Lords Sitting of 17 June 1942

Preamble
The House met, The EARL OF LUCAN on the Woolsack.
MID-WESSEX WATER BILL.
Brought from the Commons; read 1ª, and referred to the Examiners.

THE PUBLIC SERVICES.
LORD REITH LORD REITH rose to ask His Majesty's Government whether with a view to maximum efficiency in the national interest, they are giving immediate attention to the future constitution, control, and management of the essential public services; and to move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords, I submit this Motion with a view to inviting your Lordships' attention to the public corporation form of constitution, control, and management of public services—public services now either under private ownership or conducted directly by government, local or national. I submit the Motion now because of the need for making preparations against the time when problems, in some respects as serious as those of war, will arise, and when there may be little of the patience and submission and unity bred of war.
Efficiency is the inevitable and infallible objective and criterion of public service, provided that term be used comprehensively to include decent working conditions and decent treatment for all grades of staff, including welfare and some measure of security of tenure, but not the absolute security, one would hope, of the Civil Service. Although efficiency should be the objective and criterion—that is, the untrammelled and unburdened ideal of public service—there are distracting and conflicting objectives and criteria: profits and politics; and profits do not necessarily spell efficiency, as is sometimes held, nor do politics. In fact, one finds the three—the ideal of public service, politics and profits—struggling for precedence.
In private ownership—and I should like to make it clear that I belong to no politi-
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cal Party and that I would rather have private ownership than nationalization, if nationalization means the conduct of public services by Government Departments—in private ownership there is often (in the railways, for instance) a high ideal of public service, but their first obligation is to shareholders, and I am going to submit that those two obligations are incompatible. I neither criticize nor underestimate the power of the profit motive, nor do I suggest that the risk of capital should not have at least a chance of reward. What I do suggest is that it is increasingly difficult to serve, so to speak, God and Mammon, and that the position of directors and managers is more and more invidious, with their ideals of public service on the one hand and, on the other, the hungry but quite natural expectation of the shareholders. If it be held that the capitalist system is failing in public service, it is more in sheer economic impossibilities than in lack of enterprise, overweening ambition, or inefficiency of management, though these all arise too.
In services conducted by local and national government the profit motive, as such, does not obtrude. Its presence with varying degrees of urgency is necessary to conduct the service economically. Politics may, and often do, obtrude and issues are determined by them. The criticism of private ownership and even of the public corporation system that one sometimes hears is that they and their methods are undemocratic, meaning, perhaps, little more than that the elected representative cannot control the management.
Might I say a word about democracy—too much the philosopher's word and the politician's? It is necessary that its living, as distinct from its theoretical, content should be linked to real life around us, and the means should not obscure the end. Democratic methods, as sometimes we see them practised, cause one to wonder whether desirable, democratic purposes and principles will, in fact, be established and served by these methods, and whether the ways of politics, national and local, will give the efficiency so desperately and urgently needed in war and post-war.
Anyhow, there is required of the elected representative strong, courageous and definitive action. But can he think only of the issues immediately at stake? And incidentally for how much of our

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present state is fear of the elector to blame, a fear which may well have been unnecessary because his capacity to understand and to respond may be underestimated. But there are elections, especially the next election, and the representative quite naturally desires to safeguard his position. I cast no reflection on him at all. I suggest that he is in a difficult position. If we can relieve him of the management of public services, or refrain from putting the management of public services under him, then we are serving those services and the elector, and acting in the interests of the representative himself. There are immensely important spheres where he must continue to manage our affairs in community and country. Can we not give him more time to do it?
That leads one to comment on the Civil Service and Civil Service methods—and I want to make it clear that I am speaking of the possible passing of public services to Government control, as some would have it. There are civil servants for whose intelligence, capacity, and general conduct of affairs, one has the highest respect, but it is often difficult to distinguish the system from the man and the man from the system, to determine, for instance, whether it was unreasonable of one to expect what one was clearly not going to get, and whether the impatience one felt was chargeable to the man or the system. That system is not wholly of his own devising. Much of it is attributable to the Parliamentary question, in principle salutary and excellent, but too often in practice an imposition taking up a great deal of time to little or no purpose, and inducing such political tear as causes issues to be settled, not on the basis of what should be done, but with the political question in mind. There is a tradition of caution and a love of precedent, and Treasury methods of control, with their emphasis on prior authority rather than on efficiency, do not encourage a proper sense of responsibility in Departments.
The position of a Minister—and may I again make clear that I am talking about the passing of public services to Government control and not about the civil servants and the conduct of their present responsibility—the position of a Minister vis-à-vis his senior civil servants, and in particular the permanent head of his Ministry, cannot entirely be determined by the experience, capacity, and energy
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of the Minister. I cannot myself see how a Minister can refrain from taking at least an interest in the personalities of his assistants, and in the internal order and management of the work for which he is responsible. He is entitled to do what he likes, but he may in practice find that such an interest or concern is unwelcome. He may be inconvenienced by individuals with mandates and procedures of their own, and may not feel happy in the mastership of his own Ministry as he is of his business. I submit, therefore, that civil servants should not be concerned with the management of these essential public services. New requirements, new methods, my Lords. And I go a step further in suggesting this. Postal service, telegraphs, telephones and wireless services now under the Post Office, highly efficient to-day owing to the extreme competence of the civil servant Director-General, would be notably more so if they were not a Government Department subject to Government methods of financial accounting and control. And there are other services such as pensions and insurance to which this might apply.
I will now indicate briefly some of the public services which I have in mind either under private ownership or under direct political, local or national control, notably transportation. I submit that there should be a national transport corporation covering railways, road transport, canals, coast-wise shipping and internal air services; that the railways should be brought under unified management and become part of the corporation. Railways are in a peculiarly difficult position to-day on both sides. On the railway side and the Government side there is power without responsibility and there is responsibility without power. If I were concerned from the railway side I should be giving urgent thought to the matter with a view to devising some system which, on the lowest terms, would be more nearly what I would like as a railwayman than what other people would be likely to devise for me. Equitable treatment for shareholders should be assumed, and that does not mean necessarily taking current Stock Exchange figures as true values.
It is widely held that the railways will not pass out of Government control. Well, if I were a railway director, faced with a real and growing demand for some

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change, and that demand confined by no means to one Party, and whether I thought it reasonable or not; realizing the increasingly difficult position of management with the conflicting obligations to which I referred earlier, and conscious finally of the obvious economies of united operation, I would take the initiative, so that I would be sure that railway affairs were rationalized and ordered by railway men rather than by politicians and civil servants. Obviously it is wrong to do that with the railways, which provide and maintain their own roads, and do nothing about road transport; so I submit that road transport should be part of this corporation and under its direction and control. That does not necessarily mean that the corporation would amalgamate all the road hauliers and all road passenger services into one and make them a department. It would, anyhow, direct and control them and have the right of acquisition. Similarly with canals, coast-wise shipping and internal air services. One result of that would be that a customer with goods to be carried would be given rates according to speed and other considerations, but would not himself determine the system by which his goods were carried.
Then I come to building and civil engineering and the building materials industries. Some measure of central regulation and control is required by some kind of national board whose powers would include price control. It would settle prices and secure economies of materials and machinery. There will be an enormous amount of work to be done by both public and private interests. All work, public and private, over a certain figure should be subject to licence. All public expenditures should be subject to a standard schedule of prices, and work would be done according to standard forms and methods of contract. Work on standard specifications and on standardized codes of practice and research should be pressed on and recommendations if possible adopted.
Next, electricity. I have never been able to see why the Central Board and the Commissioners should not be amalgamated; and I would have them given rights and powers over distribution with this object in view, that over the whole country there should be one uniform price
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for electricity, with consequent benefit to planning, as, for instance, in the location of industry. Gas and water, roads and river management and sewage and subsoil water—there are too many authorities and too many types of authority.
With regard to coal, the new system is a compromise and one wonders whether the mixture of State and private ownership will be found satisfactory. It is fairly widely held that we shall come to State ownership. I pray that we do not come to State management. And quite as difficult and urgent as the getting of coal is the distribution of it.
All this inevitably leads to local authorities, and I would like to say a word about them. Local authorities are as strong a vested interest as any in the country. There are too many of them, and a drastic reduction in the number of authorities or a drastic increase in the area should be made, because the obvious unit for the efficient administration of services is much larger than the existing authority areas. So we must ask, I submit, for combinations of authorities or for corporations established by them or by the State for some of these services.
Now to deal briefly with the main features of the public corporation system owned and established by the State, and the duties and responsibilities defined by the State in Charter or Statute, with Parliament consulted on policy. How I wish I could make this clear. Over the whole range of the execution of those duties and responsibilities in organization, administration and management, there is the same freedom as in commercial undertakings. Parliamentary control should be limited and, as it were, remote. It maybe objected even by those who do realize that the Government, though owning, do not manage, that the absence of the profit motive and the absence of competition will produce the complacency so commonly associated with Government Departments It is not so, and it ought not to be so. Everyone knows that those who make profits do not normally benefit. In the public corporation system you can have a motive if you want it, and there are clear criteria of judgment available in almost any business, such as increased output and decreased cost. And is it suggested that there are no motives so compelling as that of making profits for shareholders or benefits so great as those of competition which we hear so much

