PERIOD OF INCAPACITY FOR WORK

HC Deb 18 March 1982 vol 20 cc551-62 8.15 pm

Mr. Rooker

I beg to move amendment No. 3, in page 2, line 22, leave out 'two' and insert 'eight'.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bolsover (Mr. Skinner) made several valid points. I hope that the points I am going to make on this amendment, although they will be brief, will be equally valid. Given that the House of Commons has just voted by a majority in excess of 100 against the last amendment, it is unlikely that the House of Lords will look at that point. The convention is that the House of Lords will take the will of the Commons as expressed by a vote. As the majority was so overwhelming, the chances of the House of Lords debating the issue and making Ministers bend are remote. I would not wish that to happen on this amendment. I am stating the position as I understand it.

Mr. Skinner

There is a good answer to what my hon. Friend is putting forward. I was complaining that miners and many other workers are to be subjected to harsh treatment by their employers intervening in the payment of sick pay. My hon. Friend is concerned about the numbers who went through the Lobby. He had the remedy in his hands. He and the rest of his Front Bench colleagues should have marched into that Lobby shoulder to shoulder with us so that it might have been shown to the House of Lords or anybody else who is interested that there was a whole body of people against the Government's proposal. My hon. Friend should not give the impression for one moment that because he and his colleagues abstained they were playing an honourable role. The honourable role would have been to walk into that Lobby against the real enemies, the Tories, who want to line up with the bosses against the workers. That was what my hon. Friend and his colleagues should have done.

Mr. Rooker

If we had done that we might have got the vote up from 14 to, say, 25.

Mr. Skinner

That says a lot about the Parliamentary Labour Party.

Mr. Rooker

That is for my hon. Friend to decide, as no doubt he will. I am pointing out the position as I understand it.

Given the fact that we have moved on to the nitty gritty of the Bill in amendment No. 2 and amendment No. 3 almost the whole membership of the House of Commons has disappeared, as one can see by comparing the last vote with earlier votes on matters that had nothing to do with the Bill.

In amendment No. 3, we are raising what is known as the linking rule. If a person has two spells of sickness joined together by a period of not more than eight weeks the two spells are linked, so that the person does not have to serve waiting days for which no sickness benefit is paid. In the Bill, the period is reduced from eight weeks which is the current period under the State national insurance scheme, to two weeks. That is grossly unfair and unjust, as we made clear in Committee.

The Minister should explain why the linking rule conditions should be worse under the employers' statutory sick pay scheme than under the State national insurance scheme. Many people would have to wait another three days without benefit or sick pay if they had a period of sickness following their return to work after a previous period of sickness. Contrary to what is said generally on the Tory side of the House and by those in business, people go back to work before they are well enough, because they need the money. There appear to be double standards as between the State scheme and the employers' statutory sick pay scheme proposed in the Bill. In this respect, fairness has become an also-ran under this Government.

I remind the new Minister what his predecessor told us in Committee on 8 December 1981: With the two-week linking rule we have sought to reach a compromise."—[Official Report, Standing Committee B; 8 December 1981, c. 78] It may escape hon. Members how two weeks compared with eight can be a compromise. Big business, in the shape of the CBI, did not want any linking rule. It wanted the employee in every period of sickness, however close to a previous spell, and however related to that previous spell, to have to wait three days. It is alleged that between zero and eight there is a compromise at two. The fairness of that escapes me, as until about 18 months ago the period for the linking rules under the national insurance sickness benefit scheme was 13 weeks, not eight. The Government have pulled down the linking rule, and we see no good reason why it should be pulled down further.

Perhaps the Minister can make a case which we felt was inadequately made in Committee. Here I play devil's advocate. It might be argued that we are now to enter a period in which the employers will be responsible for the sick pay, that there will be an interaction of the statutory scheme under the Bill and existing occupational sick pay schemes, which may or may not have linking rules and waiting days, and that therefore there will be a problem when the two schemes start to come together for many firms, including the nationalised industries. It may be that there is an overwhelming case for a two-week linking rule for all schemes. We wait with interest to discover whether the new Minister can make a better case than his predecessor did in Committee.

