§ LORD RIBBLESDALEMy Lords, the Motion that I have put upon the Paper [...]ollows on a suggestion which was made to me during the debate on March 6 by my noble friend who leads the House. The suggestion was made in such a very polite way that I find it impossible to resist it. These were the noble Earl's words to me—
If I may venture humbly to advise him, it would be to withdraw his Motion and put some other Question upon the Paper.The noble Earl had already enjoined upon me the necessity of definition, and had animadverted upon the futility of vagueness in any Motion of this kind. The Motion 534 which I have now put down is the result, of my desire to fall in with Lord Curzon's counsels. I beg to move.
§ Moved to resolve, That there be laid before the House a tabulated Return for each of the years 1916, 1917, and 1918, showing new Departments or sub-Departments created, with the name of the Minister in charge of each Department and his salary, if any, and the individual names and salaries of all new appointments exceeding £250 per annum, and the total cost of the remainder of the staff of each such Department or sub-Department; the Return further to indicate shortly whether the powers of the Department are conferred by Statute or by Order in Council, with the necessary references.—(Lord Ribblesdale.)
§ EARL CURZON OF KEDLESTONMy Lords, the noble Lord has correctly described what passed the other afternoon. I will take the terms of his Motion, as it stands upon the Paper. In the third line it asks for a Return for each of three years of new Departments or sub-Departments. The Departments or sub-Departments to which he refers are, I imagine, the Ministries of Labour, Pensions, Munitions, Food, Shipping, National Service, Reconstruction, Blockade, Air Ministry, and such Departments as the War Trade Department, the Central Control Board (Liquor Traffic), the Foreign Trade Department, the Food Production Department, and the Department for Information. The greater part of the information for which the noble Lord asks is already given, and is accessible to any one who knows where to look for it, in certain Parliamentary publications to which I will refer my noble friend. For instance, the Ministry of Labour is given in the ordinary Civil Services Estimates, Class 7, Vote 7. It is given there in full detail, but without the names, which are never given in these statements to Parliament, for reasons which I will explain in a moment. The list of the Ministry of Labour is given in those Estimates; and as regards audited expenditure, in the corresponding Appropriation Accounts presented every year to Parliament. The salaries of the Ministries of Pensions, Food, Shipping, National Service, Reconstruction, Blockade, and Munitions and of their Parliamentary Secretaries are shown in the total Estimates for those Departments. They also are presented to the House of Commons, and are accessible to any one who desires to possess them. Full particulars of the total expenditure of 535 these Departments are published at the end of each year in the Appropriation Account in the Vote of Credit. This contains the salaries and expenses of Departments which do not appear in the ordinary Estimates. That is the information already accessible to the public, and I think it shows that a good deal of what the noble Lord has asked for is already available.
But I may inform the noble Lord—and I think it will give him satisfaction to know—that the Treasury are about, in connection with the Vote of Credit for 1918–19, to publish a White Paper which will give totals of the salaries and cost of the staffs of the various Departments, with particulars of the number of posts carrying salaries in excess of £300 a year in each Department. There are good reasons for making the dividing line £300 instead of £250 which I could explain if necessary, but it is hardly needful to trouble the House with that. I think the noble Lord will see that in this way he either has got, or will presently get, the greater part of what he desires.
I must say a word with regard to names, because one of the notable features of the noble Lord's Motion is that the individual's name should be given. I must ask the noble Lord not to press that, and for these reasons. The names have never yet been given in any Return of this character presented to Parliament relating to the Public Service. But I do not base myself upon precedent only. Let the noble Lord look at the case as it now stands. If we were required to draw up and to lay a list of the names of all the persons employed above a certain salary in these Departments the number would be many thousands. And observe, too, what a waste it would be, because a great many of these persons are constantly changing their posts. The noble Lord asked for a Return for the three years 1916, 1917 and 1918. Many a man who was appointed in 1916 to a post has gone away, has left the Office, has been promoted, or has been shifted somewhere else, and the amount of time that would he taken in identification would be very great. I do not think that the noble Lord in putting down his Motion had probably any idea of the labour that would be involved in compiling a list of names. I do not know whether he has any idea of the number of persons who are employed in these Departments, but I might mention to him that in the Munitions Department alone 17,600 persons are employed. Of 536 course only a small proportion of them is drawing a salary of £300 or over a year. But I expect that you would find that even that number was very considerable, and it would place a great strain upon the time of those who were called upon to identify them.
