefore, she is not required at every stage of her argument to spell out everything in words of one syllable, and, therefore, is not required to state that a Minister of Education has only a limited amount of money to spend on education. Does that really require to be asserted or to be proved? Always the amount of money to spend on education is limited. It is bound to be limited. My right hon. Friend has to face the question, as her predecessor had to face the question: "With this limited sum available, in which way shall I spend it? Is it better to increase the amount we spend on school milk or school meals?" If she replies, "Yes, it is", then she is bound to diminish the amount of money she has to spend in other areas of education.
  What I have been trying to do, so far with a complete lack of success, is to discover from the Opposition, and in par-
  78
  ticular from the right hon. Gentleman, in what areas of education he would engage in cuts. Where would he make them? Unless he is prepared to face that, all those assertions about children and milk, and all this attempt to appeal to our feelings, are completely beside the point. They do not really bear at all upon the argument in which we are engaged.
  The Minister is entitled to say, "I have this limited global sum available to me, and I am going to distribute it in the way which, in my judgment, is best for the children." She may be wrong—certainly, any judgment of this kind is always open to argument—but my right hon. Friend is at least entitled to credit for making the judgment which she regards as the right one. She knows, as we all know, that any such judgment is always open to criticism, and to the criticism that it is wrong.
  Mr. Fred Evans: Surely, the judgment was made not by the right hon. Lady but by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. When he took sixpence off the income tax he had to get it back from the kids. This is the argument. If he had not done that none of this would have happened.
  Mr. Curran: This, of course, is a classic example of what we call the false equation, the oldest device in all the history of demogoguery. It has been going on for a couple of thousand years. The right hon. Gentleman the Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Central employed it, and now another hon. Gentleman over there is taking it up. This is the oldest of all the stock devices open to the rabble rouser, who selects a certain amount of money and purports to compare it with another sum of money whether or not the two sums have any connection at all; in such an argument that consideration does not arise at all. The question which has to be faced here is not a demogogic question about changes in taxation. The question which has got to be faced here is that with a global sum of £2,500 million, which is approximately what we now allocate to education, a larger sum than ever before allocated to education, how, in her judgment, does my right hon. Friend consider that it is best to spend it? Is it better to spend a larger proportion on all the things which need to

  79
  be done in our schools and a smaller proportion on cheap meals? That is what the debate is about.
  It is not enough for the Opposition to say that it is wrong to save £38 million in the way it is proposed to save it unless they are prepared to go on and say how else they would save £38 million—whether they would knock it off teachers' salaries or school buildings. Unless they are prepared to tell us that, I suggest that the whole attack we are getting from the Opposition is intellectually dishonest, and it comes with particular dishonesty from the right hon. Gentleman who was Minister of Education, because when he was Minister of Education he had to make precisely these choices. He knows, even if his back bench supporters do not know, that every Minister has to make them. He made them. So did his Labour predecessors when they faced the question which my right hon. Friend faces now. They took the action which they are rather anxious that we should now forget. They were perfectly willing to abolish free milk in secondary schools. Did anybody attack that? They were perfectly willing to increase the price of school meals.
  Sir G. Nabarro: Yes, it was attacked at the time. I will not weary the House by reading out the appropriate passages because I hope later on to catch the eye of the Chair, but on 20th February, 1968, the then Chief Secretary to the Treasury tried very hard to justify the withdrawal of free milk in secondary schools, and he used the term "reluctantly" on several occasions and made great play with nutritional grounds and associated matters. It was, of course, attacked from the Labour benches. It was not attacked by the Tories for reasons which I hope to give later on, but it was heavily attacked from the Labour benches, and that underlines twice over the gross hypocrisy of the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Central (Mr. Edward Short).
  Mr. Curran: Of course, the Labour Party behaves in one way when in power and acts in a completely different way when it is not in power. As my hon. Friend has reminded me, it does not lie in the mouth of any Labour Member to criticise my right hon. Friend, because the Labour Party in office did about school milk and school meals exactly the
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  things which we are now told are intolerable and outrageous and which no Government should do.
  I therefore urge my right hon. Friend to base herself upon the financial realities. I do not suppose it gives her any great pleasure to suggest, any more than it gives me pleasure to support, this proposal. I get no particular pleasure from supporting it, I say at once. None at all. I get no particular pleasure from supporting any increase in charges for school meals or any interference with the supply of milk to schools. None whatever. If we are faced with the question, as we are, "Shall we do this, or shall be make economies elsewhere in education?"—and that is the question—then I am prepared to say, with reluctance, that I will support this Bill.
  My right hon. Friend is entitled to demand an answer from her critics to the question, "If this method of allocating the money is wrong, please tell me how I should allocate it and where I should cut expenditure?" Unless the critics are prepared to answer that—and so far they have shrunk from doing so—I invite my right hon. Friend to ignore the attacks as being empty and fraudulent.
  Sir G. Nabarro: Would my hon. Friend permit me to intervene before he sits down?
  Mr. Deputy Speaker: May I ask the hon. Member for Uxbridge (Mr. Curran) whether he has concluded his speech?
  Mr. Curran: I was giving way to my hon. Friend.
  Sir G. Nabarro: I am, as always, deeply grateful for your protection, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I was trying to assist the admirable case put forward by my hon. Friend by drawing his attention to the OFFICIAL REPORT of 26th February, 1967, which deals with Clause 3 of the Public Expenditure and Receipts Bill in relation to school milk. The then hon. Member for Reading, Mr. John Lee, moved the following Amendment:
  "Provided that in no case shall the provisions of this subsection apply to a pupil whose parent or guardian or other responsible person is in receipt of unemployment benefit or has been in such receipt at any time during the past twelve months."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 26th February, 1968; Vol. 759, c. 1048.]
  If ever there was an admirable case for discriminatory treatment on behalf of the

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  needy, I suggest that the parents are in this situation, and that this surely should have been conceded by the Labour Government at the time. On the contrary, the then Under-Secretary of State rejected the Amendment—
  Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. I realise that the hon. Gentleman has the Floor of the House, but I am sure he will agree with me that it is customary to make interventions as short as possible, especially as he has said he hopes to catch my eye later.
  Sir G. Nabarro: I apologise, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I have quoted that passage, and I hope that my hon. Friend will carry on from there, since it underlines the crass and gross hypocrisy of the Labour Party.
  Mr. Curran: My hon. Friend the Member for Worcestershire, South (Sir G. Nabarro) thinks that it is necessary for me to dwell on the point, but it seems to me that by this stage the hypocrisy of the Labour Party has become as plain to see as Nelson's column in Trafalgar Square. My hon. Friend may be right, and I defer to him. He may well think it desirable and necessary to reiterate the hypocrisy which we are seeing in this present attack. It is certainly blatant hypocrisy, and the Labour Party has no moral ground on which to stand in this debate. This Bill is an exercise in choice of expenditure; that is its root cause. Anybody who says that this choice is wrong should be prepared to say what, in his view, is the right one. He should spell out what, other than school milk and school meals, he thinks should be a candidate for economy. Until we get an answer to that question, I invite my right hon. Friend to take no notice of the Opposition because they have not an intellectually respectable case.
  5.52 p.m.
  Mr. Kenneth Marks: The hon. Member for Uxbridge (Mr. Curran) and also the hon. Member for Kensington, South (Sir B. Rhys Williams) have both made interesting financial comments. The hon. Member for Kensington, South said that this was a matter of who was paying what to whom, and where. The hon. Member for Uxbridge said that it was a question of the choice of expenditure and that the Opposition should make clear what we
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  would take out of education. This sort of exercise is unnecessary. This is a question of children and their milk and whether we are wise to stop the free issue of milk in school. We must examine whether it is wise both financially and in terms of an investment in our future to take this step. I believe that it is not wise to do so.
  I was once teaching a class of children in the city of Manchester and thought I had them spell-bound with a lesson concerning a fascinating piece of local history. The class seemed attentive and the children looked at the maps and pictures which I had produced and appeared to take it all in. At the end of the lesson I asked whether anybody had any questions, and a small boy at the front said, "Yes, sir, can we have us milk?" That lesson has stayed with me for a long time—not my lesson, but the boy's lesson to me. It is a pity that many people who support this Bill have not had the experience of taking a class of pupils since they would then know why the teachers' organisations are so against the Government on this matter.
  What was the starting point for this Bill? Was it an examination of the nutritional effects of the daily third of a pint? Did the medical officers come to the conclusion that a third of a pint was too much and was harmful to children? Was it the effect that milk was having on the teeth and bones of our young children? Has this been harmful? Of course, it has not. In fact, the starting point of this Bill lies in the Government's decision to cut income tax by sixpence and to cut corporation tax. Cuts have to be made and this mean, messy, miserable Measure is one of the cuts that has to come.
  It is not a question of finance or even one of poverty. I doubt whether the dietary condition of a great many of our people warrants the taking of such a step at this time. We have not even been told the amount of saving to be expected—although the right hon. Lady told us that she—together with the local authorities—expects to save £9 million a year. This amounts to about 0·1 of an old penny in relation to income tax and that amount will be cut for the present year and in future years.
  The worst piece of hypocrisy appears in Clause 1(2) of the Bill under which the local education authorities are

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  forbidden to provide free milk for the over-sevens and to find the money from the rates. Only five weeks ago a new council was elected in Manchester, following a revision of the ward boundaries by the former Tory majority in an effort to prevent Labour from taking control in the area. The whole council came up for election and Labour made education its first issue of campaign policy. Free school milk for every primary school child was a major point in its policy. The Labour Party printed its promise in capital letters in heavy type in its manifesto. It made the promise that this would be done out of the rates if the Government were too mean to help in the rate support grant.
  The result of that election was that 81 Labour councillors were elected and 18 Conservatives. This happened in a city where the Conservatives had held power for four years. Never before had the Labour Party in that city polled more than 50 per cent. of total votes. In that election the Labour vote was over 60 per cent. Thus, a Labour council was elected on a pledge to provide free school milk in primary schools. That pledge, contrary to the Prime Minister's pledge on prices, was meant to be taken seriously.
  Ten days after that election this Bill was published. The right hon. Lady, not herself satisfied with being mean and stingy, insists that local education authorities must act in the same way. This comes from a Minister who is always talking about local authorities knowing what is best for their own areas. The right hon. Lady said this in the debate on the Queen's Speech, and often dodges Questions in the House by saying that various issues are matters for local authorities. It looks as if she believes that local education authorities know best for their own area only when they happen to agree with her.
  Last Wednesday the Manchester Education Committee passed the following resolution:
  "That this committee (a) notes with interest and approval the following statements of the Government's views contained in the White Paper on Local Government in England which was presented to Parliament in February 1971: 'The Government are determined to return power to those people who should exercise decisions locally and to ensure that local
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  government is given every opportunity to take that initiative and responsibility effectively, speedily and with vigour … A genuine local democracy implies that decisions should be taken—and should be seen to be taken—as locally as possible.' (b) In the spirit of these intentions the committee calls on the Government to show their good faith by permitting local education authorities who so wish to continue to supply milk free of charge to all primary school children."
  That resolution was carried unanimously in the Manchester Education Committee by Labour, Conservative and co-opted members, and included a number of well-known educationists not members of the Labour Party. I urge the Secretary of State to do what they ask. She says that this cannot be done because such an argument would be used in dealing with rate support grant. Of course it can be done. This particular expenditure could be excepted from arguments on rate support grant.
  I urge her to go further and to get rid of the Bill altogether. It is a bad Bill, its motives are wrong and its results will be bad. The Secretary of State should stand up to the Treasury and say that she is not prepared to do this. It is not a question whether we should cut something else in education. It is a question of arguments in the Cabinet; this is where these matters take place. This will be the first piece of legislation the right hon. Lady has presented to Parliament. I hope she is proud of it.
  6.0 p.m.
  Mr. A. E. Cooper: Such is the intensity of feeling on this subject on the Opposition benches that only 12 opposition Members are here tonight to put forward their case.
  Mr. James Hamilton: On a point of order. Is it in order for such a statement to be made by the hon. Gentleman when we know that many Labour Members who are deeply concerned with this debate are at this moment upstairs discussing the demise of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilding Company?
  Mr. Deputy Speaker: There is nothing out of order in what the hon. Gentleman has said.
  Mr. Cooper: I can understand the sensitivity of the hon. Gentleman who has just intervened, but he has only to look back through HANSARD over the last 12 months to see that this has been a sort

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  of pattern of events when these great social issues have been raised. During the last four years of Labour Government expenditure on education actually decreased [HON. MEMBERS: "No."] Oh, yes, because in terms of real money there was a decrease in educational expenditure.
  We listened to the right hon. Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Central (Mr. Edward Short) make a dreary and pedestrian speech—it was a speech from somebody who over the years was a dreary and pedestrian Minister of Education. If we are to be chided with not being in touch with teachers, education authorities and pupils, let me make my own position clear. I was a member of the Ilford Eduction Committee in 1936 and from then on, until I resigned from the council in 1952 having been elected to this House, I was the chairman of most of its committees. I suggest that it cannot be laid at my door that I know nothing about the educational matters.
  The right hon. Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Central and many other Labour Members—though I do not label them all with this fault—have a soup kitchen mentality. Everybody has got to have the same, no matter what the income. We have to pile up public money to help everybody whether rich or poor. Our philosophy is different. [Interruption.] If I were the hon. Gentleman I should be quiet for a few moments and possess myself in patience.
  Mr. J. D. Concannon: Put that brief down and get on with it.
  Mr. Cooper: It is in my own writing. Our philosophy for many years has been to help those in greatest need. We think that it is ridiculous that people earning between £3,000 and £5,000 a year should be in receipt of subsidies. [Laughter.] Hon. Members seem to think that that is ridiculous. Do they not think that there should be tax relief? The Labour Government increased taxes by more than £3,000 million. This is the prime reason why we are in this situation today. In one year the Conservative Government have reduced taxes by £1,000 million. Are hon. Members saying that that is wrong?
  Mr. Armstrong: It is if it is done at the expense of milk for seven-year-olds. The hon. Gentleman said that the
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  philosophy of the Tory Party is to help those who are in need. What Clause of the Bill says that people whose parents cannot afford milk shall receive milk?
  Mr. Cooper: Mr. Deputy Speaker—
  Mr. Concannon: Answer the question.
  Mr. Cooper: I will answer the question in my own way. The Bill will allow free milk to be given to all children up to seven. Under the Finance Bill families with more than one child will receive an additional family allowance of £40. This is a considerable achievement.
  Hon. Members opposite have charged that this year's Budget was a rich man's Budget. The vast majority of people are middle and lower middle-class people with one to four children who will benefit more by the additional £40 allowance than any other section of the community.
  Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. Before we get too far along these lines I must point out that we are discussing a very important but fairly narrow Bill. I hope that the hon. Member will not roam over the whole field of taxation as it affects people.
  Sir G. Nabarro: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. As I hope to catch your eye later in the debate I should be grateful if you would give me your guidance. Did not my right hon. Friend the Chancellor on 30th March last make an announcement in regard to welfare meals and milk in schools? Although the Bill is a very narrow one, it is essentially one which derives from the Budget Statement. Therefore, on Second Reading cannot we have a little latitude in discussing this important Measure in the wider context of taxation and fiscal arrangements generally.
  Mr. Deputy Speaker: The hon. Gentleman is quite fair in pointing that out, provided that the House adheres to what he said. However, it should be an argument and not the main theme of the speech. I am sure that the hon. Member for Ilford, South (Mr. Cooper) will understand that and abide by it.
  Mr. Kinnock: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Would it be correct to say that you will permit latitude as

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  long as it is not said with too great a longitude?
  Mr. Deputy Speaker: As a master mariner I should say that that is about right.
  Mr. Cooper: I was led away by the sheer hypocrisy of hon. Members opposite. They talk about free milk in schools when it was they who in the Public Expenditure and Receipts Act, 1968, discontinued the provision of milk for children in secondary schools. We are now asked to find agreeable the criticisms they make of this Measure.
  Mr. Marks: The hon. Gentleman seems to be addressing his remarks in my direction. I opposed my own Government and voted against them on the issue of secondary school milk. As he has been a member of an education committee for so long he should do that this afternoon against his own Government.
  Mr. Cooper: It would be nice if I could get two sentences without interruption.
  Sir G. Nabarro: I will not interrupt my hon. Friend.
  Mr. Cooper: I am grateful to my hon. Friend.
  Everybody in the country will agree that, if it were possible to give free milk to everybody, it would be beneficial. The basic truth is that we have a certain amount of money available. The hon. Member for Eton and Slough (Miss Lestor) was at the Department of Education and Science in the days of the Labour Government and she knows full well the restrictions that apply to Government Departments and how they cannot have all the money that they want to spend. Taxation cannot be raised in Britain or in any other country beyond a certain level. The Government must decide how best to spend the money which is available and to what level of taxation they can go in raising the money.
  At the same time as these charges are being imposed, wages and salaries are increasing and the nation is better housed, better clother and better few than ever it was. I do not claim the credit for this on behalf of the Conservative Government after only one year of government. This is the natural evolution
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  which occurs in a free society. If it had not been for the mess we inherited we would have been much further on the road than we are.
  The constituency of the hon. Member for Watford (Mr. Raphael Tuck), who questioned my right hon. Friend during her speech, has almost the highest proportion of colour televisions and motorcars for what can be regarded as a semi-working-class area. People cannot buy or rent colour television sets and buy cars and at the same time say that they cannot spend 15p a month on milk.
  Any Government can give money away. The problem is to spend the money more wisely. This is what we are trying to do. We want new schools and more teachers. In this context the record of the Labour Government was deplorable. We need more hospitals and more nurses. I could go on and on citing the nation's needs. The money must come from us and from nobody else. The Labour Party is not prepared honestly to say that once again it would increase taxation by £3,000 million in a four-year Parliament if ever it were returned to power. The Labour Party will fight an election at any time on a mandate of specious promises. If it succeeded it would do nothing.
  The Bill is a small Bill. It makes in a small way funds available for other purposes. It is to be commended to the House.
  6.15 p.m.
  Mr. Laurie Pavitt: This has been a sad and cold day. It started with clobbering the Clyde. It has continued with clobbering the kids.
  The House will sympathise with me when I say that I do not have to listen to the hon. Member for Ilford, South (Mr. Cooper) only in the Chamber. He referred to his being on a local council. That was at Ilford and I served with the hon. Gentleman and was on the same education committee and had to listen to similar speeches in those days. The hon. Gentleman started his speech today by calling attention to the small number of people in the House. He knows full well that there are only four Tory back benchers present now.
  Today I listened to the third speech that I have heard the hon. Member for Uxbridge (Mr. Curran) make since 1959.

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  I read his material at other times. I am surprised to find that he is just as woolly in writing as he is in speaking.
  The arguments which have been advanced today have been, so to speak, balanced on the top of a milk bottle on as wide a range as possible. Your predecessor in the Chair, Mr. Deputy Speaker, did not condone the debate's going too wide, but hon. Members have succeeded to the extent that it looked at one time as if we could discuss literally the whole taxation system.
  The House knows that I tend to speak only on health matters. In this debate I must immediately declare two interests. First, I am the Member for Willesden, West, which is part of the London Borough of Brent which in the last four years became notorious, both nationally and internationally, for the policies it pursued. Fortunately, we were able to change that pattern recently, as was my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton (Mr. Marks) in his part of the world.
  My borough is especially anxious to use its rate facilities to remedy the grave damage which can be done in a child's life and health and it wishes to have protective rather than curative medicine. This is what the Bill is all about. One of the most difficult tasks we have had in local government and in the National Health Service is in moving away from the curative to a preventive service.
  No doubt later in the debate the hon. Member for Worcestershire, South (Sir G. Nabarro) will address us in his tutti-frutti voice.
  Sir G. Nabarro: The hon. Gentleman has got it all wrong. Tutti-frutti is a variety of ice cream. That would be the last possible description to be applied to my voice.
  Mr. Pavitt: It is weak and soft, sacchariny, and rather difficult to consume. I grant the hon. Gentleman immediately that if he will read further into HANSARD he will find that I made a speech on the date that he mentioned. Some of us on this side have consistently opposed any retraction from the comprehensive approach of the nutritional values of food and milk during the whole period of a child's education. However, that process is being engaged in today. We
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  had reluctantly reached the end under the last Government: we did not intend to go further. This Government are now trying to take the process further.
  My second interest is that I am a Cooperative Member, and together with one and a half million other Londoners am a member of the London Co-operative Society. We have a large milk business. In fact, we are probably the largest distributors of milk in London. However, I do not speak for that interest this afternoon.
  I concentrate on health grounds, but I charge the right hon. Lady with gross neglect of the essential educational function of a free milk supply to our children throughout their formative years.
  The milk habit and the practical provision of meals are probably the most valuable means of getting the right balance into the diet of growing children. Far more effective than any classroom instruction is the kind of habit engendered in the past by the way that we have been able to deliver these services.
  My right hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Central (Mr. Edward Short), in his comprehensive speech, pointed to Report No. 120 of the Department of Health and Social Security which stated that from seven to nine years of age it was essential that a child should have a pint of milk a day because this one food comprises 6 per cent. calories, 13 per cent. protein, 50 per cent. calcium, 25 per cent. Vitamin A and 30 per cent. Riboflavin. The stabilisation of a youngster's diet is therefore available from this one solitary rather magic fluid. The absence of milk does not of necessity mean that the youngster's diet falls short in an affluent society, but we throw away the certainty of children having it for the hazard that they may not.
  My second indictment of the right hon. Lady is that, after consulting several nutritional experts, she is gambling on the unknown. She knows it, because in her speech she outlined plans to monitor to see what is to happen. She does not know the effects of the changes. Therefore, she will stop the supply first and measure the effect afterwards. I hope that she will completely revise her announcement about monitoring. I feel sure that she has had advice, but she could take further advice and have a more effective monitoring scheme.

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  We want to know more than the three areas mentioned by the right hon. Lady. How will the monitoring be conducted? What machinery will be used? Will the Medical Research Council be brought into play? How will the monitoring take place? Even if she revises and improves it, surely it will still take place after the event.
  We know the evidence from the past. I should like to quote from an excellent document, "Family diets before and after the war", which I am sure the right hon. Lady has seen, which states:
  "The most important single contribution to improvement of the diet of working-class families during the past generation was the provision of welfare foods, especially welfare and school milk. Such provision had begun before the war; Table 7 shows the extent to which households in the Carnegie Survey sample already depended on welfare schemes to meet their needs."
  So it goes on. I will not weary the House with a lot of figures. The charts show that there is a drop in nutritional value as the family gets larger. In all the charts of intake one sees a steady decline where the unemployment factor comes into consideration and in areas where large numbers of people are on low incomes. Secondly, there is a sharp fall which increases according to the number of children in a family. These figures significantly go back over the last 40 years to show that the pattern has not altered in these two areas which I have mentioned.
  In 1947 the American Public Health Association presented the Lasker Award to the two British Ministries of Food and Health. The citation includes this passage:
  "Although almost all other environmental factors which might influence public health deteriorated under the stress of war, the public health in Great Britain was maintained and in many respects improved….
  In the opinion of the Lasker Awards Committee this has been one of the greatest demonstrations in public health administration that the world has ever seen. The Lasker Awards Committee of the American Public Health Association therefore takes great satisfaction in recommending awards … to the four great leaders in this historic enterprise, Lord Woolton. Sir Jack Drummond. Sir Wilson Jameson, and Sir John Boyd Orr."
  As a Socialist, I have no great love for the activities of Lord Woolton, but he was the type of Conservative who
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  came in after 1945 and rehabilitated the shattered Conservative Party. However, as part of his approach, especially as Minister of Food, he had an understanding of the type of problem which we are discussing which does not seem to exist among members of the Conservative Party today. We have gone back not just to the war and post-war years, but to the last century with the kind of thinking which has been presented to us today.
  Still on medical evidence, the best and most widely accepted indices of the general health in children is their growth and development. We can see what happened in the past as a pointer to the future if this miserable Bill goes through. The average height of school children between the ages of eight and 12 between 1930 and 1933—the depression years—dropped because of the factors referred to in the Report and which I mentioned previously. Since 1945 there has been a constant acceleration. However, the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Education, Scottish Office, might like to note what is happening in Scotland. The upward trend going on in England and Wales seems to have stopped in Scotland. It would be interesting to know whether the 8·5 per cent. unemployment on Clydeside and the high level of unemployment in Scotland generally has led to the halt in the growth of school children in Scotland. This is obviously the kind of matter on which research is needed, because this is a significant factor.
  Mr. Edward Taylor: The hon. Gentleman will be aware that, because of the provisions under current legislation, school children in Scotland will have free milk provided for an extra year compared with children in England and Wales. That is because Scottish children tend to leave the primary schools a year later. How does the hon. Gentleman square that with what he has been saying?
  Mr. Pavitt: In this way. I am giving the facts. This is the kind of question to which I hope the hon. Gentleman will address himself when he replies. The argument put forward by hon. Gentlemen opposite and by the right hon. Lady is that the taking away of free school milk makes no difference because nutritional values are being supplied in other ways. If the argument is that in Scotland milk

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  is still to be available, that disposes of the argument that there will be a general balanced diet which will enable the growth and development of children to continue. I hope that we shall get more information about this matter. At the moment we have none.
  It is significant that the difference between the growth and height of children between the ages of nine and 13 varies according to different social classes. I concede that it is not only a question of milk, but the whole question of the balance of the child's diet. It seems, in the light of the right hon. Lady's speech, that we are to have differences not only between classes because of different nutritional standards and values but between the sick and the well. The local school medical officer will be able to separate the sick sheep from the healthy goats to decide again a breaking down of the entity which it is every teacher's ambition to build up in a classroom.
  I am delighted that the medical officer of health or the school medical officer in the London Borough of Brent may be able to declare all our children to be in need of—and to have—milk. I hope that this mean provision in Clause 1 will not apply to the London Borough of Brent.
  Malnutrition, to which most hon. Members have referred, was yesterday's problem. The problem today is obesity. I will not weary the House with the figures for rickets and the deficiency diseases over the years. That is not the problem we are facing today. Obesity is the problem facing us today, and that is a killer. Obesity starts when the baby is first being suckled. Mothers tend to want big fat babies, and then the consuming habits of childhood start. In areas like Willesden many children seem to eat lots of carbohydrates—buns and chips. "Chips with everything" is the order of the day. Inevitably, we are reaching the stage where obesity-through-eating habits form while the child is still at school and carry through to the stage where it can be a contributory factor for coronary thrombosis. There were about 30,000 cases of coronary thrombosis last year concerning people over the age of 45. So, within this small Bill, apart from the provision of milk for children over seven, many wider health factors are involved.
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  In planning reducing diets for overweight children, every school medical officer of health relies on a regular intake of milk. He knows that, provided the child is getting the milk, he can make other dietary provisions to reduce obesity. Milk provides a quarter to a third of the child's requirement of protein, so he can reduce that. It provides all his calcium so he can cut that out, and it supplies three-quarters of his Vitamin B2, which is essential. There is some evidence, for example in the Minister of Agriculture's National Food Survey that the amount of milk taken in term time is not the same as the home consumption in the school holidays. The right hon. Lady will have studied that report.
  I have some figures collected from my own locality, and I am fortunate here since I am a Co-operative Member and the largest amount of milk is provided by co-operative societies. In London, in June, 4,488,879 gallons of milk were provided, in August that went down to 3,973,147. In June nearly 250,000 gallons were provided in London, in other words, 231,596 in school milk. But in my area of Willesden, which is a strong industrial working-class area, the 93,000 gallons of milk supplied in June had dropped by August to a total of 78,000. Of course, a good deal of this is accounted for by people being away on holiday, but of the 93,000 gallons, 7,505 gallons supplied in June in school milk disappeared during the school holidays in August.
  So, if Brent wants a clear case, I hope that it will use these figures and I hope that my borough council has the courage of George Lansbury, when he was Member for Poplar. When he found that it was impossible to accept the rules of a Tory Government on the welfare laws operated by the board of guardians, he was prepared to go—and went—to prison. If this law is broken by my council, as it is represented in Clauses 1 and 2—I suppose I must not incite them to break the law—my sympathy would be with them.
  The hon. Member for Uxbridge used one of the oldest tricks in politics. First he made the £9 million up to £275 million by making all milk and food free and then he demolished the case by saying