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about? I submit that there are at least as many disadvantages in undercutting and overbidding for custom, and often, paradoxically enough, it is the competitive system that has to play for safety. Surely we ought to be able to feel that the motive of giving the best possible service at the lowest possible price is stimulus enough. Public services, if no longer answerable to shareholders at annual meetings, would still come under the continuous and intensive fire of public opinion voiced in Parliament and elsewhere.
I would like to say a word on leadership because some still say that we do not breed for it, which is true; and we often discourage if when it emerges. Where are the men to be found to carry such enormous responsibilities? They can be found, but two things are needed. First, they must be institutionalized, meaning that they must be given the right constitutional setting in which to work. Secondly, they must be trusted. Institutions, you may say, are little apart from the personalities who control and operate them, but I plead that institutions should be regarded, not as protection against individuals, but as protection for the social activities of right-minded men. I suggest that our lack of institutions has prevented our getting full value from key men. Individualism is still needed. It is an immense power and is still necessary for progress and development, but individualism is at its best when attacking its problems and not just when defending itself. Individualism is not the only worthy aim, and even if it were it would not necessarily be the means. The place for an atomizer is at the end of the hose pipe and not in the middle.
It has been asked, where are the safeguards? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Here is the answer, I suggest. If conforming to, and at the same time taking command of, the inevitable tendency of the times Parliament and public impose upon these key men the ideal of conscious social purpose, encouraging it and supporting it where it exists by institutions that fortify as well as control, then the guardians guard themselves. But governors and managers must be permitted to govern and manage. Corporations and key men must be trusted. Taking the long view, it is not necessarily coincident at any given time or in any mood with the short
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or popular view. After all, efficiency is not despotism, and as far as I know there is no peculiar democratic virtue in incompetent administration.
So I urge that we plan ahead for these essential public services now as we plan for war. May I quote from a recent publication by P.E.P.?
"There is a traditional inclination to imagine that an incapacity for foresight leading to failures to be forewarned or forearmed is a positive advantage. The stolidity which can take the consequences of such failures without panic or defeatism is a national virtue of which we have a right to be proud. But there is no merit in muddling through when the muddle is unnecessary and the issue doubtful."
Those are temperate words. I myself feel that our capacity to muddle through, if virtuous, is also disastrous; and that stolidity cannot be assumed when the discipline of war is gone.
Social justice is an agreed aim, but the whole structure of modern society is as haphazard and non-sensible as roads which follow ancient sheep tracks. Laissez-faire Liberalism must be replaced by some form of planning. We only know of two forms so far, and would not be very happy under either. Cannot we create our own, lest something we dislike be imposed on us by the sheer force of circumstance? Individualism and freedom we cherish. Both may be in jeopardy. A planned society may yet be a free society and should be—in fact must be—planned for freedom. However necessary and urgent planning in this or that department may be, it is of little value——it is almost planning in vacuo—unless it be part of an integral whole, an ideal of society based, one would imagine, on the Christian ethic about which we have not heard much so far. Anyhow it should be such an ideal of society as would inspire and command the dedication and service of all the people, as others are inspired by, and dedicate themselves to, other systems. But ours should be home made, British in conception, in formulation and in execution. I beg to move.
LORD STRABOLGI: My Lords, my noble friends have paid me the compliment of asking me to state our point of view about the important Motion moved in such an interesting way by the noble Lord. I am sure I can congratulate him on behalf of all your Lordships on the very adroit way in which he packed a tremendous array of facts into a commendably brief speech. I thought at the

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beginning that I could hail him as a Daniel come to judgment and, still using a Biblical expression, could say to him "Come ye over to Macedonia and help us." But as the noble Lord developed his arguments I found that, speaking for my noble friends and for the Party which we represent, I shall have to traverse some of his conclusions, particularly his objection to what he called political control, which means Parliamentary control, over those great vital services on which so much depends. Indeed the noble Lord suggested, if I understood him aright, that the Post Office should be removed from Parliamentary control. My noble friend the Earl of Selborne was hotly rebuked in another place, I remember, when as Assistant Postmaster-General he made some such suggestion.
LORD JESSEL: He got the sack.
LORD STRABOLGI: I was not quite so blunt as that. I said he was rebuked, but he was none the worse for that, and I hope he will go on committing indiscretions. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Reith, will continue, if I may so put it, making speeches which from our point of view are full of dynamite. We need dynamite at the present time in many directions. In regard to the question of political control over vital public services, Parliamentary control, democratic control has been the fixed policy on which the Labour Party have been working for many years. We have to join issue with the noble Lord on that argument. Take for example the question of the future control of banking and finance. In the last war and in the present war we had immediately to take political control, Parliamentary, democratic, Governmental control of finance, currency and, indeed, banking. We had to do it in order to survive. But in between the two wars these vital services were left untrammelled by any form of Parliamentary control or even Treasury control. If we had had Parliamentary control to a greater extent, is it to be imagined that Parliament would have tolerated the activities of the Shipbuilding Securities Corporation, fathered by the Bank of England, which sterilized, closed down and ruined shipyards all over the country? Parliament puts up with a great deal, but I am certain Parliament would not have tolerated that if it had
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known what was going on. We are paying dearly for that shipyard policy now and we shall pay still more dearly for it in the future.
The sort of organization for controlling our great vital national services which my noble friend Lord Reith suggests is most interesting, and I congratulate him on the way in which he has described it. But it is really a new form of syndicalism. I do not think that the public would tolerate it. May I, however, agree with Lord Reith, if he will allow me, in what he says about the need of new leadership? I believe that we need, at the present time, a new aristocracy, and I believe that it will come out of this war. We will get, as leaders, young men and young women who can be trusted to put the public interest before the profit motive and to manage these great undertakings efficiently. Members of the Party for which I have the honour to speak are most anxious about this whole problem, and I am sure I am speaking for all of us when I say that we support Lord Reith in his contention that plans should be made now. I will, indeed, go further and say that they should be made known now.
The war, as we are told—the Prime Minister himself has suggested it—may end quite suddenly. The last war ended six months before it was expected to do so. There may be a collapse in the camps of our enemies, and if we do not look to it we may be faced with problems of demobilization before we are ready for them. I suggest that it is necessary to proceed now to consider what we are going to do: how we are going to face these important problems after the war. I suggest also that the plans which are made should be known and accepted. More than that, I suggest that it would help the war effort if these plans were known, accepted and approved by the general public. You will, as I say, have this great demobilization and you must know in advance how you are going to deal with it. It will not do to sit down after the war to discuss and settle what you are going to do—what you are going to do to deal with the great questions of transport, the rebuilding of cities, the location of industries, and so on, and how you are going immediately to employ the great masses of munition workers and discharged Service personnel who otherwise

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will be faced with a period of idleness. Lord Reith has rightly said that you must plan for peace as you ought to have planned for war. It will be too late when the war has ended to sit down, discuss and argue, and go through the sieve of Cabinet decisions with two or three million men and women waiting for work immediately and urgent work waiting to be done. These plans, if they were known and approved, would be a reassurance for the great bulk of the people.
All those who are in touch, as many of my noble friends are, with serving soldiers and munition workers, can bear out my own observation and experience that among the ranks of those men and women there is great anxiety as to what is going to happen after the war. This anxiety is especially keen among the younger men. They know what happened to their fathers after the last war; they have heard about the slumps which occurred, about the long periods of unemployment, about the trade cycles and so on, and they are determined not to come back to such conditions. If the Government have not appreciated that, then I suggest that the sooner they do appreciate it the better. Lord Reith mentioned the coal miners. Sir Stafford Cripps has been to South Wales and has sought to reassure the coal miners on the question of their future after the war. But why the coal miners only? Why not other workers in industry—those in the service of the railways and those in the transport and engineering industries? They also have a right to know what is going to happen after the war. Are they going to be left once more at the mercy of the labour market? Will they be thrown on the scrap heap because high financial authorities, such as bankers in London, decide that there are redundant coal mines or shipyards and so on? That is what the people want to know now.
So far as the great Party for which I speak are concerned, we can assure them that our plans are ready and are designed to prevent that very thing. We say that many services now are ripe for communal ownership. It is increasingly recognized that on balance the public interest would benefit by the elimination of the private profit motive. How this is done—and here I apologize to my noble friend Lord Reith for any hard thing I have said
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about him—is not so important as that it should be done. My noble friend Lord Reith's name will always be remembered, and very gratefully remembered by us, particularly for his great services in the B.B.C. We believe that that was a form of public service which was justified by its results. There was not over-much political control, but there was enough Parliamentary control there we think to have helped in bringing about those results.
Our policy for the future is perfectly clear. It was stated and passed without opposition at our National Conference a fortnight ago. It is quite short, but I think it covers the point of view which I am trying to place before your Lordships. We regard
"the socialization of the basic industries and services of the country, and the planning of production for community consumption as the only lasting foundation for a just and prosperous economic order in which political democracy and personal liberty can be combined with a reasonable standard of living for all citizens."
That I understand is what Lord Reith wants, and the only quarrel that I can see that we have with him is on this question of Parliamentary or political control. Your Lordships will note that we speak of "a reasonable standard of living for all citizens." That is the third "freedom" laid down by President Roosevelt. He called it "freedom from want"in his famous message to Congress on January 6, 1941, which has been so frequently quoted since, and which is the basis of the Atlantic Charter. "Freedom from want" is the way he puts it, and we say "a reasonable standard of living for all citizens." The same idea reappears in the fifth paragraph of the Atlantic Charter and in President Roosevelt's speech on United Nations day—June 14.
Now I only wish, if I may, to refer to one particular service, for I do not desire to stand between your Lordships and other noble Lords who I know have valuable contributions to make to this debate. Lord Reith did not mention overseas transport. I do not complain of that; he referred to internal transport and of course he could not deal with everything. But I suggest that in the future we shall encounter great difficulties in regard to overseas transport unless we make up our minds in advance what we are going to do. Overseas passenger transport in the future, I think, is bound to be shared between civil aviation and

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the passenger liners. There will be great competition between the great passenger aeroplanes and the liners not only in the matter of the Atlantic crossing but also in the Pacific.
I suggest to your Lordships that it is very difficult to see how civil aviation after the war—whatever the intentions of certain people may be—can be handed back to unrestricted private enterprise. This was recognized even before the war in the establishment of British Overseas Airways with which my noble friend Lord Reith's name was associated. It is a much greater problem now. Aviation will not only compete with sea-going liners for passengers, but I suggest that in the future aeroplanes will compete with ships for freight as well. I believe that freight-carrying long-distance aeroplanes will be a commercial' possibility before very long, stimulated, of course, by their use in the war in the same way. If you are going to have a Government corporation managing your external civil aviation, how can that be asked to compete with passenger liner companies under private ownership? Or, to put it the other way round, how can you expect private shipowners to compete with publicly-controlled or publicly-owned civil aviation under a public corporation? I do not think that that would be fair; that is a sum that will not add up. I think that you will have to grasp the nettle and put all external transport under some form of Government control.
It also raises another complication. I do not see how you can have sovereign aviation corporations. I think it will have to be recognized in the future that to a very great extent that is not possible. Surely we are not going to allow either the Germans or the Japanese to have their own aviation companies traversing the oceans of the world, at any rate for a great many years to come, until we are quite sure of the complexion of their future Government and the attitude of their people? On the other hand, you cannot deprive great nations of the facilities of external aviation, and therefore those facilities will have to be provided for them. You cannot trust the Germans and the Japanese to have great trans-oceanic aviation companies, but you cannot deprive their peaceable merchants of the facilities of air transport,
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which must therefore be provided by some great international corporation. The complications are obvious, and I suggest that we had better recognize the fact that aviation cannot be handed back to private enterprise, but will have to be international to some extent, and that all overseas transport, including shipping, will have to be brought under some form of Government control and ownership. We must also recognize that to a very large extent there must be international co-ordination. That is the only one of the problems on which I venture to touch, and I suggest to your Lordships that it requires special attention at the present time. I should again like to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Reith, on bringing forward this very important subject, and on the way in which he has presented his case.
LORD BRABAZON OF TARA: My Lords, I also should like to convey to the noble Lord, Lord Reith, our very grateful thanks, and first of all for appearing again on our scene. He is very welcome; he is a great figure in public life, and he must not disappear. He has made a speech which is, if I may say so, so full of meat, so full of the most admirable suggestions, that it needs to be carefully read. I want to deal for a few moments with one side only of the very broad picture which he has given us—namely, with transport.
I listened with interest to the noble Lord, Lord Strabolgi. If there was one extraordinary thing about his speech, it was that the word "nationalization" did not come into it at all. I think it is remarkable that, while some people are drifting towards the "corporation" idea of ownership, if I may so describe it, some extreme Socialists are drifting away from nationalization as a general political idea. I was brought up to think that competition was a healthy thing in industry, and I must confess that there are some companies and organizations with which I am connected in regard to which I still believe that to be true; in fact, in the case of some companies I would almost encourage the invention of a rival, so as to keep them up-to-date and progressive. I very much doubt, however, whether competition in transport is a good thing at all.
I do not know whether your Lordships remember that the great Lord Ashfield,