The return in this form could, of course, be drawn up, but I must tell your Lordships quite plainly that it would take from two to three months of public time. It would take away men from work which they are doing, work vital to the prosecution of the war, to satisfy the perhaps quite legitimate, but, I think, rather exaggerated curiosity of your Lordships' House, and so far from serving any public purpose I think you would be doing an injury if you required so novel a procedure to be adopted. In these circumstances I hope that, while I have given satisfaction to the noble Lord on the question of salaries, he will not press me on that portion of his demand relating to names, which I have shown would not only be contrary to precedent but would in the present case be distinctly detrimental to the public interest.
The last words of the noble Lord's Motion are that the Return for which he asks is to indicate "whether the powers of the Department are conferred by Statute or by Order in Council, with the necessary references." That information also is already available, because of the Departments to which he refers all the more important have been created by Statute—I am speaking of those which have been created since the beginning of the war. For instance, the Ministries of Munitions. Air, Pensions, Food, Shipping, National Service, Reconstruction, Labour, and the Overseas Trade Department, a Bill concerning which is now before Parliament, have all been created by Statute, and in their case a reference to the creating Statute is given in each case in print in the ordinary Civil Service Estimates, to which I have referred. And as to Departments to which the noble Lord refers as having been created by an Order in Council, there is only one Department which has been so created, and that is the Liquor Control Board, which was instituted by Order in Council under the Defence of the Realm Acts. I hope, therefore, that the indications which I have given to the noble Lord and the promise that I have held out to him about the Paper shortly to be pre- 537 sented to Parliament will give him the satisfaction that he desires, and that he will not press me further about the question of names.
§ LORD SOUTHWARKMay I make a suggestion to the noble Earl? He said that the expenditure was already set out, I understood him to say, in the Estimates. Would it be possible to publish a summary of those Estimates, with a reference to the Estimates, in case anybody wanted to look into further details? Because it would he almost impossible for any noble Lord to search through all the Estimates in order to find out a salary. The expenditure set out in the Estimates could be easily compiled under some heads, with a reference to the Estimate to which it refers.
§ EARL CURZON OF KEDLESTONI think, with all respect, that that is quite unnecessary, because the labour which the noble Lord thinks would be considerable it will not take him ten minutes of time. I could give the noble Lord the particular Estimates to which reference is made. Everything is put down there in due order, sad I am reluctant to impose upon printers and consumers of paper a burden at this time unless it is shown to be in the public interest. There is no concealment in this matter. Everything is there, available to those who require it, and if I indicate to noble Lords the places to which they ought to go for information I submit that that is sufficient for the purposes of the case.
§ VISCOUNT HARCOURTI understand from the noble Earl that the Treasury intend to give us a White Paper almost immediately containing a good deal of this information.
§ VISCOUNT HARCOURTThat will be given now, and not at the end of the year, I understand?
§ EARL CURZON OF KEDLESTONIt is already in print.
§ VISCOUNT HARCOURTWell, we shall, of course, study that Paper, and see whether it gives us all the information which we desire. But when the noble Earl says that it has never been the custom to publish the names of the Civil Servants, both high and low, who govern us, I think 538 he has forgotten the official publication yearly—certainly up to the beginning of the war, and, I think, during the early years of the war—of the "Imperial Calendar," as it is now called. It used to be the "Royal Calendar," and it gives the name and the Department of every Civil Servant in the employ of the Crown.
EARL CURZON or KEDLESTONI did not mean to deny that. I meant that they had not been published in any Return of this character relating to the Public Service.