Mr. Andrew F. Bennett

I support my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Perry Barr (Mr. Rooker). I hope that he will press the amendment to a Division. It is often frustrating for Opposition Members to press social security matters, because there does not seem to be a great deal of interest, but now we find that suddenly many people are interested. My hon. Friend should have learned that there were many occasions when only a few of us trooped through the Lobbies on parts of the Social Security (No. 2) Bill 1980, but gradually the message got out in the country and people began to ask what went on.

I believe that many questions will be asked once this new sick pay scheme is introduced. I suggest that my hon. Friend thinks of one or two examples of the way in which it will be unfair. We do not want promises from the Government to look at it in the Lords. We want action. We put these points in Committee, and the Government showed little or no sympathy.

Let us consider the person who has an accident and breaks his leg. Often such a person must enter hospital for a short period, being off work for three or four days. He receives no benefit and, if he is in a low-paid job without an occupational sickness benefit scheme, he receives no money unless he applies for supplementary benefit. That person may well have to return to hospital a fortnight or more later to have the plaster taken off. Under this scheme, with the two-week link, there will be no opportunity for the four days to link up with the later days to ensure that at least he qualifies for sickness benefit for the later days.

I have encountered people who have had to have time off as a result of such an accident. They return to hospital to have the plaster removed, or to have it changed, and for physiotherapy or other treatment on one day a week, often for three or four weeks thereafter. Therefore, it is possible for someone to have four days off to start with and not qualify, then continue to have days off after a fortnight—perhaps one day a week for four or five weeks—and then take a long time before coming into benefit.

For people on low pay it is bad enough to lose four days' pay—the four waiting days before they start to draw benefit—but to have that go on happening week after week is grossly unfair to them. Therefore, it is reasonable to have a more generous link, as in the existing sickness benefit scheme.

In Committee, the Government said that the scheme would be too complicated for the employer to work out if the link was to run for more than two weeks. If the employer is part of a small organisation, it is fairly simple to look back through the wages book to see whether someone had one or two days off in any of the past eight weeks and to make the link. If big employers are paying out on a computer, it is easy for them to put that information into the computer programme. I understand that the Government are to spend a great deal of money running schemes and training courses for employers to make it easy for them. If they can spend that money helping the employers, why not spend a little to help the employee who is off work?

The Government are telling employess "Because we are being mean, do not try to return to work quickly. Take the extra day or days off to make sure, first, that you qualify for the benefit by getting in the four waiting days, and, secondly, to make sure that the links occur." The message to anyone who has an accident, as a result of which he has an arm or a leg in plaster, is "Do not try to return to work", as many people do. "Do not try to look after your employer's interests. Stay away. Otherwise, you will lose your entitlement to benefit. Make sure that you have one day off in the week to ensure that you maintain the link."

That is the message from the Government, and it is a very bad one. They are telling people "Watch out. If you are the good person who tries to get back to work whenever possible, you may find that your benefit is cut; whereas, if you have plenty of time off and keep the link running, within the two-week period, you will qualify for benefit."

The Government should accept the amendment and make it absolutely clear that they have confidence in the majority of employees who do their best to return to work. They should also say that the justification for the scheme is that it will greatly simplify matters for the Government. They should not simplify them at the expense of low-paid employees who desperately need sickness benefit.

Mr. Newton

The hon. Member for Birmingham, Perry Barr (Mr. Rooker) fairly explained the purpose of the amendment, and therefore I shall not go over that.

I know that there was an extensive debate in Committee about the problem, and I have read the Official Report of that debate. I entirely understand why the Opposition felt it right to return to the matter on the Floor of the House. I make no complaint about that, because it is clearly on the record that my hon. Friends in Committee, having heard the arguments, gave a clear undertaking to re-examine the matter before Report.

What I can say is that we have reconsidered this matter. Since arriving in the Department two weeks ago, I have been present at all of the discussions involved in this. Having said that, I have also to say that we have been driven to the conclusion that we nevertheless ought to stick to the two-week linking period that is written into the Bill. The case for it is a strong and reasonable one, and for the moment we have concluded that we ought to stand by it. I know that that will not be very palatable to Labour Members and I am not in any way pretending to them that the case is overwhelming and conclusive. Nor am I going to pretend to the hon. Member for Perry Barr, who raised the question of the possible relationship with occupational sick pay schemes, that we have suddenly come up with some great new argument that I can present to him as having totally changed the whole picture since Committee.

