PLANNING AND RECONSTRUCTION

HL Deb 19 November 1942 vol 125 cc143-94

Debate resumed (according to Order) on the Motion moved yesterday by Lord Latham—namely, That there be laid before the House Papers relating to the preparatory steps to be taken now in order that actual planning and reconstruction may be commenced immediately after the cessation of hostilities.

EARL DE LA WARR

My Lords, we do not very often blow our own trumpet in this country and certainly not in your Lordships' House, but a remark was made to me last night by a very prominent member of one of our Allied Governments and I feel it not inappropriate to repeat it to your Lordships. He said that he and some of his colleagues had been discussing this matter and they could not understand how it was that in your Lordships' House, which most people would consider the very centre of the landed interests of the country, we should be most forward in pressing His Majesty's Government to get on with legislation for greater planning and control of undeveloped land. They said they could only explain it to themselves by the fact that in this country those who own land are more devoted to the land itself than to any private or individual rights they may have in the land. That, coming from a member of one of our Allied Governments, I think is a very great tribute to your Lordships' House.

When we read these Reports of the Uthwatt and Scott Committees and when we go through again the report of the debate we had the other day and the beginning of this debate yesterday, what must impress us most is the intense complication of the subject. That is bound to be true the moment we begin to try and deal with the land system of this country. We are faced from the beginning with the knowledge that there is not going to be any solution that will be easy or simple or satisfactory to everyone. The only point, so far as I can see, on which we really are agreed, is that things cannot be allowed to drift on as they were and that we cannot possibly face the conclusion of hostilities without plans prepared and foundations well and truly laid. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Wedgwood, will say "There is the old gospel that something must be done, and when a sufficient number of people go about saying that something must be done you may be pretty sure that something silly is going to be done." For all that, there is general agreement in your Lordships' House on that point, and no one put the matter more clearly than my noble friend Lord Portal yesterday. We must all feel that the noble Lord should be congratulated on the speech that he made to us. To say the least, he made a very good show of a not very strong case, but he did convince us (and that is why we were pleased with his speech), that even though his brief may not be up to much his heart is in the right place and he himself genuinely wants to get on with the job.

The position, indeed, is obvious to us all, whether we think ahead in terms of the necessity for the rebuilding and reconstruction of bombed areas or the much wider question of rehousing the whole population. We know perfectly well that we were something like 2,000,000 houses short before the war; we know that on the average we lose 1,00,000 a year through sheer deterioration, and that no building has gone on for the last three years. We know, too, that we have to face the colossal problem of demobilization of the Services and the equally large problem of the demobolization of our war industrial workers, dispersed as they are in factories located, many of them, quite unsuitably for peace-time activities. Behind that is the question of the location of our industry and the location of our population. The fundamental question we have to tackle is whether we intend in future to coop up millions of our people in the restricted areas of the towns or whether we intend to help them to spread out over the great unpopulated areas of the country. Behind that again stands the great question of what we are going to do with our countryside, what is going to be our agricultural policy, and what are going to be the conditions for the use of our sadly limited and frequently decreasing stores of agricultural land. Those are the questions we have to face and those are the reasons why some action has to be taken by the Government here and now to deal with the problem, if not before the conclusion of hostilities, at any rate at the end.

Very strong opinions have been expressed in your Lordships' House about delays. I myself expressed them during the last debate. I am not sure, thinking it over and having heard what my noble friend Lord Portal said yesterday, that it was entirely fair to the Government to complain that they had not put a considered policy before us. It is true that these Reports have not been out very long. But I do not want to be understood for that reason as saying that the time has not come now for the Government to lay before us their considered proposals. Let us look for a moment at the Uthwatt Report. The main point in that Report is the question of development rights. The reason why that has to be stressed is perfectly obvious. We know that in the past the main hindrance to tackling the planning of land and land usage has been the prohibitive cost likely to face all planning authorities. What are our alternatives? They seem to me to be three. One is to do nothing, and I think there is pretty general agreement that that is an impossible conclusion to any discussion on this subject secondly, we have Uthwatt recommendations; and thirdly, there is complete nationalization of the land. There seems on the whole to be fairly considerable agreement that we do not want to tackle the matter in that drastic manner, at any rate for the moment. We are therefore taken back to the Uthwatt Report, to which hitherto no one has put any alternative.

It is true that Lord Latham—who I am sorry is not in his place at the moment and so cannot hear my reference to him—put forward yesterday an alternative proposal, but I think a moment's examination will show that it does not begin to meet the real problem, the problem of floating value attached to development rights. His proposals amount to very little more than the strengthening and extension of existing powers of control, and because it is obvious that with each area that you bring under control and prohibition to that extent you increase the value of land that is not controlled, you are therefore further intensifying your problem by piecemeal treatment. That leaves us with the Uthwatt recommendations. Lord Latham, the Earl of Radnor, Viscount Bledisloe and Lord Brocket all put a number of extremely strong arguments relating to difficulties connected with the implementation of the Uthwatt, recommendations. Many of those points, it seems to me, would belong rather to the Committee stage of a Bill than to a debate like this, at a moment before we have even got on to the Second Reading of a Bill. I am sure a great many of those points could in fact be dealt with at that stage; but nevertheless there remains a strong hard core of points against the recommendations.

I do not want to go into details of the case either for or against, because the matter has been argued so fully in the Report and so fully in your Lordships' House yesterday. One could only argue it out by repetition. And so we come back to these two points: Is there an alternative giving us a simple, easy remedy of this immensely complicated problem, or indeed any alternative at all? In both cases the answer must be in the negative. Therefore I should say strongly that in default of any recornmendation—and such a recommendation is not being put forward yet—the Government would be wise to adopt the Report of the Uthwatt Committee and prepare to implement their recommendations. There is one other difficulty that has been introduced in these debates and that is the difficulty connected with the proper machinery of administration. On that it is clear that there is very considerable disagreement between different members of your Lordships' House. I took part in the discussion a fortnight ago and then adopted the view of the noble Lord; Lord Balfour of Burleigh. I still adhere to that view; and I feel with the growing powers and the placing of completely new functions upon the Government, we have got to be prepared to have flexible minds and to develop new technique. This point of view has frequently been put forward strongly by the Labour Party. For all that, I cannot feel that this is a fundamental problem that ought to hold up consideration of this question or the taking of decisions.

When all is said and done, if you state the case for either extreme apparently there is very considerable disagreement on principle. Lord Latham and Viscount Samuel both said yesterday that they thought there was room for a Commission carrying out certain limited functions connected with planning. Lord Balfour of Burleigh has admitted from the beginning the need for ultimate Ministerial control. I cannot believe that it is not perfectly simple and possible to arrive at a compromise on that point. I feel that so important is it that we should make progress with the implementation of policy on this matter that if a decision were taken by the Government and direction given on the lines suggested from the opposite Bench, I would be perfectly prepared to accept that decision. It is a very important point for Committee, but nevertheless it has come down very much to the scale of a Committee point.

On other matters with which the Report deals, I do not think, really, that at this stage it would be right to bother your Lordships. Lord Portal spoke yesterday about various measures for the easing up of procedure for the public purchase of land and other matters of a like nature. There seemed to be general agreement on these points and I do not think it is necessary to say anything about them now. That leaves the subjects of the difficulties connected with development rights and the setting up of machinery. Though it is clear, from consideration which I have given to them, that these topics raise considerable difficulties, none of them, I believe, are insuperable. I think, therefore, that it is now up to His Majesty's Government to submit proposals to Parliament in order that Parliament may get down to the detailed working of the scheme and to giving such assistance as it can to His Majesty's Government to make that scheme a workable proposition.

We come now to the Scott Report which, put very shortly, sets out to deal with the question of how to make use of our agricultural land. The more I have read that Report the more I have felt—possibly because of the terms of reference—that important as it is, valuable as it is, nevertheless in some ways perhaps the Committee have not appreciated the true magnitude and scope of this problem with which we are faced. I find myself in strong and fundamental disagreement with Professor Dennison and his Minority Report, but I think that the detailed reasons for that disagreement would belong rather to a debate on agricultural policy than to anything which can be said to-day. His point is, of course, that there is room in this country only for a very small agriculture, an agriculture consistent with the strictest application of what are, we hope, the long-forgotten principles of Manchester Liberalism. His stand would be perfectly logical if in fact there were to be no planned international trade in the future, and if in fact no industry in the country were to receive any assistance at all. Some of these people talk as though agriculture was the only industry which during the last ten years had received any assistance at all, whereas up to 1932, although agriculture remained our largest industry, it had received almost no assistance at all, while many other industries, such as the motor car industry, had been receiving the help of a very high tariff. Such an argument shows a complete lack of contact with reality—I will not say with truth.

I do find myself in agreement with Professor Dennison, however, on one or two small, but, I think, important points. I feel that there is an atmosphere about the Scott Report which is a little too preservative. There is a little too much talk in the Report of traditional farming. I do not know what the Scott Committee mean by "traditional farming." The traditions of our farming are that it is intensely adjustable and flexible, as has been shown in the last few years. I disagree also with the Committee's suggestion that industry should be kept away from the countryside. I do not like this idea of our countryside as a museum piece which has to be preserved. The fact is that neither Professor Dennison nor, I think, the authors of the Scott Report entirely realize the change, and in fact the revolution, which has taken place in the last few years in our agricultural industry. The noble Viscount, Lord Bledisloe, put the facts before us yesterday, and I shall not repeat them; but it should be borne in mind that during the last two or three years the farmers of this country, with virtually the same amount of skilled labour as before, have increased production by between 30 and 40 per cent. We must also remember that this country has the most highly mechanized agriculture in the world. Moreover, no other industry has carried out for itself such a satisfactory scheme of self-planning for increased production in war-time. Even before the war, while other industries were talking about how to rationalize their systems of distribution, the agricultural industry was quietly going ahead with its own Marketing Act and setting up its own Milk Board, Pig Board, Hops Board and Potato Board. I hope it will be realized, therefore, to a greater extent than Professor Dennison and the authors of the Scott Report appear to realize it, that in future the agricultural industry is not going to the country cap in hand as a sort of poor country cousin, but is going to be regarded as an industry which has provided a great contribution to the war effort through its own efficiency, and which, if given an equal chance with the other industries in this country, can stand on its own feet.