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who I regret is not here to-day, in the last war obtained control of the 'buses and the Underground, and he came to Parliament and asked for a pool, so that the receipts from both those sources could be distributed between those two organizations. At first the Underground paid towards the upkeep of the 'buses, but, after the war, people insisted on going by 'bus, and the situation arose in which the 'buses paid to keep the Tubes alive. If it had not been for that pooling arrangement, the Tubes of London would have been bankrupt. Can any one think for a moment that it would have been good for the traffic of London that the Tubes should have been bankrupt? That was the first great pooling system. After a time, Mr. Herbert Morrison started the first great Transport Board. Is that looked on to-day as a great nationalization scheme? It is public ownership. Do you think that it is inefficient because it is run in this way? Not at all; I do not believe that the traffic of London and the general co-ordination of all the various methods of dealing with it have ever been better done, or could be better done, than at present.
So far as the general system of transportation which has grown up in this country is concerned, however, we have seen, and are seeing to-day, cut-throat competition between one form of transport and another. There was first built at enormous expense a system of canals up and down the country, and then we had the tremendous drive to build railways, when our top-hatted ancestors, with their side-whiskers, drove railways in every direction all over England, even in places where to-day we have not the moral courage to build a road. That was indeed private enterprise in the railway sphere. I must here tell an anecdote which relates to the grandfather of my noble friend who is going to reply. His grandfather was Chairman of the London and South Western Railway, and in those days it was run as a line on which the Chairman wished to know everyone who worked on it. In order to do that, he always travelled by the slowest trains, so that he could get out at every station and speak to the stationmaster; and, so that people should know who he was, he always wore a red tie; and everybody on the South Western Railway, in deference to him, wore a red tie for very many years. That sort of thing is not possible
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to-day; whatever kind of tie Mr. Holland Martin wore, he could never get to know everybody on the Southern Railway. These organizations have become so big that that sort of thing is not possible.
The railways are now merged into four great groups, but before that they did their best to kill the canals in every way, so that to-day, when the canals would be of vast use, we find that many of them are undredged and unusable. Then along came the motor car and road transport, and these are eating the guts out of the railways in exactly the same way as the railways did with the canals; and soon we shall have civil aviation taking the cream of the traffic away from the roads and trying to kill them. Is that a very good scheme of planning for the general transport of this country? I maintain that it is far from it. Under the stress of war, we have had to run the railways in a combined way. They were a very curious organization, entirely by themselves, and with few cross-junctions; the Great Western Railway stood almost as a barrier between north and south—a most extraordinary condition of affairs. If this arrangement which we have adopted is efficient during the war, are we to go back to the old system after the war? Surely if we have found efficiency by dealing with them as one unit now we are not going back after the war to running them as four. I sincerely hope that the Government will find some way of making the nominal amalgamation of to-day a permanent one, and that, if that is done, the Government will do it along the lines suggested by my noble friend Lord Reith, by a corporation which is neither private ownership nor nationalization.
On this question of post-war transport, whatever we do to the railways we shall not really put them in a secure position if we are going to allow uncontrolled competition by road. It would be only playing with the position to amalgamate the railways and leave them at the mercy of road transport. Are we going, then, to hinder road transport by a series of penalizations, such as have been attempted in the past? I maintain that that will be wholly reactionary. I should like to see the kind of corporation suggested by my noble friend Lord Reith. I should not like to see the railways running road transport, but I should like to see a corporation running the railways

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and corporations running road transport and canals and coastwise shipping, but all joined at the top in a pool, so that they could all run efficiently. They could all do what they can do best by themselves; and although one might be penalized yet they could be helped out from a financial point of view at the top. Sometimes people think that these schemes would mean a very great cost to the Exchequer. I do not think that is true. I think one could very easily get together a scheme of this sort, in which really all that happens is a change in the nominal scrip owner, but it should be done and worked out as much as possible at the present moment. If you do not do that you will get back to that strong individuality which is so very difficult to overcome in peace time.
There is such a lot to do. Even if you allow the roads to compete with the railways as much as they like, what an immense field there is for railway improvement. Look at the Southern Railway. The Southern Railway in its various components was once the standing joke of England. What is it to-day? It is one of the most efficient of our railways, and it has got great dormitory traffic which will never go back to any form of transport but the electric train. It only shows what immense scope there is. If you give security to these great corporations, allowing the receipts to come in, to be joined at the top so as to give long-range planning for these various forms of transport, I believe that along the way indicated by the noble Lord, Lord Reith, we could get a co-ordinated system of transport in this country which should be unrivalled in efficiency, and not cost the taxpayer anything.
House adjourned during pleasure, and resumed by the LORD CHANCELLOR.
LORD BALFOUR OF BURLEIGH: My Lords, I should like to offer my congratulations to the noble Lord who introduced this Motion on his speech. If I may say so, I think he has rendered the public a service, not only in bringing the matter forward to-day, but in the manner of his presentation of it. Nobody is better qualified to speak with authority on the subject of public corporations than the noble Lord. As the noble Lord opposite has already reminded your Lordships, he
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had great experience both of the B.B.C. and in forming and for some some time directing the British Overseas Airways Corporation. Consequently words from him on this subject cannot fail to command the closest attention of your Lordships and of the country. I should like to re-echo what was said by my noble friend Lord Brabazon as to how much we all regret that the noble Lord is no longer in the seats of the mighty. We hope it will not be long before he finds the way back to the position in which the country will have the advantage of his great ability.
The noble Lord's Motion covers very wide ground. I intend to make a few remarks only, more or less from the point of view of the railways. The first point I want to make is to record my satisfaction that it is now admitted on all hands, with our experience of three years of war, that an efficient railway system really is a prime necessity in the transport of this country. It seems almost absurd to make that statement to-day, but if your Lordships cast your minds back to the days not long before the war, when railways were asking for, and not finding it easy to get accorded, a square deal, you may recollect that some of the supporters of road transport undertakings were almost inclined to allege that the whole thing could be done by road transport, and that railways were an anachronism. I need say no more than that the war has proved what so many of us were convinced of before, that if you were planning the transport system of this country all over again the backbone of it would have to be an efficient main line railway system.
In considering the future of railways and other forms of transport, of course it is obvious that the first consideration is the achievement of an efficient system of transport. The interests of the public have to be paramount. No other interest must be allowed to conflict in setting up the most efficient form of transport of goods and passengers at the lowest possible rates. I would like to remind your Lordships that if there was a time when the railways were subject to criticism, it was in the days when they had a monopoly, and I think therefore it follows from that that a simple reversion to State ownership alone, with a monopoly of railway transport, must be obviously a bad thing. The noble Lord opposite, as Lord Brabazon has pointed out, did not

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use the word "nationalization" but he used the word "socialization." I wondered what it meant at the time, but I suppose it means national ownership of some kind or another. The noble Lord quoted a slogan from his Party conference of a fortnight ago. I must admit I thought on hearing it that it was just one of those vague generalizations which may mean everything or nothing, according to the point of view from which you regard it.
There again I thought the noble Lord opposite was finding fault rather unfairly with my noble friend who moved the Motion because, after all, they both want national ownership. It is an essential of this public corporation system that it should be nationally owned. Consequently I do not know why the noble Lord opposite should find so much fault with it. Moreover, the noble Lord opposite said that the noble Lord, Lord Reith, wanted to remove the railways from Parliamentary control. That is quite untrue, because my noble friend made it perfectly clear that Parliamentary control, although of a remote kind, was an essential in his system. The noble Lord opposite said it was syndicalism. I am not quite sure that I know what syndicalism is, but I am perfectly sure it is not the system which my noble friend was advocating. The noble Lord opposite, I understood, was satisfied with the B.B.C. when it was under the noble Lord, Lord Reith; at least I understood him to give praise to that system as it was then worked. That is the very system that the noble Lord is advocating for public services to-day, and therefore again I do not see why he found so much fault with the system which my noble friend was advocating.
I think that the public corporation system has a very great deal to commend it in theory, but I am not prepared to prejudge the issue whether it would work in practice. Take the B.B.C. example again. We are all agreed that for a number of years Lord Reith ran a very efficient British Broadcasting Corporation under the public corporation system. What is the position of the B.B.C. to-day? I think it has come right under direct control of the Government. It is not quite clear, but there is certainly a great deal more Government control of the B.B.C. now than there was in the
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days when the noble Lord, Lord Reith, was managing it. That is a danger in the public corporation system which has got to be borne in mind. Quite clearly the Government could set it up, put a key man in charge, and give the corporation a great deal of responsibility, but sooner or later there must be a danger that what was remote Parliamentary control will tend to become more direct Parliamentary control. I do not see how you are going to guard against the danger that ultimately it will become interference with the management, which is the very thing the noble Lord wishes to avoid.
Much the same thing has happened with the Airways. The British Overseas Airways Corporation is, I understand, now entirely managed by the Air Ministry. I have no doubt it is necessary in time of war that the Airways should be managed by the Air Ministry, as the railways have to come under the general direction of the Ministry of War Transport, but I cannot believe it is right that that should continue indefinitely. I am perfectly certain that the development of civil aviation will be checked unless the British Overseas Airways Corporation is taken out of the Air Ministry after the war. I cannot imagine that the Merchant Navy would have developed in the way it has done if it had always been run inside the Admiralty.
The only thing I want to say in conclusion, from the point of view of the railways, is that the railways are not unmindful of the future. If the railways were asleep when they had a monopoly, they certainly are not asleep now. The railways are, individually and collectively, thinking about the problems of the future, and the plea I want to make to the noble Lord who is going to reply (and perhaps it ought to be addressed also to the noble Lord, Lord Leathers), is that before any decision is come to about the future of the transport systems in this country—particularly of the railways—consultation shall take place with the railways themselves. I hope that such consultation may fake place not only before any scheme is produced to Parliament, but while indeed the Government are considering the details of what such a scheme ought to be. I can say with confidence that the railways will be entirely ready to offer every possible co-operation, but we do feel we should like to be consulted before