I rest principally on the arguments that were deployed in Committee, and which have to do with the question of finding a balance in the scheme between the interests of employees and employers, the interests of the Government and the national insurance scheme, and not least the interests of having a reasonably simple scheme that is relatively easy for people to understand.

Having looked again at all those factors, and the balance that we think it right to strike, we have been led to the conclusion I have set out. It is worth reiterating the point that the simplest thing of all—if simplicity were the only criterion— would be no linking arrangement at all. As the hon. Member for Perry Barr and others have said, there have been voices calling for that. We were not prepared to go along with that. We thought that it would be unfair to employees unduly to balance the scheme against them by having no linking scheme at all. That is why the two-week period is still in the Bill.

8.30 pm

At the same time, it is fair to say that, after a long and difficult period of negotiation the employers, having accepted this scheme, which involves them in certain additional efforts and tasks, are entitled to expect that the Government will have some regard to their interests as well in making the scheme as administratively easy to operate as possible, and taking account in general of the problems they may face in running a scheme of a quite different kind from what most of them have previously experienced. Taking those two things together, we came to the conclusion that the period of two weeks was about right.

That is a point about simplicity and the interests of the groups involved. There is another point, which I know was made in Committee, but which ought to be made again, and that is that the main purpose of this scheme is to deal with what one might call day-to-day, ordinary short-term sickness—that is to say, somebody who has a bad cold, 'flu, or a strained back, or any of the problems that may keep people away from work for a relatively limited period. The plain fact is that in the real world most of the conditions at which this scheme is aimed, and which it will cover, are the sorts of things—the ones I have just touched on—with which in practice sometimes people go back to work a bit early, as all of us have no doubt done from time to time. I sometimes think that the House of Commons is far too full of people who should have stayed away with their colds and their 'flus, especially in a crowded Division Lobby. All of us have sometimes gone back to work far too early. It does not take more than two weeks to find out that one has not quite got over a cold or 'flu or a strained back. I have no doubt at all that the vast majority of cases at which this scheme is primarily aimed will be adequately covered by a two-week linking scheme. That is really my principal answer to the hon. Member for Stockport, North (Mr. Bennett).

As for the subject of broken legs, which I saw that the hon. Member touched on fairly extensively in Committee, my experience of broken legs is happily not so extensive as it might be, but I do not have the impression that it normally takes three or four days in hospital to have the plaster taken off a leg that has been broken. In that sense it seems very unlikely that a second period of incapacity for work would arise in practice in most of the circumstances adumbrated by the hon. Member in his contribution. So I do not regard that as a sufficient argument for overriding those that I have been putting before the House.

Mr. Andrew F. Bennett

Is the Minister really saying that there is no problem, that this would not occur very often? If that is true, if there is no problem and it does not occur very often, then it is easy enough to go through with this plan because it will cause no problems to employers; it will turn up so rarely that it would be too easy to do it.

Mr. Newton

I am not trying to say that there is no problem and absolutely no cause for anxiety. I hope that I made it clear earlier on that that is not the kind of speech that I am trying to make.

Having said what I have about the balance between employees and employers, the likely practicability of the conditions with which this scheme is trying to cope, I do want to accept that there clearly is a separate set of considerations that must rightly be applied to the longer-term sick or to those who fall chronically sick and have frequent intermittent illness. In those cases a longer linking period would plainly be appropriate. If we consider the practicalities of what is likely to happen, those are the people who will fairly rapidly exhaust their entitlement to statutory sick pay and will be returned to the national insurance sick pay scheme.

One must also consider the eight-week linking rule. In conjunction with that, I wish the House to acknowledge that if someone on sickness or invalidity benefit recovers and returns to work, the State will retain responsibility for eight weeks after. If he falls sick during that period he can receive DHSS incapacity benefits again. In the practical world, the sort of problems that have been thrown at the Government during the discussion of this issue cannot stand all the weight that has been put upon them. Taking everything that I have said into account, I stick to my conclusion that what we are proposing remains a reasonably clear balance.