On the question of keeping industry out of the countryside, my noble friend Lord Latham used a phrase about the towns "being kept in a strait-jacket." That would be the worst possible policy from the point of view of agriculture itself. Especially in a country like this, the real hope of agriculture lies in a working together and an understanding between the towns and the countryside. It is perfectly true that a great deal of the spreading out into the countryside of the towns of late years has been highly unsatisfactory, because there has been no plan or considered policy on which it has been carried out; but that should not be allowed to prejudice us against the principle that agriculture must be considered, in terms of planning and the use of land, as a part of the whole country, and that we should welcome industry into the countryside. I was glad to hear my noble friend Lord Portal say yesterday that we should welcome the holidaymakers also. He spoke of the camps on which he and I worked some years ago. I was particularly pleased to hear him say that there is a survey going on at this moment of all the camps in the countryside, which are there for other purposes, but which may be utilized for our children in the future. If only in future years every child of school age could have a fortnight, three weeks or a month in the country every year, then, quite apart from the good effect on their health, think what it would mean in terms of mutual understanding between these completely separated units which we have at the moment, the town and the countryside.

Those are the two points on which I venture to disagree with the Scott Report; but on the fundamental and major part of the Report, which lays it down that the development of our agricultural land must be controlled, and controlled with special reference to the fact that our reserves of good agricultural land are strictly limited in this country, I am in agreement. We can import more cotton; we can import more of the raw materials of our iron and steel industry; but we cannot import more land. That is the raw material which is limited, and we must control its development. Indeed, I go further than that; I think that we should control its sale. I have been working fairly intimately in the countryside lately, and I am not sure that we have quite realized what is the type of person who in some cases is buying land at the moment—whether to avoid Excess Profits Duty or not, I do not know; I do not know what the motives are. I do not like the type of man who is buying land at the moment, however, because I think that he has no feeling of responsibility at all, and I see no justification for our private landowning system unless it is based essentially on a sense of trusteeship.

I hope also that the management of the land will be controlled. At the present moment we are turning out some farmers who are not farming it properly. I cannot believe that any good landlord would resent feeling that his estate was open to public inspection, and that, if he was not looking after it properly, either he should receive orders to do so or he should be turned out and somebody else should do it for him. To say that is to enter into the realms of agricultural policy, however, on which I hope that at some later date we may usefully have a debate. I trust that the main recommendations of the Scott Report will receive, and I gather from the noble Lord, Lord Portal, that they will receive, sympathetic consideration and active implementation by His Majesty's Government.

We are discussing to-day the very foundations of our future economic life. We are discussing the basic problem of how and where our people are to live and work, and how far it is going to be possible to go back on the divorce which took place during the last generation between town and country, confining millions of people to ill-planned, crowded, airless and sunless acres, while the misuse or under-use of vast areas of our heritage in the countryside went on. That is the problem which faces us, and it is for us to solve it, and to solve it in time, before our sons come back from the war, so as to have laid at least some of the foundations which will be necessary to enable them to carry on the life of this country.

LORD BALFOUR OF BURLEIGH

My Lords, the Motion before the House to-day is one of very wide scope, and in the remarks that I wish to make I propose to limit myself almost entirely to the Report of Mr. Justice Uthwatt. I would like to add my tribute to those that have already been paid to that Report. Not only is it a masterly analysis of the history of the very difficult subject with which it deals, but in my opinion it presents to the Government a coherent and balanced policy which can be accepted as a whole. In my opinion it is really a handbook on reconstruction, and the tenor of my remarks is to ask the Government to consider whether the wisest course will not be to accept that Report and act upon it in complete acceptance of the whole of the scheme which is outlined. Let me remind your Lordships of the background against which this Report has to be discussed. The background is the acceptance by the Government of the principle of national planning. What that means can be summed up in one quite short sentence. It means that it is essential that there should exist means by which the requirements of agriculture, transport, public services, and defence, as well as housing, industrial location, town siting and other matters, can be given proper weight and considered as a whole. That definition is in the Uthwatt Report, and it is subsequent to the various Government pronouncements that we have had about planning, but I do not think it could be denied—at least I think it would not be denied—that that represents the Government's view of what national planning means on the largest scale.

That involves as the first necessity the control of the use of land, and when the Government propose to take complete control of the use of land they at once touch closely three great vested interests. The first great vested interest which they touch is that of the owners of land. I wish to be quite clear that I make a distinction between the owners of land and landowners. I accept the definition of landowners given by my noble friend Lord Bledisloe yesterday. A landowner in that sense is a man who has perhaps inherited an estate which has been in his family for many generations, and of which he regards himself as a trustee for the national interest. That is what I mean by a landowner. An owner of land is different. He may be a person who comes under the invidious name of a land speculator; but no ingenuity could distinguish really the title of a landowner and an owner of land. As an instance, I had occasion to sell some furniture by auction a day or two ago, because I had to empty my London house and did not want to store the furniture. It realized, I need hardly tell your Lordships, very exorbitant prices. Do I thereby become a speculator in furniture? I really do not think so. If I do I do not think that it is in any way an immoral procedure. The owners of land often find themselves, through no fault of their own, in the same position. There are others who are not perhaps quite so virtuous. But this control of land is to fall on the virtuous and the immoral alike.

I think we landowners have to admit that, whatever merits we may claim for ourselves—those of us who take our responsibilities seriously—the road to the hell of the development with which we are faced in this country is paved with the profits of land speculators. Control therefore must be accepted, and I feel quite confident that landowners as a class, when they are convinced that that control is necessary in the national interest, will accept it with a good grace. And I think it will have some compensations. The first will be the great benefit which it will bestow upon agriculture. The second will be the enormous advantage in the safeguarding of amenities; and when my noble friend Lord Radnor described himself yesterday as instinctively an anti-planner I cannot help thinking that he perhaps forgot those two considerations. Because, as your Lordships know, nobody has got a more live and real interest in agriculture and in amenities than the noble Earl. I therefore do not accept his definition of himself as an anti-planner. I think the noble Earl also has misread this scheme a little bit, because he was very apprehensive about what he called the public development which was going to take place. If I read the Uthwatt proposals aright, private initiative will remain in development, and that, to my mind, is one of the great advantages that it has over complete, outright nationalization. I do not believe, in fact, that in a great many cases the passing of this arrangement into law would seriously affect a very great number of agricultural estates. I believe we should still continue in effective enjoyment and trusteeship of our estates practically to the same extent as we do to-day.

And in that connexion I must make just one reference to a pamphlet which has been sent to me, and no doubt to others of your Lordships, which purports to be a summary of the main recommendations of the Uthwatt Committee, with some criticisms. This is one of the criticisms: Any builder who wishes to put up some houses, or an industrialist who wants to build a new factory will be able to ask the State to take away the parklands and grounds, or the choicest pieces of a farm or an estate, without regard to the value of the land for farming or the amenity of the district. The owner will not be able to prevent this. I think that is a mischievous misrepresentation, and I suggest to any of your Lordships who may have read this summary that he should not depend upon it, and the criticisms, in order to form an opinion of this great scheme. The Uthwatt Report must be read itself, and then if you read that pamphlet you will see—

LORD WEDGWOOD

By whom was that pamphlet sent cut?

LORD BALFOUR OF BURLEIGH

It is issued by the Land Union.

LORD WEDGWOOD

I thought so.

LORD BALFOUR OF BURLEIGH

In that connexion may I say one word about global value? Nobody in this House has disputed the fact that the bargain, if it is made, must be fair both to buyer and to seller. Nor can it be disputed that the aggregate of the valuations, taken individually, would greatly exceed what would be a fair global value to the purchaser. There are some elements of similarity between this and the Coal Act. In the case of coal the limiting value was the potential output of coal for a period of years: in this case it is the potential building development. I think there the analogy ceases, and I do not propose to push it further; but I cannot myself resist the conclusion—and I have not heard anybody else do it either—that some reduction would be necessary on the full valuation of each individual portion, because that would disregard the floating and the shifting value, if the acquisition is to take place.

I would just like to say there that the only criticism I have to make on the Majority Report is that I do not quite follow their argument about the elimination of public demand. I think the Minority Report of Mr. Barr is nearer the truth there. That is a minor question, because Mr. Barr makes it perfectly clear that he is in favour of the acquisition. Mr. Barr says: There can be no two opinions that national planning is fundamental to make the best use of our land for the good of the community—control must be absolute—but that does not justify unfair or selective treatment. Apart from that I am in favour of the acquisition of the development right by fair compensation being paid. The Committee are therefore unanimous on this scheme, subject to the difference of opinion about compensation. Before landowners reject this scheme I think they would do well to consider the alternative, assuming, as I believe, control has got to come.

I greatly regret that the noble Lord, Lord Latham, is not here because I have to comment on what he had to say yesterday. He made quite clear what in his opinion the alternative was. First of all, he said, he would impose control without compensation except where, he added, there was manifest injustice. I am afraid that the noble Lord's view of whether there was manifest injustice might not be the same as the view taken by landowners. Then there was to be rating of site values and then there was to be nationalization. I can quite imagine the noble Lord opposite (Lord Latham), if he were sentencing the land to these penalties, adding, with his bland smile, that the sentences shall not be concurrent but consecutive. After You have had a measure of control without compensation, then the rating of site values, and then the nationalization, there will not be much left of the landowner or of agriculture; but judging from what the noble Lord said about tied houses, which indicated the extent of his knowledge of the countryside, that might not be a consideration which would cause him any great grief.