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decisions are taken about matters on which our people have intimate technical knowledge.
VISCOUNT BLEDISLOE: My Lords, I hope that your Lordships will forgive me for intervening for two minutes in this debate. Personally I was so immensely impressed by the convincing eloquence of my noble friend Lord Reith, particularly as regards the principles that he enunciated rather than with the particular plan or plans he adumbrated, that I cannot help stating that his physical stature, which is so impressive, is only equalled by the stature of his eloquence and statesmanship. I also share the hope, in the light of his past services to this country, that some responsible position will be found for him during this very critical period through which we are passing. If I understand the contention which he desired to emphasize, it is that individualism, on the one hand, has not secured, in the light of modern progress, what is essential for national requirements, nor, on the other hand, is nationalization or State ownership or even excessive State control likely to prove by itself an effective substitute. Therefore he put before us the suggestion of some intermediate agency of control which he described as a national corporation. In other words, if I understand him aright, he advocates corporation control rather than Government ownership with bureaucratic domination.
Some of us have served in Government Departments, and we have seen, during the last few years, an enormous increase in the number of civil servants, with a reflected increase in the national taxation required for their support, but without any corresponding conviction of efficiency in Government administration or in the rapidity of output of Government business. My noble friend referred to democracy. The longer I live the less I am convinced that pure and true democracy is to be brought about simply by the passage of Acts of Parliament, or by the utterance of principles expressed in eloquent phraseology, such as the noble Lord, Lord Strabolgi, presented to us this afternoon as representing the policy of his Party. I do not believe we are ever going to have a national system that is going to work smoothly and as part of an international system—which, by the way, we have more and more to consider
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in days to come—unless we get away from the Party standpoint and make up our minds that we are prepared to sacrifice something in our political outlook if only we can get something like national unity and national co-operative effort.
The noble Lord, Lord Reith, indicated—I am not quite sure that he put it in exact language—that if you expect the electorate of a democratic country effectively through its representatives to control the public services of this country, it must be better educated and better trained than it is to-day. If that is his view, I entirely reiterate that sentiment. There are only two countries with which I am acquainted—and I know them both well—which are, in my judgment, true democracies in every sense of the world. One of them is Denmark and the other is New Zealand, and in each of them, I venture to think, the average standard of education is higher than it is in any other country in the world. I am very glad to read what was said in the House of Commons yesterday on the subject of education, but I am bound to say that I remember similar forecasts being made by my late much-respected friend, Dr. Fisher, during the last war. I can only hope that Mr. Butler's policy and anticipations will be crystallized into something more effective than took place in the case of the excellent programme of education that the late Dr. Fisher adumbrated during the last war.
It is only a fortnight ago in this House that we were discussing the subject of middle-men in the matter of the distribution of agricultural produce. I cannot myself be convinced that a multiplication of middle-men, whether in the field of Government administration or in the matter of commodity distribution, is in the national interest. More than one noble Lord to-day has referred to the necessity of planning. I may be absolutely wrong, but it seems to me that in so many directions the Government lack any very definite plan. Surely it is up to the Government, not necessarily to own public services or to own industries, but to tell the nation perfectly plainly, and those who at present on individualistic lines direct industries or services, exactly what in the interests of the public is wanted. Let the Government plan, and to a certain extent control if it is necessary, and let the most highly trained and efficient individuals carry out those plans. If

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they fail to carry out plans in the public interest then only let the heavy hand of Government interference and Government control be introduced to ensure efficiency and progress.
What really further induced me to intervene is the contemplation, which by the way has been adumbrated by my noble friend Lord Addison, that sooner or later food production should become a national service, and I believe he is one who would like to see in that connexion the nationalization or Government ownership of agricultural land. All I can say in that connexion is this. If there is one industry more than another which depends upon individual enterprise it is agriculture, and its operation by the bureaucracy under any scheme of State ownership would, in my judgment, be fatal to its efficient conduct. What furthermore seems to me to be absolutely essential—and I speak with some little knowledge in regard to the industry I have just mentioned—is this, that if you are going to nationalize your industries, if you are even going to nationalize the public services to which reference is made, you must have highly-trained officials amongst your civil servants with some vocational knowledge of what they are actually directing or controlling. The noble Lord, Lord Strabolgi, gave, as I thought, a very convincing illustration of the defects of the policy which he advocated. He said, quite truly in my judgment, that if you are going to have an external transport service carried on by liners in competition with a State-financed and taxation-supported air service, sooner or later the liner service would go to the wall. Is not that the very strongest argument in favour of the continuation of private enterprise against public direction and control? Do we not find already in many directions today that where the Government step in and take the control of any industrial or national enterprise, the cost of management, the cost of conducting it, increases very materially, and any private undertaking of a similar kind attempting to compete with it has its existence seriously threatened?
What I do not quite understand is this—and my noble friend Lord Balfour of Burleigh seems to reflect the idea—that where you have national control by some public corporation there must necessarily be national ownership, I do not know if I
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repeat his view correctly, but personally I see no necessity for that. It may be that even in regard to the agricultural industry and food production a national corporation will have to be established after this war, but I see no necessity whatever for State ownership of the land as a necessary consequence. Surely the corporation can represent the Government view, and undertake the execution of the Government plan and a certain amount of Government control without the painful development, as I think it, of Government ownership and what is generally called nationalization. I, for my part, believe that whether we like it or not, for many years after the war there will have to be very considerable Government control—control of transport, control even of agricultural production—but I do not consider that that necessarily justifies State ownership. I firmly hold, in the light of past history, to the recognition of the fact that it is the enterprise and industry of the Britisher that have made the British Empire and British industry what they are, and I venture to hope that direction and control will not necessarily imply State ownership.
VISCOUNT SAMUEL: My Lords, I had not intended to take part in this debate, but its scope has become widened, and no one has spoken from these Benches. I therefore would desire in two or three sentences to draw attention to one historical fact. In 1928 the Liberal Party, of which Mr. Lloyd George was then the Leader, appointed a committee to go into all these matters, in which some of us who had been members of previous Liberal Ministries, including the noble and learned Viscount who is now on the Woolsack, and I myself, took part. There were also as members of it men who are now regarded as the principal economists in this country—all of them members of the Liberal Party—namely, Mr. Keynes, who will shortly be welcomed in this House, Sir William Beveridge, Sir Walter Layton, Mr. Seebohm Rowntree and Mr., now Sir Hubert, Henderson. After a long inquiry a book under the title of Britain's Industrial Future, which dealt with these matters among many others, was published.
While not endorsing the suggestion that the General Post Office should be taken away from the direct control of the Government, and while insisting upon the

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necessity in all cases of full Parliamentary control, I have no hesitation, in view of the results of that inquiry, in cordially welcoming the views expressed to-day by the noble Lord, Lord Reith, in his admirable speech, and by other speakers. In that book we urged that many of the national services should neither be acquired and managed by the State, nor left to chaotic private enterprise, but should be entrusted to the ownership and management of public corporations; and we did indeed devise that name "public corporation" for that purpose. I need not say with how much pleasure I listened to the adhesion to the Liberal programme of members from the Labour Benches, from the Conservative Benches, and from the Cross Benches in the person of Lord Reith, a location where we hope he will not find it necessary to reside for long.
LORD MONKSWELL: My Lords, last October I ventured to bring before your Lordships a Motion on the subject of planning the railways for the post-war period. I received a sympathetic reply from the noble Lord, the Minister of War Transport, and some weeks later the railway companies issued a communication to the Press announcing that they were setting up a committee on their own account with the same object in view. In that announcement nothing was said about the debate here, but I understand the Railway Companies Committee is in touch with the War Transport Department. I hope the Government may be able to give us some account of the lines on which the Department and the Committee are working. My own Motion was confined to suggestions for the consideration of certain technical and administrative matters, but, as my noble friend Lord Balfour of Burleigh pointed out in that debate, the inquiry could quite logically be extended to include the planning of all transport by land, water and air in and around these islands.
THE MINISTER OF WORKS AND BUILDINGS (LORD PORTAL): My Lords, I would like at the outset to add my congratulations to those already tendered to my noble friend Lord Reith on the fluent and eloquent speech in which he expressed himself on this Motion. My noble friend covered a wide
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range of subjects and so have other noble Lords in their speeches. The ground which the Motion itself covers comes under the duties assigned to my right honourable friend the Paymaster-General. The main argument of the noble Lord was that corporations or public utility companies are the best means for dealing with the public services and other large organizations, rather than public companies or State ownership. To put these methods in his order of merit: 1, corporations; 2, public companies; 3, State ownership. That is the order which he considers to be the right one.
I am not here to-day to discuss that question as it would be far too controversial. With his remarks about efficiency, I feel sure there will be complete agreement. I remember that even twenty years ago I stated that 80 per cent. of the efficiency of any undertaking rested with the management, and I would say the same to-day, whether it was run by a Government Department, public utility company, or a public company. I must also myself admit that during my business life before the war I hankered after the idea of being chairman or managing director of a corporation so that I should not have to face angry shareholders, but I was never considered worthy of such a position. I agree with the noble Lord that one of the advantages of corporations or public utility companies is that you can have a continuity of policy, which is all-important. My noble friend Lord Reith also mentioned in his speech the Civil Service. With that part of his speech I cannot deal to-day, because your Lordships will realize that in all Government Departments the Minister himself is answerable to Parliament for his own Department.
Before I deal with the questions of transportation, building and civil engineering, electricity, etc., I think your Lordships should first be told the procedure that is being adopted by the various Ministries concerned for post-war reconstruction. The Ministry of War Transport are preparing their own scheme; the Ministry of Works and Buildings are doing likewise; the Paymaster-General is dealing in the first instance with electricity, until the Ministry of Fuel and Power gets into its stride, while water comes under the Ministry of Health. Gas will come under the new Ministry of Fuel,