My final point, although it may not give Labour Members exactly what they wish, will I hope at least give them some comfort. Throughout my speech I have acknowledged that I am not saying that no conceivable problems or anomalies could arise. Some problems and anomalies can arise with an eight-week or a 13-week linking period. The fact is that, in this world, wherever one draws such a line some people will fall on just the wrong side and some will fall on just the right side and it is always possible to point to the difficulties of the line. That will happen wherever or whatever the line is—

Mr. Skinner

Not as often.

Mr. Newton

It may happen just as often if we draw the line in another place. It does not necessarily follow that drawing the line in one place rather than another reduces the number of cases that fall close to the line. Line drawing of the sort that must exist in such a scheme is bound to cause some anomalies. I do not deny that some difficulties may emerge in the light of experience.

I hope that it will be taken as some reassurance if I tell the House that if, once the scheme has got under way, we find that hardship is being experienced because of the two-week linking period—which I doubt—we shall be prepared to consider changing it. Simply because Labour Members have shown much anxiety about the matter, we have specifically asked the officials who will keep an eye on the development of the scheme as it gets under way to keep a special eye on this aspect. I do not mean that we shall rush about and produce a different linking rule or an amendment in another place. When the scheme gets under way we shall be keeping an especially close watch on the operation of this aspect of it. If it is shown that the anxieties expressed in the House tonight, and in Committee, are justified, we shall certainly do something about it.

In that spirit, I hope that the Opposition will agree not to press this amendment.

Mr. Skinner

This is the second bite of the cherry that the Tories have had. Before the Conservative Government came to power and started to wreck the sick pay schemes, the industrial injuries benefit schemes and the other schemes that help men and women—largely blue collar workers—who rely on them, they chopped the linkage from 13 weeks to eight weeks. It has been in operation for less than two years and now they are trying to reduce it to two weeks.

Mr. Newton

May I make it absolutely clear to the hon. Gentleman—it is clear to his hon. Friends—that there is no question of reducing the linking period in the State scheme. This is a different linking period for statutory sick pay.

Mr. Skinner

The original scheme had lasted the course of time from its institution after the Second World War. In 1980, under the first Social Security Bill, the Tories reduced the linkage to eight weeks. The fact that that is another way they are pushing their liabilities off on somebody else in a different fashion, is neither here nor there. I acknowledge that it is not exactly the same scheme, but the principles are the same.

Has the Minister ever heard of people going off work with dermatitis? Many forms of dermatitis are prescribed industrial diseases. Many such cases occur in the coal mines but there are various types. Miners suffer what is known as "recrudescence". When we took them to medical appeal tribunals or local appeal tribunals—depending on whether it was disability or the case itself—the recrudescence used to appear on and off and at moments that the person concerned was not ready for. By the time we got a person suffering from this form of dermatitis—outbreaks of the skin, arms, legs and other parts of the body—to the local appeal tribunal, it had gone down and there was hardly any evidence of it. However, there was another recrudescence some time later.

I am trying to describe the thousands of people in the coal mining industry and, for example, the chemical industry who are subjected to these serious forms of dermatitis. They must go to work throughout the year. They are not similar to Members of Parliament; hon. Members could come here with dermatitis and get then-jobs done. Members of Parliament, unlike people referred to in this Bill do not have to fight for £37 a week sick pay or plead with their employers, doctors, medical authorities or whoever. Hon. Members are similar to a good many people in salaried professions; it does not matter when they have a cold or the 'flu.

The Minister talked about hon. Members staying away because they had a bit of a sniffle and might give it to other hon. Members. What a load of nonsense. Count the Members here tonight. It is doubtful whether there are 200 Members of Parliament out of the 635 here tonight. Why is that? It was necessary tonight to demonstrate how many Tories were present to get the Bill through. We now know that the number is about 130 and that about 190 hon. Members on both sides who were paired have left. They are not worried about sick pay because their money is in the tin; their salary cheques are paid every month. They have no headaches about how they will make ends meet because there is a whole gang of them on the Government side and a few on the Opposition side, not content with being so-called "full-time" Members of Parliament and dragging in a salary of £14, 000, have several directorships under their belts as well.