The second great vested interest which is concerned in this scheme is that of the local authorities. The local authorities come into it because what we are talking about is national planning, which means, if the Government accept, as I think they do, some of the principles agreed in the Barlow Report, control of industrial location. That means control of the distribution of the industrial population. There, at once, you have an issue which affects very closely and vitally the interests of the great urban local authorities.

VISCOUNT BLEDISLOE

And county.

LORD BALFOUR OF BURLEIGH

But particularly urban authorities in the aspects of which I am speaking. How can these urban authorities be expected to take a perfectly impartial and disinterested view of these proposals? Of course these local authorities, attaching importance as they must do, without any natural wickedness, to rateable value, must be apprehensive of national control. National control may involve very considerable changes. Take the Port of Hull. Supposing it was decided that it was unwise to have Hull as a very large port in the future. I have not the least idea whether that would be a good thing or not: but you cannot expect the city authorities of Hull gleefully and gladly to acquiesce in the cutting down of their port to one of diminutive importance. The sphere of the local authorities in town and country planning is the administration of the Acts, not the settlement of national principles of economic, industrial, and agricultural reconstruction. Let them be supreme in their own sphere, and the role they have to play is most important, but Heaven help us if national policies are to be decided through the spectacles of the local authorities.

Let me remind your Lordships of the remedy proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Latham. His recommendation for reconstruction was the rating of site values. I am afraid I must write down the noble Lord, in the word of my noble friend Lord Radnor, as an "anti-planner." I was suspicious when I saw the terms of his Motion. He refers to "preparatory steps" being taken now in order that "actual planning and reconstruction may be commenced immediately after the cessation of hostilities." Who ever heard of planning being deferred until after the cessation of hostilities? What is the good of that? Surely we must plan now in order that reconstruction may begin on the cessation of hostilities. That made me, as I say, a little suspicious. As I listened to the noble Lord, my suspicions deepened when I heard him advocate the rating of site values as preparatory to reconstruction. Then I knew I was face to face with a real anti-planner. The rating of site values is a futile and dangerous remedy from that point of view.

LORD WEDGWOOD

Oh!

LORD BALFOUR OF BURLEIGH

I thought the noble Lord might disagree. It is a remedy that is designed to bring sites into development—very important from the point of view of rateable value—but look what it has done to New York. Where are the open spaces in New York? That, I am credibly informed, is a direct result of a system of rating site values. How very different to the levy which is proposed by Mr. justice Uthwatt is the proposal of the noble Lord, Lord Latham—the rating of the annual site value, whatever it may be. Mr. Justice Uthwatt's proposal is a levy on the realized increment once every five years—a very different thing, and designed to avoid the very dangers in which Lord Latham's proposal would involve us.

The third vested interest—this may surprise your Lordships—is the Civil Service, the great bureaucracy which reigns supreme in Whitehall. Most civil servants, in my experience, are anti-planners, the reason being that planning involves interference with Departmental routine. Every civil servant wishes his own Department to be perfect, and believes it can do things better than any other Department. We have had sufficient evidence in the last eighteen months of the difficulty of getting transfer of any powers at all from one Department to another to make us realize the impossibility of having a Planning Department which would have powers to interfere with other Departments. For that reason I greatly prefer to a Department the machinery which is recommended by Mr. Justice Uthwatt. That is ground which we traversed a few weeks ago and which I cannot go over again to-day, but I should like to say to those who are interested from the point of view of land, that the Uthwatt machinery seems to me to have great advantages from that point of view over that of a Department. I believe that a Commission would be found to be an admirable tribunal, and one to which landowners could look with even greater confidence than that with which they regarded the Ministry of Health.

In conclusion, may I say one word about the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Portal? I welcome that speech, and I thank the noble Lord for it. I thank him for the decisions which he announced. But I hope it will not be disrespectful if I say that in comparison with the scope and importance of the issues before the House the decisions which were announced were really rather in the nature of chicken food. I understand that the noble and learned Viscount on the Woolsack, who is going to wind up to-day, is not expected to give us any definite decision of Government policy. We shall have, no doubt, one of those speeches from the noble and learned Viscount in which the House delights. We shall have a balanced consideration of all the pros and cons delivered with the utmost grace and with, perhaps, a classical tag or two, but finally, at the end of it, we shall be exactly as wise as we were at the beginning. I venture to doubt whether there will even emerge from the noble Viscount's peroration a mouse of the magnitude of that which did creep forth from the concluding remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Snell, a month ago.

THE LORD CHANCELLOR (VISCOUNT SIMON)

It was my mouse.

LORD BALFOUR OF BURLEIGH

Whether it was the Lord Chancellor's mouse or not, it came out from under the skirt of the noble Lord, Lord Snell. I can only hope that another mouse or something larger will emerge from the robes of the Lord Chancellor this afternoon; but I have been led to doubt that. The Reports were only issued last August and September. I think we in this House understand that, but I think I can say this, that the House will be content with that once more and only once more. Moreover, I do not believe that the country will be content with it even once more. There is a tremendous volume of opinion in the country, which wants to see the Government get on with this question of machinery for reconstruction. Therefore my plea to the Government is this. This matter is one of great controversy, but I do not believe that it is controversy on ordinary Party lines which would be barred by the declaration that was made the other day by the Lord Privy Seal in another place. I believe there is controversy here which cuts right across Parties and classes, and is a matter in which the Government ought to give a lead, and I believe the lead will be found in adopting the whole Uthwatt Report. I ask for the Uthwatt, the whole Uthwatt and, in its scope, nothing but the Uthwatt, and I believe if the Government do that they will have laid the foundations for a real beginning of reconstruction. I think the country is waiting for a lead. I think the people are saying: Are we to be governed by the vested interests or are we to be governed in the interests of the common man? I want to see the Government lay the foundations for a victory in the field of reconstruction for the benefit of the common man which will be as great as the victory which the common man is winning to-day on the field of battle and which in God's good time will be final and complete.

LORD WEDGWOOD

My Lords, I owe to the father of the noble Lord who has just spoken my firm foundations in free trade and the rating of land values, and I shall certainly not argue against his speech. Indeed, if we are to have a dictator I would as soon have him as any other; but I have no intention of substituting for our present system any dictatorship. These two Reports remind me irresistibly of a play of Galsworthy's called The Skin Game. Noble Lords will remember that in it a country gentleman finds that a cad, an industrialist from the north, is going to put up a factory that will spoil the view from his drawing-room windows, and thereafter an unsuspected skeleton in the cupboard of the man from the north enables the country gentleman to save the view from his drawing-room windows, only to discover that he has ceased to be a gentleman and become himself a cad. We are all, myself included, anxious to save the views from our drawing-room windows; but there are other considerations.

We are familiar with that view, but not so familiar with Marx's "iron law of wages": So long as there are two men after one job and those two men have no alternative except to get that job or starve, so long will they continue to undercut each other's offer for wages, and wages will tend to sink universally to subsistence level. That is not an Act of Parliament, it is a natural law. We cannot pass an Act of Parliament to put an end to the iron law of wages. The only thing you can do is to prevent the postulates for that law, so that there shall be an alternative open to mankind. At the present time we are in the blessed position when there are two jobs for every man, and there has never been a more popular war. The principal dread of our people is that when the war comes to an end there will no longer be two jobs for every man and that unemployment will come back and the exploitation of the proletariat will be reproduced.

I recall that, after that picnic in South Africa which we used to call a war before we discovered what war really was, I remained in that country as the dictator of over 10,000 square miles. Then, at Ermelo, I was faced with an unemployment problem, because discharged men from our Army came into the town looking for a job. There was no Poor Law in South Africa and no dole. If you could not get work then you must go to prison, and we had blown up the gaol! Fortunately, the Boers of old had been more intelligent than our rulers in the years past, and around all the towns in South Africa there were large areas of unenclosed public lands. Round my town there were more than nine thousand acres of public lands, so I solved the problem of unemployment in a way I shall presently indicate. Every one was on rations for three months after that war, as they will be after this war. I said to the ex-Service men: "You can have three acres of the town lands, you can work in that coal seam in the side of the hill, you can work that brickfield"—an old disused brickfield—"get on with the good work." They started to work. They fenced in their acres with wire from the blockhouse line, and solved their housing problems for themselves with 40 lb. biscuit tins and corrugated iron. There were no shovels, so I got up a consignment of shovels and picks. So they produced vegetables and coal and bricks. We in the town got a plentiful supply of what we wanted and those men reaped for themselves the full reward of their labour. They were not robbed by a landlord or a capitalist or by the State.

But there were two sequels to that. Presently I had a deputation from the builders and the manufacturers in the town complaining that it was impossible to reconstruct civilization while the wages for unskilled labour remained at the rate they had reached, and what was I going to do about it. It did not seem to me to come within the dictator's sphere of activities. What had happened was that I had thrown open the town lands not only to ex-Service men but to any man, and no man would remain working for a master in that town for less than he would get working for himself on the free lands as a free man. In course of time, I came home, and that happy place where we had smashed the iron law of wages reverted to type. They looked out of their drawing-room windows in the town and they saw the disreputable shanties which had been put up. They decided that the town lands must be used for grazing and not for agriculture, so there were no more free holdings there. Then they leased the coal mine to a Johannesburg syndicate, which did not work it, but supplied them with coal from other pits—at a price. Then they leased the brick fields and the pug mill to somebody. He was a capitalist, but in any case he was good enough to employ some of those who had once been free men. So they got back to the "admirable" system which we enjoy in this country and elsewhere. That is an example of how it is possible to avoid unemployment by throwing open nature to the use of man, and it shows that it is not only agriculture that requires land in order to produce goods.