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Light and Power. The location of industry will come under the Board of Trade. Reports in regard to all these are being collated at the present time and presented to a Ministerial Committee presided over by the Paymaster-General.
I agree with the noble Lord that these questions are urgent, but the right timing of them is also essential. We are still in the middle of a war, but we must have the machinery being prepared, so that at the right time we may have the necessary schemes for public services ready. As the noble Lord has already stated in reference to transportation, the future of this enormous system, which embraces railways, roads, canals, and coastwise shipping, is in the hands of my noble friend Lord Leathers, Minister of War Transport. There are no interests either in the industrial or social life in this country which are not vitally concerned with the operation of transport. It follows that a transport system cannot be planned otherwise than in the light of a general policy which embraces these wider objectives. One must bear in mind that at this stage it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the war will be won by that side which can ultimately bring to bear the greatest transport resources and use them most efficiently. Nothing must be allowed to interfere with this, and it would be a grave mistake to introduce at this time controversial issues which would have the effect of diverting our energies from the war effort. Let there be no mistake—any effective solution to the transport problems will be controversial.
While, therefore, the Government are bound to devote their energies first to the war effort, yet I may state that in the Ministry of War Transport and in the various organizations of transport itself, the necessary information is being collected. The various proposals and recommendations which are already in existence are being re-examined and from these a transport policy for the future will be formulated. If such a policy is to be realistic it will not only have to take into account the national, but the world situation at the termination of hostilities. Noble Lords must realize that it was provided deliberately in the agreement for the control of the railways that this control will be continued for at least one year after the end of the war, which will give the necessary time for the Government
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to bring forward their proposals. I may add that other bodies are examining these problems as they affect the interests for which they are responsible. The Chamber of Shipping, the railways, British Road Federation and others are all formulating their proposals. I can assure my noble friend Lord Balfour of Burleigh that the Minister of War Transport will see that all matters affecting railways are fully considered. It is desirable that they should do so and in good time these proposals should be laid before the Government so that they may be taken into account.
The Paymaster-General is looking into the matter of electricity and will report in due course to the Ministry of Fuel and Power. He is examining the reorganization question of electricity from these main points of view: (1) to secure a better diversity of load; (2) to secure a greater standardization of voltage; (3) to work towards a uniformity of charge throughout the country; (4) to adopt a common policy with regard to development; (5) to put the best engineering advice at the disposal of all distributors. I am sure that your Lordships will have been among the first to realize that the question of a more equitable rate for electricity is one of the many factors that will have to come into consideration in conjunction with the question of the location of industry in the future. Even before the war this question of the electricity rate and also the question of voltage were taken into account when plans for locating an industry were being considered. Gas in relation to the post-war policy will now be in the hands of the Ministry of Fuel and Power, while water and drainage are in the hands of the Ministry of Health. The new Minister of Fuel and Power has told me that the gas industry has already been invited to consider its own reconstruction problems, and the necessity for proceeding without delay is being kept prominently before representative bodies.
My noble friend Lord Reith spoke about building and building materials. The building industry of course does not really come under public services, but it is an industry in which both the noble Lord and I take a great interest, so perhaps I may be allowed the privilege of referring to some of the building problems. I dealt with some of the points he raised in my speech in your Lordships'

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House on April 21. Lord Reith mentioned, and in my view quite rightly, that there must be some form of control of the building industry after the war. I feel certain that in the building industry there will have to be control continued for some time after the war. I am convinced, too, that when you have a big building programme—shall I say an arranged programme, a balanced programme?—if you have control of the materials required for the completion of that programme you will have to have priorities. There will be so much to do that it will be essential to have priorities to carry out your building programme. That is why on this matter I concur with Lord Reith. I think that his ideas and my own on this question run very much together. The questions which have been raised in this debate have shown that your Lordships are greatly interested in seeing that these matters are being proceeded with and I would now, if I may, say a word on the question of the timing of these programmes.
LORD STRABOLGI: If my noble friend will permit me, may I ask him if by timing he means timing in the sense of the time at which the schemes will be known to the public?
LORD PORTAL: No. I meant timing in the matter of the getting of these programmes ready by His Majesty's Government. I think the Government are very much alive to the necessity for proper timing, and that every Department which should do so is getting on with its plans. I can speak for my own Ministry, which of course has a part to play. One is anxious that all the different plans should be co-ordinated so as to be ready at the proper time and not left to be hastily planned after the war. I would like to thank the noble Lord, Lord Reith, for bringing forward this Motion which has given rise to what I think I may say, from the point of view of the Government, has been a very useful discussion.
LORD REITH: My Lords, I am glad the noble Lord felt that we have had an interesting discussion. I thought so too, and it has been a matter of pleasure to me to have been the instrument of bringing it about. May I also be permitted to thank noble Lords who have taken part in the debate for the kindly personal comments
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which they have made? Particularly am I grateful to Lord Portal for the trouble which he has taken in replying on behalf of the Government. It is good to know that before long we shall be hearing further. I beg to withdraw my Motion.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

MINISTER OF WORKS AND PLANNING BILL.
Order of the Day for the Second Reading read.
LORD PORTAL: My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time. The Bill deals with the setting up of a Ministry of Works and Planning. I want noble Lords to know this is a first step, and a first step only, in carrying out the policy of the Government which was announced in this House by my predecessor on February 11 last. His Majesty does not need statutory authority to appoint a new Minister, but, when a new Minister is appointed, legislation is generally required for the transfer to the new Minister of functions previously exercised by some other Minister and for other purposes. The present Bill provides for the transfer of certain properties and functions to the Minister of Works and Planning, when he is appointed, and makes other provisions which are customary when a new Ministry is set up. I shall deal shortly with the various clauses.
I take first Clause 1. Subsection (1) provides that if His Majesty appoints a Minister of Works and Planning certain things shall be transferred to that Minister. The method of transfer is dealt with later in Clause 6. These things are set out in subsection (1). Those named in paragraphs (a) and (b) are the functions and properties of the Commissioners of Works and the Commissioners of Public Works in Ireland. The Commissioners of Works have the general function of acquiring, constructing, owning, maintaining and furnishing all properties required for civil government purposes in Great Britain (except that Post Office properties are owned by the Postmaster-General and in part maintained by the Post Office itself). The Commissioners also have miscellaneous functions under various Acts of Parliament. A good example is the Ancient Monuments Acts,

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under which they exercise a general supervision over ancient monuments in Great Britain. The Commissioners of Public Works in Ireland own and maintain certain properties in Northern Ireland used for Imperial Government purposes (for example, the Belfast Custom House). Since the establishment of the two Irish Governments, three officials of this department have held office as Commissioners of Public Works in Ireland.
Then, under paragraph (c), come the functions of the Minister of Health under the Town and Country Planning Act, 1932, except those under Section 32 of that Act. The 1932 Act covers all the main functions of the Minister of Health in connexion with planning. Section 32 is excluded from the transfer because this section concerns the responsibility of the Minister of Health for the supervision of local government finance and not his planning functions.
With regard to subsection (3) I would point out that my predecessor and I were also appointed First Commissioner of Works, so that the functions of the Commissioners of Works would continue to be performed. It will probably take a long time to transfer all those functions to the new Minister, because the Orders in Council effecting the transfer, which I shall mention later in dealing with Clause 6, will have to specify all the different Acts of Parliament containing them. To collect this information will be a long business, and not urgent once the main functions and properties have been transferred. Further, in addition to the functions already described, the Commissioners own properties used for British Embassies and Consulates in foreign countries and the houses and offices of United Kingdom High Commissioners in the Dominions. These cannot be transferred by an Act of the British Parliament (except, in the case of certain Dominions, at the request and with the consent of the Dominion Government concerned, which we cannot well seek in war-time). The Commissioners of Works must, therefore, remain in being until each of these properties has been separately conveyed to the new Minister according to the law of the country concerned.
This cannot be done quickly, particularly as many of the countries are in enemy hands. For these reasons, the Commissioners cannot be abolished for some time, and this subsection therefore
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provides that, until they are abolished, the Minister of Works and Planning shall also be First Commissioner of Works. This means that it will not be necessary in future to appoint the Minister twice over, once as Minister and once as First Commissioner.
Clause 2 is in the customary form. Ministers on appointment take the oath of allegiance and the official oath. In Clause 3, subsection (1) empowers the Minister to appoint secretaries and other staff with the consent of the Treasury. This is the usual form. The expression "secretaries" includes Parliamentary Secretaries. Although in practice these are members of the Government appointed by the King on the recommendation of the Prime Minister, in theory they are appointed by the Minister. The subsection also provides for the payment of the Minister and staff.
Section 6 of the Ministers of the Crown Act, 1937, provides that if a Minister holds two offices he shall be paid only one salary—that belonging to the more highly-paid office. As I have already explained, the Minister of Works and Planning will also for some time be First Commissioner of Works, and subsection (2) of Clause 3 of this Bill therefore brings him within the operation of Section 6 of the 1937 Act. It does the same thing, by way of precaution, for the Parliamentary Secretaries of the new Ministry. Subsection (3) provides for the payment of the Minister's expenses.
The Succession to the Crown Act, 1707, makes it illegal for anyone appointed to any office of profit under the Crown created since October 25, 1705, to sit or vote in the House of Commons. Clause 4 of this Bill removes this disqualification so far as the Minister of Works and Planning and his Parliamentary Secretaries are concerned. The proviso ensures that not more than two of the Ministers (Minister and Parliamentary Secretaries) shall be able to sit in the House of Commons at one time.
Coming now to Clause 5, by subsection (1) the Minister is made a corporation sole, with a seal. This is a legal provision which enables the Department to own and deal in property, and ensures that the Minister of the day shall always be the owner of that property, without having to take conveyances of it from his predecessor. Subsections (2), (3) and (4) deal with purely legal points. They make