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  £275 million was too much. The hon. Member for Ilford, South did the same. He is a politician of the old school and he knows his stuff very well. He did the same sort of thing by first putting up an Aunt Sally and then knocking it down.
  I object to the concept from the Conservative Party that each individual Department must be self-contained and able to provide its own economies. For the first time in our history, we are spending more on education than on defence, but it is not right that, when we extend the education service, we should seek to get the children themselves to make the necessary economies to find increased expenditure. I object, in a similar way, to charges being made on the sick to provide resources for the National Health Service. There are other means of doing it. My right hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Central, showed how precisely equated was the amount of money being saved by this Bill and upon welfare meals to the £38 million concession to those earning over £4,000 a year.
  This Bill is putting the clock back two generations. I had the pleasure of going with the Secretary of State to a number of places in Sweden and we saw some very worthwhile evidence of social and economic progress. We have until recently been keeping pace with Sweden, or trying to. But in Sweden not only school milk but all school meals are quite free from the time a child starts until he finishes at the age of 18 or 19. This has been worth while because, in Sweden, they know that a healthy and virile nation is an asset.
  When will the Government learn that it is not public exenditure on children's education or their health. It is an investment—the safest gilt-edged security that Britain could have. If we throw out this miserable Bill today, it will be one of the best things that we could do to preserve a very good investment in Britain's future.
  6.34 p.m
  Sir Gerald Nabarro: This Bill has been variously described over the last few hours as a mean Bill, a wretched Bill, a miserable Bill and a nasty Bill—
  Mr. Pavitt: A horrible Bill.
  Sir G. Nabarro: The hon. Gentleman says "a horrible Bill". I can support none of those descriptions of this Measure, which is exactly consonant with Conservative policy. It is a highly desirable Measure, which will have my utmost support for all the reasons which I propose to enunciate.
  I summed up my philosophy in the matter of welfare milk in a supplementary question to the Minister of Agriculture a few months ago, when he was being assaulted by Labour Members for the alleged reduction in the service of school meals and the amount of welfare milk being consumed. I counselled my right hon. Friend on that occasion to advise the community to spend less in the boozers and more on the kids.
  This remark of mine was described by the right hon. Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Central (Mr. Short) in inaccurate terms—I corrected him—and so interested were Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Tyneside generally in the metaphor which I had employed that they had a banner headline in their local paper reporting it. The B.B.C. asked me to say why I had insulted Geordie workers, and interpreted it as a parochial reference to Tynemouth and the North-East.
  Of course, it applies to the whole nation. Far too much money is spent in the boozers instead of on the kids. This is exactly the philosophy related by my right hon. Friend in answering Questions last Thursday, that working mothers, although they may be doing full-time jobs in factories and elsewhere, are well capable by themselves, without Government support or guidance, of looking after the nutritional requirements of their children. Indeed, it would be impertinent for the Government to intervene on the nutritional requirements of those children.
  Personally, I love milk. I consume alcohol hardly at all, but two pints of milk per day has been my habit for many years past. [Laughter.] I am sorry to have caused hilarity behind me—
  Mr. Curran: I was expressing admiration, Gerald.
  Sir G. Nabarro: Yes, I have a splendid figure to show for it. I do not suffer from any of the obesity mentioned by the

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  hon. Member for Willesden, West (Mr. Pavitt). A matter of 160 lb. avoirdupois stripped off—which is much more satisfactory than the figure of the hon. Member for Derbyshire, North-East (Mr. Swain)—
  Mr. Speaker: We are getting into a physical area now, but I wonder what both hands in the pockets is intended to signify.
  Sir G. Nabarro: Both hands in the pockets was meant, at that moment in my speech, to display my svelte figure to (he hon. Member for Willesden, West, who alluded to obesity—something which is unknown to me. Of course we should all encourage children to drink milk and every home in the country to provide a maximum supply of milk as the most nutritious of all foods.
  I have a secondary interest in this matter, in that I sit for South Worcestershire, which is a substantial milk-producing constituency. It was for that reason that I intervened in my right hon. Friend's speech and asked what affect the Bill would have on the demand for liquid milk, as closely as could be assessed, and what influence it would have on the farming community. My right hon. Friend replied with alacrity—I did not expect her to have the answer readily available: it was extraordinarily prescient of her to know that I would ask this question—that there would be a diminution of 1 per cent.
  This is infinitesimal, of course. I do not think that there will be any diminution, because the efforts of the Milk Marketing Board, a large number of hon. Members and others interested in stimulating the demand for milk and supporting the production of an ever-increasing quantity of liquid milk—but no more liquid milk than can readily be sold—will look after any temporary shortfall which there may be and set the path upward again in increasing milk production.
  In your absence from the Chair, Mr. Speaker, hon. Members opposite suggested that some of my hon. Friends and myself were guilty of hypocrisy in putting forward the Bill for Second Reading. We now have nods of assent from the hon. Member for Bolsover (Mr. Skinner) and the hon. Member for Manchester, Wythenshawe (Mr. Alfred Morris), who suggested that I had been a hypocrite because the contents of the Bill, they said,
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  are contrary to the provisions and the principles on which I was elected in June, 1970. That is utterly false. I warned all my constituents in South Worcestershire all 70,000—for which they gave me a vastly increased majority on that important occasion—that our application of welfare moneys would be highly selective in character and would be directed on the narrowest front to those truly in need, when the Conservative Party had disposed of the three or four weeks before the long recess.
  Immediately the Conservative Party returned here in October, after the long recess, my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer provided for important measures. He laid before the House the White Paper Cmnd. 4515 entitled "New Policies for Public Spending." Before quoting from the While Paper, I allude to the debate on public expenditure and taxation allied to it, and I quote my right hon. Friend, who said:
  "I now come to the social services. Here, we shall establish more sensible priorities. We shall expect that, where the user can afford it, he should bear more of the cost and the taxpayer less, but we shall give more help to those who need it. At the same time, we intend to add substantially to the resources devoted to the basic structure of the health, welfare and education services and to introduce a new social security benefit."—[OFFFCIAL REPORT, 27th October, 1970; Vol. 805, c. 42.]
  The new social security benefit is the family supplementation arrangements. There was clearly stated on 27th October last, eight months ago, the intention of my party.
  Referring to the Command Paper No. 4515, I find these words clearly denoted in paragraph 19:
  "A Bill will be introduced to discontinue the supply of free milk to pupils at the end of the summer term after they reach age 7. Younger pupils in nursery and primary schools, pupils up to 12 who have a medical requirement and pupils in special schools will not be affected. The practical arrangements will be discussed with local education authorities. In a full year the saving will be about £9 million."
  That is exactly what the Bill implements. It is eight months too late, in my opinion—squeezed out of the legislative queue by the lengthy deliberations on the Industrial Relations Bill. Had there been parliamentary time, we should have introduced the Bill last autumn. For hon. Members opposite to accuse my party of hypocrisy, and individual members of it of being hypocrites, is grossly false. I

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  resent the accusation. I rebut their suggestion. What we have printed in the Command Paper, and what was related by the Chancellor of the Exchequer on 27th October, 1970, is an exact implementation of the policies on which we were elected in June, 1970, an important factor and feature of which is the Bill now before us.
  Mr. Pavitt: Is the hon. Gentleman saying that what he has just read out was part of the Conservative Party's election manifesto, too?
  Sir G. Nabarro: Yes, Sir. The Conservative Party said throughout the General Election that it would be more discriminatory and would specialise more in the application of social welfare benefits. This afternoon, in the context of liquid milk, I thoroughly resent the conspiracy of the Labour Party to drown me in welfare milk. I do not want welfare milk, neither do I want it for my children. I will pay for milk myself. We will help those who are needy and have children who are genuinely requiring this form of sustenance in schools and who cannot afford to pay for it. But there is no sense or reason for drenching or drowning the whole of the community in welfare milk because a few are needy. That is chucking the baby out with the bath water, to use an appropriate metaphor.
  Mr. Kinnock: Mixed.
  Sir G. Nabarro: Not mixed, very appropriate.
  I quote a further passage from the White Paper, because it has been suggested that this economy in welfare milk is equated to a reduction in income tax. The right hon. Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Central even suggested that the economy in welfare milk was being related to a benefit for surtax payers earning above £4,005 annually. The hon. Lady the Member for Eton and Slough (Miss Lestor) is supporting her right hon. Friend by nodding assent to that pro-poition. I reject it absolutely because of the words in the Command Paper, which I now quote:
  "Increased primary school building programme
  21. There will be a substantial increase in school building programmes for 1972–73 to enable local education authorities to make faster progress in replacing and improving old
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  primary schools. For Great Britain the previous programme (see general note (i) on tables 1 and 2, page 5) had allowed for the start of only £13 million worth of work for improvements in 1972–73. Instead the new programme for that year will include starts for this purpose totalling £44 million of which about £36 million will be for England, £5 million for Scotland, and £3 million for Wales. The net effect will be that expenditure on educational building as a whole during the four years to 1974–75 will be increased by £28 million."
  Here I put the matter into the correct perspective. We are saving £9 million on school milk. Against that, we are increasing the programme from £13 million to £44 million for improvement works in 1972–73. So we spend £31 million more on school improvements and we economise £9 million on school milk.
  Mr. Kinnock: Rubbish.
  Sir G. Nabarro: It is not rubbish. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman has followed the figures I quoted. We are spending more than three times more money on school improvements than the relatively small sum of £9 million economised on welfare school milk, and without depriving any children of school milk so long as it may be demonstrated that their parents really need financial help to pay for the milk.
  The difference in philosophy between our two parties, the Conservative Party that I represent and the Party represented by the hon. Member for Willesden, West, can well be found by going back to the debates in the days of the previous Labour Government, when milk for secondary school children was abolished by the Labour Government.
  Mr. Dennis Skinner: They were wrong.
  Sir G. Nabarro: The hon. Gentleman may think that it was wrong, but, if he would allow me to continue, I would demonstrate that many of his colleagues had the courage to carry their objections into the Division Lobby. I quote from a speech made by the hon. Member for Willesden, West on that important occasion. This is relevant to what we are debating.
  In the debate on Clause 3 of the Public Expenditure and Receipts Bill, the hon. Gentleman said:
  "Under the Amendment, the nutritional facts would be established before the Clause

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  was implemented. I am glad that a representative of the Ministry of Health is here, because that Ministry is seeking to get away from cure to prevention of illness. This is what the National Health Service is about. We have the opportunity when a child is growing to establish solid bones and healthy bodies for the rest of his life. Now, at the age of 11, and despite the fact that bones will grow until the age of 20, we will ignore this factor. Precisely because of this opportunity of giving school milk we have been one of the few countries to eliminate rickets. The calcium and protein which we have fed school children has given them the strength to withstand such diseases."—[OFFICIAL REPORT,—26th February, 1968; Vol. 759, c. 1093.]
  That is a remarkable statement. The hon. Gentleman is notorious, and his speech was characteristic, for being not only persistent—and I congratulate him on his pertinacious qualities—but utterly consistent. He is consistent within the philosophy of his party, because he believes in drowning the nation in welfare milk. I do not. I believe in giving welfare milk only to those in need.
  Let us look at the Amendment which the hon. Gentleman was then supporting. It had been moved by the then hon. Member for Reading, Mr. John Lee. It said:
  "Provided that in no case shall the provisions of this subsection apply to a pupil whose parent or guardian or other responsible person is in receipt of unemployment benefit or has been in such receipt at any time during the past twelve months."
  What the hon. Gentleman and his friends were then saying was that the provision for the withdrawal of welfare milk to secondary school children should not be made applicable to any child whose parent was then unemployed. The Labour Government rejected it out of hand—at least, the wilder excesses of its back benchers were frustrated by Ministers taking the advice of the Treasury and other civil servants.
  The voting was interesting. I quote Division No. 67 of 26th February, 1968, column 1104, where the name "Pavitt, Laurence" is to be found at 11.55 p.m. voting against his own party and in support of the philosophy which he holds so dear. I congratulate the hon. Gentleman both on his persistence and on his consistence, but the fact remains that I do not want to be drowned in welfare milk, and neither does any other member of my party. We will apply welfare provisions in a discriminatory fashion to those who are truly needy. When it came to the
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  voting on the Question "That the Clause stand part of the Bill", the hon. Gentleman carried his resistance even further, despite the Whips, and abstained from voting.
  Mr. Pavitt: Will the hon. Gentleman take it from me that we do not mind what he drowns in?
  Sir G. Nabarro: That is being thoroughly offensive and not very funny. I am seeking to demonstrate and not without some success, the fundamental differences in philosophy between the Labour Party and the Tory Party. I will help anybody in my constituency who is needy, infirm, sick, elderly, or for some other reason in unfortunate circumstances. What I will not do is to try to help people who do not need help and who ought to be capable of standing on their own hind legs.
  Miss Joan Lestor: In order to help me with my winding-up speech, could the hon. Gentleman tell me where in the Bill, on which, he believes, he is shedding so much light, there is a poverty qualification for children to receive free milk?
  Sir G. Nabarro: Children who are needy will undoubtedly receive free milk. I will deal with all this in a moment when I reach a further stage in my speech. I am now dealing with the hypocrisy of the Labour Party.
  I will rub it in a little more, for we may be told by succeeding speakers, especially by the hon. Lady, that when the hon. Member for Willesden, West was in revolt against his own Government, he was suffering some kind of mental aberration, was off the rails, and that no member of the Labour Government supported the view that welfare milk for secondary school child; en should be abolished. But did they not?
  Let us have a look at what was said by Mr. John Diamond, who lost his seat at Gloucester—
  Mr. Hardy: Bromsgrove!
  Sir G. Nabarro: —and is now upstairs. No doubt his hypocrisy made a contribution to the loss of his seat. On the Bill dealing with the abolition of secondary school welfare milk he said:
  "We very carefully considered the possibility of providing free milk for some secondary

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  schoolchildren on grounds of special need, and we decided to continue free milk for children at special schools. But we have reluctantly concluded that it would not be possible to select from secondary schoolchildren in ordinary maintained schools those who should receive free milk while their fellows were not receiving milk in school at all. Great difficulties are obviously inherent in selecting individual children on nutritional grounds, or grounds of family finances. In particular, there is the overriding human difficulty that any such provision would inevitably single out children and lead to considerable embarrassment."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 20th February, 1968; Vol. 759, c. 252–3.]
  Mr. Skinner: He was not being serious.
  Sir G. Nabarro: He was being serious. This was said in the House of Commons and it must have been serious; everything said in the House of Commons is serious. The hon. Gentleman was not in the last Parliament and does not realise the impact of Labour Ministers resisting the wilder excesses from their back benches.
  The principle was applied to secondary school children in the last Parliament under a Labour Government, and very properly applied, in order to contain excessive expenditure. My own party, not only because it carefully follows the principles on which it was elected, is well advised, in the interests of the public purse and the national economy, to apply similar principles to all primary school children.
  I want to say a word about the former Member for Uxbridge. He, too, lost his seat. I am delighted to see his successor here.
  Mr. Thomas Swain: He once lost his seat, too.
  Sir G. Nabarro: My hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge (Mr. Curran) was elected with a resounding majority of 3,646. His predecessor pleaded with the then Minister, but the Minister did not take much notice of him, I am sad to say. The then Member for Uxbridge asked that more vending machines for milk should be placed in education establishments. Mr. Ryan said:
  "I ask my hon. Friend whether he would encourage local authorities or individual schools to provide an alternative source of milk through vending machines …"—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 26th February, 1968; Vol. 759, c. 1092.]
  I should like to refer to that.
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  There are far too many vending machines in education establishments offering cigarettes and tobacco. Had not the Government been so severely misguided as to defeat my recent attempt—
  Mr. David Crouch: Not misguided.
  Sir G. Nabarro: I do not want any interruptions from my hon. Friend, who was an opponent of the Bill.
  Had not my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Social Services been so misguided as to bring his immense forces to bear to squash that Bill—as the hon. Member for Willesden, West will recall—we should have had a provision on the Statute Book prohibiting vending machines selling cigarettes and tobacco in educational establishments.
  I want my right hon. Friend to consider this carefully. I want there to be special provision and encouragement in all educational establishments to sell liquid milk.
  Mr. Skinner: Why vending machines?
  Sir G. Nabarro: Vending machines are appropriate machines for this purpose, as we know in the House of Commons. If the hon. Gentleman goes to the cafeteria, he will be able to buy in a paper cup a generous supply of ice-cold liquid milk, which will do his constitution much more good than the beer which he usually absorbs.
  Mr. Hardy: How can a school of 500 or 1,000 children properly provide vending machines? The children will have only 10 or 15 minutes for their break. Does he think that it would be a good arrangement that hundreds of children should queue for the whole of their break time so as to be able to get to the vending machines?
  Sir G. Nabarro: I shall not go into minute administrative arrangements. Such arrangements may be made perfectly well, as they are made in other places, where, for example, thousands of people are employed in factories, workshops or offices or, indeed, as such machines are used in the House of Commons. I want my right hon. Friend to have some regard to that suggestion.
  Mr. Skinner: A moment ago the hon. Gentleman suggested that I should drink more milk and, perhaps, less beer. I have not had a drink of beer since I came here. I drink milk stout.
  Sir G. Nabarro: True, it is better to drink stout than ale. But the hon. Member for Bolsover is generally misguided in these welfare food and milk matters, as he was last Thursday when he put a Question to my right hon. Friend about school meals. The arguments about meals at school, welfare milk, and so on are closely associated one with the other. On that occasion the hon. Gentleman was seeking to make propaganda at my right hon. Friend's expense, but, as always, she was a jump ahead of him and responded accurately to his Question. It was most instructive. The hon. Gentleman asked my right hon. Friend:
  "how many schoolchildren in Derbyshire are taking school meals, at the latest possible date; and by how much this figure has fallen since a year previously."
  This was her reply:
  "The latest information available to my Department relates to the autumn of last year, when the number of school meals served in Derbyshire was 73,441. The corresponding figure for 1969 was 73,289."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 10th June, 1971; Vol. 818, c. 1223.]
  The two figures are very close to one another.
  Mr. Skinner: They are not relevant.
  Sir G. Nabarro: What they show dramatically is that there has been no significant drop in the period stated.
  Mr. Skinner rose—
  Sir G. Nabarro: I shall give way in a moment. I can ask Sir Jack Longden for the figures. He is an authority on Derbyshire education, and he will provide me with the figures. He is the distinguished director of education for the County of Derby, so distinguished that he has been awarded a knighthood for his services, and I am sure that he will provide me with evidence right up to date showing that there is no significant drop in the number of school meals as a result of recent provisions and new policies implemented during the last 12 months of Conservative rule.
  Mr. Skinner: It should be pointed out that the figures given by the Secretary of State relate to autumn 1970, which was
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  well before the increased charges came in. So there is no question of any significant drop being relevant there, as I pointed out in my supplementary question on that occasion. What is more, Jack Longden—
  Sir G. Nabarro: Sir Jack Longden.
  Mr. Skinner: —Sir Jack Longden has now left Derbyshire as director of education. He left it to serve on the Royal Commission dealing with local government reorganisation, and he was knighted not because of his services to the county in education but, almost certainly, because he served on the Maud Commission.
  Sir G. Nabarro: The hon. Member for Bolsover misses the point. Sir Jack Longden was the greatest educationist the County of Derby had ever acquired. I am glad to observe that the silence which has greeted my comment in this important regard gives ample confirmation of that.
  Mr. Phillip Whitehead: The hon. Gentleman would like some up-to-date facts from Derbyshire. Perhaps he will be interested to know that I spent last week touring primary schools in the County Borough of Derby, and I was told in those schools that the number of children taking school meals had fallen by between 25 and 30 per school. Moreover, I was told that it was deplored in each and every one of those schools that this mean little Bill was to be brought forward to deprive the children also of school milk.
  Sir G. Nabarro: If the period is irrelevant, as the hon. Member for Bolsover says, because it is 12 months out of date, we shall bring the figures up to date shortly. I ask my right hon. Friend to publish them.
  Mr. Whitehead: I gave some significant facts.
  Sir G. Nabarro: The hon. Gentleman must contain himself. He has ants in his pants, jumping up and down so much that I wonder whether he is a Member of Parliament or a jack-in-the-box. I was replying, first, to his hon. Friend the Member for Bolsover. Between 1967 and 1969 the Labour Government increased charges for school meals considerably. If there was any falling off in the days of the

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  Labour Government, it was due simply to the action of Labour Ministers.
  The hon. Member for Derby, North (Mr. Whitehead) may have been told that there was a great decline in the consumption of school meals. There is no evidence to support it, as my right hon. Friend demonstrated last Thursday. If he has more recent evidence, perhaps he will produce it.
  I turn now from Bolsover, Derbyshire, North and Derbyshire, North-East to Derbyshire, South-East. This is not a Derbyshire debate, but Derbyshire seems to have been prominently associated with this controversy. The right hon. Gentleman the Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Central (Mr. Edward Short), opening for the Opposition, purported to quote my hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire, South-East (Mr. Rost). [An HON. MEMBER: "Disgraceful."] Disgraceful, I agree, because he had not given my hon. Friend forward notice that he would quote him. I shall now deal with the point which he then made. The right hon. Gentleman did not quote from the OFFICIAL REPORT. He gave his own interpretation of what was said, and, as usual, it was wildly inaccurate. This is what was said in the exchange between my right hon. Friend and my hon. Friend last Thursday.
  My right hon. Friend had replied to a Question from the hon. Lady the Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Mrs. Doris Fisher), and then, in response to the hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. R. C. Mitchell), she said:
  "The hon. Gentleman asks whether I do not think it disgraceful that there should be a fall-off. I do not think that one should assume that because fewer children are taking school meals they are not getting as good a meal at home or elsewhere."
  Whereupon my hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire, South-East, in his characteristically ebullient fashion, and in the most apposite terms, put this proposition to my right hon. Friend:
  "Does not my right hon. Friend feel that it would be appropriate to remind the Opposition and the country that it is not the State's responsibility to feed children, that her resources in the education service should be concentrated on improving educational facilities, and that if parents are not prepared to ensure that their children are properly fed, they are not fit to be parents and should not have children?"—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 10th June, 1971; Vol. 818, c. 1222.]
  Mr. Swain: The hon. Gentleman wants to say that in Swadlincote.
  Sir G. Nabarro: Does the hon. Gentleman want to interrupt me?
  Mr. Swain: The hon. Member for Derbyshire, South-East (Mr. Rost) wants to go into his constituency and say that on the public platform. His constituents would lynch him.
  Sir G. Nabarro: The hon. Member for Derbyshire, North-East walked into this Chamber at 6.28 p.m. for the first time. I noted the time at once, because he is notorious in this House for absenting himself from debates, coming in at a late hour and remaining in a sedentary position and bawling.
  An. Hon. Member: The hon. Gentle man has been speaking for 35 minutes already.
  Sir G. Nabarro: Another 35 minutes coming up.
  Of course, the philosophy of my hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire, South-East is, in metaphorical terms, exactly the same as the supplementary question which I put to my right hon. Friend the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food some months ago, when he was being attacked over this same question. I said that his advice to the community should be—I repeat it and I shall come to Swadlincote with it—"Spend less in the boozers and more on the kids." In other words, working men who can afford to spend large sums of money on beer or other alcoholic beverages would do well to devote an appropriate part of it to buying milk for their children, and not charging the cost of the milk to the taxpayer.
  Mr. James Hill: Is my hon. Friend aware that two children can have a third of a pint of milk a day for a week for the price of about 1½ bottles of milk stout?
  Sir G. Nabarro: I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Test (Mr. James Hill). I wish to put this Bill into its correct perspective as to the influence it might have on family and household budgets. I have had worked out carefully what would be the effect of removing free milk in primary schools on a family with two

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  children getting milk free at the present time. The extra charge would be of the order of 16½p per week, or 3s. 6d. in old currency. If there were three children in the family the extra cost would be 25p a week, or 5s. If the parents cannot afford it, there will be provision to help them.
  Hon. Members: That is not in the Bill.
  Sir G. Nabarro: Maybe not in the Bill, but it is elsewhere in the social welfare services.
  Miss Lestor: I have already asked the hon. Gentleman—
  Sir G. Nabarro: I am coming to the hon. Lady's point. She is so impatient.
  Miss Lestor: I am impatient on this point. I have asked the hon. Gentleman, and he said he would tell me, where the Bill says that poverty is a ground for getting free milk.
  Sir G. Nabarro: I wonder where the hon. Lady has been in the last few months. I wonder whether she has read the legislative provisions of my party. We have brought in family supplementation—
  Hon. Members: In the Bill?
  Sir G. Nabarro: Not in this Bill. [Interruption.] Of course not. The "Ha, ha" from Labour hon. Members displays their incredible ignorance. Family supplementation provisions are in other legislative Measures, but they are directed to provisions for helping poor and needy families who cannot provide the money for milk in school. There was no family supplementation under the Labour Government. Family supple mentation is available to help poor families—
  Mr. Skinner: Not for the unemployed.
  Sir G. Nabarro: Yes—for the unemployed. The unemployed may derive benefit from other welfare provisions to provide money for milk for children in school if the parents cannot afford to pay for it, and there are provisions, as my hon. Friend in winding up the debate will amply confirm—
  Mr. Edward Taylor indicated assent.
  Sir G. Nabarro: I am glad to see my hon. Friend nodding assent. There are ample provisions for the family that cannot afford to pay an economic price for welfare milk in schools to be helped by State provisions. [Interruption.] Labour hon. Members do not like having the facts of life rubbed into them. I have demolished the case they have put up against the Bill. It is a great pity that the right hon. Gentleman who led for the Opposition makes his own speech and then scurries for cover. He is never here to listen to the come-back from the opposite side of the House. He ran away a quarter of an hour after making his speech.
  Mr. William Price: The hon. Gentleman has misquoted my right hon. Friend.
  Sir G. Nabarro: I have quoted from HANSARD. The right hon. Gentleman could not quote from HANSARD in his speech, and for that reason he was wildly inaccurate in almost everything he said.
  Mr. Price rose—
  Sir G. Nabarro: I shall happily give way to the hon. Gentleman, but he is getting very black looks from his hon. Friends behind him for delaying the debate if he persists. Is he sure that he wants to intervene?
  Mr. Price: I am sure that the hon. Gentleman wishes to be occurate about at least one quotation alleged to have been made by my right hon. Friend. He will find that this quotation was made by my hon. Friend the Member for Watford (Mr. Raphael Tuck).
  Sir G. Nabarro: No. The quotation I gave from my hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire, South-East was strictly correct.
  Mr. Price: It was quoted not by my right hon. Friend but from below the Gangway.
  Sir G. Nabarro: Whether it was quoted from below the Gangway or by the right hon. Gentleman, the right hon. Gentle man was even too idle to go away and get the correct text—
  Mr. Price: Withdraw.
  Sir G. Nabarro: —of what I said a few months ago about spending less in