The problem that is faced by the Uthwatt Committee and by us to-day is the same in principle but far more difficult to tackle. We are anxious, all of us, to preserve that view from the drawing-room windows. Some people are anxious to prevent ribbon development and these townspeople settling in the country. The whole of English history has been one long story of those who could getting away from the towns and going to live outside. My own forbears for a hundred years used to ride in to the works at Stoke- On-Trent, seven miles each way, from where they were living in the country. Then the railways came along and not only the wealthy manufacturers but the professional classes came out into the country and settled outside the towns in pleasant surroundings. Then came the bicycles and motor cars, and ever since 1900, particularly since the last war, all the managerial class, the £300 a year class, tried to get out into the country. They built these houses which you hate. Now the working classes, who are certainly in the £300 a year class, are also beginning to want to get out. The shopkeeper looks forward to a chance some day of retiring from business and settling in the country, keeping a few fowls, breeding a few pigeons or rabbits, and having the grandchildren out from the town on Sunday afternoon. You cannot stop that.

The Uthwatt Report is like King Canute's courtiers telling him to drive back the waves of the sea. The use of land is not solely for agriculture. It is also for recreation, and the people who want recreation most are the people who have to live in the towns. The noble Lord, Lord Portal, spoke the other day about reviving the old English country inn. You know that old inn, with the oldest inhabitant sitting on a bench at the door with his pint of beer, smoking his clay pipe. Do you really think these "pubs" still exist for the benefit of the agricultural community? Go to Stoke-on-Trent and see. It is long since the agricultural labourer has been able to afford a pint of beer. You see instead beautiful reproductions of Elizabethan manor houses, with quarter-acre car parks attached, crowded on Sunday evenings with cars which have brought out the townspeople. I wonder if that forms part of the planning of England, whether it is proposed to develop this or stop it. Why are there these places? They are there because people want them enough to pay the price for using the land. I dislike them, but if people want them, if they are economically advantageous to the community, let us have a little realism in our minds and see that land is put to its best economic use, which is measured by what the users are prepared to pay.

There are many uses for land. All production, all useful work that you can conceive, is taking some part in the conversion of land and raw materials into finished articles. Useful productive work turns agricultural land into ham sandwiches, mines and coal turn iron into bicycles and sewing machines; it turns land into houses, even into public-houses. Every form of productive work must begin by the application of labour to land. Yet in this Report it is actually proposed to pay millions of pounds to landlords, in order that they may not sell, not do exactly what they ought to do if they want to be good citizens. The good citizen is the man who allows raw materials to be used; the bad citizen is the man who keeps people unemployed, refusing to let them have access to that raw material which is essential to all production. If you allow people to start work in the primary trades, building, agriculture, mining, quarrying, they in turn will pass on the job of completing production to all the other trades in the community including the distributive trade and the retailing trade. But if you dam the stream of production at the source, not only will primary workers be out of work but everybody else will be deprived of his proper work. Yet it is proposed to pay to the owners of undeveloped land large sums so that they may not sell that land, so that they may keep the land in inferior use. I wish I could make your Lordships see it as clearly as it appears to me !

What is the actual position? You have, on one side of a high brick wall, men able and anxious to work, and on the other side the raw material without which he cannot start work. The height of that wall measures its price. By this proposal you are going to make that wall a little higher and more difficult to get over. Why not pull a few bricks off the top of that wall, make land cheaper and let people get over the wall so that men who want to work can do so? Town planning is worth nothing and country planning is worth nothing unless you face up to the fact that your first and final duty is to throw open, not to seclude, the land of England so that the people of England can work it and develop it. I do not know how we can defeat this terrific vested interest of agricultural land owning. They have beaten us all the time. They have got rid of all rates on agricultural land, they have now the Uthwatt's endowment almost in pocket, and now they are demanding that Death Duties on agricultural land shall be abolished. There is no end to it. If you abolish Death Duties to-morrow—I know the noble Lord opposite would like to do so—that would immediately send up land prices. We shall all rush to put some of our money in such land in order to save Death Duties.

VISCOUNT BLEDISLOE

There is absolutely nothing that would stimulate enterprise in rural areas more than the abolition of Death Duties on agricultural land.

LORD WEDGWOOD

Stimulate enterprise ! It would stimulate investment in agricultural land. Do you call that enterprise? I wish noble Lords would remember that there are two people interested in every bit of agricultural land—the farmer who farms the land and gets all he can out of the land, and the landlord who farms the farmer and gets all he can out of the farmer. Whenever you mention agricultural land everybody gets so sentimental, so "gooey." So they do on this side of the House when anyone mentions "the State." Your Lordships have been debating which authority should dictate the use of land. I wish noble Lords beside me would remember that it is possible to conceive that "the State" is not the friend of the working-class but the friend of the vested interests. The "State" which is being invoked by Lord Balfour of Burleigh seems, in his case, to be some body rather like the Uthwatt Committee—a lot of lawyers and surveyors, with no politicians among them, deciding how and where we are all to live in future. The State has many incarnations. That is his conception of the State.

Lord Samuel, on the other hand, says: "Oh no, we will not have any bureaucrats doing these things; we will have them done by county councils and town councils. These local authorities must decide how they are to live." That is his conception of the State. My Lords, I know my own county council very well, and if such bodies are to be "the State" then our second state will be worse than our first. County councils, normally, have had towns extracted from their electorate, and they represent the purely obscurantist farming industry. Or suppose you leave this to the city councils, make them "the State." Well, city councils are human beings. Do you think the local council would have allowed my particular firm to leave Stoke-on-Trent if they could have stopped it doing so? Of course they will not wish any of their ratepayers to settle in the country if they can prevent it. Their main interest is in keeping their population, getting fresh industries, keeping the rates down, keeping the people packed in the towns. No change there. Believe me, "the State" is no servant but a dangerous master. The only check upon "the State" is this House and the other place.

VISCOUNT SANKEY

My Lords, your Lordships must be grateful to the noble Lord who has initiated this debate, for the suggestions which have been discussed are momentous and far-reaching. It would be impossible to survey them all at a single sitting, but no doubt other opportunities to consider them will be forthcoming. Permit me to-day to deal with one matter only. Now assuming, and only assuming, that Parliament decides to adopt the recommendations as to the utilization of land contained in these two Reports, it is obvious that their working out must be entrusted to some authority or authorities. These authorities will have to make a great number of decisions and reach a great number of conclusions, and the important point at once emerges, what authorities should be entrusted with the task and what procedure should be adopted.

The questions which will arise before them are quite different from those which arise in an ordinary court of law. There the contest is between individuals whose rights and liabilities are determined by their own contracts or torts as affected by Statute or by the principles of Common Law or Equity. But the type of case which will arise under the new legislation, will not be a contest between individuals, but rather a contest between the State and an individual or between the State and a group of individuals, and to this type, apparently, different principles are to be applied. The good of the community, or the will of the community, will be the major consideration. The Uthwatt Report frankly acknowledges this. Permit me one quotation only. It is from paragraph 17. It states: We assume that it [national planning] will be directed to ensuring that the best use is made of land with a view to securing economic efficiency for the community and well-being for the individual …. Then this Report goes on to say: … it will be recognized that this involves the subordination to the public good of the personal interests and wishes of landowners. It is clear from that statement that people's rights, as at present existing, may be severely restricted or even entirely taken away. In time of war rights must be surrendered, and they have been willingly surrendered, but it is to be hoped that in time of peace, first, that the rights of individuals to free speech and criticism will be respected; and, second, that an opportunity will be given to show cause before the authority why any plan which affects them should be reconsidered or modified. It is open to doubt whether these two things are adequately provided for in the Uthwatt Report. People will put up with a good deal if they have an opportunity of being heard, but plans proposed and passed in secret may give rise to widespread discontent.

Assuming, therefore, that many of the recommendations of the Report will be implemented by legislation, the machinery and the procedure by which they are carried out will become of major importance. "Whatever is best administered is best." That there must be some central authority is beyond argument, but in a movement which is in a large measure to alter and regulate our national life, it is devoutly to be wished that Parliament in some degree will retain its control, and will not hand over national planning to the uncriticized discretion of a single Minister, or a Committee of Ministers, or a Commission, or any central or local authority. Still less should Parliament permit a procedure by which decisions can be reached behind a smoke screen of officials, who, impartial and efficient as they undoubtedly are, are inexperienced in such matters, and hampered by a system which is entirely unfitted for such a task. If we are to be planned, let us be planned in the light. We do not countenance a State in which planning and control are centralized in a few hands, and where the fundamental distinction in society is between the few who control and plan and the many who are controlled and planned.

Parliament, by its Private Bill legislation, has dealt effectively and to the general satisfaction with schemes and situations where large public interests are involved and individual rights have from time to time to be restricted. Let us consider how far that can be adapted to meet the problems which will confront us when peace is declared. I am far from saying that every individual should be entitled to appear before a Committee to object. Certainly not; but possibly some sort of representative order could be made, enabling groups of individuals, or at any rate some great local authorities—as has been mentioned already in the course of this debate—to appear to take objection. Would it not be possible and desirable that the Ministerial order and the scheme itself should have to come before a Committee for criticism, debate and approval? It is not sufficient that a scheme should lie for some specified period on the table of this House. Such a Committee could not examine every detail, but Parliament itself would have an opportunity of seeing whether the scheme should go forward either as a whole or with some modifications. We shall win this war; but, having done so, do not let us lose our freedom. If we are too much governed, we shall forget how to govern ourselves.