§ VICOUNT HARCOURTThe noble Earl has mentioned a number of Offices the details of which can be obtained from the Estimates. But the noble Earl is, no doubt, well aware that many of these new Departments, and Directorates, and Controls, do not appear on the Estimates at all, but are paid for directly out of the Vote on Account. If that is going to be cleared up by the Treasury Paper, it will be satisfactory. But I was sorry to hear the noble Earl state that the Return which is to be offered to us is only of those who are receiving a salary. It is quite clear that in the Estimates before the House of Commons there only appear those to whom salaries have to be voted, but the noble Earl said the other day, and said with much truth, that an enormous amount of unsalaried valuable work is being done for the country. Many of our Controllers and Directors are receiving no salary, but there is no reason why they should not receive the reward of public recognition, and there is no reason, because they are not paid, why we should not be allowed to know their names.
The Departments mentioned by the noble Earl will not give us all the information which would be desirable. For instance, there is a Controller of Wool, who has not been created by Order in Council or by Statute, but was appointed under the Board of Trade, and he is, I imagine, a sub-official of the Board of Trade. In ordinary times all those particulars would appear in "Whitaker's Almanack," supplied by each Department, and to it we could go when we wanted information. We do not want to ask for anything that will take long to compile, that will be expensive to the public, or that will withdraw a number of people from public service. What we want is a few sheets of simple print, which will tell us the names of our governors and rulers to-day.
§ LORD RIBBLESDALEMy Lords, I do not wish to be unreasonable, particularly after what the noble Earl has said. As the noble Viscount remarked, I think we are entitled to know, after three years of war, a little as to how our affairs are being managed. I believe that a few pages of print would do it, and I think that the noble Earl, Lord Curzon, himself defeats some of his points. For instance, he says there is great difficulty in putting the references, but the references are already there. If they are already there, the making of a summary in a compendious form which everybody could understand without prosecuting all sorts of inquiries into many Returns, does not constitute a difficulty. With regard to the names, I recognise that when you get 17,000 names in one Department this is the sort of thing which is beginning to excite apprehension in the minds of the public. As regards the point of the noble Earl that the names cannot be found because of removals—like removals in the case of votes—I can hardly believe that our affairs are so badly managed that the large number of people we have employed, say, in 1917, but who do not appear in 1918, should have gone away and left no trace behind them, so that nobody can know what they received, what they did, or what their names were. Surely the noble Earl is pressing his point a little far in that connection.
May I speak to the noble Earl in a parable? Let us assume that the noble Earl and I were partners in a large and rapidly-developing property—town property if you like, or anything else; at all events, a property which, owing to circumstances beyond our control, is developing by leaps and bounds. We put that property into the hands of a highly competent and zealous firm of solicitors. We are easy-going gentlemen ourselves and we do not want to be bothered much about these things, so we tell the solicitors that we will give them practically a free hand with regard to finding the proper people to deal with the development of the estate. We tell them that we will allow them to arrange salaries, define the posts of the people employed, and so on. Suddenly the noble Earl and I, after three years of this arrangement, begin to realise that it is costing us a good deal of money, and we do not know exactly for what we are paying that money. Thereupon we ask the solicitors to make us a report on the various classes of posts, and the different 540 kinds of people they have employed during the three years. I do not think that the noble Earl would accept it as a satisfactory answer from these solicitors if they said, "Your estate is so important; it has given us so much anxiety appointing the people required and apportioning their work, and so on, that it is impossible for us to look up our books and to tell you what we have done or what we have not done." But that seems to me to be the position in which the Administration have placed our affairs; and I confess that some of the excuses which the noble Earl has brought forward against the Motion that I have on the Paper to-night do not seem to me any stronger than what I say he would object to very much if, in the hypothetical case I put, his solicitors returned to him such an answer as the one I have indicated.
If this White Paper is to be produced—I think it is in print—and if it deals with the points with which I think it ought to deal, I should be prepared to withdraw my Motion. After what has been said by the noble Earl it would not be good manners, and it would not be good tactics, to divide upon the Motion this evening; but I shall withdraw only upon the clear understanding that, unless this White Paper does give the details which I think requisite and necessary in the present state of our national housekeeping, I shall bring this matter forward again when the White Paper is on the Table of the House. I thank the noble Earl for the very kind way in which he met my Motion, although he did not like the whole of it. It was not likely that he would. But in these circumstances I beg leave to withdraw my Motion, on the distinct understanding that the White Paper gives the information which the public want.
§ Motion, by leave, withdrawn.