Hon. Members have got the cheek to talk about people in coal mines who are suffering from pneumoconiosis and gasping for breath, not knowing how they will walk to the main gates and having to make several stops to get there. Pneumoconiosis affects 10 to 30 per cent, of them. Has the Minister ever seen a man gasping for breath because he is riddled with pneumoconiosis and emphysema? I do not suppose for a minute that he has. These are the people who will lose. They lost when he shifted the period from 13 to eight weeks.

A whole range of hon. Members do not understand how those people manage to carry on, because they have no problems. When I fractured my skull two years ago, I did not have to worry as I used to do when I worked in the pit. I had to worry about getting better, but I no longer had to worry about getting out of the sick bed to get to work and earn money; I was on industrial or sickness benefit.

We are discussing and attacking the wealth creators. Such people in the Tory Party talk about encouraging those that want to fight to earn a living. They are always talking about those out of work. They seldom talk about getting them back to work; they are more concerned with throwing more out of work. They are saying to the reduced number of people still in work—not those in the professional classes, but those who work in pits, on the shop floor and in industries where they have to rely on sick pay—that they will cut and carve even further. They are saying "We are going to stop you getting sickness benefit during those times for which you could get it before this Bill goes through the House of Commons and the House of Lords". What a scandal.

The Prime Minister had the cheek to stand on the steps of No. 10 in 1979 and talk about St. Francis of Assisi, about hope and compassion and one nation. Yet now the Government are attacking the people who are creating the wealth of the country. What a scandal.

8.45 pm

I tell my hon. Friends now, before they attempt to withdraw the amendment, that I shall go through the Lobby in its favour if I can find someone who is prepared to act as a teller. I am not prepared to crawl on my hands and knees to the House of Lords to put things right. I am in the business of getting rid of the Lords, and I hope that my hon. Friends on the Front Bench understand that.

This is another attack on the people who provide the Minister with his "brass". Without the people who go down the mines and provide the goods and services, and sometimes have to get sick pay, he could not do his job, because there would be no money for the Chancellor to dish out and pay Ministers their fat salaries. He does not need to worry about the dark days. He does not have to get back to work because the money has run out. Nor do his hon. Friends.

The Minister says that he will have another look at the matter. What are the Government doing? They are throwing people out of work, and attacking those who are still in work. They are trying to make them crawl because they know that there are 300 or 400 others after their jobs. The Government are driving them back to work before they are ready to work. All the people who suffer from pneumoconiosis, dermatitis and other industrial diseases are the very people who depend on linkage to save an extra few "bob" in order to exist.

What about the people with slipped discs? Does the Minister realise that that is a major problem in heavy industry? People who suffer from slipped discs go off work for two or three weeks, come back to work, but then have to go off again. The attack comes on all at once. No doubt some Members of Parliament have suffered from it, but they do not have to worry about the sick pay and the linkage.

We should like the Minister to bring back linkage and change the period back to 13 weeks. He should think about the people in work who are providing the wealth of the country. If he is not prepared to do that, which I am sure he is not, we shall force the amendment to a vote.

Mr. Bob Cryer (Keighley)

I want to comment on what the Minister said, because he produced a lot of platitudinous rubbish that I want to challenge.

The hon. Gentleman said that, after the Committee stage, the Government would look at the balance, as though they had been fair. The Minister represents employers, not fairness. I was struck by the fact that, while he was speaking, sitting behind him was the hon. Member for Bridlington (Mr. Townend). In addition to the £14, 000 that he gets as a Member of Parliament, the hon. Member for Bridlington is a director of about 10 companies. He is an employer. How does the Minister's bag-carrier, with his £20, 000, £30, 000 or £40, 000 a year, view workers? He thinks that the wages councils make awards that are far too lavish. The bag-carrier nods his head in agreement. What sort of balance is that from this class-ridden Government who are attacking the workers and lining their pockets, day in, day out, as they work here—

Mr. Deputy Speaker

Order. The hon. Gentleman is going a bit wide of the amendment.

Mr. Cryer

The amendment is designed to give back to the employees what the employer class, represented by the Government, are taking from them.

The Minister said that he had taken a balanced view. In Committee, the Tories promised that they would examine this matter, but they are not in a position to take a balanced view. Their talk of balance is a mockery of words, because they represent employers, not employees. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bolsover (Mr. Skinner) said, the Tories want to cut back the rights of those who create the wealth.