LORD BINGLEY

My Lords, I do not propose, in the few remarks which I wish to offer to your Lordships, to deal at all in detail with the urban side of the problem; I propose to deal rather with the rural side, with which I am more familiar, and mainly with the Scott Report. In the Scott Report there are two different lines of thought, which appear in the Report itself and in the Minority Report. There is first of all the view of those who hold that the agricultural industry must have priority in many respects in all country areas, and that other industries should come second. Those who know the bad times that the agricultural industry has been through must have some sympathy with the idea that it should have a better time in the future. On the other hand, there are those who hold that the countryside should be the playground, the health resort, the lung and the sanatorium of our great towns and their crowded populations; and anybody who has considered the hideous conditions in which some of our town populations have been living must necessarily have considerable sympathy with that idea.

The truth, as happens in most cases, lies between the two extremes, and there is no doubt a certain amount of truth in each of them. But it cannot be denied that a vast amount of really good agricultural land has been prevented from being used for food production, and the denying of the use of such land for that purpose should be limited as far as is possible without undue hardship. It has needed a world war to prove to us how dangerous it is for this country to depend very largely on foreign supplies of food. If it had not been for the wonderful performance of that wizard, Lord Woolton, and his power of distributing inadequate supplies without the general mass of the population feeling at all seriously that they are short of food, we should have been very near the starvation line, and should have realized more fully than we do how necessary it is that this country should be a better food-producing unit than it has been in the past.

The Scott Report is very comprehensive. If I wished to criticize it at all, I should be inclined to say that there is almost too much in it; one can hardly see the wood for the trees. But it is a charming document. It embodies the ideals which we should all like to see become realities in the agricultural industry and in the countryside. Many of its recommendations are already being carried out where local authorities are efficient, and, where they are not efficient, machinery can easily be devised to make them more so. We have power to do a great many of the things that the Scott Report recommends. But, when the Scott Committee talk of a five-year plan, what I hope will happen is that out of all their recommendations we shall concentrate on several which are of infinite importance and absolutely vital to those who live in the country. They are mostly things which can be dealt with at an early stage and put through, if sufficient energy is devoted to the task.

Nobody can deny that the better supply of water and of electric power in our rural districts may make all the difference to the comfort and happiness of those who live there. It is terrible to think that in thousands of cases there are still farm labourers' cottages without an adequate water supply, and where the water has to be carried some distance, through snow and mud and in darkness, from a spring or well. When the unfortunate man comes home from his work, wet and tired, that water has to be manhandled into the house and heated in a copper before he can have a hot bath, which you and I would not consider in such circumstances to be a luxury, but rather a necessity. It is also hard that he should have to get up by the dim light of an oil lamp, and spend the early hours of the morning and the long dark hours of the night with only that to depend on for light. All these things were tolerable once, but now they are out of date; we have got beyond them. There was a time when everybody expected hardship, but now the rural population, as Lord Portal has said, travel about more, and they know what conditions are like elsewhere, to a far greater extent than was the case a hundred years ago. We must try to bring their conditions of life more into consonance with what they see elsewhere.

The objection has been raised that these things cannot be provided in remote districts without considerable cost. Of course they cannot, and that is what has prevented anything being done in the past; but, when the nation has deliberately allowed the stagnation and the depression of the agricultural industry which has been the characteristic of that industry for so many years, do you tell me that it is not now going to do something to try to overcome the troubles which it has caused? In order to be able to feed and clothe the population cheaply—something very desirable in itself—the agricultural industry has been neglected for very many years. What has been the result? Not the travesty of agricultural history which my old friend Lord Wedgwood has just presented to us. The miserable wages which agricultural labourers have had to be paid in the past were not due to any innate wickedness on the part of those administering the land, but to the very inadequate prices which farmers were able to get for their produce, which made it impossible for them to pay more. In the same way, taxation has been very hard on the agricultural industry, and, whatever the noble Lord may say about Death Duties, I do not think he can deny that years ago, when those spacious farm- houses and (by the standards of the time) those comfortable, solidly-built cottages, of which we now see the very ancient remains and sometimes the ruins, were built they were built by this very class which my noble friend now denounces. In those days they had the means to do it; it was before their capital was taken from them by Death Duties, and when they still had the possibility of carrying out proper repairs and renewals.

LORD WEDGWOOD

If the noble Lord asks me I should say that they had farm houses which were decent as a matter of supply and demand. There were not so many tenant farmers after them, and therefore they had to supply good accommodation.

LORD BINGLEY

The noble Lord, I am afraid, is not very well versed in the history of this question. I think he knows more about the history of the pottery industry, which has made such a mess of some of the rural parts of Staffordshire. The provision of good farm buildings in the past is a fact which might easily have been reproduced now if the economic conditions had not been so greatly changed. We have been told that the agricultural industry wishes to treat the other industries as poor relations. Surely in view of what I have been saying, and what everybody knows—the fact that the agricultural industry has been kept depressed for so many years—the true position is exactly the opposite. It is not a case of our considering other industries as poor relations; it is that other industries have pushed down the agricultural industry for many years into a state of depression, which we hope will never return.

I think we must all agree that access to the land of the country ought to be more easy for the urban population. We desire to see them enjoying themselves in the country. Our only desire is that when they do they should behave themselves in the way the country people expect to do themselves. They will learn in time. A great many of them are new to the situation; they do not realize the mischief that can be done by small acts of carelessness. A farmer near me complained to me that one day he found all his cows on the road, and a charming young woman who had left the gate open, when reproached, said she thought the poor cows had had enough to eat and wanted to go home. That sort of thing will very soon pass. There is no doubt that properly regulated holiday camps will more and more become an asset of very great value, and will be a means of improving the health of our urban population. It ought to be possible also for the urban population to roam about the country, and footpaths ought to be better marked, because there are many beautiful places where damage is done because people do not know which way to go. That is a matter which can easily be improved. But in order that people may enjoy the country you must leave a certain proportion of amenities which they can enjoy, and I commend the whole spirit of the Scott Report, which says that so far as possible, without detriment to the rest of the population, the amenities of agricultural land should be preserved.

With regard to the Central Planning Authority, personally I have a very strong feeling that that is long overdue. But it must not be a bureaucratic and tyrannical authority, taking the initiative and dragooning everybody into doing things which it thinks are good for them. It should be advisory, sympathetic, helpful, and only in the last resort compulsory. But I agree that in some cases—many cases possibly—compulsion will be necessary. And, above all, the authority should be responsible to Parliament. It should be possible for its actions to be questioned and criticized in the only place where really effective criticism can be made, and that is in the Houses of Parliament. Subject to that, I think development can be worked out very largely by the local authorities. There are some that are less efficient than others. There are some to whom the primary interest seems, to be keeping down the cost of the plans. All that can be corrected and can be improved, but I think that some form of central authority is necessary; and though there are a great many of these plans—some are actually in operation in a small way, though of course they have not been continued during the war—there are a certain number of local authorities which, if they knew that there was a central authority in the background to help them, would go much further in the future than they have been able to do in the past.

In conclusion, I hope that as a result of all this we shall get a really settled order in the future, but I also agree that we must start to think about planning before the time comes when there will be a desperate need to reconstruct. Plans take a long time to work out, and unless we have them ready a time may come like a thief in the night when suddenly we shall find ourselves up against the real problem, the men coming back from the Army, nothing ready for them, nothing for them to do. Therefore I hope that the Government will seriously proceed on the lines of Lord Portal's speech yesterday to try to develop their plans as soon as possible and have them ready when the time comes.

VISCOUNT ASTOR

My Lords, I must apologize to your Lordships first of all for not having been present here yesterday. It was physically impossible for me to be here, but, having read every word of yesterday's debate in the Official Report, which reached me commendably early this morning in spite of the war, I agree entirely with what the noble Earl said at the beginning of our discussion this afternoon, when he paid a high tribute to the technical knowledge, the information, and the general standard of the contributions made to yesterday's debate. In fact, my sole fear on reading through the debate was that where there were so many experts, and they differed on so many points, the very expert knowledge and the strong views might prevent that rapidity of progress which I have come here to advocate. I speak as representing a city which has been completely "blitzed," and there are others in the country in the same condition. When I walk round the streets of Plymouth now and look round acres of flattened-out rubble I close my eyes and picture to myself what the city used to look like. I remember its narrow and tortuous streets. Now Hitler has given Plymouth an opportunity of, starting afresh with a clean slate, and we are anxious that we should not lose that advantage which has come out of so much tragedy.

The noble Lord, Lord Reith, came down to Plymouth very soon after the attacks, and he convinced a city council where the majority is Conservative that it was in our interest that a public body—whether Plymouth itself or some other public body—should acquire the whole of the freehold of the damaged areas. I was glad to read in the Official Report that the noble Lord, Lord Portal, implemented that promise. I only hope that he will not delay in bringing in legislation which will ensure that the whole of the land in the damaged areas—which is what we have in mind—can be acquired. We appointed a world authority, Professor Abercrombie, to replan the future of Plymouth. Plymouth is bounded on three sides by water, and a large number of the people who work in Plymouth live in the adjacent areas to a greater extent to-clay than they did before the war, and obviously we depend a great deal for our amenities upon the way in which the adjoining areas are developed. So the city of Plymouth suggested, with due deference to their free and independent status, to the adjoining rural district areas that it would be to their interest, as it was to our interest, to appoint the same gentleman to plan. I am glad to say that Cornwall, after thinking about it for some time, decided to appoint Professor Abercrombie to plan their area. Not so our neighbours on the other side. After reading our very polite suggestion—no attempt at dictation—the Rural District Council of Plympton said they had a Charter long before Plymouth had a parish pump, and they were jolly well going to appoint a different planner! It is quite impossible to have the best scheme of planning when you have that sort of quite unnecessary jealousy and rivalry.