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it easy for documents, regulations and orders for which the Ministry is responsible to be received in evidence by the Courts. Subsection (5) provides that no stamp duty is payable on deeds to which the Commissioners of Works are a party. In cases of sales of property by the Commissioners where duty would be payable by the purchaser and this exemption might lead to a loss to the Exchequer, care is taken, under Treasury instructions, to see that the price paid reflects the exemption.
In Clause 6, subsection (1) provides that the transfers of functions and property shall be made by Orders-in-Council. In this way it will be possible quickly to make the more important transfers, while the transfer of all the functions of the Commissioners of Works will, as already explained, involve a good deal of research and the amendment of a good many Acts of Parliament. In the same way, the Minister of Health has planning powers under various other Acts besides the Town and Country Planning Act, 1932; for example, the London Squares Preservation Act, 1931; the Green Belt (London and Home Counties) Act, 1938; the Allotments Act, 1925, and various County Council Acts. These powers will be transferred in due course by Orders in Council. The subsection provides that powers under the Defence Regulations (which are held both by the Minister of Works and Buildings and by the Commissioners of Works) shall be transferred, not by Order in Council under this Bill, but by Defence Regulation. This has the advantage that it still leaves it possible further to amend those Defence Regulations, if it is desired to do so. The powers in question include licensing of building, registration of building and civil engineering contractors, requisitioning of property and other less important matters.
Subsection (3) of Clause 6 provides that subsidiary matters in connexion with the transfers of powers shall be dealt with by Order in Council. These comprise: (a) such repeal or amendment as may be necessary of Acts of Parliament, regulations and other instruments; (b) the transfer of the Minister of Health's planning functions under other Acts than the 1932 Act (for example, the London Squares Preservation Act, 1931, and the other Acts which I have mentioned); (c) the transfer
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of functions of one of the Commissioners of Works, as distinct from the Commissioners as a body. This is necessary because, under various Acts, the First Commissioner alone has certain functions (for example, the Chequers Estate Act, 1917, under which he is one of the administrative trustees of the Chequers Estate). In addition, there are also the matters referred to in paragraphs (d) and (e)—the carrying on of such matters as appeals already made to the Minister of Health under the Town and Country Planning Act, or of litigation to which the Commissioners of Works are a party, and the continuing in force of orders or directions already given by the Minister of Health or the Commissioners of Works.
Subsections (4) and (5) of Clause 6 provide for the abolition by Order in Council of the offices of the Commissioner of Works and the Commissioners of Public Works in Ireland respectively, as soon as the transfers of their functions and properties are complete. Subsections (6) and (7) are in common form. Subsection (8) provides that any Order in Council repealing, modifying or adapting any enactment shall be laid before Parliament.
The last clause, Clause 7, provides that the Bill shall extend to Northern Ireland and the Isle of Man, to cover the Commissioners of Public Works in Ireland, and because the Commissioners of Works own certain properties in the Isle of Man used for coastguard purposes. The planning functions to be transferred do not extend either to Northern Ireland or the Isle of Man.
This Bill, my Lords, constitutes the first step only in carrying out the Government's policy. The objective of that policy is to secure the right use of the land of the country for all purposes. For this, existing planning powers are known to be inadequate, and it will be necessary to introduce legislation substantially amending, strengthening and extending the present law. Before this is done, I consider it essential to have the final Report of Mr. Justice Uthwatt's Committee, and the Report of Lord Justice Scott's Committee, which I am pleased to tell your Lordships' House are now near completion. In my speech in this House on April 21, I outlined my policy, and I do not propose to deal with this at length to-day. I will refer once again to the speech made by my noble friend

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Lord Latham, with reference to delays in procedure. It is quite apparent to me that there will have to be a speeding up of procedure under the Town and Country Planning Act. I made it clear that in planning the use of land it will be the duty of my Ministry to see that the national policy laid down for agriculture, location of industry, and for transport and communications shall be observed.
In trying to overcome the difficulties caused by the existence of numerous planning authorities in the various areas, I think your Lordships will be interested to hear what is being done in Greater London. Lord Reith took the view that in planning the reconstruction of the London region a beginning should be made with the central areas, particularly in view of the fact that enemy bombing had been largely concentrated at the centre. Accordingly the Corporation of the City of London and the London County Council were invited by him to prepare provisional plans of redevelopment for the City and County respectively. Those provisional plans are now in an advanced stage of preparation, and I took the view, therefore, that the time had arrived when consideration should be given to the question of planning the area surrounding the County of London, which, in many ways, forms a composite whole with the City and County. I referred the matter to the Standing Conference on London Regional Planning, with the suggestion that a comprehensive plan for the whole of the region should be prepared by an eminent planner to be appointed by me; making clear that it would be for the planner to advise me on the precise area or region which it would be best to include in the plan, and that he would need the assistance of the local authorities, both county and district, in the region in regard to the supply of facts, figures and other information. I pointed out that the plan must be based on present facts, but must be sufficiently flexible to enable any necessary adjustments to be made as the war proceeds and post-war prospects emerge with greater clarity.
I am glad to say that at their meeting held on the 27th of last month the Standing Conference welcomed my proposal and suggested that the eminent planner might well be Professor Abercrombie, who was already preparing the re-development plan for the County of London as consultant to the London County Council. I intend
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to adopt this suggestion, and to appoint Professor Abercrombie accordingly. He will enjoy the help of the Technical Committee of the Standing Conference and will work in consultation with the transport and other public utility services. I am convinced that these steps will have the approval of your Lordships' House, and will prove a valuable contribution to more efficient planning, which I know the House desires. This Bill starts us on our way. I beg to move.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 2ª—(Lord Portal.)
VISCOUNT SAMUEL: My Lords, the House will be grateful to the noble Lord the Minister of Works and Buildings for his workmanlike explanation of the clauses of this Bill. I have no observations myself to make upon the clauses, which, as we will have gathered, are of a somewhat technical character. He has also made it fully clear that this Bill does not embody the proposals of the Government with regard to planning. It is merely a Bill of a preliminary character necessary before the actual work of planning can be undertaken by the Government. As he has rightly said, it is impossible to introduce the main Bill until Reports have been received of the Committees presided over by Mr. Justice Uthwatt and Lord Justice Scott. I could for my own part have wished that we could have had the main Bill long before this. We have had many debates in this House on this subject, and from many quarters of the House complaints have been made at the very prolonged delay in introducing these proposals. But I recognize that it is far better to have the present Bill before us now than to wait for these provisions, as well as for the larger provisions, until after the Reports of those two Committees have been received, and there has been time to reflect upon them, and for the Government to draft the necessary legislation.
When the nation undertook its great movement for rearmament we recognized that we had first to obtain the machine tools for making the machines that would make the planes and the tanks, and in this matter of planning we are still in the phase of getting the machine tools to make the machines. This Bill proposes to establish the Ministry which will undertake the initiative in the whole movement, and which will frame and

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introduce and carry through Parliament the legislation which will be necessary. Also it will help to organize the local authorities into the groupings which will be essential if the work is to be efficiently undertaken. I trust that when the legislation is introduced it will deal in a bold and thorough fashion with the whole of the problem of the land—how to secure that the land should be effectively put to the best use. The whole work of planning has been greatly trammelled by the complexities of our ancient system of land ownership. I trust that the Government will be courageous enough to frame their substantial legislation on very broad and comprehensive lines. The landed interests concerned may have a right to claim that these proposals should not be of a confiscatory character, but at the same time the nation has a right to claim that those interests shall not show any spirit of obstruction. I feel sure that the country is not in a mood to see its hopes for the future thwarted or blocked by financial interests.
The main work of preparing the actual plans will in fact be done by local authorities. There is some fear abroad in the country that some kind of national map will be made in London by Government officials, who are imagined to live in the quiet and seclusion of Whitehall, irrespective of the wishes and the legitimate interests and the local knowledge of our local governing bodies. I feel sure that that is not for a moment intended. The function of the Government will be merely to lay down the lines of general policy, and that will have to be done in large measure not by any one Minister but by a Committee of Ministers. For Agriculture, Health, Transport, the Board of Trade are all concerned. The Minister of Planning will be only one among several members of the Government, and he would not wish to claim, and could not be granted, any right of control or veto over the rest. Any other arrangement than this could only lead in my judgment to confusion and to friction.
At the same time it will be to the Minister of Planning that we shall have to look for initiative and for steps to secure that local action will be in conformity with the general scheme of national organization. It will be necessary also for him, as I have said, to
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organize the local authorities into suitable groups. It is well known, and it was said in earlier debates, that our local areas do not conform to the requirements of modern conditions. They are mostly too small, and particularly for carrying out effectively the work of planning. But it is impossible to wait for a readjustment of boundaries before this work can be undertaken. A general readjustment of the local government areas of the country must give rise to a great deal of controversy and must involve much delay, and meanwhile we have to make the best we can of the organization that we have.
And here I find myself at variance with my noble friend Lord Latham in some observations that he made in his maiden speech in the debate on February 11. He said on that occasion:
"The noble Lord, the Minister of Works and Buildings, proposes to get over the difficulty of the numerous small town-planning units now in existence by the appointment of Committees.…"
Then he said:
"With all respect, I do not believe that town planning can be done by Joint Committees. I believe that town planning must be done by popular, democratically-elected local authorities, and if their boundaries are inappropriate, as they clearly are for existing conditions in this country—and will be even more inappropriate for the conditions which we hope may be brought into being—then the Government should have the courage to tackle the problem (complex, I agree) of the reorganization of local government units in this country."
That seems to me to be wholly impracticable in present circumstances, and indeed the noble Lord at the end of his speech pointed out, as many others of us have pointed out here, the grave harm that would be done if at the end of the war the country was caught unprepared and without the necessary legislation on the Statute Book, the necessary schemes framed by the local authorities, and in general the work of reconstruction well organized in advance. He urged the Minister to do what he can to expedite the final Report or the next Report of the Uthwatt Committee, and not to delay for a moment in getting new and comprehensive legislation on the Statute Book. I submit to my noble friend that those two expressions of opinion directly contradict one another. It is quite impossible for the Government to take their courage in both hands and to reorganize the whole of the local government areas of the