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  the boozers and more on the kids. He got that all wrong, so I had to correct him. It is correct that this was brought out by the hon. Member for Watford (Mr. Raphael Tuck) and agreed to by the right hon. Gentleman.
  Mr. Peter Rost: My hon. Friend the Member for Worcestershire, South (Sir G. Nabarro), in quoting the remarks I made in the House last week, did not suggest that these remarks were quoted by the right hon. Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Central (Mr. Edward Short). What I believe he was referring to was that the right hon. Gentleman regarded my remarks as arrogant, and said so in this Chamber this afternoon, and I believe that that is what my hon. Friend was wishing to draw attention to.
  Mr. Price: My right hon. Friend did not misquote the hon. Gentleman, did he?
  Sir G. Nabarro: I do not believe that my hon. Friend was arrogant at all. He has a philosophical approach to these matters, which is identical to my own. What hon. Members opposite seem to forget is that on 7th January this year I had the pleasure of visiting my hon. Friend's constituency and making three speeches for him on the same day—one at lunchtime, one in the afternoon and one at a public meeting in the evening.
  Mr. Swain: Same speech.
  Sir G. Nabarro: No—three entirely different, as always. Shortly before he was elected I visited my hon. Friend's constituency and delivered the speech in Derby, which led to widespread approbation and acclamation. He won the seat, just as my hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge won his by 3,646 votes.
  Mr. Speaker: Order. We are all interested in the hon. Gentleman's speeches, but he should now speak to the Bill.
  Sir G. Nabarro: I was led astray by my hon. Friend. The fact is that in the Conservative Party there is a philosophy which says that welfare benefits should be applied where they are really needed.
  I want to ask my right hon. Friend a final question. For far too long there
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  has been a discrimination between the public and private sectors of education. At the moment 95 per cent. of pupils are in State schools, while 5 per cent. are in private, independent, fee-paying schools. I declare my interest. I am Chairman of the Council for Independent Education, which is a consultative body representing all fee-paying school interests.
  Mr. Kinnock: It is only 5 per cent.
  Sir G. Nabarro: That is so, but it is very important that parents should have a choice, an alternative to State schools. The hon. Member for Bedwellty (Mr. Kinnock), who persists in shouting at me. might remember that the Labour Party took no steps to abolish the private sector of education. It could not do it. It never will be able to do it. There will always be a private sector of education, and I see no reason why welfare milk for the under-sevens may be given at taxpayers' expense in State schools but not in private schools.
  Mr. Kinnock: On a point of order. Mr. Speaker. I have chosen to make my interruptions from a sedentary position because, before the hon. Gentleman started to speak, I took it upon myself not to interrupt formally. My view is being borne out by the ridiculously long speech which the hon. Gentleman is making on a very serious matter.
  Mr. Speaker: That is not a point of order. I have no control over the length of speeches.
  Sir G. Nabarro: Mr. Speaker, I am. as always, grateful for your protection.
  Mr. Fred Evans: On a point of order. Mr. Speaker. You have ruled that the hon. Member for Worcestershire, South (Sir G. Nabarro) must be pertinent to the debate, but he has again strayed far from it.
  Mr. Speaker: That is a matter for me Sir Gerald Nabarro.
  Sir G. Nabarro: As always, Mr. Speaker, I am grateful for your protection.
  In case the new arrivals on the benches opposite do not know the facts of parliamentary life, let me tell them that it is permissible, and within the rules of order, to draw attention to omissions from the Bill. We are on the Second Reading of

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  the Bill now, and I am drawing attention to an omission from it. I should like my right hon. Friend to provide that children under seven in private, fee-paying independent schools may receive free milk in the same way as children receive it in State schools. My interpretation of the Bill is that children in private schools do not get free milk. If I am wrong, I hope that my right hon. Friend will correct me, but, if I am right, will she consider introducing a Government Amendment, in Committee, on Report, or at some other appropriate stage, to make sure that children up to age of seven receiving their education in private fee-paying independent schools get free welfare milk on the same terms—that is, gratuitously—as children educated in State schools.
  Mrs. Thatcher: The point is dealt with in Clause 1(3), under which children in schools not maintained by local education authorities receive milk until the end of the summer term in which they become seven, but the provision for milk on health grounds beyond that does not extend to these schools. At the end of the summer term in which they reach seven it does extend to them.
  Sir G. Nabarro: I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for that explanation. I hope to go away and examine the provision in greater detail.
  Mr. John Page rose—
  Sir G. Nabarro: I give way to my hon. Friend.
  Mr. Page: I wonder whether, in his—
  Mr. Speaker: Order. I have said that I have no control over the length of speeches. I have not, but I have a memory. The hon. Member for Worcestershire, South (Sir G. Nabarro) has now been speaking for 50 minutes, and I think that at least half-a-dozen other hon. Members wish to take part in the debate. I hope that the hon. Member will have some regard to that fact.
  Sir G. Nabarro: I give way to my hon. Friend.
  Mr. Page: I wonder whether my hon. Friend would be willing to ask our right hon. Friend to impress on local authori-
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  ties the importance of giving equal treatment to children in State schools and those who go to independent schools?
  Sir G. Nabarro: My right hon. Friend will have heard that apposite inquiry, and no doubt will deal with it later if any further correction or emendation is required.
  In deference to your views, Mr. Speaker, and as I have been speaking for more than 50 minutes—[Interruption.]—no doubt it seems like two hours and 50 minutes. The hon. Lady always shuns the truth in these important matters.
  I end by congratulating my right hon. Friend on two counts, first, on implementing precisely the Conservative Party's General Election manifesto of June, 1970; second, on carrying through to fruition the important provisions related by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the public expenditure debate arising from Cmnd. 4515 on 27th October last. Notwithstanding the Whips tonight, I am assured that the Bill will receive a substantial majority on Second Reading, which will give joy to all the Conservatives in this country.
  7.27 p.m.
  Mr. Alfred Morris: I make no apology for having described the Measure as a "nasty little Bill." The arguments advanced by the Conservative Party in its support of the Bill could be summarised in the writing space provided by a milk bottle top, and very little of that would be taken up by the points made by the hon. Member for Worcestershire, South (Sir G. Nabarro).
  Mr. Fred Evans: The hon. Gentleman is here only to waste time.
  Mr. Morris: I am sure that my hon. Friends will agree that the hon. Member for Worcestershire, South adopted a clever tactic.
  Sir G. Nabarro: He is a clever chap.
  Mr. Morris: The hon. Gentleman appreciated that few of his hon. Friends wished to offer any defence of the Bill. By taking up more than 50 minutes of our time he has shielded those of his hon. Friends who are much more deeply embarrassed by the provisions of the Bill

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  than they would care to admit in open debate.
  The Bill is regarded as extremely serious.—[Interruption.] The hon. Member for Worcestershire, South has taken up a great deal of our time. I hope that he will maintain silence from a sedentary position while those who wish to take up much less time than he did are addressing the House.
  The Bill is deeply regretted by representative people in localities throughout the country. I have received from the City of Manchester—as have some of my hon. Friends—its view of what it regards as a deeply retrograde step. The Manchester City Council Education Committee points out that in another context the Government said:
  "A genuine local democracy implies that decisions should be taken—and should be seen to be taken—as locally as possible."
  When I asked the right hon. Lady earlier today whether local authorities would be allowed to pay for free school milk from the rates if they wished to do so, I had in mind what had been said by her right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for the Environment in his White Paper "Local Government in England." But in this Administration one Minister says one thing and another Minister acts completely in defiance of and in contradiction to her colleague's policy. I hope that the right hon. Lady will take very seriously our concern that local authorities, if they wish, should be able to continue to provide free school milk for primary school children.
  The right hon. Lady referred to Dr. Lynch and his colleague, who produced an important report about the feeding habits of school children—
  Mr. Charles R. Morris: Before my hon. Friend leaves that point of local autonomy, may I point out that the view which he has expressed is that of the party which received 60 per cent. of the votes of the electorate in the recent municipal election in Manchester.
  Mr. Alfred Morris: Nor was this an unimportant issue in that recent test of public opinion. As usual, the hon. Member for Worcestershire, South was somewhat out of date. He was referring
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  to the test of opinion in June, 1970, but my hon. Friend is referring to a test of opinion in Manchester and elsewhere in recent weeks. Naturally, I agree with my hon. Friend—
  Sir G. Nabarro: He is your brother.
  Mr. Alfred Morris: He is the most fraternal of my hon. Friends. The study undertaken by Dr. Lynch and his colleague showed that school milk is an important item in the diet of school children. In Manchester recently a disturbing report showed that more and more very young children had to wear false teeth. I would much prefer to spend public money on school milk than on false teeth for young children. Preventive action is much more important than curative or remedial action.
  We know from nutritional experts that there is a serious danger of increased hypoplasm among young children because of the withdrawal of school milk at an important formative stage in their development. Hypoplastic teeth are honey-combed teeth. They are teeth that look as if they had been stuck together into one big tooth. They are caused by lack of calcium and riboflavine. That is why I call this Bill a prescription for ugliness. I ask the right hon. Lady even now to consider what has been said by Professor John Yudkin and other distinguished nutritionists in the context of whether the Bill should be pressed by the Government.
  The Government will not save £9 million by this Measure. It was estimated that the withdrawal of school milk from secondary school children would "save" £4½ million, but I have it on the most reliable testimony that the "saving" was £1·2 million. If the saving from the abolition of milk for primary school children is only a quarter of the expected saving, it will be £2¼ million and not £9 million.
  There are hon. Gentlemen opposite who know something about the agricultural determinations made by their right hon. Friend the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. When that aspect is taken into account, the saving is much smaller than the apparent saving. The figure given by the right hon. Lady was the gross figure, or the apparent saving. I should like to know what is the expected net saving. If the right hon. Lady disagrees that the actual net saving from

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  the withdrawal of school milk for secondary school children was only £1·2 million, will she tell me how, inter-departmentally, her figure is arrived at? I insist that there will not be a saving of £9 million by the Bill and that it is misleading to say that the saving to public funds will be £9 million. Let us have more accurate information.
  The right hon. Lady referred to the Committee on Medical Aspects of Food policy. It is deeply regrettable that that Committee was not approached before the Government took the decision to abolish the provision of milk for primary school children. Professor John Yudkin said to me that he doubted the value of serving on a committee of this kind if the committee were not consulted by the Government of the day.
  The country wishes the House to reject the Bill. The smokescreen from the hon. Member for Worcestershire, South, designed to hide the inadequacy of the arguments advanced from behind him, is no substitute for genuine debate. I hope that the right hon. Lady will take seriously the arguments advanced by my right hon. and hon. Friends. Many local authorities want the freedom to save their children from preventable ill-health. They want it to be emphasised, as do the National Dairy Council and other organisations involved, that there will be no saving of the order of £9 million. I again appeal to the right hon. Lady to consider carefully all that we have said, and not to proceed with a Bill which the vast majority of people in the country regard as a nasty and shabby Measure.
  7.40 p.m.
  Mr. David Crouch: There has been a great deal of compassionate and sensitive feeling for the care of our children, indeed for the care of anyone in our society of any age, today. There has also been much talk about the saving of £9 million. I do not welcome that completely without giving some thought to the possible cost of that saving. I am concerned, as were the hon. Members for Manchester, Wythenshawe (Mr. Alfred Morris) and Willesden, West (Mr. Pavitt), about the possible effect which the drinking of less milk by our schoolchildren may have on their ultimate health. We must all be concerned, and no one on this side is any less concerned about this than the hon. Members opposite.
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  We do have to be responsible, if we are to set an example of greater responsibility to parents and families in our developing society. I am concerned at certain things that I hear about, developing in our schools on this question of food and drink. I have a letter which arrived today from a constituent of mine which I would like to quote. It first of all concerns meals but it also concerns the question of what the child drinks with the meal. The letter says:
  "My daughter attends the Endowed Girls Junior School, Whitstable, in Kent. Since the increase in school dinners she has been having, in company with 12 or more other children, packed lunches. On Wednesday 9th June the children were told that they were no longer allowed to bring drinks from home, hot or cold, to school. This means that from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. they go without a hot drink. One of the reasons given was that the children who had school dinners only had water to drink. I will try not to bore you with too much detail but there is a great deal of difference between a hot meal with a cold drink and a cold meal with water. I rang the headmistress to protest at this injustice. I also lodged a protest with the local education authority and they support the headmistress's action. I sent my daughter to school on 10th June with the usual lunch and a flask of hot drink and the flask was taken away from her at 11 a.m. and returned to her at 4 p.m. on leaving. You may say that in this day and age this is incredible but this action was taken by a mature, adult teacher."
  I think the House will agree that there is some misdirection and some misunderstanding of the responsibilities in that school by those teachers. Together with the new plans we have made for savings and giving some responsibility back to the parents who can afford to pay for their children's school meals and milk, we should also say parents who provide the packed lunches should be able to send their children to school with a bottle of milk or a flask of milk, or some other drink. There should be some direction given to the local authorities so that this restriction does not continue to apply.
  I said that in the first year of Conservative Government we are creating a more responsible society. I know that there will be many voices saying that we are going about it in a rather tough fashion, that it is tough to take away the opportunity of free milk in schools. The last Labour Government decided to do this in secondary schools, and all we are saying in the Bill is that this should now stop after the age of seven. Is this so

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  wrong? We are creating a more responsible society.
  Mr. Freeson: I respect the hon. Member's feelings, but even if we accept, which we do not, the point that he makes about State provision, how do we increase responsibility by preventing, by law, local authorities—elected authorities—from providing this service to people among their electorate if they wish to do so? How is that increasing responsibility? Surely he cannot go along with the Government on that point, even if he agrees with them on the first?
  Mr. Crouch: I understand the purpose of the hon. Gentleman's intervention but really we are trying to create greater responsibility among parents towards their children. We are saying that parents must begin to take some further responsibility for the provision of their children's food and drink in schools. The State provides very fine facilities in education. My right hon. Friend has produced and presented to this House a programme for greatly expanding expenditure on schools. The programme of expenditure for 1972–73 of £38 million is a record for any one year in this sector. We are not neglecting our educational responsibilities; we are redirecting our priorities. We are recognising that a great deal has to be done to improve education; we are recognising not only a need for further buildings to replace old buildings but the need to produce more teachers and to increase their quality.
  These are surely the requirements of any Government concerned to produce the best possible facilities and opportunities for our children's education and well-being. We are not neglecting their health; what we are saying is that parents must not neglect the health of their children. It is difficult to change direction in a society but that is really the difference between this Government and the Opposition. The country will begin to recognise that there has to be a change of direction, and gradually people will take upon themselves this greater responsibility.
  Let us recognise that we are talking here of asking families to provide something like 5s. a week for meals for three children—less than the price of a packet of cigarettes. Surely this is not too
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  much to ask parents to pay for their children. If we never take this sort of decision, if we never face up to this difficult decision—and I find it difficult from this side of the House—if we do not face up to the possible ill-health which may result in perhaps 1 per cent. of our children today—and we must be on our guard—we will never see the change of direction, with mothers and fathers taking this greater responsibility for their children, so allowing our Government to take greater responsibility for the things which the State must provide—the buildings, the teachers and the educational opportunities.
  Mr. J. D. Dormand: If the hon. Gentleman is saying that the criterion is that responsibility ought to go to parents, would he say whether he agrees that exactly the same criterion must apply, for example, to maintenance grants to keep children at school after school-leaving age for college of education awards and for university grants?
  Mr. Crouch: No, I would not agree at all. As I was trying to argue, that is the main purpose of the State in education, to be generous in these areas. While I have talked about a more responsible society, my hon. Friend the Member for Worcestershire, South (Sir G. Nabarro) in his long speech made the point that there were many other social benefits which this Government had provided in the last year. He mentioned the family income supplement. For the first time a Government have begun to consider the means of providing for families in employment who are below the poverty line.
  In a redirection of priorities in social benefits, the Government have decided that it is vitally necessary and long overdue to provide a pension as of right for people over the age of 80. Only a few weeks ago the Secretary of State announced greatly increased benefits for disabled persons. The Government are going in the right direction and showing the right sense of priority. Some people think it wrong that we should deprive children of the regular provision of one-third of a pint of milk a day, which encourages the milk drinking habit. Milk is very good for children. My teenage son drinks pints of milk a day at some cost. He prefers it to other drinks, and I am glad that he does. But the habit

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  obviously started at an early age in primary school.
  This Bill is taking a new direction. I should not like to see the good practice of young people taking this valuable food to build them up and to protect their health lose its momentum. But it need not do so if my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State encourages a campaign to ensure that families recognise the true value of milk as a food and encourages parents to take this responsibility on their own shoulders where it properly should be.
  7.51 p.m.
  Mr. Fred Evans: I regret that I shall have to leave the Chamber shortly after making my speech because of another engagement. That would not have been necessary if we had not had a filibuster speech from the hon. Member for Uxbridge (Mr. Curran) and a still more tedious drooling of words—one could not dignify it by calling it a speech—from the hon. Member for Worcestershire, South (Sir G. Nabarro).
  This is a mean and vicious Bill conceived in ideological vengeance and delivered by a midwife who has shown only too clearly how anxious she is to see the ugly brat enter the political world, to the rejoicing of many members of her party. The absence of so many hon. Members opposite is indicative of the shame which some of them feel about it.
  The viciousness of the Bill is obvious in the present economic context. With an extremely high unemployment rate, more families are living on or below the subsistence level. The unemployment rate in Wales is extremely high. The male unemployment rate in my constituency is 17·5 per cent. In one travel-to-work area in my constituency, male unemployment has risen by 100 per cent. since last June.
  At the same time the Government have completely failed to control prices. The limited amount of housekeeping money in most households has been eroded. There is an ever-increasing necessity to guard children's health through school milk and meals. Yet this is the moment when the Government have chosen to introduce what I can only term a vicious Measure. It is not simply mean; it is class-consciously vicious. I hope that my party will learn a lesson from this and
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  that when we resume power—and it is the feeling of the country that an election tomorrow would sweep the Conservative Party from power—we shall show the same ruthlessness in achieving our objectives.
  Much play has been made by the hon. Member for Canterbury (Mr. Crouch) about parental responsibility. Anyone who knows anything about teaching knows that, in an age of earlier marriages and of a limited period after 11 years of age particularly in the secondary modern school, the amount of knowledge of dietetics and cookery which can be imparted to girls is extremely limited. One factor in the dietary finding of Dr. Lynch was that irrespective of income there is still a great lack of knowledge about children's diets in every home, but especially in the homes which are already deprived financially.
  It is therefore a very cheap form of preventive medicine to supply one-third of a pint of milk to children. This was recognised in the early days of the last war when women were needed to work and children had perhaps haphazard meals, certainly meals limited in dietetic balance. That is even more so today. Let it not be misunderstood that affluence means a properly balanced diet for everybody.
  Perhaps the right hon. Lady the Secretary of State will consider what is happening in America. International Documentary Television Films is making a documentary film about this matter. I saw some of the present attitudes in America where public money is to be spent by vastly extending the provision of free milk to all children and greatly to increase the number of school meals because it is found, even in an affluent society, that it is not always possible to give children the kind of diet that they should have. The argument about parental responsibility should not altogether wash.
  The right hon. Lady the Secretary of State glossed over the research work of Dr. Lynch. I do not know why. He is the head of a nutritional research unit. He involved in his researches 11 other university departments throughout the country. The results of his research work have been borne out by many other people who have carried out similar work.

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  But, if the right hon. Lady does not want to accept his findings, perhaps she will be prepared to accept the findings of the World Health Organisation which found that the minimum calcium intake that a child needs per day is 400 milligrammes, and one-third of a pint of milk provides 250 milligrammes. Therefore, a child is reasonably safeguarded simply by drinking one-third of a pint of milk a day in school.
  Mr. Rost: Is the hon. Gentleman suggesting that mothers are so ignorant and irresponsible that they would deprive their children of the nutriment from milk that they require unless it was provided free in schools?
  Mr. Evans: That is a typical twist of the argument that we expect from hon. Members opposite. Of course mothers are not ignorant or adopting evil attitudes. What I have said is that there is a lack of knowledge. The twist of the argument in the hon. Gentleman's intervention makes it appear that there is a deliberately negligent attitude towards children. There is not.
  I will put one or two other imbecilities which come into this matter. For example, there was the abortive Education Bill of the Labour Government. The right hon. Lady argued then passionately in favour of freedom for the local authorities. Freedom was the great watchword, and the present Secretary of State for the Environment, before the last election, was clamouring for freedom for the local authorities and arguing that they should be free from the Socialist bondage to which they had been tied for so long. This Government produced the Education (Scotland) Bill, and there this argument about freedom came out most strongly.
  I do not want to take too much of the time of the House but I should like to give a quotation from the speech of the Secretary of State for Scotland moving the Second Reading of that Bill, which was about fee paying being reintroduced into Scottish schools. That, he said, was a matter of freedom for the local authorities; not that there should be fee paying in all the schools: it was purely a matter of freedom of the local authorities. He said:
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  "This illustrates a fundamental difference between the philosophy of the Government and their predecessor. We believe that in running their own affairs people should have some freedom to choose what they consider to be the best. The Socialists seem to believe that people should get only what the Government think good for them…. The nature of school provision will rightly vary from area to area according to local circumstances. Education authorities are in day-to-day contact with the people most concerned with the provision—teachers, parents and children—and so they are best qualified to make decisions about the organisation of school education."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 11th November, 1970; Vol. 806, c. 415–16.]
  Now we get this volte-face. There is to be freedom at one stage and a denial of freedom at another.
  Mr. Crouch: The hon. Gentleman has accused me of misleading the House in one direction, but he is misleading the House on this question of freedom. The Labour Government deliberately restricted secondary schools from providing milk either free or on payment. They did it by legislation. There was no freedom whatsoever. What answer has he to that?
  Mr. Evans: That is exactly the point I was about to make next. Much play has been made of this taking away of school milk from secondary schoolchildren and the reinstitution of prescription charges. Instead of having positive answers right hon. and hon. Members opposite say, "Ah, but you did the same as well." They must remember that many of us resisted even those attempts; but all of us—all of us—on these benches recognise the difference of objective. In order to show that there was some across-the-board equality of sacrifice the Labour Government were prepared to make some small sacrifices in the social services, but they always made it plain that the long-term objective was to restore those services and to increase them. The objective of this Government is the massive transfer of resources from one part of the population to the much smaller, minute, section of the population—the "haves" who possess a great amount of the wealth of this country.
  The people of this country have come to realise this—unfortunately, a year too late, maybe; but they are realising just what they did last 18th June. They look at this Bill and at the provision of school milk, and they look at other actions of this Government, and if there were a

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  general election tomorrow there would be no doubt at all about what would happen.
  Anyone who has lived in an area like the North-East or the North-West of England, or South Wales—and I speak particularly or South Wales—knows the fears which are being expressed by medical officers of health. We know that medical officers of health are already discerning signs of the reappearance of the dreaded disease, rickets. That is due to a deficiency of calcium. The medical officer of health at Merthyr Tydvil, for instance, will give evidence on this. Those of us who lived through the period of the absurdities which went on at an earlier time see old people walking around with badly bowed legs and twisted joints because of their earlier calcium deficiency.
  I well remember, as a teacher in a grammar school, that we had about 40 per cent. unemployment in the catchment area of the school. So we began to insist on the provision of free school meals. The medical attitude will be exactly the same over school milk now. Then to get free meals one had to put in a medical certificate that the child was under-nourished. When the child was no longer under-nourished it was struck off the list—until it became under-nourished again. This is likely to happen in this case.
  My right hon. Friend asked the question, what is to happen if an enlightened medical officer of health—and certainly there are some to be found in South Wales—says that, on medical grounds and on medical evidence, all the children should have free milk? Will the right hon. Lady challenge the medical judgment? What criterion will she have in deciding between a medical officer in one part of the country and a medical officer in another part of the country?
  On the teaching side, who will do all the arranging? In a typical school some of the children will be seven or just under seven and some will be over seven. There is a stretch in the age limit of some six months. Some of the children will be having free milk and some will be denied it and some will be paying for milk. There will have to be a great deal of sorting out of the children under this legislation. It will cost nearly as much to bring to the school the limited amount of free milk as to bring in the
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  heavier load there would be if every child were to have free milk.
  Who is to do all this arranging? Will there be ancillary helpers? How much will it cost to have ancillary helpers? Why have the teachers not been consulted, or the head teachers? Why were teachers not consulted as soon as the Bill was envisaged? Having won the battle to get rid of serving milk and of other duties in the schools, will the teachers submit willingly to having these burdens of administration imposed upon them? Does the right hon. Lady think they will? Most certainly not. Somebody has to assume the final burden of responsibility in this administration. Is it to be imposed on the head teachers? Is that to be written into their contracts of employment? We want to know the answers to these questions, and we want to know them now.
  Although the Bill applies to education authorities, there is no mention of district councils. We appeal to district councils to assume the burden of providing milk and to reach some agreement with their county authorities. This may involve a modification of precept or other arrangements. But we appeal to the London boroughs to follow this line and to set up the maximum resistance to this kind of Measure.
  It is not my prerogative to advise the borough education authorities, since they are sane, well-balanced and intelligent people. I know the attitude in the borough of Merthyr Tydfil. I know how determined it is—and it must be their own decision. Their determination must not be under-estimated. If the Government refuse to modify the Bill so that milk can be provided out of the rates, and if this kind of resistance is experienced, we must make it clear to the country that we tried to get the present Government to effect such a modification so that the health of at least some children should not be put at hazard.
  If a modification is made, as I hope it is, the duty of the Opposition is to point out that the Tory Government have already imposed on the population swingeing increases in rates and that the expenditure out of rates would be made unwillingly because wt do not wish to impose further burdens. However, if we are faced with the evil choice of imposing an extra rate and of seeing the

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  health of some of our children put at hazard, we will impose the extra rate. But the guilt lies firmly with the Government.
  8.12 p.m.
  Mr. Michael Roberts: I intend to make a brief speech. I welcome the opportunity of following the hon. Member for Caerphilly (Mr. Fred Evans). We owe him a debt in that he has spelt out the significance of Dr. Lynch's survey. Some people have noted that Dr. Lynch's statistics indicate that unsatisfactory diets are being taken by considerable sections of the community. The figure of unsatisfactory or poor diet in Wales was about 66 per cent.
  When I first heard this figure, before looking into the matter in detail, I felt that it reflected a considerable degree of poverty in my native Wales which did not exist so far as my personal observation was concerned. Therefore, I was glad that the hon. Member for Caerphilly spelt out the fact that in an affluent society, even when there is plenty of money available, dietetically parents and children do not always have those things which are good for them. Indeed, I doubt whether my own consumption of food would always meet the approval of those who talk in terms of a balanced diet.
  The hon. Gentleman made an important point in talking of the need for more knowledge in the preparation of food. There is perhaps a case for spending more money and giving a greater service in our schools to educate the parents of the future so that they have a greater knowledge of what is required to bring up a family.
  I do not share the hon. Gentleman's view that the withdrawal of the supplementary diet of a third of a pint of milk for children between the ages of seven to 11 will have a disastrous effect on their health. The hon. Gentleman quoted certain medical officers of health, though not by name, in South Wales and I am sure that our medical officers are as progressive as anywhere in the country; but I would point out that the Public Health Committee of the British Medical Association commented that there was no evidence that the withdrawal of milk
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  supplies in schools for children from seven to 11 years of age will have any detrimental effect on health.
  I particularly welcome the aspect of the Bill which allows a local education authority to provide milk at an economic charge. Before I came to the House I was the headmaster of a secondary school, and one of the problems we faced was the provision of snacks during the school breaks. We faced this problem at a time when the Government of the day had withdrawn free milk supplies. Indeed, in the period from 1968, if the secondary schools wished to provide some form of drink, since milk supplies had been withdrawn by a Labour Government, they had to look a little further than the water tap. We looked at what we could provide, and vending machines were installed.
  It was suggested earlier in the debate that there was some difficulty involved in the installation of vending machines because there is only a 15-minute break in which children are able to use them. In fact, in the larger schools some two or three such machines are provided and a wide choice is offered to the pupils. It is reasonable in that context to remember, particularly since in recent days we have heard so much about the nutritional value of milk, in 1968, when milk was withdrawn from secondary schools by the Labour Government, I did not then hear quite so much about milk's nutritional value. It is only common prudence to allow local education authorities to provide milk as well as Coca Cola and a wide range of goods through vending machines.
  There is one aspect of the Bill about which I am not happy. Local authorities are not to be allowed to decide for themselves whether they should provide milk out of ratepayers' funds. This causes me some unease and unhappiness. If an authority can decide the structure of secondary organisation, it is reasonable that it should make the less momentous decision about whether it should supply a third of a pint of milk. This surely could come within an authority's ambit. What are our schools about? Are the priorities to involve the catering and cafeteria aspects of school organisation? So far as I am concerned a school is primarily a place of learning and not a restaurant.