The Minister said that he wanted a simple scheme. He wants it to be simple for employers, not for employees. As a concession to the fact that there has been linking for many years, and to cloak their attempt to wreck a scheme of national insurance that has been built up and is much appreciated by working people, the Government rejected no linking at all. They said that, as a matter of balance, they would introduce two weeks as they had to recognise the view of employees.

The reality is that the Government are recognising the views of employers. As a sop, they say that officials will examine the issue.

Who will suffer the hardship? It will be retrospective examination and working people will suffer hardship. The evidence of suffering will be presented to official working committees. At some stage the information will filter through to the Minister, and he might then introduce amending legislation, presumably by way of statutory instruments. How long will that take? Will it take a year for examination and then another six or 12 months before the reintroduction of the change? The Minister said that he will not be rushing around having changes.

Meanwhile, who will be suffering hardship? Workers in factories, shops and warehouse premises will suffer hardship while the evidence is collected by the officials and filtered through the machine. We say that that is not good enough.

By accepting that officials will examine this matter, the Minister recognises that there is a possibility of hardship. It ill becomes him to advance that view from the Dispatch Box when he knows that hardship will be suffered not by him or hon. Members, but by workers who are already suffering enough hardship. There are 3 million of them on the dole.

The Minister has not given a good medical reason. Broken limb cases have already been mentioned as requiring linking, but there is also back strain. Some years ago there was an Adjournment debate on the subject of back pain. The Back Pain Association suggested that up to 15 million days a year are lost through back strains. Does the Minister realise that agriculture workers, irrespective of age and ability, are allowed to lift weights of up to 180 lb? In the textile industry adult male workers are allowed to lift up to 120 lbs. Other workers, who come under the Factories Act 1961, are allowed to lift "a reasonable amount"—whatever that is—irrespective of age. A youthful and vigorous man of 20 is expected to lift exactly the same load as other persons of any age. A man of 64 is still affected by that legislative limit.

When, in 1976 and again in 1979 I tried to introduce legislation suggesting a maximum permissible limit of 1 cwt., everyone said that it was a good idea because it might reduce injury. It might have reduced the types of injury that have already been referred to because a person goes back to work after a few days off and, because he lifts heavy loads again, his injury is exacerbated and he is off work again. That is the sort of injury that would occur over several weeks and would require four, five, six, seven or more days off.

It is exactly that sort of injury that affects hundreds of thousands of workers. It is not easily quantifiable, but it is a matter of concern. It is a matter of such concern that the Health and Safety Executive formed a working party that was given the task of producing a code of conduct and suggesting legislative improvements. The working party began its work in 1976. It could not reach agreement, so it started again in 1981. it is still deliberating. Clearly the issue presents a problem that is recognised. It is the type of problem that is covered by the amendment. It would benefit many people if the linking covered a longer period.

Surely the Opposition's proposal of eight weeks is extremely reasonable and should be accepted. It has already been argued that 13 weeks has been reduced to eight weeks. We are talking about a further swingeing decrease in the rights of workers. None of us in the House lifts heavy weights or, for that matter, any weights. Who is doing the lifting? It is being done by workers in offices, factories and shops. Nurses are also involved. Back pain is very much a concern of nurses, who have to lift patients. These workers have to balance their wages each week and carefully allocate their expenditure. These are the people who made the nation. The Tory Government are attacking these people in an unjustifiable and discriminatory fashion.

When the Minister says "We have considered the matter and, on balance we have decided that two weeks is appropriate", he is, in effect saying, "I represent the employers. This is an attack on those who create work for the nation." We should defend workers against these attacks. I hope that the Minister will accept that eight weeks is appropriate. If not, we shall do our utmost to ensure that eight weeks is placed on the record as a desirable aim.

Question put, That the amendment be made:—

The House divided: Ayes 9, Noes 128.