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country, and at the same time to expedite the conclusion of this matter and to see that plans are made well in advance of the end of the war.
The fact is that we cannot do for planning purposes with the areas we have; at the same time we cannot wait to remodel our local government areas in general; therefore we must make shift with the system of Joint Committees. Such a system does already exist to a very large extent over a great part of the country, and it is well understood by the local authorities. One of the first tasks of the new Ministry will no doubt be to arrange that they should, wherever necessary, be grouped into suitable planning areas. They will need technical advice for the proper completion of the work which they will be called upon to do. Town planning is a science. It is a highly technical business, as technical as the work of a borough engineer or a lighting engineer or anyone else concerned with public services, and I would urge the noble Lord to take steps to influence his colleagues to secure that the necessary qualified planning officers should be available for the local planning authorities. They cannot do without them. It is only, I believe, a question of about 500 men, some of whom are engaged in the military Forces, but not in combatant duties, and I would suggest to the noble Lord that he should take such measures as are necessary for securing that adequate technical advice should be available, otherwise the whole of the work will be in many districts postponed, or else, if it is done, may be badly done.
He has mentioned the plan that has been prepared by Sir Patrick Abercrombie and representatives of the London County Council for the larger London area where there are, I believe, over a hundred separate authorities with powers under the present Planning Act. Obviously they have to be brought into one coordinated body for the work to be well done. The matter has also been examined by a committee of architects of the Royal Academy under the chairmanship of Sir Edwin Lutyens, and I had the privilege a few days ago of seeing the very remarkable plans which, after two years' work, they have produced. I believe they will be exhibited to the public at the Royal Academy later in the year. They are most striking and will, I think, arouse public enthusiasm when they are seen.
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These two plans, no doubt, so far as they are found to be acceptable, may be brought together, and I have no doubt that the Ministry of Planning, the London County Council, the City Corporation, and the other authorities will take steps to see that they are carried into effect so as to make London what it ought to be—a city really worthy of this nation, of the Commonwealth as a whole, and of the position of moral leadership which the country is now taking in the world.
This Bill constitutes the Minister at one and the same time Minister of Planning and Minister of Works. Some difficulties may arise from the duality. The Minister of Works has exceedingly important functions on a very large scale during the war. He is constructing buildings—temporary buildings—and I hope when the war is over he will also have the function of demolishing a very large number of them where they have been erected in unsuitable places. But here there may be a conflict of views between the noble Lord as Minister of Planning and the noble Lord as Minister of Works. I can imagine him, like Pooh-bah in The Mikado, saying in a particular case, "As Minister of Planning I know it is essential that this piece of land should be maintained as a public space, as part of the Green Belt around this town, but I regret to say that as Minister of Works I find it indispensable that it should be used for the purposes of Government buildings." No one will know which way the decisions will be given. Possibly the decisions will come, like the dreams in William Watson's poem, "through the horn or the ivory portal—he wist not which of the two." The House, I am sure, will give to this Bill, if not a cordial, at least an acquiescent welcome.
LORD LATHAM: My Lords, as I understand the Bill submitted by my noble friend Lord Portal, it is procedural. It gives effect to a decision of the Government to make the present Minister of Works and Buildings also Minister of Planning, and to that extent discharges the claim which has been made by those interested in planning that there should be a central planning authority. On the passage of this Bill to the Statute Book, I take it, the Minister of Works and Planning will be the central planning authority. There are some of us who take the view—and have expressed it—that the

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proper Ministry to discharge the functions of central control and co-ordination of planning is the Ministry of Health, but the Government have decided that this should not be the case, and accordingly this Bill is before your Lordships' House to give effect to a decision, inter alia to transfer the powers in the existing Town and Country Planning Act to the Ministry of Works and Buildings, other than Section 32. Your Lordships need not trouble very much about Section 32. That Section deals with the division between the local authority and the Government of any moneys that may be received from betterment. The history of betterment and the recovery of moneys from it is such that no one need be unduly anxious that any large sum of money will ever, under present legislation at all events, come in issue.
The noble Viscount, Lord Samuel, indicated, as is the case, that it is a wrong conception to assume that in London or elsewhere there will be prepared a detailed national plan. The function of the Ministry now in course of being set up will be, I take it, in consultation with other Government Departments concerned, such as the Ministry of Health, the Board of Trade, the Ministry of Agriculture, and in particular and especially the Ministry of Transport, to determine the main lines of policy upon which the land of this country will be best used and its beauty best preserved. It will then be the duty of the Ministry of Works and Planning, as the central planning authority, to see to it that the plans prepared by local government authorities conform to the policy thus laid down. I should have thought that one of the principal functions of the Ministry of Works and Planning would be not only to co-ordinate the plans of local authorities, but to co-ordinate the policies of the various Government Departments concerned in formulating these national policies. While none of us would wish to involve the noble Lord in any conflict of status with his eminent colleagues in the other Government Departments concerned, it seems to me it is the function of his Ministry, which is the Planning Ministry, to co-ordinate the policies which will ultimately determine the national plan. I hope that view may prevail, and that we may thus get a homogeneous plan accepted by all the Ministries concerned, and one which local
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authorities can regard as being the national policy.
Everyone will welcome with satisfaction that the noble Lord has been able—and I congratulate him upon it—to secure that the outer London authorities will cooperate with him in the preparation of a plan for their areas and that the same consultant as has offered his services to the London County Council will be the person entrusted with this task by the Ministry. That is a first-class piece of coordination. But it would be unfortunate, if I may say so, for the Minister and for the good relationships between the London County Council and the out-county authorities if it should be thought that any influence at all has been used by the London County Council in this matter, or that the Minister has not acted quite freely without any suggestion from the London County Council. I make those observations because nothing could be more unfortunate than that the out-county authorities should think the London County Council were seeking, or were attempting, to plan their areas. The fact that there will be one man dealing with both the inner ring and the outer ring of London cannot but conduce to a proper solution of the problem of a plan for London.
The noble Viscount, Lord Samuel, sought to convict me of a contradiction. I respectfully submit that he did not make out his case. It is correct that I stated in the debate on this matter on the nth February that from my experience planning could not be done by Joint Committees. I think that is the case. These Joint Committees are entirely voluntary. There are already 139 Joint Planning Committees in this country, and these Committees have no power at all to decide upon a town plan. Any one of the constituents of a Committee can make the plan inoperative by refusing to implement it. These voluntary Committees, in addition to having no statutory powers, have no power to levy a rate or otherwise to finance the schemes which they may collectively decide upon, and if there is to be co-ordinated and rapid planning of this country I can conceive of no kind of organization less capable of carrying it out. Joint Committees are more joint than otherwise, and I have served on many both in connexion with planning and other local government functions.

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It is a fact that county councils themselves, apart from the London County Council, are not town-planning authorities; they are only town-planning authorities if a county district is willing to surrender to the county council its town planning powers. That is an anomalous position which can be remedied without a fundamental reconstruction of local government, although—and let us be quite candid about it—planning is not some-thing which is finished when the plan is decided upon. Planning is not something finished within a few years after it is decided upon. Planning, in fact, is a continuous process of local government, it is the keystone of local government, for you cannot plan a single acre without bringing into operation one local government service after another. If you put down a factory you must put down houses; when you put down houses you must build a school; you may have to build a hospital; you ought to provide an open space; you certainly must provide streets, and maybe a main road; you have to provide sewers; you have to see to the lighting of the streets and of the roads. You cannot move a yard in planning without bringing into operation all the local government services that exist and all that will exist. Accordingly, planning is a continuous process, and we all hope it will be so.
After all, nothing can survive if it is static, and in my submission, while it would perhaps be unwise to delay provision for the formulation of plans until there has been a thorough reorganization of local government units, there will never be an effective execution of planning until the whole structure of local government has been reorganized in this country. That structure is one which was laid down, if I may use the term, in the horse age; it is now inappropriate to a motor age; it is inappropriate to services which cannot be provided effectively for small units, and can only be effectually and efficiently and economically provided if they are services covering wide areas. When I invited the then Minister to urge his Government to have the courage to tackle the reorganization of local government I apprehend I was doing something which, sooner or later, some Government must tackle if local government in its fulness and its amplitude is to survive efficiently and effectively in this country.
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I was gratified to hear, as no doubt your Lordships were, that we may soon expect the publication of the Reports of Mr. Justice Uthwatt and of Lord Justice Scott, and we may reiterate the hope (and may I say the expectation?) that within a reasonably short time of the publication of those Reports the Minister will introduce legislation to give effect to them and to arm his Ministry and the local authorities with the necessary weapons with which to carry on planning.
I would like the Minister to give some attention to another element of planning which, all other difficulties having been overcome, may nevertheless arrest it. It is the provision of building materials and of building labour. There is perhaps no field in which a stronger case can be made for the maintenance of control after the war than that in respect of building materials. We all know, and especially my noble friend Lord Addison, how many of the hopeful projects following the last war were defeated because of the absence of control. It is a matter of history, that Lord Addison, who was then a Minister, asked for powers to control building materials, both their user and their price. Those powers were never vouchsafed to him. The result was that in 1921 the cost of building reached indefensible heights, and shortly after that we had an economy campaign which delayed, interrupted and threw out of balance the whole of the projects for clearing the slums. I hope, therefore, that the noble Lord will, in his legislation, seek power not only to control the price of building materials but also the priority of user, and, further, will concern himself with the organization and the supply of those materials, the examination of substitutes and of new methods of building, the revision of specifications; in short, do everything necessary to ensure that the tools are there when local authorities and the Government wish to go on executively with planning.
That brings me to another aspect of this problem, and it is an important aspect, that of building labour. The history of the building industry from the point of view of those employed in it is not a happy one. It is in fact a very unhappy one. The workers will be an essential factor in any comprehensive planning of this country. I hope the noble Lord and his Department will push forward with the organizing of an adequate

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labour force. That will include training men to become efficient operatives. It will also, I think, require that some reasonable assurance shall be given to those employed in the building trade that if substantial dilution takes place they will not be, as was the case after the last war, faced with unemployment within a comparatively short time. In short, it will be the function, and the duty in my submission, of the Minister to organize the building trade on a long-term basis in co-operation with the local authorities and other organizations.
There is yet another important aspect of this planning. It will be idle for local authorities to be so constituted that they can do the job, for them to be given the powers to enable them to do the job, for the Ministry to have power to supervise and co-ordinate, unless two things are settled in advance. To one I have already alluded, the organization of the building industry. The other is finance. It will profit little if London within the county, London outside the county, Hull, Coventry, Plymouth and other cities prepare plans, unless they know in advance how they will stand with regard to the finance of carrying out those plans. I am one of those who take the view that the cost of the planning cannot be left to the local authorities themselves. It is a charge which ought to be spread over the whole of the country. It will include replacement, restoration, reconstruction and re-planning.
It is true that under the war damage provisions local authorities, like other property owners, have been required to insure in respect of property which may be destroyed or damaged, but the recovery of the cost of any particular building which may be destroyed or damaged does not, and cannot, recoup the local authority for the loss that has flowed from that. There is first the loss of rateable value, and there are other consequential losses which cannot be dealt with and are not adequately met by any recovery under the war damage insurance scheme. Moreover, I think it would be unfair if a city which had been a target should find its burdens higher because of that than the city, or urban district, or rural district which had happily escaped attack. I submit therefore that the cost of reconstruction ought substantially to be borne by the State, and it may well be that the
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best way of achieving that would be for the State to undertake to raise loans for local authorities for the purpose of enabling them to finance their reconstruction schemes. A good case can be made, I submit, for these loans being issued interest free and repayment free, but I would not exclude on grounds of financial responsibility local authorities being asked to make some small contribution. If financing were done centrally it would have two satisfactory results. It would prevent a scramble in the capital market between competing local authorities which, apart from being untidy, could not fail to have the result of pushing up the rate of interest to the detriment and damage of all.
LORD STRABOLGI: Except the financiers.
LORD LATHAM: I accept my noble friend's correction. The second advantage would be that there would be a more central control of the implementation of schemes of planning, and it would give the nation power to regulate by reference to priority of need as between certain projects and certain other projects, and, it might well be, as between certain cities and certain other cities. I do not mean by that that I would welcome any proposal to give the Government substantial powers to impair the autonomy of local authorities. I am an unrepentant believer in the autonomy of local authorities and I shall contest any effort to impair it. On the other hand, we are bound to admit that we cannot have planning unless there be control. Planning means control. The finance of planning must be controlled. I ask the noble Lord, the Minister of Works and Planning, to pluck up his courage, to take such physical or other support as he can with him, and go to the Treasury and get a satisfactory, honest deal for those who will be engaged as local authorities in replanning after the war. It is important that that problem should be settled before peace comes to us, otherwise all the preparatory steps will be nugatory. Local authorities will be unable to take any actual steps until they are satisfied where the money is coming from.
There is one other point I would make about finance. It is the practice, as your Lordships know, that, save for road projects, grants made by the Central Government are not capital grants. They are