There are two things which I wish to impress upon the noble Lord. One is the need for a stand-still order to prevent building. I shall give the noble Lord cases which have recently come before our special works committee, and I shall send them to him in greater detail to show what is happening, in spite of the enactments at present in existence to prevent new vested interests being created. Let me give three cases. One refers to the proprietor of a cooked meat shop. He came along with plans for erecting a building which complied entirely with the by-laws and, as the noble Lord realizes, shops which are associated with the sale of meat come very high on the list of priorities. The site on which he wanted to build was obviously going to be a thoroughfare or in an area where a thoroughfare probably was going to be put. Let me take the second case. Again, all the conditions of the by-laws were complied with. The proposal came forward for the erection of a shop. In that case those who wanted this permission had a site not very far round the corner. The third case was the most difficult of all. A lease had expired—again it was a food shop—and the owner of the property was proposing to put up the rent to an undue figure in the opinion of the tenant. The tenant then came before the committee of the municipality and asked permission to erect a temporary shop on his own site. The building had been destroyed by fire. If that permission were granted there would be numerous other requests, and however much you lay down conditions that the building is to be pulled down in three or six months, or whatever the term may be, the noble Lord knows enough about local authorities to know that they are unwilling to inflict what can be represented as hardship on individuals. So there would be delay and retardation of the whole of the rebuilding of important areas.

I hope the noble and learned Viscount, when he replies to the discussion, will be able to repeat and to re-emphasize the very excellent statement made in another place yesterday by the Lord Privy Seal. There has been a certain amount of agitation as to whether or not the Government are entitled to proceed with controversial legislation in time of war. We almost lost the war because, in Erne of peace, before the war started, we failed to introduce controversial legislation—conscription, A.R.P. services, control of industry for the manufacture of munitions, and so on. Let us see to it that we do not make the same mistake in war-time and thereby risk losing the peace. It is difficult, however vivid one's imagination may be, to picture what the state of Europe and the world will be when the "Cease fire" sounds. Let your Lordships picture to yourselves the condition of the Continent of Europe—chacs, no Government, nobody to set up a Government. The attention of the Legislature—this House and another place—will be required to try and solve these vast problems. Or look round the world. Look at the Pacific, India, Malay, the Philippines—all these represent problems depending for their solution on the best brains of the country, and the best brains, I am glad to say, are included in the two Houses of Parliament. They will have to concentrate on solving these problems.

Take our own country and consider the vast problems which will have to be faced on demobilization—the tens of thousands of men and women coming out of the Armed Forces and out of industry. We shall also be faced either with an immediate Election, or the prospect of an immediate Election, and all the opportunities an Election provides for misrepresentation, particularly on the small controversial points. The dangers I foresee, unless we agree to pass essential controversial legislation, are congestion in Parliament, a sense of frustration, a general disgust growing in the hearts of the people, a feeling that democracy has failed. Democracy has not failed in the past and let us see it does not fail in the future. I would like once again to say how much many of us welcomed the speech of the Lord Privy Seal in another place, and I hope the noble and learned Viscount will be able to announce that at no distant date the Government will bring in legislation even though it is bound to be controversial. Some people are bound to object to it, for it is obvious from this debate that we cannot expect to get unanimity.

There is another matter which ought to be dealt with. Preliminary steps have not yet been taken by the Government to see whether, and to what extent, there ought to be reform of local government. I hope the Government will, at no distant date, announce the appointment of another Uthwatt Committee or ask some impartial body to look into this question of areas and the powers of local authorities, because there you are dealing with essential machinery which must be passed now if we are to be in a position to tackle the various problems which will come before us when the war ends. I hope that the noble Lord (Lord Portal) will be ready to deal with the measures which affect him in particular, if necessary, by several Bills. If he waits until he can bring forward one comprehensive Bill dealing with all points, there will be such an interminable delay and the Bill will be so over-weighted and so controversial that we shall not be able to deal with certain fundamentals which to-day should be dealt with.

I remember a statement made by a member of the War Cabinet in the last war. He referred to the fact that on numerous occasions matters of controversy between Departments and Ministers had been referred to him for decision. He said that, looking back, he believed that many of his decisions had been wrong but that, collectively, it was right to have given the decisions. There was a debate in your Lordships' House not very long ago in which two alternative proposals for the central authority were advocated by my noble friend Lord Reith and my noble friend Lord Samuel. The Government took the worst course when they indicated they were not in a position to adopt either. My own personal opinion is that Lord Reith's is the right proposal, but let us get ahead and get a central authority. The worst thing of all is to try and get complete agreement.

LORD PORTAL

The Government did not say that they would not adopt either proposal.

VISCOUNT ASTOR

I do not want to misrepresent my noble friend. Let me put it this way—he was unable to express any opinion. I hope the noble Lord will deal with these matters with boldness and vigour, and I do wish to impress upon him the sense of urgency. I hope there will be individual members of your Lordships' House belonging to the different Parties or sitting on the Cross Benches who will say two things to the Government—"Deal with these matters as soon as possible, and when you introduce your Bill" (which, after all, will represent the combined efforts of representatives of three Parties) "we will give you the necessary majority in the Lobby." It is no good urging Government action and then turning down the results of their deliberations. When the time comes for dealing with this or with other proposals we shall all of us have to sacrifice certain things—some of our opinions, some of our views, some of our privileges, some of our property, some of our rights. I am perfectly certain that the members of your Lordships' House will be as prepared to make these sacrifices in the national interests as they have shown themselves willing to sacrifice their own persons or to sacrifice their own sons when it is necessary in the national interest. If we do that, if we take that line, we shall have made a contribution towards the winning of the peace.

LORD GEDDES

My Lords, I have listened with extraordinary interest to the debate through all yesterday and to-day and I feel, in common, I am sure, with all your Lordships, that the level of the debate has been extraordinarily high. But there has been one side of this problem of planning which I have not heard referred to directly. Perhaps my experience in the course of the war is a little special. What has been brought forcibly to my notice by my experience of the last three years has been the unhealthiness and the still continuing unhealthiness of the common human crop, much the most important crop of the country, in fact the crop which is to be the country. In the days just when war was started, when evacuation was going on, I saw thousands of children, received them, and felt very like the old woman who lived in a shoe because arrangements had to be made for them at very short notice. One saw exactly what the physical condition of those children was, what their clothing condition was, what their mental condition was, what their manners were. Then, later in the war now still going on, I was in the north-west, and there, in the most densely populated parts of the country over a huge area, I saw conditions under which our people were living and under which the future citizens were growing up.

With all that in my mind, when I came to read the Scott Report I really felt shocked. It was so obvious that something other than reconstruction was in the mind, perhaps, of the majority. There was preservation, it seemed to me, rather than a vigorous going forward to the future, a future which we still have ahead of us, a future in which we shall have our young population—that is to say, the young men and the young women who are to be mothers and fathers, or who are, perhaps, now the mothers and fathers of young children. We shall have to get them into conditions of life, of space, and of amenity where they can bring up healthy young people; where they are not so crowded and congested that they get hidden away and lost, and are insulated from the influences of civilization which ought to be bearing upon them and moulding them. It seems to me that the future development of the population distribution in this country must involve the building of new towns of a new type. It cannot be done overnight. I believe it must be done over a long period if we are to have a really healthy human England. Of course we always use this term "England" in two or three senses; for the land, for the people as they live and for the actions of the State. The England that matters is the England of the people. That seems to me to have got rather left cut of this debate so far as any actual expression of the fact is concerned. I know it has been behind everything that has been said, but it has not been brought into the foreground.

Now what is the vision that one has of a future England? Most of our people are now herded together. If we were certain that there were to be such masses of people always in these places where the herds are, we would need most vigorous reconstruction there, and that would only be the case if there were some definite reason tying industry to those spots. Many of the industries were started where they are now because of local advantages which have long since passed away and now it is merely tradition that the industries should be there. We have got these great agglomerations and we have got another thing that is not referred to anywhere, I think, in the Scott Report—namely, the very rapid change that is going on in the age position of our population. We have got an ageing population because we have got many people preserved by medical science from that very prolific period, the seventies and the eighties. Whether or not we have old people in such numbers, there cannot be so many of the same ages as there will be in the next few years, because they have not been born, but we may have more people of an older age, and that, too, is a factor which has to be considered in any planning that is to be done.

And so I put this question to myself when I read the Scott Report: Have the Committee really envisaged the fact that the young people of the country, always precious, are more precious than ever? Have they envisaged the fact fully and explicity that these young people have got be given a very much better environment than they have had in the years before the war if they are to develop into what they can develop into? And have the Committee thought of how to deal with the problems of an ageing population? If we are to have industry, as we must have, for we are an industrial country and cannot get away from it, and if we are to have industry prosperous, we must have healthy workers in the industries; and if we are to have healthy workers they have got to come from homes in a healthy environment. Our industries have been eating the country population ever since the beginning of the industrial revolution. People have gone from the country to the towns. That cannot go on indefinitely. My home is in the country and I know the sort of conditions that exist around us—they are typical—in connexion with the human stocks. We must bring back the population from the towns and bring the young people into the country.

How is that to be done? It must be done not only by agriculture but by industry of all sorts. With electricity, which creates no local nuisance, we are able to provide with power factories in the country which are not an eye-sore. They will make the country different because around them there will be people who work in them. That will mean that there will be a change in the small country towns and in the villages, but it will be a desirable change. For fifteen years, from 1924 to 1939, I was engaged, as some of your Lordships may be aware, in perhaps as big a development of creating new centres for life and work as any member of your Lordships' House. I was concerned, and still am, with the copper belt in Northern Rhodesia. There in a place which was just savage wild we have been able to create new towns surrounding new industries, for Europeans and for Africans, and to provide them with centres of interest and life and energy in what we call great clubs, but which are really large community centres for providing opportunities for social gatherings, for games, for lectures, for dances, in fact for all the life that goes to make people happy and contented in their leisure hours.