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  I accept that a Government must make the decision about social priorities. This is what influences the Government today, just as it influenced the Labour Government in 1968. They then made a decision about the provision of milk and said that resources were not to be spent on milk in secondary schools; the present Government have reached a similar decision. I am not altogether happy about the situation. Although I do not altogether trust the judgment of local councils, I have great faith in the judgment of the people. I am fairly certain that a local ratepayer would look very closely at any argument put forward by a council for the provision of one-third of a pint of milk for each child. Possibly in certain situations a case could be put forward by a local authority that such a course could be justified on medical grounds, but ratepayers would certainly take a close look at the matter.
  Ratepayers would want to ensure that milk was offered during the summer holiday and particularly the Christmas holiday. They would want to know how much milk had been consumed when on offer to the children during the Christmas and summer holidays. If it is as important nutritionally and as vital as some people have suggested to the children's health, then ratepayers in those authorities that decide to supply free milk will ask, "What about last Christmas or last summer—how many children turned up for this vital commodity during those periods? What steps did the authority then take to ensure that this provision was widely advertised and that the children were encouraged to go along to receive this valuable one-third of a pint per day?" If the answer is that very few people have taken advantage of the offer, then many ratepayers would question the whole value of the exercise.
  Mr. James Hamilton: Could the hon. Gentleman instance any areas where milk is supplied during the school holidays? Certainly none of my colleagues on these benches knows of any place where school milk is provided during the holidays.
  Mr. Roberts: I am sure that in the borough of Merthyr the milk supplies are available during the holidays. I understood that this was something that authorities could provide. If they have not done so, then they ought to have
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  done so. Is this not a reflection on the value which local authorities attach to this one-third of a pint of milk? I am prepared to be corrected on this matter, but I understand that it can be provided, and in the case of Merthyr is provided. I will make some inquiries about the extent to which it is taken up.
  Mr. Alec Jones: Has the hon. Gentleman's own Tory-controlled authority made milk available during school recesses?
  Mr. Roberts: I cannot speak for the Cardiff authority on this question. I have said that Merthyr has done so. I have been assured on this point by members of the Merthyr Council. I shall be interested to learn how much of it has been taken up. I am certain that if ratepayers have to pay for milk supplies, they will closely question the value of the provision, and if in their wisdom they believe that such supplies should be made, I cannot see any objection to a local authority being allowed to make such provision. I hope that my right hon. Friend will reconsider this part of the Bill.
  8.23 p.m.
  Mr. Neil Kinnock: I warned the hon. Member for Worcestershire. South (Sir G. Nabarro) that I should refer to him early in my speech. I will make the reference very brief. He has prohibited some hon. Members from speaking on this singularly important issue of milk in primary schools because of the ridiculous length to which he took his speech. It is necessary to put that on the record because if we had been discussing a non-contentious Measure or one which was not so important the hon. Gentleman's action might have been excusable. This is no reflection on Mr. Speaker, who occupied the Chair for most of the hon. Gentleman's speech. Mr. Speaker must obviously rely on the responsibility of hon. Members to discipline themselves.
  The Bill affects every child between 7 and 11 to a greater or a lesser degree, depending on whether the child is sick or fit. Hon. Members have been prevented from making points relevant to their constituents by the thoroughly irresponsible behaviour of the hon. Member.
  The hon. Member for Cardiff, North (Mr. Michael Roberts) said that before

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  coming to the House he was a member of the teaching profession. I go further and say that the hon. Gentleman was the well-respected head of a school in Cardiff. He deserved that respect. It was, therefore, all the more surprising to me that the hon. Gentleman defended the Bill. Other members of the Tory Party who are as progressive as the hon. Gentleman in education are conspicuous by their absence: they have not bothered to attend to support this action by their Secretary of State.
  The hon. Gentleman defended the Bill in a tortuous way. He supported part of the Bill, one which we are forced to accept. That is the part which will permit schools to make milk available for sale. It is a second-best. The hon. Gentleman then made the small criticism that local authorities should be able to finance the provision of milk from the rates. Then the hon. Gentleman went very wide of the mark by pinning all his arguments on the availability of milk during school holidays. It it ludicrous to compare the situation in which children are at home during holidays with the situation of their leaving their homes at any time from 7.30 a.m. onwards and being expected to go through the school day with, possibly, one meal at lunchtime, but with the increasing price of school meals the probability is that they have no meal at all during the day.
  Welfare milk is provided for expectant and nursing mothers throughout the year. I am informed that the take-up of this welfare milk is at a very high level. This shows that where free milk is made available there is widespread recognition of its nutritional value, its sheer enjoyability, and its sheer necessity. This is why we condemn as strongly as we can the Government's decision to remove free welfare milk from schoolchildren.
  Over the years the public have come to hold the opinion that there is a certain level of conventional humanitarianism accepted by everybody in public life. The public had come to accept that since the war a degree of natural justice, a feeling of compassion, had developed amongst people regardless of party, who put themselves before the public for election.
  That opinion which was held by the public was justifiable until recent months.
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  Now this atavistic Government have moved back to the priorities of a bygone age. In the name of respectability which has been referred to countless times—this curious and condescending respectability which is so much beloved of Tory M.P.s—the Government are removing what has come to be accepted as an inalienable right of school children—the right to free milk.
  Most people believed until recently that anyone who entered public life at local authority or at national level had one priority which, though it might vary in degree, did not vary in purpose. That priority was to maximise the welfare of school children. The public believed that everyone in the House had that priority. It is no longer so. Opinion amongst parents, in the medical profession and in the teaching profession is unanimous in deploring and condemning this miserable Bill.
  However many exemptions the Secretary of State chooses to make for sick and weakly children, no one will attach any credibility to the maxim she enunciated when she said that to condone certain public expenditure—at another point she referred to maintaining the larger purpose of the White Paper introduced by the Chancellor on 30th October—children aged 7 to 11 should have the right of school milk withdrawn. That is not an excuse for committing an act not of social negligence, but a socially divisive and ultimately a socially criminal and irresponsible act.
  Medical and professional opinion is unanimous as to the value of free milk over the years during which it has been available. We are not talking about a sudden social revolution which began a few years ago. School milk was established 49 years ago. It is universally accepted by people of good will and common sense that children need milk. Since free milk became available for school children, the consumption of milk at school has risen and the health of children has become immeasurably better. I know that much of this could be attributed to increased affluence.
  Anyone who has stood, as the hon. Member for Cardiff, North has, and as I have for a much shorter number of years, at junior school assemblies knows that even parents of affluence cannot be

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  left to do everything. I have seen children of parents of this generation faint because they have been hungry. This is not an untruthful or scandalous statement. Every teacher in the House and outside if he has taught in even a normal urban district, let alone in a deprived area, has seen children vomit and faint at nine o'clock assembly, for the simple reason that whatever affluence our society has endowed their parents with it has not endowed them with the requisite sense of responsibility.
  To define the responsibility of parents as the hon. Member for Canterbury (Mr. Crouch) did in his condescending and feudalistic way was wrong. We must accept that in a civilised society the State and the appointed representatives of society should establish higher standards. If the majority of parents accept those standards, well and good. The vast majority of parents accept the standards laid down by the State. However, it must be acknowledged that some parents do not come up to those standards.
  Our responsibility is to ensure that standards are raised. By the Bill the Government are ensuring that those standards will fall. It is not sufficient for the Secretary of State to say that children with a medical need will continue to receive milk. It is established beyond question that all children have a medical need for milk, and the Secretary of State acknowledged this. A concomitant of this is that it is the responsibility of society to maximise the welfare benefits to children.
  Rather than gambling on the responsibility of parents or on local authorities, if we ensured beyond doubt that free milk was made available to schoolchildren it would cost a few million pounds. That is our function in Parliament. It is not sufficient to say that only the sick and the weakly will have the benefit of free milk from now on.
  During our last debate on education I said that we are reintroducing a physical means test. Can the House visualise little boys of 8 to 10 acknowledging their weakliness by going to their teacher with a note or by going through some form-filling procedure to acknowledge that they are less strong, less well, less virile, less active, than their fellows? The Secretary of State is imposing ignominy on children at an age when it will cause
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  them a deep and lasting grievance. I say that, without any kind of false compassion, as someone whose first interest is the welfare of children.
  It is not enough to say that Dr. Lynch's researches were not conducted on the basis of clinical or physical examination. When one has seen children fainting it is not necessary to go through a tooth-combing research. It should be our pleasure to spend the minimal amount required to ensure that children get milk.
  It is not enough to say that social security benefits are being increased. They are due to factors entirely extraneous to children's need for milk. They are factors which derive from the rising cost of living, not from the Government's misplaced sense of compassion.
  It is not enough to say that the withdrawal of milk from secondary school children has no adverse effect and to try to justify this Government's action by that of the Labour Government. Had I been here when the Labour Government introduced legislation which had the effect of withdrawing milk from secondary school children, I should have been honoured to join those of my hon. Friends who had the plain common guts to go through the Lobby against their own Government. The notable absence of so-called progressives on the Government side indicates not only that they have not got the moral courage to come and speak but that they will hide behind their Whip to go through the Lobby in support of this thoroughly heinous Measure.
  There are two aspects which show that public opinion, medical evidence and historical experience are against the Government and are a measure of their credibility. The first, which has already been referred to extensively so I will not bother the House too long, is the freedom of local authorities to operate. Both The Times and the Guardian on the same day drew attention to the fact that the Government, contrary to their declaration of independence for local authorities, both in their manifesto and on subsequent occasions, have incarcerated local authorities not only in this policy, but in others, with the bondage of their own prejudice. That was not forgotten a few weeks ago at the local elections, and it will not be forgotten at the next General Election.
  The second aspect concerns the sense of priorities and the flimsy arguments which

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  have been adduced by hon. Members opposite in support of the Bill. The hon. Member for Worcestershire, South gave the impression that he was thin-skinned. He complained that certain of my hon. Friends called him a hypocrite. I do not consider that either he or the Secretary of State is a hypocrite. They were, they are, and they always will be, barbarians. This is a barbarian Bill which is the product of a barbarian mind. In that sense they are not hypocrites.
  We had the reactionary utopianism of the hon. Members for Canterbury (Mr. Crouch) for Kensington, South (Sir B. Rhys Williams) and for Uxbridge (Mr. Curran) saying that they would love to give universal benefits to everyone. I should like to remind those hon. Members of the kind of public opinion they are up against. People have rumbled the nonsense that they try to spout. I have a letter from a constituent in which he says:
  "You of course know of the Monmouthshire County Council's protest to the Minister."
  This is a protest about milk which the Secretary of State has probably received.
  "Also on Tuesday of last week the Monmouthshire County Officers' branch of N.A.L.G.O. sent a protest to the Miinster. The following day, Wednesday, 9th June, Bedwas and Machen Trades Council and Labour Party agreed to send a letter to the Minister again protesting. That same day, Bedwas Group of Primary School Managers recorded their support to the Monmouthshire County Council in their fight against the Government's proposals. Oddly enough, even though I seconded this proposition, it was moved by County Councillor Grimmer, a Conservative."
  This is a sample of public opinion on the basis that this is a small Bill involving a small amount of money but has massive implications for the future of our educational and political system.
  I ask the Government, even at this late date, to withdraw the Bill. If not, I appeal to the courage of hon. Gentlemen opposite to vote against the Bill and with the people that they represent.
  8.40 p.m.
  Mr. James Hill: It would have been very difficult for me to speak enthusiastically about the Bill—in Southampton, I received only two letters on this matter—but the extravagant phraseology of the Labour Party has led me to think that there is some defence
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  for my right hon. Friend. We badger her for further education expenditure. I have lately been trying to get modernisation of a Victorian slum school in Southampton, called Deanery, and a dreadful little primary school Bassett Green, which was meant as a temporary school in the 1930s and is still with us.
  We have heard from Labour Members some evidence that from 1930 to 1933 the height of children was dropping, but that it started rising again in 1945, and we have also heard of honey-combed teeth and rickets and of children fainting. But we have also heard about obesity among children. So the sheer extravagance of their arguments has led those on this side who could have been the friends of hon. Members opposite to go to the defence of our own Front Bench.
  One of the more extravagant claims was that our Front Bench was ruthless. A less ruthless group of people one would go a long way to find. Ruthlessness is not a characteristic of my right hon. Friend. This must have been a very difficult decision for her. We are all demanding things on behalf of constituents and it is a case of trying to get a quart into a pint pot. Some hon. Members may think that £9 million is cheeseparing, but when faced with poor accommodation, temporary classrooms, nissen huts, children running from one class to another in inclement weather, this £9 million, if turned into bricks and mortar, would give some lucky cities 36 more primary schools.
  Mr. Norman Buchan: The hon. Member has this absolutely wrong. It is nothing to do with a choice between different resources to go on education. It is a choice between £9 million worth of free school milk for our children and a cut for surtax payers. That was the choice—and they made the wrong one.
  Mr. Hill: I would not accept that for a moment. It is this doctrinaire nonsense which will make this effective Government strive more and more for savings which can be turned into more school buildings and educational facilities—and, if the country prospers, more tax cuts.
  On the question of children fainting, I would go along with my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Mr. Crouch).

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  As for parental responsibility, all hon. Members opposite who have the facts and figures at their fingertips will know how many children go to school without breakfast. That is why they faint. Parental responsibility starts at the beginning of the day, not at the milk break. If it is said that parental responsibility cannot go to the extent of making sure that a child has a breakfast, surely it should go to the extent of providing less than two shillings a week for this essential milk supply.
  If these savings go towards further assistance in the educational sphere, I see nothing wrong with that. I should like to think that in the future, perhaps, if my right hon. Friend is so inclined, the age limit could be raised. But, once again, that is the quart demand and the pint pot.
  It can be argued that the Bill increases the freedom of local authorities. To my amazement, the previous Government not only took away milk from secondary schools but did so without consulting the schools in any way. It seems ludicrous for hon. Members of the Opposition to bring forward the argument that the Government have done this without consultation. If local authorities, in their wisdom—I hope that Southampton may well follow this—find a need for this milk, I should be only too pleased if they provided the milk which seems to be lacking so often in the constituencies of the Opposition.
  It was a very difficult decision for the Government to make. They have made it with every resource of the education service at their fingertips. I should like to think that tonight neither we nor the Opposition neede a three-line Whip, because everyone interested in education will see that this sort of Measure can only do good in the long term.
  8.48 p.m.
  Mr. Peter Hardy: Obviously the Government decided that they needed a three-line Whip because they have needed a Conservative Party brief to sustain them during the debate.
  The hon. Member for Southampton, Test (Mr. James Hill) commented that only two of his constituents had written to him about this matter. I am not surprised that so few of his constituents
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  expect Conservative Members of Parliament to be interested in the subject.
  The hon. Member for Ilford, South (Mr. Cooper) seemed to suggest that our opposition to the Bill was because we wanted to raise another £3,000 million of taxation. This was followed by a speech from my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Wythenshawe (Mr. Alfred Morris), who said that the total savings on public expenditure as a result of the decision to cease to provide milk in secondary schools were really only £1·2 million. In an intervention, I said to the right hon. Lady the Secretary of State that I thought it was less than £1½ million, but we understand that the net savings on public expenditure were £1·2 million. That came from the failure to provide milk for children between the ages of 11 and 18.
  Let us suppose that the child in the secondary school stays there for an average of five or five and a half years; we save £1·2 million. How can the Secretary of State expect to save a total of £9 million when the child is in the junior school for only about four years? Looking at it carefully, it seems to me that the true saving in public expenditure will be about £2 million, putting it at its most generous, not much more than 3p per head per year. In order to save 3p per head per year, we are to deprive primary school children of free milk. For this we risk not merely a deterioration in the dietary pattern of the country, which demands that warning signals should be made clear, but frustration in local government.
  The Conservative Party promised that local government would have more freedom and that there would be some devolution and that councillors would not be rubber stamps. I was a councillor myself and I heard slogans of that sort until the election. But now local authorities will find their freedom greatly reduced. I hope that they will protest about the Bill. I hope that when my own area provides its own Labour education authority, it will seek power to provide free milk. I would rather accept its judgment than that of the Department, because councillors know their areas and the needs of their areas and are able to give the matter far closer consideration than can any Department.

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  The Government offer the defence that free milk will be available to some who need it. This is an imperfect arrangement, imperfect in that it could cause many of those who would qualify to be reluctant to do so. I know of constituents who refuse to ask for free meals and who will refuse to ask for free milk, because they will not wish to risk their children being embarrassed. This is particularly so in some of the more affluent areas where only a small minority of children would qualify and where the parents of such children are conscious that they are in a minority and are, therefore, more reluctant to claim these privileges. They may feel that there is an unfairness about it; they may feel embarrassed about asking.
  But they are not the only people who will be embarrassed by this extension of the theory of selectivity. The Government will be extremely embarrassed by this approach at the next General Election. The Government suggest that drinks should be sold. I am sorry that the hon. Member for Cardiff, North (Mr. Michael Roberts) has now left the Chamber. I, too, was teaching in a secondary school before the last election, and we, too, had vending machines. We had to stop using them, because they caused many problems. Although we had, as the hon. Member for Cardiff, North said he had, an adequate number, we still had about 200 children per vending machine.
  I gather that, being a Conservative, the hon. Member would conduct his school duties on effective but nevertheless traditional lines. If he conducted his school on traditional lines, I cannot understand how he could expect 200 children to get a drink from a vending machine during one playtime. If he did he must have had one of those progressive schools where there are no timetables, no lessons, no subjects, very little discipline and the kids may go in and out as and when they feel like it. I may be old-fashioned, but I should not have thought that that sort of school was very effective. But it is only that sort of school which could use vending machines effectively, even though the education system itself might not be very good.
  The hon. Member for Worcestershire, South (Sir G. Nabarro) ducked the question when I intervened in his speech to
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  point out that even a vending machine arrangement in a school was scarcely satisfactory, and I should like the Secretary of State to reconsider that. Another consideration is that if vending machines are installed, the children will spend the whole playtime queuing up, so that not merely will they be deprived of school milk, but many will be consistently deprived of fresh air during the 15-minute break which they should be enjoying outside.
  The Secretary of State said that the cost of this provision would be met by the families, and that social security benefits and wages had risen so that people were able to meet it. If this were the only cost which people were incurring, that would be entirely reasonable, but rents are rising, food prices are enormously higher, and the cost of services is increasing day by day.
  It is reasonable to suppose that, although some people may have benefited considerably, the majority are not benefiting to such an extent that they can afford to bear an additional imposition of this sort. Although many parents may be prepared to make sacrifices to buy an alternative provision in the early weeks following this imposition, the continuing inflation which we are experiencing will mean that more and more find it increasingly difficult to give the children the extra money which they need.
  The Government's defence is that the Labour Government stopped the provision of milk in secondary schools. I was not enthusiastic about that reduction, but the situation in the primary school is entirely different. At least one-third of children in secondary schools in my area never took their free school milk—the girls, I think, largely because they were afraid of getting too fat—but in primary schools, in which I taught for a period, the vast majority of children take the milk.
  An important matter was touched on by my hon. Friend the Member for Bed-wellty (Mr. Kinnock) when he spoke of children fainting. In my teaching career, I have know many children to faint, often because they had had a light breakfast. Boys or girls of 12 or 13 are able to get some breakfast for themselves, but children of eight or nine are much less able to do so. I should hate to think that we were condemning hundreds or thousands

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  of children to leave home for school and have to wait at least until lunch time before they had some sustenance.
  The hon. Member for Worcestershire, South told us that he drank two pints of milk a day. Perhaps it does him far more good than some other beverages which have been mentioned, but the hon. Gentleman scarcely needs two pints of milk a day. On the other hand, there are many children in my constituency and elsewhere whose parents could not afford two pints of milk a day. Until we have a situation in which parents can well afford all that their children need, this Government ought not, in our so-called civilised society, to seek to add a dreadful imposition of this kind.
  8.57 p.m.
  Mr. Bob Brown: I return to the subject of my intervention in the right hon. Lady's speech, namely, that of a nutrition survey. If ever such a survey were needed, it is needed in connection with this squalid Bill. The Government's suggested survey is a squalid commentary on the nation's electorate. It is typical of a Tory Government to suggest that it should be carried out in Croydon, Bristol and Sheffield, three of the richest towns in the country. The proposal is arrant nonsense.
  If the survey is to mean anything at all, it must be carried out in an area like Tyneside. I commend to the right hon. Lady two riverside schools in my constituency, in Denton Road and Delaval Road, an area in which many underprivileged people live and many underprivileged children are taught.
  The right hon. Lady should get together with her right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Social Services and try to retrieve some semblance of credit among the electorate, that credit which the Government have completely lost by their dishonest dealings with the people. Let them agree that the nutrition survey should take place on Tyneside, on Clyde-side and in the valleys of South Wales. If it is to mean anything, that is clearly where the survey should take place.
  The Newcastle Journal of 2nd June, under the headline
  "Tories rebel over school milk—angry councillors warn Government"
  [An HON. MEMBER: "The Government are not interested."]—No, especially when
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  they find that their colleagues, some progressive colleagues in the country, are condemning them. The Newcastle Journal said:
  "Newcastle Education Committee is opposing the Government's decision to raise school meal prices and withdraw free milk. Last night members unanimously approved a resolution calling on the Government to reconsider its Bill stopping the supply of free milk to the seven-to-11-year-old age group. At the same time the Chairman, Alderman Doctor Cyril Lipman"
  —who was my Tory opponent in the 1970 election—
  "hinted that if the Bill became law the city might find loop-holes to continue providing free milk."
  It is to the credit of Dr. Lipman and his Tory colleagues on the education committee, allied with our members on the education committee, that they condemn the Government out of hand for their action. There are colleagues of mine who would criticise me for giving him any credit. They might well say that with the message of Thursday, 13th May, of the electors of Newcastle ringing loudly in his ears, he found this a convenient thing to do. But I believe that he is an educationist before he is a Tory and that he is extremely concerned for the children of Newcastle, who are not swimming in rich gravy by any means, that this disastrous Measure should be opposed.
  I ask the Secretary of State to take note of the protestations of some of her own colleagues in a city that has always been noted for a progressive education committee.
  9.2 p.m.
  Miss Joan Lestor: Hon. Members on this side of the House and some hon. Members opposite, have treated this matter with fitting gravity and seriousness. I was sorry that the hon. Member for Worcestershire, South (Sir G. Nabarro) spoke in the way that he did, dealing with the subject in a hilarious way, and lowering the debate to a level to which it ought never to have been allowed to deteriorate. I was sorry that phrases like "soup-kitchen mentality" were introduced into the debate. Some of us who have been responsible, as I have, for dealing with school meals and milk have never regarded their provision as in any way

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  comparable with a soup-kitchen mentality.
  We must stress at the outset that, as the Secretary of State said, no advice was taken about what is likely to happen as a result of the withdrawal of free milk. We were advised when we withdrew free milk in secondary schools, that it would be harmful to do the same in primary schools.
  Professor John Yudkin, who is a member of the committee of the Department of Health and Social Security on the medical aspects of food policy, said that the children's milk issue had not been put to his committee and asked,
  "What the hell's the use of sitting on the committee if it isn't asked about this supremely important issue?"
  This was reported on 27th October last year. Professor Yudkin added that the cuts would be the most retrograde step that could be taken. Children and parents were being tempted increasingly to consume things of low nutritional value. To offer a child at playtime a soft drink instead of milk was to offer it an almost irresistible alternative. Someone had to divert the child's hand from the soft drink bottle to the milk bottle. I am amazed, to say the least, that the views of people like Yudkin and others have been disregarded.
  The right hon. Lady said that a survey was to be carried out, but she has been extremely selective in her choice of areas. She says that she intends to give effect to what is found by the survey, but that seems to me to be rather like bolting the stable door after the horse has gone, because the right hon. Lady gave us no guarantee that if the results of the inquiry are what we believe they will be—which is that over a period of time there will be a detrimental effect on the health of children—the Government will immediately reintroduce the supply of free milk to children in primary schools. There seems to be little point in having the survey if its findings are not to be put into effect.
  I hope that the results of that survey will not be treated in the way that the hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr. van Straubenzee) treated the interim report of the survey of the Queen Elizabeth College. The right hon. Lady said that she
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  would not accept the report of the survey unless various things were done. I view with great apprehension what will happen after this survey is carried out in selective areas and shows that grave dfficulties are being caused for these children. We have not been given any guarantee that anything positive will come from it.
  Many hon. Gentlemen opposite have talked about exceptions under the Bill. They have said that if there is a medical need, if children are in special schools, and so on, they will still be entitled to free milk. As I put to the hon. Member for Worcestershire, South, there is no provision in the Bill for poverty. That is not to be one of the criteria for the provision of free milk. The right hon. Lady said that as there is now provision for the payment of family income supplement, as social security benefits have been increased and as there will be more free school meals, the need to provide free milk is not so great. The right hon. Lady and hon. Gentlemen opposite are guilty of an omission, and any error of judgment, because they continually confuse eligibility with take-up. One of the biggest indictments of any system of welfare provision is that the provision is there if people need it, but they have to apply for it; but we know that the take-up falls far short of the provision.
  That statement is borne out by what was said by the Secretary of State for Social Services, that despite a £340,000 advertising campaign by the Government more than three-quarters of those entitled to free milk, welfare foods, free prescription, free dental and other treatment have failed to apply for those benefits. The Government have estimated that 190,000 people are entitled to claim free welfare foods and milk. The figures given on 11th May by the Secretary of State show that up to 27th April the number of claims was only 23 per cent. of that figure. It is no good arguing that where there is eligibility there will be take-up, because hon. Gentlemen opposite will find that view impossible to prove. Eligibility does not mean that people take up the benefits to which they are entitled.
  References to soup-kitchen mentalities and lame ducks discourage people from taking up the things to which they are