Division No. 98]	[8.57 pm
AYES
Bennett, Andrew(St'kp't N)	Newens, Stanley
Dixon, Donald	Parry, Robert
Field, Frank	Powell, Raymond(Ogmore)
Mikardo, Ian	Ross, Ernest (Dundee West)

Welsh, Michael	Mr. Bob Cryer
	Mr. Dennis Skinner.
Tellers for the Ayes:

NOES
Alexander, Richard	Maude, Rt Hon Sir Angus
Alison, Rt Hon Michael	Mawby, Ray
Aspinwall, Jack	Maxwell-Hyslop, Robin
Atkinson, David(B'm'th, E)	Mayhew, Patrick
Bendall, Vivian	Mellor, David
Benyon, Thomas(A'don)	Meyer, Sir Anthony
Berry, Hon Anthony	Miller, Hal(B'grove)
Bevan, David Gilroy	Mills, Iain(Meriden)
Biffen, Rt Hon John	Moate, Roger
Biggs-Davison, Sir John	Montgomery, Fergus
Blaker, Peter	Moore, John
Boscawen, Hon Robert	Morgan, Geraint
Boyson, Dr Rhodes	Murphy, Christopher
Bright, Graham	Myles, David
Brinton, Tim	Needham, Richard
Brooke, Hon Peter	Nelson, Anthony
Browne, John(Winchester)	Neubert, Michael
Bruce-Gardyne, John	Newton, Tony
Buck, Antony	Normanton, Tom
Butcher, John	Onslow, Cranley
Cadbury, Jocelyn	Page, John (Harrow, West)
Carlisle, Kenneth(Lincoln)	Page, Richard (SW Herts)
Clarke, Kenneth(Rushcliffe)	Patten, Christopher(Bath)
Cope, John	Percival, Sir Ian
Dorrell, Stephen	Prentice, Rt Hon Reg
Dover, Denshore	Proctor, K.Harvey
Dunn, Robert(Dartford)	Raison, Rt Hon Timothy
Dykes, Hugh	Rhodes James, Robert
Eggar, Tim	Rossi, Hugh
Elliott, Sir William	Sainsbury, Hon Timothy
Faith, Mrs Sheila	Shaw, Giles (Pudsey)
Fletcher-Cooke, Sir Charles	Shaw, Michael(Scarborough)
Fraser, Peter (South Angus)	Shelton, William(Streatham)
Goodlad, Alastair	Shepherd, Colin(Hereford)
Gow, Ian	Sims, Roger
Grant, Anthony (Harrow C)	Speed, Keith
Gray, Hamish	Speller, Tony
Greenway, Harry	Spicer, Jim (West Dorset)
Griffiths, Peter Portsm'th N)	Spicer, Michael (S Worcs)
Gummer, John Selwyn	Squire, Robin
Haselhurst, Alan	Stainton, Keith
Hawksley, Warren	Stanbrook, Ivor
Heddle, John	Stanley, John
Hogg, Hon Douglas(Gr'th'm)	Stevens, Martin
Hordern, Peter	Taylor, Teddy (S'end E)
Howells, Geraint	Tebbit, Rt Hon Norman
Hunt, David (Wirral)	Thomas, Rt Hon Peter
Hunt, John(Ravensbourne)	Thompson, Donald
Jopling, Rt Hon Michael	Thorne, Neil(Ilford South )
Knight, Mrs Jill	Townend, John(Bridlington)
Knox, David	Townsend, Cyril D, (B'heath)
Lang, Ian	Viggers, Peter
Lawrence, Ivan	Waddington, David
Lawson, Rt Hon Nigel	Walker-Smith, Rt Hon Sir D.
Le Marchant, Spencer	Waller, Gary
Lester, Jim (Beeston)	Ward, John
Lloyd, Ian (Havant & W'loo)	Watson, John
Lloyd, Peter (Fareham)	Wells, Bowen
Loveridge, John	Wheeler, John
Lyell, Nicholas	Wickenden, Keith
Macfarlane, Neil	Williams, D.(Montgomery)
Mac Gregor, John	Wolfson, Mark
Major, John
Marlow, Antony	Tellers for the Noes:
Marshall, Michael(Arundel)	Mr. Tristan Garel-Jones and
Mather, Carol	Mr. John Stradling-Thomas.

Question accordingly negatived.

Mr. Newton

I beg to move amendment No. 4, in page 2, line 29, after 'contract' insert 'or after the contract expires or is brought to an end'.

This is a technical amendment intended to clarify the position. I shall elaborate if the House wishes, but the amendment is intended solely to make the position clearer than it was in the legislation as drafted.

Amendment agreed to.