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revenue grants calculated on a certain proportion of the interest charges and of the annual repayment of the loan. For some continuing services that form of grant may be the most proper form, but for replanning it is not. Most of the expenditure will be capital expenditure in the same way as is expenditure on substantial road improvements. In the case of the latter the Ministry of Transport make a capital grant, say, of 60 or 65 per cent., or, if it is a trunk road project, of 100 per cent. I would ask the noble Lord, the Minister, to request Treasury consideration whether grants for replanning, which must be substantial, should not in this case also take the form of capital grants. In conclusion, may I say that we have all been inspired by the Atlantic Charter and the recently concluded Russian Treaty? If we are to have effective planning of this country we want a charter and a treaty for ourselves between ourselves. We must work that out in comprehensive detail. We must secure all the necessary powers so that we can implement the principles of that charter for ourselves so soon as the "Cease fire" shall have sounded.
VISCOUNT GAGE: My Lords, as has been stated, this is a machinery Bill which has been, in principle, largely approved already, and the chief interest in it lies in what may follow from it. It is obviously impossible to ask the Minister what his intentions are in regard to any detail. But I am wondering if he can say anything at all, either to-day or at some other time, about his future relationships with the present planning authorities. Up to the present, the Minister of Health, more or less in a judicial capacity, has considered local objections to schemes. He has never considered any scheme with regard to the question of how it will fit in with national interests because there has never been a national plan for him to compare it with. Now, I understand, there is going to be a National Planning Board, and, presumably, their recommendations will be put into effect either through the present planning authorities or through some other method whereby Government schemes will be superimposed, as it were, on the present planning schemes. It seems to me that it is rather unsettling for the present planning authorities to have had this possibility hanging over their heads for
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so long as has been the case, and that they may be failing to do their duty from sheer lack of understanding of how responsibilities are going to be divided in the future. I feel that this request for information is a reasonable request to make, and if we could have some elucidation on this point I am sure it would be most useful.
I would like to take this opportunity of saying how much I hope that, whatever form this new central body may take, it will produce some positive ideas of its own, and will not merely become yet another instrument for telling private enterprise what it cannot do. Frequently, in spite of so much rather grandiose talk, there have been cases where the consent of one, if not of two Ministers has had to be secured before some old lady living in the country could even put up a hen house. I have known other cases where houses have been kept half constructed while some authority has been making up its mind whether the owners should be allowed to complete the building. I know that these things should not happen, but they do happen, and I believe that the explanation of why these things happen is also the explanation of why a good deal else has gone wrong with planning up to the present. There have been too many authorities; too many powers and too little purpose behind these powers.
We have heard, and we still hear, a great deal about obstacles to planning. We have been told that it is impossible to plan when land is divided between so many owners. The noble Viscount, Lord Samuel, said so, and I have no doubt that, as he says so, it must be true. Nevertheless, I cannot call to mind any particular plan—at least in a rural area—with any degree of public support behind it which has really been held up because of the private ownership of land. Of course, there are, we all agree, a number of obstacles that have to be got over before you can put through a planning scheme, and it is perfectly true that the number of private owners which have to be dealt with is one of them. Another great obstacle lies in the complication of legislation with which we have had hitherto to deal. Yet another, and I think the most formidable obstacle of the lot, is that it has been practically impossible to discover from Government Departments what their intentions are. That applies particularly to the Ministry of

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Transport. Indeed, it has often been found that, after persuading owners to agree to a certain project, a Ministry may completely defeat the object of the plan by some subsequent action.
I think it is true that many authorities would have done more than they have done if they had had more money at their disposal. Even so, very considerable schemes have been carried out—for example, the Green Belt Scheme and our Downlands Preservation Scheme in Sussex. Experience has shown in planning matters that where there is a will there has usually been a way found to put the will into effect. I understand that the Minister himself is going to suggest either to the local authorities or to Parliament certain aims and objects for which they should be working. I think that that is an admirable innovation, and one which has been badly needed in the past. I would like, with respect, to express the hope that he will be able to put forward these suggestions in a plain and intelligible manner. I know that there are very often a number of objections to being clear and intelligible, but I do feel that in a country like this you cannot be too authoritarian. You have got to have a degree of popular support for whatever project you want to carry through, and I do not see how people can support, or feel any great enthusiasm for, a scheme or project which they cannot understand.
If I may, I will give an example. I understand that one proposal the Minister may have to consider is a proposal to reserve certain areas of land for agriculture. I think that is an excellent idea, but I hope that he will be able to say what areas he suggests should be reserved, and state the kind of restrictions that should be placed on those areas, rather than that he will approach the problem by producing some highly complicated formula by which it is hoped that these results may be indirectly secured. I am quite sure that the first method would raise a great deal of controversy, though I do not think that that, in itself, is entirely a bad thing. While the other method Would probably avoid the controversy, nobody would really have the least idea where they stood, and I think it is quite likely that the result aimed at would not be achieved.
Similarly with regard to the "location of industry." That is a matter on which
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one hears a great deal of enthusiasm expressed, though, by itself, the phrase does not mean very much. What we want to know in rural areas is whether the Government think that there are national reasons for the inclusion or exclusion of industries from any particular part that has hitherto not been industrialized. Then we do want to know what are the plans of the Ministry of Transport for the construction of new roads. I believe that, provided the local authorities and the local populations know these things, the existing planning authorities can and will do a good deal to put them into effect. They should be given a great deal of latitude as to how they are put into effect. It seems to me that flexibility is required, not so much in the plans themselves as in the machinery for giving effect to the plans.
I know that requests of this kind may sound simple, and yet there may be many difficulties attached to them. There is always the question of compensation. Moreover, if you reserve an area for a particular purpose you incur a certain responsibility for making the area a financial success. I also know that when, in the past, Ministers have made definite statements about their intentions, speculators have frequently taken advantage of that information. It is to be hoped that, with the new procedure resulting from the first Uthwatt Report, that will be impossible in future. I believe that all these difficulties can be overcome, however, if the people at large are really behind the scheme. If, on the other hand, we rely on bureaucratic methods and place the different authorities and the people in general under "high power" experts giving orders through elaborate machinery, I do not think that this new movement will come to much. My plea is that in the orgy of discussion on planning machinery which we are now likely to have we shall not forget the necessity for making clear the objectives that we are trying to reach.
LORD ADDISON: My Lords, before the noble Lord replies I should like to make one observation on behalf of my friends. We were thoroughly alarmed—at least I was—by what we were told by the noble Lord as to the number of Departments, if I understood him aright, which were considering this, that or the other branch of planning. I understood that a report was coming from somebody

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on electricity, that somebody else was considering roads, that somebody else was considering railways, and so on—quite a catalogue. I shall, of course, read the noble Lord's speech carefully in the Official Report. I also gathered that the different Departments were going to send the results of their meditations to the Paymaster-General. What is to happen then? I confess that it gave me a vista of delay and indecision which was perfectly appalling. I thought that you were going to establish with complete unanimity a Ministry of Planning. If it is going to be planning by compartments, big or little, and left to the energy or lack of energy of somebody else, the scheme does not inspire us with much hope. I hope that the noble Lord's statement will read better than it sounded, because frankly I was very alarmed by the vision which the noble Lord conjured up. If further consideration of the subject confirms our uneasiness, we shall wish to raise the matter later in this House.
LORD PORTAL: My Lords, I should like first of all to answer the question put by my noble friend Lord Addison. I think that he has gone back to the first debate; we have had two to-day, in both of which I have spoken. Perhaps I may be allowed to explain the position. If you are to have a post-war plan for railways and transport, it must come from the Department of which my noble friend Lord Leathers is the head. If you are to have a plan for electricity, it must come from the Department concerned, and so on. The noble Lord is quite right up to a point. Those plans are being formulated, and are being sent to a Ministerial Committee over which the Paymaster-General presides; and that is necessary in order to co-ordinate those plans and to see that their timing is correct. Somebody must co-ordinate those plans, and that is what the Government are trying to do now. The plans are well advanced, and they must be considered together, when they are ready; because plans for transport, plans for electricity and so on must all be linked up into one plan, and, unless there is someone to co-ordinate them, I do not see how that could be done.
The question of how they are getting on is one which we have already debated in
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this House to-day. There is no need to be alarmed lest these things are not going on as they should; they are making good progress. I think that each Department is alive to the situation, but the work must be done by the Departments concerned, because they contain the technical people who can deal with the matter. I should hate to have amateurs coming into a Department which I represented and trying to deal, say, with the future of transport or of electricity. If the noble Lord thinks that the work is not going forward rapidly enough I am sure that he will not hesitate to bring the matter before this House. It will probably be realized that the debate to-day ranged widely from its starting point; it was very interesting, but it covered ground which was not in the Motion at all. That is something which is to be expected by anyone who has the privilege of replying to a debate in your Lordships' House, and it is something which I am trying to learn.
Coming to the debate on my second speech, I should like to thank the noble Viscount opposite for his remarks, of which I have duly taken note, and also to thank my noble friend Lord Latham for what he said. There were a few points which he made which are very important. One was the question of control after the war, to which I did allude in my first speech, and which I think is all-important. He referred to the control of materials, and to the question of labour. I said in this House some time ago that if you want a big building industry, with a balanced programme and priorities, you must do away with the system of casual labour which has existed in the building trade. That, I think, was the point which the noble Lord wished to make, and I entirely agree with him. It is being done in the mining industry, and it will have to be done in the building industry. The questions asked by the noble Viscount, Lord Gage, will all receive attention, but time will not allow me to deal with them now. A note has been taken of all of them, and we shall see that they are looked after.
On Question, Bill read 2ª, and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.
House adjourned.