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  entitled because it makes them feel that they are not welcome to those benefits. It makes them feel that if they are poor, or inadequate, or in some other way unfortunate, they are grudgingly given these things by society. The effect of using phrases such as those is shown by the lack of take-up of many of the benefits provided by society, for the simple reason that people feel that they are being labelled in that way.
  It cannot be argued that because there is a family income supplement everything is taken care of. It seems that the supplement is intended to cover a variety of sins. It has to cover everything out of £7 million. The right hon. Lady said that we spent more on milk than on school books. I do not know whether the inference was that we shall now be spending more on school books; I hope so. I know that she intends to spend more on primary schools. Perhaps she will tell us whether more will be spent on books.
  Mrs. Thatcher: There is a bigger improvement element this year in the rate support grant.
  Miss Lestor: It has been suggested that school milk was being withdrawn so as to give relief to surtax payers. Hon. Gentlemen opposite said that it was doctrinaire and stupid to say that, but I do not know where the money has come from if it has not come from reductions in social welfare services. Let us further consider what was done in the Budget this year. The £15 to £20 million that the Labour party put into the public purse was taken out again by the disaggregation of a child's income. The way in which taxation applied to the income of parents and children enabled parents to pay for their children to go to public and independent schools. We altered the basis of taxation so as to prevent that, but the Conservative Government have put back the old system. That £15 to £20 million is twice the amount which, on the right hon. Lady's figures, would be saved by the withdrawal of school milk.
  This is likely to be the way in which the public will judge it. We cannot afford to give free school milk to children, but we can afford to subsidise the rich to enable them to pay for their children to go to schools such as Eton, in my con-
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  stituency. This is an odd set of values. I should like an explanation why we should give relief to surtax payers and put back between £15 and £20 million into the pockets of rich people for the purpose of subsidising public school education.
  The Evening Standard tonight and the Guardian and The Times on Saturday pointed out what the Prime Minister said at the time of the General Election:
  "The most urgent reform of local government is to get the Government spanner out of the works. Under Labour there can never be real reform of local government for they will always seek to use their powers to bend local authorities to their will. It will be for a Conservative Government to restore to the local elector and the local councillor the freedom of action he needs to make life better for himself and his fellow-citizens and to control his own destiny and that of the community."
  Surely local authorities should be allowed to make the choice. Perhaps this is something else that the Prime Minister did not mean when he said it, or perhaps he has been misquoted. It is an odd situation that, when the Government have the opportunity to give freedom to local authorities, they refuse to allow them that freedom. The same point was made on Second Reading of the Education (Scotland) Bill.
  On this question of freedom for local authorities, let me remind the right hon. Lady that this was what all the row in comprehensive education was about. This is what the row at Enfield was about. She wanted freedom for local authorities, but now we are not to have it. I do not know whether hon. Members opposite have seen the evidence put forward by the legal department of the G.L.C. on behalf of the Inner London Education Authority. It has made a statement to which consideration ought to be given. Perhaps it will be mentioned in the wind-up speech. The statement says that this is
  "… a retrograde step, the effects of which can only be plainly discernible after it has been in operation for some considerable time.
  "In the meanwhile it will fall on us and our staff to implement the proposal and to ascertain which children in this age group require free school milk on health grounds. While we do not feel that any set standard of height or weight should be regarded as the criterion and believe that the decision should rest on the clinical judgment of the doctor concerned, we nevertheless feel that he will be placed in a difficult position without having any definite guide as to the standards he has

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  to adopt. We understand that the Department of Education and Science is not willing to lay down any set standards.
  "We are moreover concerned at the effect on the parent/doctor relationship and conseqently on the whole relationship between the parent and the school health service. The parents of some children whom we consider to be in continued need of school milk will disagree with our decision and conversely some parents of children for whom we do not consider continuation of milk necessary will think that they do need it."
  It goes on in detail and makes the point:
  "We appreciate that the judgment of the doctor making the decision in any individual case must be based solely on medical grounds but think that there could well be social grounds why a child should or should not be given free school milk and regret that there is no parallel in the proposed legislation."
  This is something that has not been given the careful consideration it needs. Nor have many of the medical and other views put forward. The question of the care of teeth has received a great deal of publicity since this Bill was announced. A total of £80 million is spent on dental care, including dentures. Dentures among children are much more common than they were. We know that milk is one of the main requirements for creating good strong teeth. I find the ignoring of this point very disturbing. All the evidence put out to warn the Government is being completely ignored on the principle that parents must learn to feed their own children.
  The hon. Member for Ilford, South (Mr. Cooper) said that all children up to the age of seven will continue to receive free milk. That is not true. There is a situation among the under-fives which puzzles me. Why is it that children in nursery schools, playgroups and other pre-school and registered establishments, according to the Secretary of State for Social Services, will continue to receive free milk, while children at home with their mothers will continue to be deprived of cheap welfare milk? That may not be in the Bill but it is a fact. I am in favour of children in nursery schools receiving the milk, of course, but I do not understand why those at home should not receive it, bearing in mind not only the maldistribution of nursery schools throughout the country but that many children in playgroups are there—not all but some—because their parents are able to pay the playgroup fee whereas many are not in playgroups because their
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  parents cannot afford it. There has not been, and there is not likely to be under this Government, any further development of free nursery schools started under the last government.
  I do not understand how the Government have got themselves into this situation. They may say that provision to this effect is not in the Bill and therefore it does not matter. Many speeches by hon. Members opposite have had little to do with what is in the Bill, but we have had to listen to them and suffer as a result. This may seem to be a small point, but, as somebody who has a lot to do with children in schools, I am not happy about the classification "medical milk". It is not good for a child to know that he is receiving free milk because there is something wrong with him. It could have a bad psychological effect on him. These matters can be explained to older children but this is not a wise classification in respect of younger children. The right hon. Lady should drop the term "medical milk" very quickly.
  The hon. Member for Uxbridge (Mr. Curran) said that he would like this to be an ideal society. Would not we all? We are further from it than we were a year ago. He said that there was a limited amount of money available for education, and we had to decide the best way in which to spend it. Making sure that children have at least one-third of a pint of milk a day is one of the best ways in which we can spend it.
  The hon. Member for Worcestershire, South, whose speech was, I think, the most disgraceful I have heard since I have been a Member, talked about his fine figure. If his speech is one of the results of all the milk that he drinks, it may feed the body but it certainly does not feed the mind. Looking at him and listening to him, I thought that we were in a circus where a clown had taken over. The hon. Gentleman fell into the trap of talking about poverty and said that poor children will get free school milk. But they will not.
  I must ask the Under-Secretary of State to comment on the big drop in the take-up of school meals, which is relevant to the Bill and why many local authorities are reacting so strongly to it. There has been a 20 per cent. drop in Slough. According to the survey carried

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  out so far, the drop in Brent is much the same. Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a Conservative-controlled authority, says that the Bill should not go through because people are worried about the nutritional effects it will have on children. Someone talked about children fainting in school because they had not had any breakfast. Perhaps it is suggested that they will have a longer faint if their milk is taken away. This is logic gone mad. I accept completely that many parents need to be educated about nutrition—not only about under-feeding but about overfeeding. But we do not do it by saying, "We shall not give your children free school milk, even if they faint". Positive steps must be taken in educating people in these matters.
  If, as the Government say, people must stand on their own feet and lame ducks and soup-kitchen mentalities are the results of welfare services, where shall we go next? If it is said that parents can buy milk for their children and that it is not up to the Government to provide it, I would point out that they can also buy books for their children. Will the right hon. Lady or somebody else on her side of the House suggest that we should start cutting the public libraries and that we should have public libraries only for poor children? People can buy swings at Harrods and Gaits. Is it to be said, "We shall not provide these things"? Hon. Members shake their heads. What is the difference between saying, "You can buy milk. Therefore, we shall not give it to you" and saying, "You can buy swings and books. Therefore, they will not be provided"?
  I get sick and tired of listening to hon. Members on that side of the House talking about "free"—free milk, free this and free that. Everybody who is a taxpayer or a ratepayer is paying for these services. When I see children getting milk, when I see children having access to libraries, when I see, as we saw under the last Administration, a great development of free nursery education, I am glad and I am happy that my taxes and rates should go to that provision. It is being paid for, and the people who are being deprived of this free milk are already paying for it out of taxation. In fact, of course, the money which is to be saved is going to bolster up other people who do not need it. That is the terrible thing.
  Mr. Crouch: Will the hon. Lady give way?
  Miss Lestor: Very briefly.
  Mr. Crouch: I will be very brief, and I am grateful to her. Again she is misleading the House in suggesting that there has been any suggestion on this side of the House of reducing facilities in education. My right hon. Friend has been at great pains over the last year to show how she is trying to redirect and produce better facilities.
  Miss Lestor: What I said was, what is the next principle—what is to come next? If this is the principle, I must suggest to the hon. Gentleman that he reads some of the Bow Group publications. He will find what some of the suggestions are. I hope that, as a result of my putting up that warning, the Government will not do these things. I was asking, if this is the principle, where do we go from here?
  The right hon. Lady last Thursday said that those of us who were arguing for free school milk and subsidised meals were saying, in effect, that parents are incapable of looking after the nutritional requirements of their children. Nobody on this side of the House has said that. That argument could well be applied in reference to a large variety of services which are already provided for children, and some of them I have mentioned. Is the right hon. Lady saying that only those people incapable of looking after the nutritional requirements of their children should get free milk and subsidised meals? If she is accusing us of saying that, or of saying it of the majority, we must ask her what her criterion is. I believe the right hon. Lady has never taught in school.
  Mrs. Thatcher: I have.
  Miss Lestor: Oh, then the right hon. Lady cannot be forgiven. I was going to forgive her, but now she cannot be forgiven. Those of us who have taught know, as I know, that young children—and it is true of older children also, come to that—will eat in school what they will not eat at home, and that they will drink milk when in a community. [Laughter.] Do not let hon. Members laugh about this, because it is a very important point. Everybody concerned with the nutrition and diet of children knows this to be a fact. Most parents

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  know it to be a fact. If the right hon. Lady has taught in school she should have known that this provision is worth preserving. Nothing she has said indicates that she has any experience of it—[An HON. MEMBER: "The hon. Lady is being rather rude."]—I am being rather rude? The hon. Member for Worcestershire, South was rather rude. Hon. Members opposite did not object to that, did they? I can be as rude as the hon. Member for Worcestershire, South can be any day.
  I do not want to get involved—for they are not relevant to this debate—in arguments about other aspects of public expendtiture, except to say this: I believe that it is a public outrage that we as a country see Concorde costing at least £1,000 million, maybe more, half of which we shall be paying, and yet here we are arguing about £9 million—and £9 million minus, because it will not be that much which will be saved. When people talk about saving money it seems to me that the Government look for the meanest, narrowest ways in which to do so, and that is what I believe most people in this country, including a large number of Conservatives, feel about this Bill, that it is hitting at those least able to take it. It is moving away from a principle we have always followed in this country, for we have always shown a great deal of concern for our children. Now the Government cannot give this measure of compassion, and not only turn the welfare services from those in need in terms of poverty but take away what we regard as a right of every child.
  This is why we call this Bill a miserable Bill, and that is why I feel in my heart that this is only one of many steps which are yet to come. It is only right that I should put this warning out to the public this evening.
  9.30 p.m.
  The Under-Secretary of State for Health and Education, Scottish Office (Mr. Edward Taylor): We have had an interesting debate in which I have had the pleasure of hearing, for the second time during my parliamentary life a maiden speech by the hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. R. C. Mitchell). I heard him on many occasions speak with great conviction and at length on the Ports Bill upstairs in Committee. I
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  am sure that we all look forward to hearing him again.
  We also had some well-informed contributions from members of the teaching profession, including the hon. Members for Rother Valley (Mr. Hardy) and for Bedwellty (Mr. Kinnock), my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, North (Mr. Michael Roberts) and others.
  The debate has covered a great deal of ground, and one matter with which I had intended to deal was the relevance of the Bill to Scotland. We have had no speaker on either side of the House from Scotland. This is understandable today in view of those hon. Members' minds being on other matters.
  Mr. James Hamilton: The hon. Gentleman must recognise that I was trying to get into the debate and will remember that I had an Adjournment debate on this matter. I told the House a little earlier that many of us from Scotland were busily engaged in fighting for U.C.S., but I have been here during this debate.
  Mr. Taylor: I was not trying to cast any reflection on Scottish Members who attend the Chamber with great regularity, particularly the hon. Member for Bothwell (Mr. James Hamilton) who, as he said, raised this matter on the Adjournment. I was only trying to apologise for answering questions which had not been asked.
  The Bill will affect Scotland differently in regard to the date of operation for sever-year-olds. We take 1st August as the effective date instead of a date after the summer term since the school holidays in Scotland are different from those in England. Secondly, children in Scotland who receive milk for certain health reasons can receive it for a year longer simply because children in Scotland normally stay at primary school a year longer.
  I listened with interest to the speech of the hon. Lady the Member for Eton and Slough (Miss Lestor). It is interesting that whenever we come forward with a plan of any sort involving cuts in public expenditure or a reduction in services, the Opposition say that it is wrong or outrageous. On the other hand, whenever we ask for suggestions as to where the money is to come from, they are reluctant to tell us—[HON. MEMBERS: "What

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  about surtax?"]—I will deal specifically with the tax question a little later.—[HON. MEMBERS: "Get back to your brief."]—I am not reading a brief.
  The hon. Lady said that it was strange that on the one hand we were spending millions on Concorde, and yet on the other hand were cutting free school milk, which will save us £9 million. I suggest that that argument is just not good enough. We all know that if anything were to happen to the Concorde project because of any action by this Government, there would be uproar, alarm and complaints of outrage expressed by the Opposition. They cannot have it all ways, as the hon. Lady and her Friends have been trying to do.
  The hon. Lady then asked, since we are seeing cuts in school milk, what was to come next? She said that all kinds of terrible things were just around the corner. She was being unfair to my right hon. Friend who, with her colleagues in the Cabinet, have fought vigorously and hard for increases in social services where there is a need and to fill in the gaps which were left by the previous Administration in making good deficiencies which have existed for so long.
  Mr. R. C. Mitchell: Will the hon. Gentleman give a firm and binding assurance that there will be no more charges in respect of the education services during the lifetime of this Parliament?
  Mr. Taylor: What I can say is that any provision made by this Government will be wholly consistent with what we set out in the White Paper. I will give a clear and absolute guarantee that this Administration will be more able to meet the real needs of the social services than was the previous Administration.
  Is not the hon. Gentleman aware that, apart from the changes brought about in the charges for school meals and in the provision of school milk, we have made provision for an additional £28 million to be spent on the primary schools where it is needed, consistent with the promises made by this Administration at the last election? We have also provided more than £100 million for health and social services where needed. We are carrying out the promise to try to make good the services which were not provided by the previous Administration because the cash
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  was not there. This is what we are doing and will continue to do.
  A number of different points have been raised during the debate and I will endeavour to deal with as many of them as I can. My hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Mr. Crouch) mentioned one of his constituents who had experienced difficulty in a child taking drinks to school and packed lunches. I was surprised to hear this, but if he would send details of the case to my right hon. Friend, I am sure she will be only too glad to look at it.
  My hon. Friend the Member for Worcestershire, South (Sir G. Nabarro) referred to two points. [HON. MEMBERS: Where is he?"] My hon. Friend has been present for most of the debate and made an interesting contribution. He asked about the provision of milk for independent and direct grant schools. The position is that under Clause 1(3) local authorities have a power, but not a duty, to supply milk to children at independent and direct grant schools. The situation is unchanged in regard to this provision compared with previous legislation.
  Mr. Buchan: Having said that there is a power in regard to grant-aided independent schools, will the hon. Member now say that the same power will be given to local authorities in the fee-paying sector?
  Mr. Taylor: I was referring to local authorities having power to do the same for direct grant schools as they have the power to do for their own schools, namely, to provide milk to the age groups mentioned in the Bill.
  I will deal with the two main points which were raised by the right hon. Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Central (Mr. Edward Short) and by the hon. Lady the Member for Eton and Slough about the exemptions which are provided. On the question of health, the right hon. Gentleman, whom I greatly respect, indicated that C.O.M.A. advised in 1968 that the withdrawal of milk from primary schoolchildren would have adverse nutritional effects. I cannot answer for the actions of the previous Administration, but this is not the advice that I have been given now by the same Committee, and I find it difficult to believe that it took a different line in 1968.

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  Here again, I cannot speak about what happened before. I can say that within days of the White Paper being published C.O.M.A. considered the proposals and endorsed the view of the Chief Medical Officer, who is C.O.M.A.'s Chairman, that it was not possible to say whether the withdrawal of milk from the over-sevens would have any adverse effect on their health. C.O.M.A., did, however, recommend that there should be careful monitoring. This is now being arranged under the guidance of C.O.M.A.'s own Sub-Committee on Nutritional Surveillance. The question was raised as to the nature of this monitoring, whether it would be adequate and whether it would cover the right areas. The hon. Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme, West—
  Mr. Bob Brown: On a point of order. Newcastle-under-Lyme is a village down in the Midlands. Newcastle-upon-Tyne is a city in the North.
  Mr. Taylor: The hon. Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, West (Mr. Bob Brown) asked whether something could be done for areas like Newcastle. I can give him some helpful information. The Sub-Committee on Nutritional Surveillance is to form views on the withdrawal of milk by conducting a survey in five areas. One will be in Scotland, one in Wales, and three in England. Apart from that, we shall have the general study of children's health, which will be conducted in Scotland on the basis of three ad hoc special studies being carried on in England. One, which is being carried out in Kent, is a fairly large-scale study of children's health. One to be conducted in Newcastle-upon-Tyne will be a study of the health of poverty children. One to be conducted in Birmingham will be a study of the general nutritional level of children aged 14 and 15. The Scottish statistics of height and weight are very comprehensive indeed and can be used for comparisons. The data in England and Wales generally are to be brought up to the same standard. These will enable us to carry out this monitoring very accurately and ensure that we get the best possible results as quickly as possible.
  Mr. Edward Short: Will the Under-Secretary explain that? We do not
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  understand it. Is the last one he mentioned—the child health study—related specifically to the withdrawal of primary school milk, or is it something else?
  Mr. Taylor: The revision of the figures which are being used as data will cover many things and not just this. We hope that the up-to-date information to be provided on height and weight will give us information on a wide range of questions. Apart from that, we are having specific monitoring surveys in the areas to which I have referred. We believe that on the basis of the Scottish survey we can come to a quicker decision or a quicker opinion on information which comes forward, and this general updating of data will enable a better picture to be arrived at sooner.
  The right hon. Gentleman then said that it was all very well to have the survey but asked what would be done if it showed that the position had deteriorated. I can give the right hon. Gentleman the categorical assurance that if the surveys produced an adverse result, we would reconsider the whole situation, first, to identify whether any such deterioration had occurred and, second, to ascertain whether this deterioration was attributable to the withdrawal of free milk. If we found that out, the whole policy would have to be considered.
  Mr. Pavitt: Is the hon. Gentleman aware that in research terms he has given an impossible remit? It is impossible to give answers to the remit he has given.
  Mr. Taylor: It is not an impossible task. We have asked for this to be done. As the hon. Gentleman himself suggested, it should be done. We have asked for a full survey of the effects of the withdrawal of milk. This we are doing. Once the evidence comes forward, of course we will consider it very carefully. [Interruption.] That comes ill from the hon. Gentleman, who supported his Government throughout when they withdrew milk from secondary schoolchildren.
  Mr. Freeson: Is the hon. Gentleman aware that the vast majority of people on this side of the House—I cannot speak for hon. Members opposite—and many people outside the House who are interested in this subject will consider, when

  157
  they read in HANSARD tomorrow what he has just said, that he has been totally misleading the House and the public?
  Mr. Taylor: I do not accept that for one minute. I will not take that from the hon. Gentleman in particular, because we have to remember that this is not the first time that free milk has been withdrawn from schools. It was withdrawn from secondary schools by the Labour Government. I should like the hon. Gentleman in particular just to look back at HANSARD for 26th February, 1968. There he will see that certain of his hon. Friends asked this very same question, whether milk should be withdrawn from secondary schools, without there being a survey of poverty and without there being full consideration of what was involved. Labour Members voted against it, and I see that the hon. Gentleman time after time supported his Government. I am only too glad to listen to objections from some hon. Members opposite who I know are considering the matter sincerely. I am only too glad to consider valid objections.
  It has been argued that our safeguards are not adequate. When the Labour Government abolished free milk where were the safeguards? When there was any suggestion of any sort about safeguards the hon. Member for Willesden, West (Mr. Pavitt) and, indeed, the hon. Member for Renfrew, West (Mr. Buchan) voted slavishly with their Government time after time.
  Having dealt with that matter, I should like to mention the attitudes and tasks of medical officers of health under these arrangements. Much has been said about the difficulties which will face medical officers in selecting pupils for free school milk. I suggest that these difficulties have been exaggerated. Medical officers should know from their routine examinations of pupils which children are likely to be at risk when the period of automatic issue of free milk comes to an end. For example, my authority in Glasgow finds little difficulty in selecting children who, on health grounds, should attend residential schools in the country for a brief spell. It therefore seems reasonable that among this group will be found those children who should continue to get milk. There will be difficulties when the new scheme is introduced, but I am sure that they can be overcome.
  158
  Hon. Members have said that it is all very well to talk of exempting children on health grounds and giving them free milk, but, as the hon. Member for Eton and Slough said, what about those who cannot afford it on financial grounds, apart from health grounds? The hon. Lady will be aware that, consistent with the policy of this Administration, not only in education but throughout the social services, we have been arranging for help to be given to those in need. For example, supplementary benefits will go up on 20th September; unemployment benefit is to go up, sickness benefit is to go up, widows' pensions are to go up, and allowances are going up. For those on very limited incomes, the family income supplement is being provided to help the very poor. [Laughter.] Hon. Members opposite may laugh, but to some families it is not chicken feed. I suggest that to a family on a low income £4 a week is an important amount. All our policies are concerned with concentrating help where it is needed.
  Most hon. Members opposite who have spoken have suggested in emotive language that the Government's policy as set out in the Bill is a wicked attack on the health of school children and a gross interference with the right of local authorities to decide how they shall carry out their functions. In face of this attack, which seems thoroughly unjustified, it is right to repeat, as my right hon. Friend did at the beginning of the debate, what we are proposing and why we are doing it.
  We believe that the country cannot afford to continue to give benefits in cash or in kind indiscriminately, regardless of need. What we can afford and what we intend to do is to give benefits, and where appropriate improved benefits, some of which I have already mentioned, to those in real need, but to expect those who can well afford to pay to do so. The Bill is a reflection of that policy. We agree that children up to seven years of age should continue to get free milk in school. We say that handicapped pupils at special schools will continue to get free milk, whatever their age, and that those older primary pupils who, on medical grounds, need milk will continue to get it free. We are ensuring that children who need milk will get the free issue.

  159
  This is a reasonable extension of what was done by the Labour Government when they abolished milk for secondary schools. I emphasise that when they abolished it no provision was made for those who were considered to be in health need and there was no provision for the kind of careful monitoring which we are carrying out.
  Time and again during the debate we heard the old hardy annual—it is, I accept, the crunch of the argument about our policies in the White Paper: how can we justify reducing taxation which could be of real benefit and value to those in the higher income groups and at the same time make adjustments in and increase the charges for prescriptions, milk and so on? This is perhaps the crunch of the argument.
  It is true that if we had avoided the measures which we took in the social field and had not reduced taxation, it might have been possible to balance the books, square the account and close the story for this year. In this way, we would be carrying out the policy of the previous Government which led to stagnation, to a static national cake, and made it certain that it would just not be possible to continue to provide for the needs of the social services.
  I am a junior Minister responsible for health and education in Scotland. When we consider the future in social trends, we can see the great needs which exist and the greater needs which will have to be coped with in the social work services, hospitals and elsewhere. Obviously we shall have to find more resources and more money to fill the gaps. Where will this money come from? There are two ways.
  First, we could decide that every extra demand on resources should result in increased taxation and that, from a virtually static national cake, more and more should be taken in taxation. The economy would not grow, and our young graduates would be encouraged to go abroad for the opportunities which they cannot get in this country.
  Instead, what we are trying to do is precisely what the last Conservative Government did—namely, greatly to increase social spending on housing, health
  160
  and other areas of real need and, at the same time, reduce taxation so as to provide an incentive. Once our policies work their way through, they will ensure real prosperity and growth. This is the only way in which it can be done.
  If hon. Members opposite are suggesting that we should, in this Bill or in future, consider and continue indiscriminate subsidies throughout the social services, I would point out that this could not be done unless we were prepared to face up to the situation of stagnation which was developing. In this Bill we are making a contribution. We are saving money—£9 million. This is one of the measures outlined in the White Paper. We believe that it is a justified saving, that it will make a contribution to the increases in our expenditure in other fields. We believe that we have made proper provision for those who are in medical need of milk.
  I would like to outline the safeguards which we have provided. We have made specific provision for those who require milk on health grounds to continue to get it. We are continuing the supply of milk to children aged seven and under. Perhaps most important of all, we are making specific provision for proper monitoring and for a survey to be undertaken so that we can ensure that, if there is deterioration, the appropriate steps can then be taken.
  Mr. John Mackie: The hon. Member has a point about the survey, but surely to take a survey over the whole of our young children is wrong. Should not the Government have done the survey in a couple of schools instead of putting all the young children at risk?
  Mr. Taylor: The survey which is being undertaken and which will continue to be undertaken covers not only pilot studies of various schools but also special surveys covering particular groups of children—for example, fatherless children or those in a particular age group.
  We have no reason to believe that the health of those who will no longer receive free milk will suffer. There is no evidence to suggest that the health of secondary pupils has suffered from the withdrawal of milk, a withdrawal which hon. Gentlemen opposite voted for. But we are not content to rely on the belief that what

  161
  has apparently been true of the health of secondary pupils will also be true of the older primary pupils. We will monitor the effects of the change of health of pupils, and arrangements for this are already in train.
  Mr. Buchan rose—
  Mr. Taylor: I will not give way; I have only a few minutes.
  I turn to the allegation that this decision represents interference with the freedom of local authorities and that it is inconsistent with our declared policy to allow them to make their own decisions. We are discussing the limitation of public expenditure and the most effective and efficient use of resources which are necessarily limited. Public expenditure is not only expenditure by central Government; it includes local authority expenditure and the spending of money raised by rates as well as that raised by taxation.
  Mr. Buchan rose—
  Mr. Taylor: If we are to revive our economy through a limitation of the excessive amount of public expenditure which we inherited from the previous Administration, and if we are to ensure that what must be spent is spent effectively on those who really need help, all public expenditure must be controlled. It would be absurd for this or any Government to countenance unlimited spending by local authorities while firmly controlling Government expenditure. This means that local authorities cannot be wholly free to determine their expenditure. We are allowing them to be as free as possible, subject to the overriding demands of the national economy and, indeed, of the law.
  Some hon. Members have suggested that there are authorities which are so convinced of the desirability of continuing the indiscriminate issue of milk to older primary schoolchildren that they will do so regardless of what the Bill says. I doubt whether any authority would be so unwise as to contemplate a deliberate breach of the law, and I certainly hope that no hon. Member would
  encourage any authority so to do. I need not spell out what action would be open to the Government if faced by such a challenge. Those who might be concerned w2l no doubt bear in mind the Government's general powers to reduce rate support grant in certain circumstances and, indeed, to surcharge the members of any council responsible for authorising any illegal expenditure.
  It is absolute nonsense for hon. Members to suggest that we have to control national public spending, on the one hand, and then suggest that local authorities should be free to spend what money they wish for whatever purposes they wish. Clearly, this could well undermine the whole of the Government's economic policy. I hope that no hon. Gentleman opposite will encourage any local authority to undertake anything which is illegal.
  If there is a question of freedom, I ask; where was the freedom from the right hon. Gentleman when his Government abolished the provision of milk in secondary schools? Did the right hon. Gentleman give freedom to local authorities to provide milk in secondary schools? Where was the freedom then? I put a question to the right hon. Gentleman: if he is now demanding that we should have freedom for the local authorities to do what they want, where was the freedom when he and his hon. Friends voted for the abolition of free milk in secondary schools? On this matter, as on many others, the attitudes put forward by hon. Gentlemen opposite are blatant hypocrisy today and every day.
  Mr. Humphrey Atkins (Treasurer of Her Majesty's Household)Mr. Humphrey Atkins (Treasurer of Her Majesty's Household) rose in his place and claimed to move, That the Question be now put.
  Question, That the Question be now put, put and agreed to.
  Question put accordingly, That the Bill be now read a Second time:—
  The House divided: Ayes 281, Noes 248.