It seems to me that we have ahead of us a great opportunity in this country to build new towns—small towns, not great towns—and new villages on lines something like those which I have tried briefly to sketch to you. In that way, and only in that way I believe, shall we be able to get life back into the country because these small towns and villages will themselves be a help to agriculture. I know it will be a different England, but the conditions that made the England with which we are familiar to-day—I am speaking geographically—the England that we all love so much, were economic conditions that have passed. New eco- nomic conditions will compel change. What we have to consider to-day is what is the best machinery to bring about an adequate study and an adequate discussion and ventilation of the problems that lie ahead of us. I believe that all this planning has got to be under a Minister of high rank and influence. He must be responsible to Parliament. Behind him there must be a highly expert staff, the sort of staff which is envisaged in the proposed Commission—not the department that is going to carry out the actual development. We want a general staff of national organization which will include a very strong representation from the medical side, because after all the profession that is most closely concerned with the physical life of the people is the medical profession, and that is the human problem that we can all be most interested in.

My noble friend Viscount Astor raised a moment ago the question of some redistribution of power among local authorities. I think all of us who have been thinking a good deal, as I have been, about this problem of population distribution, must feel that many of the local authorities as they exist to-day have a vested interest in over-population. It is a most pernicious thing that it should be so. Therefore it seems to me that there ought to be established in connexion with planning a redistribution of local power among what I may call Regional Councils. I am not suggesting that Regional Commissioners, the nominated officials appointed for war purposes, should be continued. If anybody suggested that to me, I should say: God forbid. But there should be Regional Councils to relieve the centre which is going to be very busy, as Viscount Astor has pointed out, with many problems concerned with the detailed study and detailed decisions in connexion with national planning. That I think is essential. Below these there would remain county councils and so on, but that any authority should be concerned directly to exercise and able to exercise a veto on proposals as to how the population is to be distributed in a more health-giving way I think is wrong.

I feel sure that everyone who has listened to this debate has a clearer mind about what is wanted than before. I think we have found that we all really mean the same thing, although some throw a little more emphasis here and others a little more emphasis there. But there is almost universal agreement—I believe it to be completely universal agreement—that we have got to get this Central Planning Authority. After so many brilliant speeches on the subject I do not want to say anything in detail on the financial side. I would only stress my fundamental agreement with the proposals of the Uthwatt Committee. I think they are extremely helpful, and I think as the noble Earl, Lord De La Warr, said, that you cannot possibly get universal agreement on everything, but that you will get something much worse if you do not agree. Therefore I think we ought to make it quite plain, as has been said by other noble Lords, to the Government that they should adopt the Uthwatt Report, perhaps with minor modifications, but without destroying or weakening its essential principles. With the creation of a general staff of planning I think we can look forward to the future with the certainty that we will not be quite unprepared when peace breaks out.

LORD SEMPILL

My Lords, I will not detain you more than a few minutes, but I should be grateful if you will allow me to make a few observations on the all-important subject of communications which have only been briefly referred to in this extremely interesting debate. My noble friend Lord Latham is very much to be congratulated on focusing our attention on these vital problems. We have all listened very closely to the debate which has gone on for two days, but in that debate and in the previous debate on a similar subject raised by my noble friend Lord Reith, too little has been said of the question of communications. I hope that on some future occasion the noble Lord who controls these matters with such distinction will give us his views on them and some idea of the plans he has for the future.

I feel that your Lordships will accept the fact that psychological and economic planning cannot be divorced from physical planning. Physical planning is a technical operation which must follow certain first principles. Such a plan, I suggest, consists at the outset in making marks on a map to indicate the location of buildings, whatever function they may eventually have to fulfil. These marks will be grouped when certain functions are best operated in locations which should be near in time to one another. Physical nearness is often not possible, but the same effect can almost always be got by providing an equivalent—that is, nearness in time. This nearness in time is determined by the road, which must therefore be recognised as amongst the fundamentals of planning. No house, farm, factory, field, harbour, bridge or the all-important aerodrome can be used or operated at all unless it can be reached by road.

Roads, therefore, are also essential to the working of any plan because they provide to-day the most flexible, prompt, convenient and far-reaching mode of transport. But for the immense taxation—latterly £63,000,000 per annum in addition to the payment of road upkeep—they would, for many classes of carriage, prove to be the cheapest. It is to be deplored that their use has been attended by a great toll of accidents, but I suggest that for this there are two reasons, the simplicity of which, perhaps, has led to their being overlooked. In the first place, no attempt has been made in this country, so far, to provide absolute segregation from one another of the two types of road traffic which are utterly incompatible—to wit "through" traffic and "service" traffic, of which the latter, of course, includes pedestrian traffic. The second reason I suggest is that, whereas one category of traffic units, to wit, the 3,000,000 motor vehicles, has been subjected to some 2,000 mandatory regulations, the major number of traffic units, the 30,000,000 pedestrians, have been subjected to no guidance by any habit-forming rule of conduct—after the fashion of the "show your helm" rule of the sea—which would lead to their intended next move being foreseeable.

I leave this second matter aside to revert to the former which is of more direct and, I think, of cardinal importance to every part of the projected physical plan. I mean the provision of segregation by means of "through" roads for non-stop "through" traffic. I suggest that the only known method of segregation is by means of the motorway. As your Lordships will remember, this was first developed by the Axis Powers and was displayed in being in Germany to a Parliamentary Committee of both Houses consisting of 250 persons, in, I think, the year 1938. It is, I suggest, by no means a bad thing to learn from experience, even when the experience is that of our enemy. Perhaps your Lordships may remember that when, in 1935, Hitler was asked by the British chairman of a visiting automobile organization: "What is your purpose in making these thousands of miles of motorways?" the answer was instant: "I am making these Autobahnen in order that it may be possible to develop industry in those places that are best for industry, and not be limited to those places where there happens to be a railway station." His ultimate purpose was, no doubt, war, but his proximate purpose was to allow of the most efficient planning of industry and agriculture. He thus freed the planners in their choice of location for the industrial population in a way they never have been freed in this country.

If, at the same time, Hitler neglected (as he certainly did) his railway system, in this he was wrong, but that does not vitiate the fundamental usefulness of a clever road system. It was found that with average speeds as high as fifty-five miles per hour the fuel and tyre consumption per mile run, instead of rising as was anticipated by some, was reduced by 30 per cent. It was also found, by contrasting the number of accidents on 100 miles of these high-speed motorways with the number on the corresponding 100 miles of mixed traffic roads between the same two places, that the accidents were reduced by 83 per cent. on the motorways.

If I were to be asked where these safe routes for segregated traffic could be run in this country, my reply would be: "Wherever it is desirable to relieve a line of towns, villages and hamlets from the dangers of mixed traffic roads, while yet ensuring that the inhabitants are not cut off from the rest of the life of the community." That is where these motorways, I suggest, are most desirable. Their routes, of course, must be decided on a proper survey of these facts whilst yet utilizing only such land as is not otherwise valuable. In this connexion the facts brought to life by the traffic manager of one of the greatest manufacturing concerns in this country (Mr. F. Smith, of Lever Brothers), while they may have been noted by some of your Lordships are, perhaps, not widely known. They show that out of the 39,300 towns, townlets and villages of this country, no fewer than 31,500 have no railway station. We have 20,000 miles of railway routes, and 120,000 miles of roads. I do not suggest that stations should be provided everywhere, or that it would be possible to pay for them; none the less, the effect of this isolation, taken together with our bad road layout, is obviously related to, if it is not actually the cause of, the undesirable concentration of our industries and our industrial population which was referred to in such detail by my noble friend who preceded me in this debate.

The undoubted need for an improvement in our road communications is fully admitted by the very fact that in 1937, under the Trunk Road Act, 4,500 miles of our tortuous road network were handed over to a central authority to widen, straighten and adapt to trunk traffic, at a cost which was subsequently estimated to be £240,000,000. This procedure would have attracted our trunk traffic into the midst of our mixed traffic, and would certainly have disastrous consequences so far as concerns the children, the aged, the harried pedestrian, the cattle and all other traffic that necessarily uses the roads on to which every farm, field and village house door unavoidably opens and delivers its victims. Such a road scheme is the ultimate negation of sane planning. The suggestion has recently been made in your Lordships' House by the most reverend and noble Lord, Lord Lang of Lambeth, that our past efforts at planning have been attended by progressive deterioration of beauty and by further ribbon development. That seems to me to be largely ascribable to the neglect of the road problem. If the Minister had exercised the power given to him to forbid access to the new by-pass roads and to the approach roads to towns, no single house or factory would have been built to front on to any of these great roads, and there would therefore have been no ribbon development. I hope that the noble and learned Viscount on the Woolsack, when he comes to give us the views of His Majesty's Government on these matters, may see fit to give us some guidance in this respect.

THE LORD CHANCELLOR

My Lords, earlier in the debate to-day my noble friend Lord Balfour of Burleigh, who himself made so powerful and interesting a contribution to our debate, offered to the House an abbreviated sketch of what I was about to say, and pointed out, as of course is the fact, that although at Lord Portal's request I am saying a few words at the end of the discussion, I could not be expected to come forward now in order to make additional Government pronouncements on this subject. That is perfectly true; and it was not, therefore, altogether unnatural that my noble friend should have added, with complete good humour, that at the end of my speech the House would be just as wise as it was at the beginning. I must confess that, if I might choose my role, I would sooner be engaged in explaining the clauses of a Bill on this subject and endeavouring to explain why I thought that they could be justified and in meeting concrete criticisms on concrete points; but perhaps I may be allowed to say that one cannot always choose one's role or the occasions when one may take the course that one prefers.