  Division No. 374.]

  AYES

  [10.0 p.m.

  Adley, Robert

  Archer, Jeffrey (Louth)

  Baker, Kenneth (St. Marylebone)

  Alison, Michael (Barkston Ash)

  Astor, John

  Baker, W. H. K. (Banff)

  Allason, James (Hemel Hempstead)

  Atkins, Humphrey

  Balniel, Lord

  Amery, Rt. Hn. Julian

  Awdry, Daniel

  Barber, Rt. Hn. Anthony

  Batsford, Brian

  Cower, Raymond

  Murton, Oscar

  Beamish, Col. Sir Tufton

  Gray, Hamish

  Nabarro, Sir Gerald

  Bell, Ronald

  Green, Alan

  Neave, Airey

  Bennett, Sir Frederic (Torquay)

  Griffiths, Eldon (Bury St. Edmunds)

  Nicholls, Sir Harmar

  Bennett, Dr. Reginald (Gosport)

  Grylls, Michael

  Noble, Rt. Hn. Michael

  Berry, Hn. Anthony

  Gummer, Selwyn

  Normanton, Tom

  Biffen, John

  Hall, Miss Joan (Keighley)

  Nott, John

  Biggs-Davison, John

  Hall, John (Wycombe)

  Onslow, Cranley

  Blaker, Peter

  Hall-Davis, A. G. F.

  Oppenheim, Mrs. Sally

  Boardman, Tom (Leicester, S. W.)

  Hamilton, Michael (Salisbury)

  Orr, Capt. L. P. S.

  Body, Richard

  Hannam, John (Exeter)

  Osborn, John

  Boscawen, Robert

  Harrison, Brian (Maldon)

  Owen, Idris (Stockport, N.)

  Bossom, Sir Clive

  Harrison, Col. Sir Harwood (Eye)

  Page, Graham (Crosby)

  Bowden, Andrew

  Haselhurst, Alan

  Page, John (Harrow, W.)

  Boyd-Carpenter, Rt. Hn. John

  Havers, Michael

  Parkinson, Cecil (Enfield, W.)

  Braine, Bernard

  Hawkins, Paul

  Percival, Ian

  Bray, Ronald

  Hay, John

  Pike, Miss Mervyn

  Brewis, John

  Heath, Rt. Hn. Edward

  Pink, R. Bonner

  Brinton, Sir Tatton

  Heseltine, Michael

  Pounder, Rafton

  Brocklebank-Fowler, Christopher

  Hicks, Robert

  Powell, Rt. Hn. J. Enoch

  Brown, Sir Edward (Bath)

  Higgins, Terence L.

  Price, David (Eastleigh)

  Bruce-Gardyne, J.

  Hiley, Joseph

  Prior, Rt. Hn. J. M. L.

  Bryan, Paul

  Hill, James (Southampton, Test)

  Proudfoot, Wilfred

  Buchanan-Smith, Alick (Angus, N&M)

  Holland, Philip

  Pym, Rt. Hn. Francis

  Buck, Antony

  Holt, Miss Mary

  Quennell, Miss J. M.

  Bullus, Sir Eric

  Hordern, Peter

  Raison, Timothy

  Burden, F. A.

  Hornby, Richard

  Ramsden, Rt. Hn. James

  Butter, Adam (Bosworth)

  Hornsby-Smith. Rt. Hn. Dame Patricia

  Redmond, Robert

  Campbell, Rt. Hn. G.(Moray&Nairn)

  Howe, Hn. Sir Geoffrey (Reigate)

  Reed, Laurance (Bolton, E.)

  Carlisle, Mark

  Howell, David (Guildford)

  Rees, Peter (Dover)

  Channon, Paul

  Howell, Ralph (Norfolk, N.)

  Rees-Daviss, W. R.

  Chapman, Sydney

  Hunt, John

  Renton, Rt. Hn. Sir David

  Chataway, Rt. Hn. Christopher

  Hutchison, Michael Clark

  Rhys Williams, Sir Brandon

  Chichester-Clark, R.

  Iremonger, T. L.

  Ridley, Hn. Nicholas

  Churchill, W. S.

  Irvine, Bryant Godman (Rye)

  Ridsdale, Julian

  Clark, William (Surrey, E.)

  James, David

  Rippon, Rt. Hn. Geoffrey

  Clarke, Kenneth (Rushcliffe)

  Jenkin, Patrick (Woodford)

  Roberts, Michael (Cardiff, N.)

  Clegg, Walter

  Jennings, J. C. (Burton)

  Roberts, Wyn (Conway)

  Cockerman, Eric

  Jessel, Toby

  Rossi, Hugh (Hornsey)

  Cooke, Robert

  Johnson Smith, G. (E. Grinstead)

  Rost, Peter

  Coomhs, Derek

  Jopling, Michael

  Royle, Anthony

  Cooper A. E.

  Joseph, Rt. Hn. Sir Keith

  Russell, Sir Ronald

  Cordle, John

  Kimball, Marcus

  Scott, Nicholas

  Corfield, Rt. Hn. Frederick

  King, Evelyn (Dorset, S.)

  Shaw, Michael (Sc'b'gh & Whitby)

  Cormack, Patrick

  King, Tom (Bridgwater)

  Shelton, William (Clapham)

  Costain, A. P.

  Kinsey, J. R.

  Simeons, Charles

  Critchley, Julian

  Knox, David

  Sinclair, Sir George

  Crouch, David

  Lambton, Antony

  Skeet, T. H. H.

  Crowder, F. P.

  Lane, David

  Smith, Dudley (W'wick & L'mington)

  Curran, Charles

  Langford-Holt, Sir John

  Soref, Harold

  Davies, Rt. Hn. John (Knutsford)

  Legge-Bourke, Sir Harry

  Speed, Keith

  d'Avigdor-Goldsmid, Sir Henry

  Le Marchant, Spencer

  Spence, John

  d'Avigdir-Goldsmid, Maj.-Gen. James

  Lewis, Kenneth (Rutland)

  Sproat, lain

  Dean, Paul

  Lloyd. Rt. Hn. Geoffrey (Sut'nC'dfield)

  Stainton, Keith

  Deedes, Rt. Hn. W. F.

  Longden, Gilbert

  Stanbrook, Ivor

  Dixon, Piers

  Loveridge, John

  Stewart-Smith, D. G. (Belper)

  Douglas-Home, Rt. Hn. Sir Alec

  McAdden, Sir Stephen

  Stodart, Anthony (Edinburgh, W.)

  du Cann, Rt. Hn. Edward

  Mac Arthur, Ian

  Stoddart-Scott, Col. Sir M.

  Dykes, Hugh

  McCrindle, R. A.

  Stokes, John

  Eden, Sir John

  Maclean, Sir Fitzroy

  Stuttaford, Dr. Tom

  Edwards. Nicholas (Pembroke)

  McMaster, Stanley

  Sutcliffe, John

  Elliot, Capt. Walter (Carshalton)

  Macmillan, Maurice (Famham)

  Tapsell, Peter

  Elliott, R. W. (N'c'tle-upon-Tyne. N.)

  McNair-Wilson, Michael

  Taylor, Sir Charles (Eastbourne)

  Eyre, Reginald

  McNair-Wilson, Patrick (NewForest)

  Taylor, Edward M.(G'gow, Cathcart)

  Fell, Anthony

  Maddan, Martin

  Taylor, Frank (Moss Side)

  Fenner, Mrs. Peggy

  Madel, David

  Taylor, Robert (Croydon, N. W.)

  Fidler, Michael

  Marples, Rt. Hn. Ernest

  Tebbit, Norman

  Finsberg, Geoffrey (Hampstead)

  Marten, Neil

  Temple, John M.

  Fisher, Nigel (Surbiton)

  Mather, Carol

  Thatcher, Rt. Hn. Mrs. Margaret

  Fletcher-Cooke, Charles

  Maude, Angus

  Thomas, John Stradling (Monmouth)

  Fookes, Miss Janet

  Maudling, Rt. Hn. Reginald

  Thomas, Rt. Hn. Peter (Hendon, S.)

  Fortescue, Tim

  Mawby, Ray

  Thompson, Sir Richard (Croydon, S.)

  Foster, Sir John

  Maxwell-Hyslop, R. J.

  Trafford, Dr. Anthony

  Fowler, Norman

  Meyer, Sir Anthony

  Trew, Peter

  Fox, Marcus

  Mitchell, Lt. -Col. C.(Aberdeenshire, W)

  Tugendhat, Christopher

  Fraser. Rt. Hn. Hugh (St'fford & Stone)

  Mitchell, David (Basingstoke)

  Turton, Rt. Hn. Sir Robin

  Galbraith, Hn. T. G.

  Moate, Roger

  van Straubenzee, W. R.

  Gardner, Edward

  Molyneaux, James

  Vaughan, Dr. Gerard

  Gibson-Watt, David

  Money, Ernie

  Waddington, David

  Gilmour, Ian (Norfolk. C.)

  Monks, Mrs. Connie

  Walder, David (Clitheroe)

  Gilmour, Sir John (Fife, E.)

  Montgomery, Fergus

  Walker, Rt. Hn. Peter (Worcester)

  Glyn, Dr. Alan

  Morgan, Geraint (Denbigh)

  Walker-Smith, Rt. Hn. Sir Derek

  Goodhart, Philip

  Morgan-Giles, Rear-Adm.

  Wall, Patrick

  Gooahew, Victor

  Morrison, Charles (Devizes)

  Gorst, John

  Mudd, David

  164

  165

  Ward, Dame Irene

  Wilkinson, John

  Wylie, Rt. Hn. N. R.

  Warren, Kenneth

  Wolrige-Gordon, Patrick

  Younger, Hn. George

  Weatherill, Bernard

  Wood, Rt. Hn. Richard

  Wells, John (Maidstone)

  Woodhouse, Hn. Christopher

  TELLERS FOR THE AYES:

  White, Roger (Gravesend)

  Woodnutt, Mark

  Mr. Jasper More and

  Whitelaw, Rt. Hn. William

  Worsley, Marcus

  Mr. Hector Monro.

  Wiggin, Jerry

  NOES

  Abse, Leo

  Ford, Ben

  Mallalieu, J. P. W.(Huddersfield, E.)

  Albu, Austen

  Forrester, John

  Marks, Kenneth

  Allaun, Frank (Salford, E.)

  Fraser, John (Norwood)

  Marquand, David

  Allen, Scholefield

  Freeson, Reginald

  Marsden, F.

  Archer, Peter (Rowley Regis)

  Garrett, W. E.

  Marshall, Dr. Edmund

  Ashley, Jack

  Gilbert, Dr. John

  Mason, Rt. Hn. Roy

  Ashton, Joe

  Ginsburg, David

  Mayhew, Christopher

  Atkinson, Norman

  Golding, John

  Meacher, Michael

  Bagier, Gordon A. T.

  Gourlay, Harry

  Mellish, Rt. Hn. Robert

  Barnes, Michael

  Grant, George (Morpeth)

  Mendelson, John

  Barnett, Joel

  Grant, John D. (Islington, E.)

  Millan, Bruce

  Beaney, Alan

  Griffiths, Eddie (Brightside)

  Milne, Edward (Blyth)

  Bennett, James (Glyasgow, Bridgeton)

  Griffiths, Will (Exchange)

  Mitchell, R. C. (S'hampton, Itchen)

  Bidwell, Sydney

  Hamilton, James (Bothwell)

  Morgan, Elystan (Cardiganshire)

  Bishop, E. S.

  Hamilton, William (Fife, W.)

  Morris, Alfred (Wythenshawe)

  Blenkinsop, Arthur

  Hamling, William

  Morris, Charles R. (Openshaw)

  Boardman, H. (Leigh)

  Hannan, William (G'gow, Maryhill)

  Morris, Rt. Hn. John (Aberavon)

  Booth, Albert

  Hardy, Peter

  Moyle, Roland

  Bottomley, Rt. Hn. Arthur

  Harper, Joseph

  Mulley, Rt. Hn. Frederick

  Brown, Bob (N'c'He-upon-Tyne, W.)

  Harrison, Walter (Wakefield)

  Murray, Ronald King

  Brown, Hugh D. (G'gow, Provan)

  Hart, Rt. Hn. Judith

  Ogden, Eric

  Buchan, Norman

  Hattersley, Roy

  O'Halloran, Michael

  Buchanan, Richard (G'gow, Sp'burn)

  Healey, Rt. Hn. Denis

  O'Malley, Brian

  Butler, Mrs. Joyce (Wood Green)

  Heffer, Eric S.

  Oram, Bert

  Campbell, I. (Dunbartonshire, W.)

  Hilton, W. S.

  Orbach, Maurice

  Cant, R. B.

  Horam, John

  Orme, Stanley

  Carmichael, Neil

  Houghton, Rt. Hn. Douglas

  Oswald, Thomas

  Carter, Ray (Birmingh'm, Northfield)

  Huckfield, Leslie

  Owen, Or. David (Plymouth, Sutton)

  Carter-Jones, Lewis (Eccles)

  Hughes, Rt. Hn. Cledwyn (Anglesey)

  Padley, Walter

  Castle, Rt. Hn. Barbara

  Hughes, Mark (Durham)

  Palmer, Arthur

  Clark, David (Colne Valley)

  Hughes, Robert (Aberdeen, N.)

  Pannell, Rt. Hn. Charles

  Cocks, Michael (Bristol, S.)

  Hughes, Roy (Newport)

  Pardoe, John

  Cohen, Stanley

  Irvine, Rt. Hn. Sir Arthur (Edge Hill)

  Parry, Robert (Liverpool, Exchange)

  Concannon, J. D.

  Janner, Greville

  Pavitt, Laurie

  Conlan, Bernard

  Jay, Rt. Hn. Douglas

  Peart, Rt. Hn. Fred

  Corbet, Mrs. Freda

  Jenkins, Hugh (Putney)

  Pendry, Tom

  Cox, Thomas (Wandsworth, C.)

  Jenkins, Rt. Hn. Roy (Stechford)

  Pentland, Norman

  Crawshaw, Richard

  John, Brynmor

  Perry, Ernest G.

  Cronin, John

  Johnson, Carol (Lewisham, S.)

  Prentice, Rt. Hn. Reg.

  Crosland, Rt. Hn. Anthony

  Johnson, James (K'ston-on-Hull, W.)

  Prescott, John

  Crossman, Rt. Hn. Richard

  Johnson, Walter (Derby S.)

  Price, J. T. (Westhoughton)

  Cunningham, G. (Islington, S. W.)

  Jones, Dan (Burnley)

  Price, William (Rugby)

  Dalyell, Tam

  Jones, Rt. Hn. Sir Elwyn (W. Ham, S.)

  Probert, Arthur

  Davidson, Arthur

  Jones, Gwynoro (Carmarthen)

  Rankin, John

  Davies, Denzil (Llanelly)

  Jones, T. Alec (Rhondda, W.)

  Reed, D. (Sedgefield)

  Davies, G. Elfed (Rhondda, E.)

  Kaufman, Gerald

  Rees, Merlyn (Leeds, S.)

  Davies, Ifor (Gower)

  Kelley, Richard

  Rhodes, Geoffrey

  Davies, S. O. (Merthyr Tydvil)

  Kerr, Russell

  Roberts, Albert (Normanton)

  Davis, Clinton (Hackney, C.)

  Kinnock, Neil

  Roberts, Rt. Hn. Goronwy (Caernarvon)

  Davis, T. A. G. (Bromsgrove)

  Lambie, David

  Robertson, John (Paisley)

  Deakins, Eric

  Lamond, James

  Roderick, Caerwyn (Br'c'n&R'dnor)

  de Freitas, Rt. Hn. Sir Geoffrey

  Latham, Arthur

  Rodgers, William (Stockton-on-Tees)

  Delargy, H. J.

  Lawson, George

  Roper, John

  Dell, Rt. Hn. Edmund

  Leadbitter, Ted

  Rose, Paul B.

  Dempsey, James

  Lee, Rt. Hn. Frederick

  Ross, Rt. Hn. William (Kilmarnock)

  Doig, Peter

  Leonard, Dick

  Sheldon, Robert (Ashton-under-Lyne)

  Dormand, J. D.

  Lestor, Miss Joan

  Shore, Rt. Hn. Peter (Stepney)

  Douglas, Dick (Stirlingshire, E.)

  Lever, Rt. Hn. Harold

  Short, Rt. Hn. Edward (N'c'tle-u-Tyne)

  Douglas-Mann, Bruce

  Lewis, Arthur (W. Ham, N.)

  Silkin, Rt. Hn, John (Deptford)

  Driberg, Tom

  Lewis, Ron (Carlisle)

  Silkin, Hn. S. C. (Dulwich)

  Duffy, A. E. P.

  Lipton, Marcus

  Sillars, James

  Dunn, James A.

  Lomas, Kenneth

  Silverman, Julius

  Dunnett, Jack

  Loughin, Charles

  Skinner, Dennis

  Edelman, Maurice

  Lyon, Alexander W. (York)

  Small, William

  Edwards, Robert (Bilston)

  McBride, Neil

  Smith, John (Lanarkshire, N.)

  Edwards, Willam (Merioneth)

  McElhone, Frank

  Spriggs, Leslie

  Ellis, Tom

  McGuire, Michael

  Stallard, A. W.

  English, Michael

  Mackenzie, Gregor

  Steel, David

  Evans, Fred

  Mackie, John

  Stewart, Donald (Western Isles)

  Faulds, Andrew

  Mackintosh, John P.

  Stoddart, David (Swindon)

  Fisher, Mrs. Doris (B'ham, Lady wood)

  McMillan Tom (Glasgow, C.)

  Stonehouse, Rt. Hn. John

  Fletcher, Ted (Darlington)

  McNamara, J. Kevin

  Strang, Gavin

  Foley, Maurice

  Mahon, Simon (Bootle)

  Strauss, Rt. Hn. G. R.

  Foot, Michael

  Mallalieu, E. L. (Brigg)

  166

  167

  Summerskill, Hn. Dr. Shirley

  Varley, Eric G.

  Whitlock, William

  Swain, Thomas

  Wainwright, Edwin

  Wilfey, Rt. Hn. Frederick

  Taverne, Dick

  Walden, Brian (B'm'ham, All Saints)

  Williams, Alan (Swansea, W.)

  Thomas, Rt. Hn. George (Cardiff, W.)

  Walker, Harold (Doncaster)

  Williams, Mrs. Shirley (Hitchin)

  Thomas, Jeffrey (Abertillery)

  Wallace, George

  Williams, W. T. (Warrington)

  Thomson, Rt. Hn. G. (Dundee, E.)

  Watkins, David

  Wool, Robert

  Thorpe, Rt. Hn. Jeremy

  Weitzman, David

  Tommy, Frank

  Wellbeloved, James

  TELLERS FOR THE NOES:

  Torney, Tom

  Wells, William (Walsall, N.)

  Mr. Alan Fitch and

  Tuck, Raphael

  White, James (Glasgow, Pollok)

  Mr. Ernest Armstrong.

  Urwin, T. W.

  Whitehead, Phillip

  Bill accordingly read a Second time,
  Bill committed to a Standing Committee pursuant to Standing Order No. 40 (Committal of Bills).

  BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE
  Ordered,
  That the Motion relating to Food and Drugs may be proceeded with at this day's Sitting, though opposed, until half-past Eleven o'clock.—[Mr. Humphrey Atkins.]

BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE
10.12 p.m.
The Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons (Mr. William Whitelaw): With permission,
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Mr. Speaker, I should like to make a Business Statement.
Following the exchanges earlier today, Government business for the remainder of the week has been rearranged as follows:
Tuesday, 15th June—Until 10 o'clock, there will be a debate on the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, which will arise on a Motion for the Adjournment of the House.
Thereafter, progress on the Report stage of the Immigration Bill.
Wednesday, 16th June, and Thursday, 17th June—Completion of the remaining stages of the Immigration Bill and of the National Insurance Bill.
Motion on the Supplementary Benefit (Determination of Requirements) Regulations.

WELFARE FOODS
10.14 p.m.
Dr. Shirley Summerskill: I beg to move,
That the Welfare Foods Order 1971 (S.I., 1971, No. 457) be withdrawn.
We have just heard the Education (Milk) Bill described by various speakers as petty, mean and squalid. The Order we are discussing is, for the same reason, equally petty, mean and squalid. It totally abolishes the provision of cheap welfare milk for expectant and nursing mothers and for children under 5.
Once again, the Government have attacked the most needy in the community, those least able to help themselves. Not content with taxing the sick by raising prescription charges, they now deprive unborn babies and infants of cheap welfare milk. This Order is both economically unjustifiable, and medically harmful. It is economically unjustifiable because, on the one hand, the Government have cut taxation, but on the other they are cutting the supply of milk to children. Are the Government claiming that cheap welfare milk for expectant mothers and infants can be classed as an unnecessary public expenditure?
Will the Minister tell us on what the money that will be saved by this Order will be spent? Will it be spent, most of it, on additional free welfare milk, for which the Order provides? Can the Minister tell now what will be the take-up of the additional free welfare milk? I suggest that the estimated saving, like so many estimated savings, can only be a guess. Will the money be spent on further provision for education?
We were told this afternoon by the Secretary of State that twice as much is spent on school milk as on school books. That was one of her arguments for abolishing free school milk for the over-7s. Apparently a child is offered a choice between physical health and mental development; it cannot have both. But that argument cannot be used about unborn babies and children under 5. If they are to be deprived of their cheap welfare milk, what do they get instead? Not even school books!
I submit that medically as well as economically the results of this Order will
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be positively harmful. That is firmly established, as we have heard throughout the debate today, by the mass of medical and physiological evidence that a good daily supply of milk is essential for the growth and development of children, and at no time is it more necessary than in the very first years of life. Milk is the most nearly perfect food, and contains the best balance of essential nutrients, particularly calcium, proteins and certain vitamins. Not only is milk attacked by this Order, but we have in it the abolition of free cod liver oil and orange juice which contain vitally important ingredients for a young baby.
There are two strong arguments why many children will be deprived by this Order of an adequate milk intake. The first is poverty. We know that the Order entitles an increased number of expectant mothers and children under 5 in low income families to free welfare milk, but there will be millions of families who cannot spend money on extra milk—not only cannot, but will not, or both. We have heard of the 800,000 unemployed who will, obviously, have to watch every penny they spend. There are still people living in poverty who will be above the income level which will allow them free welfare milk.
A pint of milk each day at the reduced price of 2½p was worth more than £9 a year to a man with a family. In July milk prices will rise by ½p a pint. It will then be worth nearly £11 a year. A man with two children under 5 will have to earn £37 a week to gain as much from the cut in income tax as he will lose on his milk bill alone.
Secondly, will those who are entitled to free milk claim it? Here again, we know that there are thousands of people entitled to benefits which they do not take up. Thirdly, we have evidence that when the price of school meals is raised people will not pay the extra money. In my constituency there has been a 21 per cent. reduction in the uptake of school meals since the price rise. Why do we therefore assume that if we abolish cheap welfare milk people will spend money on buying milk? There is no evidence that this will happen.
Whether we like it or not, many mothers, not all, through no fault of

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their own are still ignorant of the benefits and necessity of milk. There are expectant mothers and mothers with young families who do not appreciate the necessity of milk in their children's diet. In the same way that we have malnutrition in poverty we have malnutrition in affluence. Mothers do not appreciate that a diet of chips and pop is not the best thing for their children. This measure will have the additional effect of reducing the importance of milk in the minds of mothers. When the Government no longer supply cheap welfare milk, cod liver oil and orange juice, mothers will think that they cannot be so important and will ask why they should go out and buy these commodities. The result of all this will be that the majority of pre-school children will not be receiving a sufficient amount of welfare milk.
There are in the Order invidious exceptions similar to the invidious exceptions in the Education (Milk) Bill. Children are being categorised into those who need free milk and those who do not, and the categorisation is based on no clear logic.
First, free milk will be available to all educationally subnormal children up to the age of 12 and all handicapped children attending special schools. Where is the logic of that? Why is milk essential to the physical well being of a handicapped or mentally backward child but not essential to the physical well-being of a mentally normal child? There is no medical evidence that children attending special schools for mental conditions need more milk than children attending normal schools. Here there is set up a completely invidious category of children.
Secondly, free milk will be available for children in day nurseries and private day care groups. Children who go to nursery schools are in one of two categories. There are the privileged children whose parents can afford to pay for them to go, and the under-privileged children who are there because they have an unmarried, divorced or widowed mother or a mother who has to work outside the home. For some reason known only to the Government, these children in day nurseries who are either very privileged
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or under-privileged will be set apart to receive free milk.
Thirdly, expectant mothers who have two children under 5 will receive free milk. How this has been arived at is unexplained. An expectant mother with one child under 5 does not qualify, an expectant mother with no children under 5 does not qualify, but an expectant mother with two children qualifies. The complete inconsistency of the milk scheme contained in the Bill and the Order can be summed up by saying that from now on milk will be completely free for children between 5 and 7. It will not be free for all children under 5 and it will not be free after they reach the age of 7; between the ages 5 and 7 all children will have free milk. There is no logic or reason in it and there is certainly no scientific basis. According to the Government the main growing years, when free milk is needed, are between the ages of 5 and 7.
Will there be any monitoring of this Order in the way that we heard there is to be under the Bill? Will there be monitoring of these children no longer receiving cheap welfare milk, a nationwide survey? Will the hon. Gentleman undertake, as was done with the Bill, to reconsider the Order if he finds by the monitoring that there is deprivation of these children? Why under this Order do we not have, as we did under the Bill, free milk for children so-called at risk medically? There are surely in the Government's view—although I do not understand their reasoning about this—children under 5 who are at risk medically and need extra milk just as there are children over 5 at risk medically needing extra milk. I do not see how these children will be categorised as needing extra milk.
To me milk is not a medicine given as treatment for some illness; it is a physiological necessity, a basic food that children should have, whether they are ill or well. In view of the Government's argument perhaps the Minister will explain why the under-5s are not to be categorised as medically at risk and given special treatment?
In all this there is no sign of progress towards preventive medicine. Milk is given to children as a nutritious food to create healthy, strong, non-ricketed

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limbs. Milk is not given to children whom it is thought are in need of it because they are in some way deficient. It is not a drug but it is an essential foodstuff, and it should be available to the expectant mother, the infant and the school child, throughout the period when that child is growing up, to the age of adolescence.
We have had many statistics quoted in the last debate but I would like to give some which are relevant to this Order. The survey by Dr. Lynch of Queen Elizabeth College, London, showed that of children in State schools only half now have a wholly satisfactory diet; 11 per cent. of those children have a very poor standard of diet; 18 per cent. of primary school children are deficient in calcium, a substance in which milk is strong, and 28 per cent. of primary school children are deficient in riboflavin, also a strong component of milk.
Here we have statistics about the condition of children when they go to primary school at the age of 5. This makes it more important than ever that their intake of milk in pre-school years should be adequate and never put at risk. The earliest years of growth are even more important than the primary or secondary school years, although these are important for the full development of the child.
For these reasons I put it to the House that there is absolutely no justification for this Order. It is the responsibility of society to ensure that its children are properly looked after and properly fed. This Order is all the more shameful because it has been brought in so soon after the Government came into power, along with the Bill we have debated. If it had been in the Conservative election manifesto, perhaps the Conservative Party would not have returned to power.
The Welfare Milk Scheme was introducsed originally under the National Milk Scheme in July, 1940, whereby all expectant mothers and children up to 5 years of age received a pint of milk every day at a reduced price. In 1971 the Government are introducing a regressive, retrograde measure of which they should be ashamed. This Order reveals in all its meanness the real philosophy of the Government, and I ask the House to reject it.
10.30 p.m.
Mr. John Golding: One of my earliest recollections is that of my dad giving me Oxo cubes to take to school to provide the sons of salmon fishermen in Chester with some sort of what we called dinner. These children were suffering from malnutrition, and among them "Boney" was a common nickname. I had hoped that those days had disappeared and that it would be a matter of recollection to talk of rickets. But once again we are debating the subject of malnutrition. The point is emphasised by the increase in the cost of school dinners, not only this year but proposed for next year, the abolition of school milk for children over 7 and the abolition in many cases of welfare milk.
Perhaps, later we shall hear medical practitioners among hon. Members opposite supporting the Government. In the earlier debate the absence of medical Members on the benches opposite supporting the Government was very marked. Equally marked is the absence of evidence to support the Government's view in the documents on this subject to be found in the Library. The only statements in support of the Government's measures have been made from the Front Bench. It is clear from surveys that one-third of the children in the Midlands, a relatively prosperous area, are undernourished, many because of poverty but others because of ignorance. We are not charging mothers with not caring or wilful neglect; we are charging society because of a lack of knowledge among mothers.
We do not have to rely solely on Dr. Lynch for evidence on this subject. We do not have to rely on one survey. The St. Thomas survey has shown that undernourishment is particularly prevalent among working-class children in areas where women go out to work and particularly in areas where there is shift-working. I am not talking of the generality of the population. I am concerned particularly with industrial areas populated by working-class people where women traditionally go out to work or are forced to work because of the low rates of pay for men in the area.
Under-nourishment is a serious matter. Investigations by the National Food Survey have shown that our children are overfed but under-nourished. It has been

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shown that they are taking too little protein and too little calcium. The actual amounts of protein and calcium are falling.
I have treated with some suspicion many sources of evidence in this matter. I realise that there is a dairy lobby and that farmers are rightly upset because their incomes will fall since they will sell less milk. Farmers in my constituency, who are not a very Socialist group, have made representations to me to support the local authorities in the stand they are taking to provide milk for school children. There are also medical men who are prepared to argue strongly for the provision of milk for our children. They say that 18 per cent. of children are deficient in calcium and that some 28 per cent. are deficient in riboflavin.
The argument about the abolition of school milk is similar in many households to the argument on the abolition of welfare milk because parents will not be able to afford the extra money. Those hon. Members who have been out canvassing in Bromsgrove and Macclesfield will know the feeling in many families over the increase in the cost of living. When commodities which have come to be accepted as being provided free are free no more, there is no spare money for people to go out and buy those things for themselves.
Hon. Members opposite talk as though 4s. was a matter of no significance. Of course it is not to us. For the £40, £50, £60-a-week man it is not difficult to find an extra 4s. a week, but for the average manual worker in an inflationary situation such a sum can be difficult to find.
Calcium is important to a child. John Yudkin has been quoted in this debate. I would quote Professor A. S. Prophet, Professor of Dental Surgery, University College Hospital, who says:
"Few people realise how important it is for young people to take an ample supply of calcium in their food. Calcium is essential for healthy teeth and bone structure."
We must ask the Government whether they have lost all concern for the health of our children. Are they saying that our children's health and well being must depend on the foresight and knowledge of their parents? Many of us who represent people with less knowledge and foresight would argue against this concept.
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We recall that in 1906 the principle was accepted that the maximum benefit will be obtained from State education only when schoolchildren are healthy and alert. We seem to be going backwards daily.
If we were at war the generals would not allow the Government to pass such legislation. Emissaries from the Ministry of Defence would remind the Department of Health and Social Security that the nation would soon need healthy bodies. As in 1939, there would be a preoccupation of the ruling class with the health and welfare of working-class children. But as we are not at war the Government introduce this mean Measure.
The Government have seen in the local elections at Bromsgrove what the people think of such legislation. At Macclesfield, if the Government are not too frightened, they will shortly see again what the people think of mean and despicable class legislation.
10.42 p.m.
Dr. Tom Stuttaford: I agree with the hon. Member for Halifax (Dr. Summerskill) that milk must be considered as a dietary necessity and not as a prophylactic medicine. I do not altogether share the Secretary of State's conviction that everybody who needs milk will get it. Having worked with people who have been in need of milk, I know that the lower one goes in the social scale the more there is a need and the less likely they are to make the necessary application or even to know about the means of obtaining free milk.
I should be grateful if my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary will tell us what will be done to publicise the availability of welfare milk and other welfare foods. What campaigns is it intended to launch so that the general public can know what is available free of charge? This is not only a matter of telling people about it. It is often a matter of ensuring that they do something about the information that they have been given.
There is some misapprehension about rickets. Rickets are caused by a deficiency of vitamins AA and D. They are not due to a deficiency of milk. More fundamental than the intake of milk is the intake of these vitamins, which will still be available free of charge to

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children at the most important age—under 5.
Although I cannot feel entirely happy about the Order, it is not devastating, as hon. Members opposite would have us believe. The saving will be irrelevant to the national economy. It is probable that the effect will be almost irrelevant to the nation's health—almost, but not completely. The very people who may need the milk most may well be those who do not get it.
10.45 p.m.
Mr. Charles Loughlin: The Under-Secretary has a formidable task this evening. I have much sympathy for him.
I do not know how the Order originated, but from my day-to-day dealings with the Department of Health and Social Security I know that it has been put forward against the wishes of the staff in the Department.
We do not need the antiseptic, clinical analysis employed by my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax (Dr. Summerskill), if I may say so without disrespect. Nor do we need the apologies of the hon. Member for Norwich, South (Dr. Stutta-ford). Anyone with experience and knowledge of ordinary people knows that welfare milk and foods have made a tremendous change in the physical health of our youngsters. I do not need to go back to the time when I was young. One of the delights of my life, at least in the post-war years, has been to observe the quality of children being born. There is no comparison between the period before welfare milk and foods were available and the post-war period in the physicial health of babies and, indeed their mothers. There is a fantastic difference.
We do not need statistics to prove that one of the finest events in this country was the beginning of the idea that we looked after the pregnant mother from the time of pregnancy to weaning the child and then provided the requisite basic requirements towards the physical health of that child until it could almost fend for itself.
I do not need statistics when I can look back over the three or four gener-
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ations involved and think of the bow-legged kids who were quite common in my generation compared with the two children my wife has borne to me with the advantage of the welfare facilities, aids, adjuncts to the diet, milk in particular, and so on. I see the product of that assistance in the health of the children of the present generation. I believe that to a large degree the increase in the physical stature of so many of the present generation has been determined by the assistance that we have given to the mother while she has been carrying the child and in the nursing period subsequent to its birth.
I have a lad of 21. He is 6 feet 3 inches and weighs 13½ stone. He is no exception. Such physical characteristics are common throughout our society. Our children are bigger. I believe that is due to the foundation we laid in the gestation period when they were in their mother's wombs.
The Order is mean and despicable, but that is not the charge which has to be answered. The Government are endangering the health of future generations. They seek to return to the differences that existed before, when a small élite had the benefits that accrued from the possession of money and the rest of the community could stew in their own juice. In view of economic and social developments, they are producing the conditions for a revolutionary situation in Britain.
That may sound exaggerated, but I believe that if the Government continue with present policies anarchy will prevail, and out of it there will be either revolution or a Fascist State. It is symptomatic of the approach of Conservative hon. Members that they are making a division in society, arguing that we have an affluent society and that everybody can look after himself. It is not true that everybody can look after himself; it is not true that we have an affluent society. More than 50 per cent. of the people are 3 per cent. worse off as a result of the past 12 months of Tory Government, and the situation is becoming worse. The charge that the Government must answer is not that they are despicable, as they are, but that they are in danger of undermining future generations, and the Order is one of the measures by which they are doing it.

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My experience of the Under-Secretary is that he is decent, honest and compassionate, but on an issue like the one before us, when he is withdrawing something fundamental to the nation's future health, he has a lot of explaining to do.
I do not believe that the Government know what they are doing. I wish that Conservative hon. Members would begin to think about it. They are bogged down with doctrinaire Toryism, intent on almost a spiteful campaign against a great mass of our people. They carry it out at their peril; because of their spitefulness we are in serious danger of having a situation in which there will be no co-operation from our side of industry. Why should people engage in productivity deals and drive themselves into unemployment? The Government are in serious danger of alienating the whole of the industrial and working class, and in those circumstances they will bring about a situation which they do not want.
Mr. Timothy Raison: Will not the hon. Gentleman think again, and acknowledge that the Government have introduced measures to help the disabled, invalids, people over 80, widows and a string of other people, which completely contradicts what he has been saying?
Mr. Loughlin: If the hon. Gentleman restricts himself to the over-80 widows, I accept it. More than 65 per cent. of the over-80 widows who have received a pension under the Government's scheme were previously in receipt of supplementary benefit in excess of that pension. The whole of the other issues to which—
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Miss Harvie Anderson): Order. I hope that both hon. Gentlemen will realise that the Order is on a specific subject.
Mr. Loughlin: I apologise, Mr. Deputy Speaker, but, with due respect, if an intervention is allowed and the Chair does not intervene at the time, one ought to have the opportunity to reply. But I will reply briefly. Each of the measures to which the hon. Gentleman referred were already on the stocks under the Labour Government before this Government came to power.
The Order is another little piece that fits the jigsaw. Unless the Government are careful, they will destroy any possibility of co-operation from our side, and
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they will be in danger of undermining the health of future generations of Britain.
10.57 p.m.
Mr. D. G. Stewart-Smith: I feel compelled to draw the Minister's attention to the yawning gap between the intentions of legislation, passed with the very best of intentions, and what arrives in the house of the ordinary miner in my constituency. He just does not know what he is entitled to. Before we start withdrawing what he is used to, we must remember that.
There is malnutrition in our land. It occurs through poverty and through ignorance. I associate myself entirely with the remarks about poverty made by the hon. Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Mr. Golding). In my constituency a large number of lower-paid workers, surface workers at the mines, take home £14 a week. They are very badly hit by inflation and they suffer enormously. It will be an immense burden for them to pay for this extra milk. The State should have a continuing rôle here. I probably sound like a Socialist; but I describe it at Tory paternalism. We are, perhaps, less spiteful than the hon. Member for Gloucestershire, West (Mr. Loughlin) implied.
Any policy which accidentally or deliberately—I am certain that it is not deliberate—prevents milk physically reaching children under five is unacceptable. Whatever they do, I ask my Front Bench not to hit the children of the lower-paid workers. If they want to make economies, they should have a crack at the professional layabout, sponger and parasite, but leave alone the children of the lower-paid workers.
10.59 p.m.
Mr. Laurie Pavitt: I congratulate the hon. Member for Belper (Mr. Stewart-Smith) and his hon. Friend the Member for Norwich, South (Dr. Stuttaford). Having sat through the whole of the previous debate about welfare milk, when there was a most lamentable performance from the back benches opposite, and we had not the second but the fourth eleven, I have found it refreshing to hear the two hon. Gentlemen in this debate bringing forward some doubts—without being disloyal—and putting fingers on some extremely important

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points which I am sure the Parliamentary Secretary will answer.
On the question of take-up, what is typical of this Order and a number of other similar Orders which the Government are putting through the House is that, having established a certain economy, we have to incur considerable expenditure to tell people what it is all about. Not only do publicity campaigns have to be run to ensure that the needy poor—a phrase from the benches opposite—are aware of their entitlement, but at the same time, because we are making a barrier between those who are deserving and those who claim to be undeserving, we have to have an army of doctors, welfare officers and others who have to ascertain which is which.
By the time one has finished setting up the machinery, it is not certain whether the net economy is worth making. The classic example of that occurred not under this but under the Labour Government when £10,200 was spent on eight civil servants making sure that £169 was saved on I do not know how many prescription forms when it was suspected that people were bilking by use of the E.C.10 forms. The whole philosophy behind the Order leads to that kind of provision.
I have some sympathy with the right hon. Gentleman. I believe that no one in the House knows more than I do about the kind of comprehensive problem which he has to face. He is not dealing just with hospitals, or just with welfare foods, or just with the general practitioner service, or cod liver oil, or orange juice. He has to consider the whole pattern, and he cannot act in one sector without that action having repercussions elsewhere. What disappoints me about the right hon. Gentleman is not that he has yielded to the pressures of the economic situation—all Governments have to do that and no Government were worse than the Labour Government in many respects concerned with health—but that he should have yielded to the Treasury's thinking, which is that each item must be self-balancing without any consideration being given to the effect on other health or welfare provisions.
The right hon. Gentleman is seeking to act in a very narrow area, to save a minimum amount, when over the whole area of his responsibility it is clear that
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he ought to leave welfare foods alone, when he could probably do better in other respects. Of course more resources are required to meet the items with which the Order deals, but the amount spent on these charges is only 3·6 per cent. of his total cost and even if he doubled that, he still would not be getting at the true problem.
This is one of a number of mean actions. The meanest was imposing an extra 15s. on the chronic sick for their "season tickets", so that those who must have medicine for the rest of their lives will have to pay £3 10s. a year instead of £2 15s. Only those on the fringes will benefit from this and similar provisions, and once again the saving will not justify the cost of the machinery.
My hon. Friend the Member for New-castle-under-Lyme (Mr. Golding) drew attention to the calcium intake and the number of dental caries cases with which the dental service had to cope affecting schoolchildren. A break-through in research recently may mean that within five years dental caries will be a problem of the past, but at the moment the Order can do nothing but harm the dental health of children. How is that harm to be rectified? I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman of going further with fluoridation research and I hope that he will continue with it. He may be able to deal with the problem of fluoridation of schoolchildren's milk. I hope that we shall hear more about that subject tonight.
My hon. Friend mentioned costs. Hon. Members opposite do not realise that it is not just a matter of the costs which the housewife has to find. In a working-class family, irrespective of the amount of income resulting from overtime and so on, the amount a wife gets from her husband is invariably the same week by week. By Thursday of any week she is often in difficulty. Chemists report that women with a number of prescriptions for their families to have filled at the end of a week will often ask the chemist which prescription is urgent and which may be delayed, simply because of the amount which they had to pay in prescription charges.
Just as a prescription may have to wait the next pay packet, so it is with welfare foods. There are people for whom welfare foods are essential but who, as it were, have a mental block against applying for them. The more barriers we put

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in the way of application, the more will the feckless and those in need be unlikely to take them up.
The exercise encompassed by the present Order is reminiscent of what happened in 1961. The last time I was concerned in a battle about cod liver oil and orange juice was when the right hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Mr. Powell) was Minister of Health. At that time, the charges for cod liver oil and orange juice and a number of other things were increased in order to raise a total of £65 million, and in the subsequent Budget in 1961 we gave £83 million back to surtax payers. In the same way, the Government are today making small but mean and despicable inroads into the provision of such things as welfare food, welfare milk and cod liver oil and orange juice at the same time as they are changing the aggregate arrangements regarding parents' and children's incomes in order to make it possible for about £20 million of tax relief to go to people who want to send their children to public schools. It is the same exercise. It is back to the same pattern.
Considering the beneficiaries, one wonders why the cut-offs have been made in the way they have. I shall not repeat the arguments; they have been very well put already by my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax (Dr. Summerskill).
I come to the question of the changeover in the means of providing welfare foods to children, turning from the old-fashioned cod liver oil and orange juice to the drops. The Under-Secretary of State will recall that I put a Question to him about it when he first made the announcement. His answer was most interesting. I want to know why one particular firm got the contract. The hon. Gentleman will recall that one firm was able virtually to corner the market and to eliminate all competition in the provision of drops of cod liver oil and orange juice. What were the market forces in the background? What sort of analysis has the Minister made not only of the medical and clinical aspects of the matter but of the psychological effects of children having to take drops of medicine instead of cod liver oil and orange juice?
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One of the right hon. Gentleman's problems today is that the medicine habit is developing. Instead of taking their vitamins in milk and ordinary foods, people are inclined to take them in tablet form. We are becoming a nation of pill swallowers. How much research has been done to show what will be the effect on children of suddenly having to take drops instead of the cod liver oil and orange juice which they have known up to now? My hon. Friend the Member for Gloucestershire, West (Mr. Loughlin) said that the Government were inclined to let the working class stew in their own juice. One thing is quite certain: if this Order is allowed to pass, they will not stew in their own orange juice, because the orange juice will be stopped.
In contemplating this Order and the Bill about welfare milk which we debated earlier, I think of what the Scandinavians have done and are doing in health matters, and I note their performance both socially and economically. What we are doing in Britain is going back on the standards which we first set and which the Scandinavians copied. They have copied from us very successfully, but now, by the measures which the House has before it today, we are putting back the clock, retreating from the advances which we have made.
My hon. Friend the Member for Halifax put the point succinctly. Unless the Government reverse their policy which is represented by Orders of this kind, there will be no hope of our moving on to preventive medicine. They will be bogged down in the continuation of a purely curative health service. We can move towards the prevention of illness, the strengthening of people's physique, the elimination of dental caries and the development of the body's resistance to the bacteria which come from modern environmental pollution only if we start right from the time when a child is born.
The Order makes inroads into the very foundation of the health of the nation. I accept that the Government are also trying to extend the provision to those in need, but they are making a division betwen two types of people—those who are really needy and those a little higher up the scale who are beyond the pale.

185
I should like the Government to forget about the Order. Its contribution to the economy, the health or the welfare of the nation, as was said by the hon. Member for Norwich, South, a qualified doctor, is irrelevant.
11.10 p.m.
Dame Irene Ward: I did not want to intervene in the speech of the hon. Member for Gloucestershire, West (Mr. Loughlin), but it should be put on the record, from the point of view of my party, that a great deal of the improvement in children's health and appearance was due to the Act, introduced in the late thirties by Mr. Neville Chamberlain, which established maternity and child welfare centres. I am very proud to know that that was established while I was in the House, and under my Government.
During the war, when Lord Woolton was looking after the health of the children, he ensured, even at the height of the controversy, that children had both cod liver oil and orange juice. He did so effectively and with the co-operation of both sides of the House.
A great deal of the wonderful improvement in children's health has been due to the magnificent efforts of the medical people who, after research, have made suggestions which have been put into operation by both sides of the House. I resent it when hon. Members opposite, such as the hon. Member for Gloucestershire, West, talk as if my party had never done anything, because in fact they have done a great deal.
11.12 p.m.
The Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Security (Mr. Michael Alison): From the rather gloomy speeches of hon. Members, it might be thought that I had an uncomfortable row to hoe, but that is not the case. I rise with no sense of apology and I hope that the House will agree, when it has considered some of the facts behind this Order, that the case is sound and reasonable.
The Order represents a further stage in the implementation of the Government's policies, announced in the original White Paper of 27th October last year, "New Policies for Public Spending", to concentrate provision of free health and
186
welfare benefits on families and individuals who are most in need of them.
There can be little dispute that there have been massive changes in the standard of living of the great bulk of our population over the last 30 years since the original welfare milk and food schemes were introduced. I agree that this is not to say that real poverty does not exist, that real areas of deprivation do not exist. It is because they do that we want to concentrate the free provision of welfare food precisely on those exposed sections of the population who, for various reasons, have not benefited from the sharp increase in the standard of living of the general population over these years and are specifically at nutritional risk. I take the point of the hon. Lady the Member for Halifax (Dr. Summerskill)—that we are here concerned with milk as an aid to nutritional well-being, and not precisely as a medical element.
It is the logic of the contemporary changes in which we find ourselves living today that has led us to decide that it is right to cease paying a subsidy in the shape of cheap welfare milk indiscriminately for all families with children under five, and to substitute for it the extended provision of free welfare milk to large families and to needy families. The extension to which I refer of the concentration of free welfare foods on the large and needy families is no mean extension, and perhaps I might remind the House of the figures involved.
This is our calculation, and it remains to be seen to what extent it is fulfilled; it is bound to be assessed over a period of time, but these are the figures for which we have budgeted: we expect that there will be an increase in those qualifying for free milk of roughly 25 per cent.—and I mention that as it has been the principal element in the welfare foods debate. That is from 590,000 beneficiaries to 754,000 beneficiaries—a massive extension of the availability of free provision.
The point about take-up, which was made by my hon. Friends the Members for Norwich, South (Dr. Stuttaford), and Belper (Mr. Stewart-Smith), is very important, and I should like to say something about the expectation of take-up, and also about the figures so far. In addition to the two campaigns that we

187
have been running—and this specifically answers the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich, South—that is, the Department's campaign, and that of the National Dairy Council, together costing more than £650,000 and aimed at making as many people as possible aware of their entitlement, local authority domiciliary workers and voluntary organisation social workers have been approached by my right hon. Friend in a nation-wide publicity campaign and have been asked, by personal contact with potential beneficiaries, to offer advice, encouragement or help in making applications.
I think that the figures of the response to that personal approach, and the massive extra funds allocated to publicise it, are quite striking. For the period January to April, 1971, that is to say, before the Order took effect on 4th April, the number of claims for free welfare milk and food averaged 32 a week. For the months of April and May, claims totalling 121,367 have come in. That means that from an average of 32 a week, the figure has risen to 15,000 a week. I hope that my hon. Friend the Member for Belper will appreciate that that is a substantial reflection of the efforts that we are making to bring to the attention of people their entitlement, particularly those who are entitled to substantially more.
I agree that this provision is not entirely without its financial repercussions, and hon. Gentlemen opposite and the hon. Lady have tried to make the most of this. I do not blame them for that. It is fair to ask what the financial implications will be, but I think that we must keep in perspective the increase in family expenditure on liquid milk. The needy are unaffected by any financial penalties there may be. The increase in family expenditure for those held to be more or less able to look after themselves, by the very much extended criteria that we have adopted in assessing availability for free milk, cannot be more than 35p per week in any circumstances. In other words, it cannot be more than the extra half cost which they are now having to pay for the first two children at the rate of 14 pints per week, which would be the entitlement of those two children. As
188
soon as there are more children one gets into the family category and receives free milk; so it cannot be more than 35p a week in any circumstances.
I agree that this is no chicken-feed, even for those comfortably above the supplementary benefit level, if the substantial extra burden is taken in isolation. But the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is often accused of having done nothing for the poor and given everything to the surtax payer, has in his Budget made enormous provision through increased child tax allowances for all families with children. These benefits apply roughly at the rate of £13 a child right down to the income tax level, which is only just a little about the supplementary benefit rate. So, taking the much higher tolerance we have adopted for entitling people to free provision on grounds of need, the increase in child tax allowances and the absolute limit placed upon the extra charges which may be visited upon families, this scheme does not partake of the vicious, heartless, scandalous and inhumane charges launched against it. Put into perspective, it is a small contribution to expect those who can afford it to make.
Mr. Bob Brown: The hon. Gentleman should admonish his Department for what it has put before him on this occasion. The hon. Gentleman referred to the activities of the Chancellor of the Exchequer in his Budget. But there is a vast difference between £38 million given to surtax payers spread across several thousand and the £40 million given in income tax child allowances spread across six million. In any event, the people to whom he referred who would find it difficult to pay an extra 35p a week, those earning £14 a week, would not be paying income tax.
Mr. Alison: The income tax allowance goes right down practically to supplementary benefit level. The value of the child tax allowances is worth £200 million a year, and this is the figure to bear in mind when considering the offsets.
The hon. Member for Halifax asked about the net savings. The net savings from taking up to 35p a week from families who on a more generous assessment than supplementary benefit scales are held to be able to meet their own

189
requirements will be £30 million, which produces a substantial extra sum of money towards my right hon. Friend's enormous sum of £110 million extra resources available for the development of the health and welfare services. It is rank hypocrisy for right hon. and hon. Gentlemen opposite to criticise us for putting a modest charge on those who can afford it whilst extending free provision of foodstuffs, particularly milk.
I recall what happened in the days of the Labour Government under the leadership of the right hon. Member for Coventry, East (Mr. Crossman), when, as my right hon. Friend said in a recent speech, the publication of the report on the terrible goings-on at Ely hospital revealed the deficiency in the diet of the inmates of mental hospitals. The diet was 25 per cent. below that in ordinary hospitals. All the right hon. Member for Coventry, East could find from the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the subsequent year to assist those patients was £1½ million to increase the dietary take-up of the mentally handicapped. From this one Measure of extending free milk and charging a modest sum to people who are able to look after themselves, we are producing £30 million extra for allocation to our starving hospital and welfare services which we have inherited from the outgoing Administration. If this is not humanity, if this is not the right set of priorities in the circumstances, I do not know what is.
The hon. Lady asked why we are continuing to provide children who attend day nurseries with the regular one-third of a pint a day, irrespective of whether they are beneficiaries of free milk. We felt that the children who would be away from home during the day for an extended period ought to have some milk in the course of a day even though there may be free milk for them at home.
I said that I had no hesitation in commending the Order as one which will impose no hardship. All those on supplementary benefit will continue to receive free milk; all those who come into the family income supplement in August will continue to receive free milk; all families with three or more children under five will continue to receive free milk; all children in families where the financial resources are higher than the supplementary benefit levels but where there is still real need will continue to get free milk. It is only in respect of those who really can, on any reasonable assessment, be held to afford up to 35p per week, and no more, that we commend this Order as being able to produce £30 million in extra resources for the community health and welfare services. For that reason I hope that the House will uphold the Order.
Question put:—
The House divided: Ayes 169, Noes 198.

Division No. 375.]

AYES

[11.27 p.m.

Albu, Austen

Davies, Denzil (Llanelly)

Gourlay, Harry

Allaun, Frank (Salford, E.)

Davies, G. Elfed (Rhondda, E.)

Grant, John D. (Islington, E.)

Archer, Peter (Rowley Regis)

Davies, Ifor (Gower)

Griffiths, Eddie (Brightside)

Ashton, Joe

Davis, Clinton (Hackney, C.)

Hamilton, James (Bothwell)

Atkinson, Norman

Davis, T. A. G. (Bromsgrove)

Hamling, William

Bagier, Cordon A. T.

Deakins, Eric

Hannan, William (G'gow, Maryhill)

Barnes, Michael

de Freitas, Rt. Hn. Sir Geoffrey

Hardy, Peter

Barnett, Joel

Delargy, H. J.

Harrison, Walter (Wakefield)

Beaney, Alan

Dempsey, James

Hattersley, Roy

Bennett, James (Glasgow, Bridgeton)

Dormand, J. D.

Horam, John

Bishop, E. S.

Douglas-Mann, Bruce

Houghton, Rt. Hn. Douglas

Blenkinsop, Arthur

Driberg, Tom

Huckfield, Leslie

Boardman, H. (Leigh)

Duffy, A. E. P.

Hughes Rt. Hn. Cledwyn (Anglesey)

Booth, Albert

Dunn, James A.

Hughes, Mark (Durham)

Brown, Bob (N'c'tle-upon-Tyne, W.)

Dunnett, Jack

Hughes, Robert (Aberdeen, N.)

Brown, Hugh D. (G'gow, Provan)

Edelman, Maurice

Hughes, Roy (Newport)

Buchan, Norman

Edwards, William (Merioneth)

Janner, Greville

Campbell, I (Dunbartonshire, W.)

Ellis, Tom

John, Brynmor

Cant, R. B.

Evans, Fred

Johnson, Carol (Lewisham, S.)

Carmichael, Neil

Fisher, Mrs. Doris (B'ham, Lady wood)

Johnson, James (K'ston-on-Hull, W.)

Carter, Ray (Birmingh'm, Northfield)

Fitch, Alan (Wigan)

Johnson, Walter (Derby, S.)

Clark, David (Colne Valley)

Fletcher, Ted (Darlington)

Jones, Rt. Hn. Sir Elywn (W. Ham, S.)

Cocks, Michael (Bristol, S.)

Foley, Maurice

Jones, Gwynoro (Carmarthen)

Concannon, J. D.

Forrester, John

Jones, T. Alec (Rhondda, W.)

Conlan, Bernard

Fraser, John (Norwood)

Kaufman, Gerald

Cox, Thomas (Wandsworth, C.)

Garrett, W. E.

Kelley, Richard

Dalyell, Tam

Gilbert, Dr. John

Kerr, Russell

Davidson, Arthur

Golding, John

Kinnock, Neil

Lambie, David

Morris, Charles R. (Openshaw)

Silkin, Hn. S. C. (Dulwich)

Lamond, James

Mulley, Rt. Hn. Frederick

Sillars, James

Latham, Arthur

Murray, Ronald King

Silverman, Julius

Lawson, George

O'Malley, Brian

Skinner, Dennis

Leadbitter, Ted

Orme, Stanley

Small, William

Leonard, Dick

Oswald, Thomas

Smith, John (Lanarkshire, N.)

Lestor, Miss Joan

Palmer, Arthur

Spriggs, Leslie

Lewis, Ron (Carlisle)

Parry, Robert (Liverpool, Exchange)

Stallard, A. W.

Lomas, Kenneth

Pavitt, Laurie

Stoddart, David (Swindon)

Loughlin, Charles

Peart, Rt. Hn. Fred

Strang, Gavin

McBride, Neil

Pendry, Tom

Summerskill, Hn. Dr. Shirley

McElhone, Frank

Pentland, Norman

Swain, Thomas

Mackenzie, Gregor

Perry, Ernest G.

Taverne, Dick

McMillan, Tom (Glasgow, C.)

Prentice, Rt. Hn. Reg.

Thomas. Rt. Hn. George (Cardiff, W.)

McNamara, J. Kevin

Prescott, John

Tuck, Raphael

Mahon, Simon (Bootle)

Price, J. T. (Westhoughton)

Urwin, T. W.

Mallalieu, J. P. W. (Huddersfield, E.)

Price, William (Rugby)

Varley, Eric G.

Marks, Kenneth

Probert, Arthur

Wainwright, Edwin

Marquand, David

Reed, D. (Sedgefield)

Walker, Harold (Doncaster)

Marsden, F.

Rees, Merlyn (Leeds, S.)

Wellbeloved, James

Marshall, Dr. Edmund

Rhodes, Geoffrey

White, James (Glasgow, pollok)

Mason, Rt. Hn. Roy

Roberts, Albert (Normanton)

Whitehead, Phillip

Meacher, Michael

Roberts, Rt. Hn. Goronwy (Caernarvon)

Whitlock, William

Mellish, Rt. Hn. Robert

Roderick, Caerwyn E.(Br'c'n&R'dnor)

Williams, Mrs. Shirley (Hitchin)

Mendelson, John

Rodgers, William (Stockton-on-Tees)

Williams. W. T. (Warrington)

Millan, Bruce

Roper, John

Milne, Edward (Blyth)

Ross, Rt. Hn. William (Kilmarnock)

Mitchell, R. C. (S'hampton, Itchen)

Sheldon, Robert (Ashton-under-Lyne)

TELLERS FOR THE AYES:

Morgan, Etystan (Cardiganshire)

Shore, Rt. Hn. Peter (Stepney)

Mr. Ernest Armstrong and

Morris, Alfred (Wythenshawe)

Silkin, Rt. Hn. John (Deptford)

Mr. Joseph Harper.

NOES

Adley, Robert

Elliot, Cant. Walter (Carshalton)

Legge-Bourke, Sir Harry

Alison, Michael (Barkston Ash)

Eyre, Reginald

Longden, Gilbert

Allason, James (Hemel Hempstead)

Farr, John

McAdden, Sir Stephen

Atkins, Humphrey

Fenner, Mrs. Peggy

McCrindle, R. A.

Awdry, Daniel

Fidler, Michael

Macmillan, Maurice (Farnham)

Baker, Kenneth (St. Marylebone)

Finsberg, Geoffrey (Hampstead)

McNair-Wilson, Michael

Baker, W. H. K. (Banff)

Fisher, Nigel (Surbiton)

Maddan, Martin

Balniel, Lord

Fookes, Miss Janet

Madel, David

Bennett, Sir Frederic (Torquay)

Fortescue, Tim

Maginnis, John E.

Berry, Hn. Anthony

Fowler, Norman

Marten, Neil

Biffen, John

Gibson-Watt, David

Mather, Carol

Biggs-Davison, John

Gilmour, Sir John (Fife, E.)

Mawby, Ray

Boardman, Tom (Leicester, S. W.)

Goodhart, Philip

Maxwell-Hyslop, R. J.

Boscawen, Robert

Goodhew, Victor

Meyer, Sir Anthony

Bowden, Andrew

Gorst, John

Mitchell, David (Basingstoke)

Boyd-Carpenter, Rt. Hn. John

Gower, Raymond

Moate, Roger

Braine, Bernard

Gray, Hamish

Molyneaux, James

Bray, Ronald

Green, Alan

Money, Ernle

Brinton, Sir Tatton

Griffiths, Eldon (Bury St. Edmunds)

Monks, Mrs. Connie

Brocklebank-Fowler, Christopher

Grylls, Michael

Monro, Hector

Brown, Sir Edward (Bath)

Gummer, Selwyn

More, Jasper

Buchanan-Smith, Alick (Angus, N&M)

Hall, Miss Joan (Keighley)

Morgan, Geraint (Denbigh)

Burden, F. A.

Hall, Joan (Wycombe)

Morgan-Giles, Rear-Adm.

Butler, Adam (Bosworth)

Hall-Davis, A. G. F.

Morrison, Charles (Devizes)

Carlisle, Mark

Hamilton, Michael (Salisbury)

Murton, Oscar

Chapman, Sydney

Hannam, John (Exeter)

Neave, Airey

Chataway, Rt. Hn. Christopher

Haselhurst, Alan

Nicholls, Sir Harmar

Chichester-Clark, R.

Hay, John

Noble, Rt. Hn. Michael

Churchill, W. S.

Hicks, Robert

Normanton, Tom

Clark, William (Surrey, E.)

Higgins, Terence L.

Nott, John

Clarke, Kenneth (Rushcliffe)

Hiley, Joseph

Oppenheim, Mrs. Sally

Clegg, Walter

Hill, James (Southampton, Test)

Osborn, John

Cooke, Robert

Holland, Philip

Owen, Idris (Stockport, N.)

Coombs, Derek

Holt, Miss Mary

Page Graham (Crosby)

Cooper, A. E.

Hordern, Peter

Parkinson, Cecil (Enfield, W.)

Cordle, John

Hornsby-Smith. Rt. Hn. Dame Patricia

Percival, Ian

Corfield, Rt. Hn. Frederick

Howe, Hn. Sir Geoffrey (Reigate)

Pink, R. Bonner

Cormack, Patrick

Howell, David (Guildford)

Pounder, Rafton

Costain, A. P.

Howell, Ralph (Norfolk, N.)

Powell, Rt. Hn. J. Enoch

Critchley, Julian

Hutchison, Michael Clark

Price, David (Eastleigh)

Crouch, David

Irvine, Bryant Godman (Rye)

Prior, Rt. Hn. J. M. L.

Curran, Charles

James, David

Proudfoot, Wilfred

Davies, Rt. Hn. John (Knutsford)

Jenkin, Patrick (Woodford)

Pym, Rt. Hn. Francis

d'Avigdor-Goldsmid, Sir Henry

Jessel, Toby

Raison, Timothy

Dean, Paul

Johnson Smith, G. (E. Grinstead)

Redmond, Robert

Deedes, Rt. Hn. W. F.

Jopling, Michael

Reed, Laurance (Bolton, E.)

Dixon, Piers

King, Evelyn (Dorset, S.)

Rees, Peter (Dover)

Dykes, Hugh

King, Tom (Bridgwater)

Rees-Davies, W. R.

Eden, Sir John

Kinsey, J. R.

Rhys Williams, Sir Brandon

Edwards, Nicholas (Pembroke)

Knox, David

Ridley, Hn, Nicholas

Lambton, Antony

Roberts, Michael (Cardiff, N.)

Roberts, Wyn (Conway)

192

193

Rossi, Hugh (Hornsey)

Stoddart-Scott, Col. Sir M.

Walder, David (Clitheroe)

Rost, Peter

Stokes, John

Walker, Rt. Hn. Peter (Worcester)

Royle, Anthony

Stuttaford, Dr. Tom

Walker-Smith, Rt. Hn. Sir Derek

Russell, Sir Ronald

Taylor, Edward M.(G'gow, Cathcart)

Wall, Patrick

Scott, Nicholas

Taylor, Frank (Moss Side)

Ward, Dame Irene

Shaw, Michael (Sc'b'gh & Whitby)

Tebbit, Norman

Warren, Kenneth

Shelton, William (Clapham)

Thomas, John Stradling (Monmouth)

Weatherill, Bernard

Simeons, Charles

Thomas, Rt. Hn. Peter (Hendon, S.)

Whitelaw, Rt. Hn. William

Sinclair, Sir George

Thompson, Sir Richard (Croydon, S.)

Wilkinson, John

Sheet, T. H. H.

Trafford, Dr. Anthony

Woodhouse, Hn. Christopher

Smith, Dudley (W'wick & L'mington)

Trew, Peter

Woodnutt, Mark

Soref, Harold

Tugemlhat, Christopher

Wylie, Rt. Hn. N. R.

Spence, John

Tunton, Rt. Hn. Sir Robin

Sproat, lain

van straubenzee, W. R.

TELLERS FOR THE NOES:

Stainton, Keith

Vaughan, Dr. Gerard

Mr. Paul Hawkins and

Stanbrook, Ivor

Waddington, David

Mr. Keith Speed.

Stewart-Smith, D. G. (Belper)

LITTLE SISTERS OF THE POOR (MANCHESTER)
Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Rossi.]
11.37 p.m.
Mr. Gerald Kaufman: I am grateful for the opportunity of raising the question of the old people's home of the Little Sisters of the Poor, in Plymouth Grove in my constituency. The Little Sisters of the Poor is a religious order which came to England from France in 1839. The order has established in this country 26 homes for the care of old people.
Two of these homes are in Manchester, one in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Openshaw (Mr. Charles R. Morris), which is now, alas, closing because the order lacks funds to remedy basic structural defects in that home in Newton Heath. The other home, St. Joseph's, is in my constituency. Some 126 old people live in St. Joseph's Home and are looked after by 17 of the Little Sisters, working sisters as they are called. Those old people are extremely well looked after. The food is good, the care is devoted and St. Joseph's is not simply a shelter for the elderly but is a home. It is kept spotlessly clean and is full of an atmosphere of genuine concern and affection. It is a Catholic home but people of all faiths are made welcome there. The Minister who is to reply agrees, and has said in correspondence, that there is a high standard of care in the home.
The principal income of the Little Sisters to run the home comes from their own efforts. Some beg for income and in this way raise about £4,000 a year. In addition, there is a fund-raising com-
194
mittee. But the home has no assured income and receives nothing from the State. The Sisters receive no pay of any kind, but out of the money they obtain pay the domestic staff whom they employ. As a home it sounds idyllic.
But St. Joseph's is far from idyllic. It is a large old building. It is 103 years old. The places where the old people sleep are dormitories with curtained cubicles. They are grossly overcrowded. The bath facilities, the washing facilities, and the lavatory facilities are far too limited for the numbers who live there: far too limited, too, for the dignity of those who live there. On one floor in two separate parts more than two dozen old ladies have to share the use of only one bath. Lockers in the corridors are the only places where they can keep their private possessions. In addition, there is a leak in the roof. This has made some of the sleeping accommodation uninhabitable, which has meant greater overcrowding than would otherwise be occasioned.
The Little Sisters of the Poor are themselves more conscious of the defects at St. Joseph's than anybody else. They want to improve the place; they want to reconstruct it to provide modern facilities and decent privacy for those for whom they care. They want to introduce bedsitter accommodation with private toilets and their own washbasins for those living there.
The Little Sisters signed a contract to begin a major reconstruction and modernisation. The financial means for this were quite beyond their own efforts. They cast about to obtain a loan. At the same time they decided to seek Government aid, taking the view—quite fairly—that if the home did not exist, the residents in it would be a charge on public funds and that this would

195
come, on the most conservative estimate, to more than £50,000 a year. The Little Sisters have saved the State millions of pounds through their own efforts. They thought that, as the State now had the power under the Health Services and Public Health Act, 1968, to provide them with finance, the State should be forthcoming.
At this point I should dispose of an argument which has been advanced and which the Minister may have it in mind to advance again tonight, namely, that the new per capita system of assistance of Manchester Corporation is a help to St. Joseph's. This is far from so. It is true that Manchester Corporation at the beginning of 1970 agreed to provide per capita payments for new entrants to St. Joseph's who came from the City of Manchester. Some other local authorities agreed that they would do so, too. These per capita payments were to provide, not for capital costs, but for part of current costs. Still, this was a gain; and the Little Sisters were very grateful for it.
My hon. Friend the Member for Openshaw was in large part instrumental in bringing this about. It sounded marvellous, but I regret to say that it was far from it. To begin with, of the 126 residents in the home only 11 qualified for this per capita payment, six from the City of Manchester. Second, this per capita payment, which sounds so grand, amounts to only 46p a week for each of the 11 who are covered. This, added together, would bring an annual income of £263 and in 16 years this per capita payment aggregated would just about pay for repairing the leak in the roof.
There is a snag. The per capita payment scheme has been in operation for 14 months, but so far the Little Sisters have received not one farthing or one new penny of this money. The mills of municipal treasurers grind exceeding slow.
Therefore, last year the Little Sisters approached my right hon. Friend the Member for Coventry, East (Mr. Cross-man), then Secretary of State for Social Services, and asked him for help. In a letter dated 15th May last year, he replied:
"I cannot give you a positive answer one way or the other until I get a clear picture
196
of the local possibilities of aid. My difficulty is, of course—as I am sure you will appreciate—that I must take into account not only the very many demands which will be made to me on resources that, however large, are always too small, but also the fact that local authorities have exactly the same powers to help financially that I have."
He did, however, arrange a series of meetings, which I attended. At one meeting, on 3rd July last year, the Ministry's principal regional officer told us that the Ministry could not step in until the local authority had refused help. Therefore, we went to the local authority and we had a series of meetings, but I am afraid that they were fruitless.
On 22nd October, at a meeting with the local authority, it was made clear that loans would certainly not be available in this or the next financial year, because loans to independent causes represented a surplus to the authority's needs and there was not this surplus.
On 7th December last year the matter was clinched in a letter from the chief welfare officer of the City of Manchester, who wrote:
"At their meeting on 9th November, 1970, the Welfare Services Committee resolved to continue their existing policy to make per capita payments to voluntary organisations in respect of accommodation provided by them for Manchester residents in their establishments, but that no grants or loans be made to organisations providing new residential accommodation or replacing existing accommodation similar to that provided by the Committee. This resolution was confirmed by the City Council at their meeting on Wednesday last, 2nd December, 1970.
You will appreciate, I am sure, that this resolution has the effect of precluding your making an application to the Corporation for a loan in respect of the project you had in mind. I trust, however, that you may possibly find other means of financing the scheme …"
By then the Little Sisters had had to cancel their building contract, because the money was not available, but they still wished to proceed with their plans. Recalling what the Secretary of State for Social Services and his principal regional officer had said, they decided to go back to the Ministry which had given a strong indication that once the possibility of aid from the local authority was out of the way it would consider, possibly favourably, extending assistance itself. But as the Little Sisters were ready to make this approach, by an extraordinary coincidence a letter was received from

197
the Department of Health and Social Security which said:
"I am now writing to say that the Secretary of State regrets that he is unable to give the direct assistance which you seek. It is of course for the Manchester City Council to decide whether or not to help under their powers."
However, the Manchester City Council had already decided not to help under their powers. Therefore, we were being sent back to the council by the Ministry which had said that it would consider help if the council decided not to provide it.
We had gone through all that, so I wrote again pointing this out, and I received a letter, dated 26th April, from the Under-Secretary in which he said:
"… officials of the Department went to some trouble to arrange local discussions to see if a viable solution could be found and in the event Manchester C.B.C. were able to offer some additional help with capitation payments but decided not to make a grant towards the capital costs."
Manchester City Council had decided to make no additional help with capitation payments. It had not paid the original capitation payments, and it had certainly not decided on an increase. I know that the Minister gave me this statement in complete good faith, but he was misinformed if he believed that extra assistance had been given as a result of our approaches. If this misinformation played a part in his deciding that the Little Sisters should not be given financial help by the Ministry, this alone is a ground for his thinking again about the matter.
But there are greater grounds for reconsideration in another statement in the Minister's letter to me about the use of Section 64 of the Act. I am sure that in making that statement he did not mean it to be interpreted in an arbitrary or restrictive manner. He said:
"In order to avoid undesirable duplication of grants for public funds agreement was reached with the local authority associations that use of the Government's powers under Section 64 of the Health Services and Public Health Act 1968 is limited to either assisting with the administrative headquarters costs of nationally operating voluntary organisations in so far as they relate to relevant health and social services, or supporting special projects where there will clearly be results which will be of wide if not national significance."
The one thing of which there is no danger whatsoever is the
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"undesirable duplication of grants from public funds",
because Manchester Corporation turned us down last year, and therefore the Government are our only hope.
In any case, I should be grateful if the Minister would look further into that statement about new approaches, because on our first approach to the Ministry it was particularly interested in the possibility that St. Joseph's could prove that homes of sizes other than the standard size which the Ministry approves, even very large homes, could be made into real homes with a good atmosphere and individual care. The impression was given to us that St. Joseph's could be a test case in this regard, that the Little Sisters, if given the opportunity, with good buildings and good facilities, could prove that a big home could still be a cosy home.
The Little Sisters work wonders already in a building which in other hands would be institutional, and have done so on a shoestring. These women want nothing whatever for themselves. All they want is the chance to provide an even better life for others. I would welcome the Minister to Manchester to see for himself how the Little Sisters of the Poor are enriching the lives of more than 100 old people, and how the Government could help that work by providing financial assistance.
Therefore, I hope that in his reply the Minister will not give a blank refusal. I hope that if he cannot promise concrete assistance here and now he will at least say that, in the light of the case I have tried to make and the merits—indeed, the virtues—of those involved—he will look at the matter again.
11.53 p.m.
Mr. Charles R. Morris: While not wishing to question the sincerity of the approach to this important issue by the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Security, may I impress upon him that already in Manchester we have seen the closure of one of the splendid homes which the order of the Little Sisters of the Poor provided for the elderly within the city. I hope that the Government and the Manchester City Council do not allow the St. Joseph's home to close. The financial provision by the Manchester Corporation in the past has been too

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little, too late. I hope that we do not miss this opportunity to save this splendid home and encourage this dedicated order in the splendid work which it does for the community in the city.
11.54 p.m.
The Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Security (Mr. Michael Alison): I am grateful to the hon. Members for Manchester, Ardwick (Mr. Kaufman) and Manchester, Openshaw (Mr. Charles R. Morris) for raising for discussion tonight the decision by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Social Services not himself to assist the Little Sisters of the Poor with the rebuilding of their home for elderly people at Plymouth Grove, Manchester.
The House already knows that decision and, very briefly, the reason why it was made. But the debate enables us to look at the case in a slightly wider context. I want to place the issue in that slightly wider context because I do not want to leave the impression that we are insensitive to the claims of voluntary organisations and bodies. Successive Ministers, standing where I now stand, for as much as a quarter of a century have pressed the value of voluntary bodies and urged in general terms the development of partnership between them and the statutory services. But the present Government are the first to state a commitment to the ideals of voluntary service as part of their general policy.
Our party manifesto at the last Election contained a specific passage about it, and I stress that we see voluntary service of the sort carried out by the working Sisters, as the hon. Gentleman called them, which is I am sure a proper description, both as an essential complement to the statutory services and as a good in itself—a form of direct participation by the public in public life in the interests of the whole community. I have no doubt that this is reflected in their work and in the striking way in which they set about raising voluntary funds in Manchester.
Over the years we shall be developing the theme of more assistance and partnership in practical discussion with those who are willing to be our partners in terms of mutual help. I have myself been charged with responsibility for develop-
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ments of this kind, participation and partnership between the statutory services and voluntary services, within the remit of my Department. As far as I know, it is the first occasion on which a Minister has been given a specific responsibility for helping, promoting and encouraging voluntary work.
As a result of that, both I and my colleagues have engaged at every opportunity that has occurred to us in visiting hospitals and any sort of D.H.S.S. establishment in any part of the country, and we have seized every possible opportunity of making personal contact with voluntary bodies. I have no doubt that if I have an opportunity to visit Manchester, which I hope I shall have at some future time, as part of my request to the statutory authorities to let me meet cross-sections of all those engaged in voluntary work, I may have a chance to meet some of the hon. Gentleman's constituents who work with the Little Sisters.
The hon. Gentleman referred to the Health Services and Public Health Act, 1968. This is the general empowering Act and it has fallen to this Government to put teeth into these general powers. When we took office in July, 1970, we found that my Department had grants amounting to less than £200,000 a year on its books as old clients, as it were. Some are of very considerable vintage, venerable in their pedigrees. In November, 1970, my right hon. Friend was able to announce that he would more than double the allocation by 1971–72 and further increase it in subsequent years. I hope that the House will accept that as a token of our mounting efforts in helping voluntary organisations.
Alas, it is not possible under the arrangements for paying Government grant to local authorities to influence their decisions in such matters as assistance to voluntary bodies. They retain very considerable discretionary powers. However, in the rate support grant negotiations with local authorities last year, the Government were able more than to match the requirements of local authorities in the health and welfare fields and thus to open the possibility of greater assistance to local organisations if they chose. It is not for want of resources which the Government are putting at the disposal of local authorities through the

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rate support grant. We have increased, and we shall further increase as soon as we are able, the resources available in terms of loan sanction which will enable local authorities to provide or to assist voluntary bodies in providing new or replacement homes.
Mr. Kaufman: With respect, the Minister is saying what local authorities may or may not do. This local authority, the Manchester City Council, before the elections—though I do not wish to introduce a party political note—turned us down flat. Therefore, I am not asking what the local authority could do if it wished but what the Government are empowered to do under Section 64 of the Act. I am asking for Government assistance, and not to be told what the local authority can do, since the local authority will not do it.
Mr. Alison: I take the hon. Member's point, but I hope that he will recognise that there is a genuine problem here. It is exactly on this division of responsibility that I hope to elaborate in the few minutes remaining to me.
Where should the responsibility lie? Let me put the matter into perspective for the hon. Member and his hon. Friends. There are more than 1,000 voluntary homes, providing some 25,000 places for elderly people, with which my Department is theoretically engaged. Nearly half of these places are taken up by people to whose maintenance local authorities are contributing under the National Assistance Act. These homes provide essentially a local area service which local authorities themselves would have to provide if the voluntary homes did not. It seems clear that the function of support rests, and ought to rest, with them.
Let us briefly consider the respective powers. Those of my right hon. Friend and of the authorities—the social services departments under the Local Authority Social Services Act—are nearly identical. We may both assist voluntary bodies active in health and welfare either by grant or loan, or by way of recurrent assistance on such terms as appear suitable to us in the particular case. We have therefore to agree how, without being inflexible and bureaucratic, we should exercise our respective powers
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under Sections 64 and 65 of the Health Services and Public Health Act.
We have agreed—and it seems a reasonable and logical division—that it is the function of the Secretary of State to give such help as seems to him proper to bodies with national scope to enable them to function more effectively, or to foster some experimental development locally which cannot otherwise get under way and which may have national repercussions. It is for the authorities to assist local bodies or projects, or, for that matter, branches or affiliates of national bodies—and the Little Sisters would come into that category, because they have several homes—that operate in their own areas. They can judge the needs and they can judge how wisely public money is spent, for they are on the spot and they have the opportunity to examine closely the actual disposition and the characteristics on the ground of these bodies to whom they make an allocation within their responsibility.
Mr. Charles R. Morris: Time goes by while we are arguing about the division of responsibility and the availability of these homes to care for the elderly is disappearing, for homes are being closed throughout the nation. How can we afford to stand unmoved while local authorities and the Government argue divisions of responsibility?
Mr. Alison: It is not quite so easy as the hon. Member suggests. Manchester itself has been given extra resources. It is the Corporation's responsibility to judge where those resources should be used and only it can make that local judgment. It has to decide whether developing the Little Sister's homes will preclude it from assisting projects of its own with exactly the same purpose, but which it considers to be more in the contemporary interest. It alone can judge. There may be exceptions to that, but this case, for practical reasons, cannot be one.
However greatly enlarged are the resources of the Secretary of State, they are not without limit and demands, however considerable, must have priorities within the national objectives which my right hon. Friend has rightly set and which I have described tonight. I agree that the Little Sisters of the Poor are meeting an important need in Manchester,

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but the Corporation is well aware of this and it is in a uniquely good position to determine whether there is provision, and it is on the ground to see whether a local home should get the relevant resources for this sort of project.
On policy and practical grounds, therefore, the Secretary of State had no alternative, however regretfully, but to decline to help. I understand that Manchester Corporation has also considered its policy in this matter and is resolved not to offer capital assistance where replacement is necessary, but rather to make provision itself. This must be a matter wholly for the Corporation.
I understand that the Corporation is willing to help the home by contributing to the current costs of accommodating residents from Manchester—and, no doubt, other authorities from whose areas residents originate will help—but it has set its face against a capital grant.
I assure the hon. Member for Ardwick that I shall look into the allegation that the wheels of the city treasurer's department grind exceedingly slow. I shall see whether I can impose a more divine swiftness, or rather suggest a more divine swiftness in this area, since I have no locus standi in that respect. But I take
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the point that, if anything can be done to expedite bureaucracy, it should be done.
It may be that one of the charitable foundations will be able to help. No doubt, the Little Sisters are exploring these possibilities. I believe that in other parts of the country they have, in fact, had a remarkable response to attempts to raise capital funds. I am sorry that, on behalf of the Secretary of State, I cannot give more practical backing to the sympathy which we both feel.
I understand that at least in theory, from 1st April, 1970, Manchester has undertaken to contribute 46p per resident, and it is thought to be willing to extend this to residents accepted earlier and to increase the amount if audited accounts justify this. That sum appears at first sight to be derisory, until it is recalled that staff costs in a home run by a religious Order are, in the main, nominal. Against the background of the representations which the hon. Gentleman has made, I shall certainly see whether what has been agreed in principle can be realised in practice.
Question put and agreed to.
Adjourned accordingly at six minutes past Twelve o'clock.