While what my noble friend said may very well be true—and I certainly do not mind his saying it, and am greatly obliged to some of your Lordships for re-assembling to hear my closing words—there is another thing which is quite certain, and that is that, if we take this two days' debate as a whole, we may say that all of us will go away a good deal wiser than we were at the beginning. This has been a very remarkable debate. It offers a very good example of the value of discussion in this House of topics of public policy of first-class importance. I am not surprised that my noble friend Lord Astor, who had to acquaint himself with what was said on the first day by reading it in the Official Report, should have been struck, as I think any of us who have been here throughout have been struck, with the real value of the contributions which it has been possible for noble Lords who have taken part to make.

While these speeches are speeches of great weight and authority, it really cannot be said that all the speakers arrive at the same conclusion. If the Government looked to this debate to provide them with what the French call a directive, they will find only finger-posts which seem to me to point in several contradictory directions. The noble Lord, Lord Latham, in his detailed and analytical speech, to which I must return, and about which I have one or two modest observations to offer, did not accept either the Uthwatt Report or the Scott Report as pointing out the true method of advance. He warned us that he was not speaking for his Party. The speaker from the Front Bench of the Labour Party (Lord Wedgwood), who entered no such reservation, was the only noble Lord on the left of the Woolsack who contributed anything orally from that Bench. I am bound to say that I did not precisely follow the relevance of his recollections, but I gathered from occasional phrases, which I hastily jotted down, that he was not in favour of the Uthwatt Report. He referred to it at one illuminating moment as "this wretched Report," and advanced the proposition, particularly attractive to those of us who are not members of the Socialist Party, that the State is a very dangerous thing. That is the condition of opinion so far as it has found expression in that quarter of the House.

My noble friend Lord Radnor, following Lord Latham, explained that he had expected the noble Lord who moved the Motion to bless the Uthwatt Report, and declared himself somewhat embarrassed to find that from the Labour Benches his own objections were anticipated. I did not myself think that it cramped the noble Earl's style at all, or at any rate he recovered from it, because I should like to extract two sentences from his most interesting speech. First of all, he thought that the suggestions in the Uthwatt Report "will be found to be quite unworkable," and secondly, he described one of the principal recommendations of that Report as "absurd" because, he said, it proposed to give "power to a public body to purchase land compulsorily from a private individual in order to relet it to another private individual for development, and presumably to let to that third party for the benefit of his own pocket." I should dearly like to indulge myself in this interesting scrap. There are a lot of things I am prepared to say at the proper time, but this at least is a moment when my lips are sealed.

I feel that I surely shall be doing what is right by the general course of the debate if I remind your Lordships of the very important and impressive contribution made yesterday by the most reverend Pre- late the Archbishop of York. He is a man who, as your Lordships know, has really spent a great deal of his life in making himself at first hand personally and really acquainted with what you may call the rural problem, and his speech seemed to me, if I may presume to say so, an admirable example of an informed contribution made by a prominent ecclesiastic on a social and economic problem which he thoroughly understands. He put in his plea for a strong, effective central authority. He made what, to me at least, seems a most sensible remark, that whatever the Scott Committee may be supposed to entertain as an ideal, there must be dispersal of industry into the country.

I remember that in the days long ago when I was in the House of Commons as member for Walthamstow, just outside London, and when I used to expound, as I did nightly, the merits of the Lloyd George Budget, I called attention one evening to the fact that this spread-over into the country was an inevitable consequence of the development of our native land, and that it was perhaps worth while when you had taken your ticket at Liverpool Street in order to travel to Waltham-stow, to notice and reflect upon the names of the intervening railway stations. There was Bishopsgate. No doubt in ancient times it was the point in the walled City of London where the town ended and the country began. Then you came to Bethnal Green, which is not quite so green as it used to be. Then you came to Cambridge Heath, where in the good old days the highwaymen used to stop the travellers from Cambridge. Next came London Fields—there are not many fields there now. And lastly you came to Hackney Downs, which again at present are largely covered by bricks and mortar. Nothing that you can do will alter the fact, in a country like ours, that there will be this spreading from industrial centres into some wider area. The real question is not whether there should be such a spreading: it must be so; but the real question is, is it possible to devise regulations and conditions under which that may be done in orderly fashion for the general benefit of the community? That is the point which the Archbishop made, and it is one which I thought was worth recalling to your Lordships just now.

Then we came to the pair of brethren, the noble Viscount, Lord Samuel and the noble Lord, Lord Balfour of Burleigh, each of whom is an enthusiastic planner and a strong supporter of the Uthwatt Report—with the striking difference that my noble friend close to me is a determined opponent of the Commission which the Uthwatt Report recommends, while Lord Balfour of Burleigh, as I understand, favours the other view. I am not saying at all that that is unnatural, but since admittedly one of the very first things now to be declared is the Government's policy on this very question, the Central Planning Authority's nature and functions, the mere fact of that contrast does show, as Lord De La Warr said in his speech early this afternoon, that this question is one of the most intense complication, not capable of a simple or a concrete solution, which is bound to involve a great many points and provisions one way or the other which will not be universally accepted.

And here I would like to take up a reference, I may say an appeal, made to me by my noble friend Lord Astor, who has evidently been spending the morning in reading the debates in both Houses, when he asked for an assurance that, notwithstanding these difficulties—and they are very great—that would not be regarded as a reason why legislation as prompt as possible on this sort of subject should not be pursued. He asked in effect that the Government should in this House repeat the assurance that was given to the other, and that is quite right, for I conceive that your Lordships are entitled to similar treatment on such a matter. I will not delay, but I will simply say categorically that the assurance that the Lord Privy Seal there gave is one upon which undoubtedly both Houses of Parliament may rely.

I will read, if I may, a few of the words which he used. He reminded the House that he had earlier said this: It will be generally agreed that, as a first consideration, our deliberations must be concentrated upon matters or measures which are vitally connected with the effective prosecution of the war; nevertheless, we have now reached a stage at which it may be necessary for Parliament to consider legislation arising from or out of conditions created by the war on which there is a general measure of agreement. The right honourable gentleman, my colleague the Lord Privy Seal, went on to expand this in the course of his speech. He said: As was pointed out in the gracious Speech, the Government have instituted a number of inquiries into the sort of action it may be necessary to take in order to deal with the perplexities of peace, and it will be in your Lordships' recollection that there was a reference in the gracious Speech to both the Uthwatt and the Scott Reports. The right honourable gentleman went on: and the Government statement which I have cited contemplates that, in the course of this Session, it may be necessary to introduce legislation, additional to that required for dealing with the immediate war situation, which additional legislation will relate to actual conditions of difficulty that have been created by the war, with a view to easing conditions when the war is over. I think your Lordships may take it that the Government are not going to set up the fact that this topic raises difficulties and controversies as a final and conclusive reason for denying the possibility of further action.

I should like now without delaying any longer to return to the speech made by the noble Lord, Lord Latham. As I have said, he stated the case as he saw it against the proposals of these two Committees, proposals which are designed to promote orderly planning, and my noble friend felt it right to indicate what he thought was a preferable mode of action. I am speaking quite summarily, because it is too late in the day to go into precise detail, but I state it fairly, I hope, when I say that his view was that the right line was quite different, the right line was nationalization, and the right line was the rating of site values. I desire to submit to the House, without seeking to conduct controversy at this hour, that whatever may be said for either of these proposals, they are not really contributions to planning at all.

Take the second one first. The point was made in anticipation of what I intended to say by my noble friend Lord Balfour of Burleigh. The rating of site values, to the general principle of which I have never expressed objection, because I believe some such system has behind it much that is just and fair, has amongst other things the purpose of compelling, or at any rate doing all you can to force, the owner of a site to develop it to its fullest possible extent. I gathered from one of the interstices of the oration by my noble friend Lord Wedgwood that he desired to convey the same thought to the House. The whole idea is that here you have people who are not putting the land they own to the best possible use. The best use is the developed use. If it is undeveloped, but is ripe for development, it ought to be developed. If it is partly developed, but is ripe for complete development, it ought to be completely developed. And in order to assist the landowner in his duty, let us clap on a rate or tax upon the site value of the land, and that will make him build a hotel on the top of it, or whatever other thing is the maximum way of developing his land. That is what it is. One would not say there is not a very great deal in theory, and it may be in more than theory, to be said for that view, but I respectfully beg to point out that that conception is in precise and flat contradiction of the conception involved in planning?

The object of planning is to secure that people should not, except by leave, develop their property to the highest possible degree. If a man does want to put houses on his site, he is not to be allowed to put houses up unless he gets the leave of the proper authority. The Archbishop of York said in his speech yesterday that there are areas in the north of London which would make some of the best market gardens in tile world and which, in the days when everybody growing vegetables in the suburbs brought their stuff to Covent Garden, produced much food, but which to-day are covered with houses. If your instrument is the weapon of the rating of site value, that is a very good way of compelling these areas to be covered with houses. On the other hand, the Archbishop of York and others, in this debate, after having, quite rightly, attached importance to regular and controlled planning, contemplate that there should not be such a development save under direction. Therefore I submit, with great respect to my noble friend, that whatever he may say in favour of the rating of site values, it has nothing in the world to do with any possible contribution to town or country planning.

I am afraid I take the same view about nationalization. Putting aside the perfectly enormous range of such an operation, which I should have thought is quite inconceivable in the course of the war; putting aside all the formidable questions that arise about compensation, which I gather Lord Latham would, to a large extent, avoid by the process of not paying compensation unless he was convinced manifest injustice had been done—putting aside all that, when the State had acquired the land, is planning any further on? Not at all Planning is not a question of ownership; it is a question of control and management. Take an example very well known to your Lordships at this moment—the county agricultural committees. In many counties these committees are giving directions that such and such a crop shall be planted, such and such a field shall be ploughed up, and they are exercising a most effective control over agricultural areas. That is a form of management, a form of planning. Does anybody suggest that powers are required that they should own the farms which they direct? Not in the least.

The ownership of the land is not in itself a factor on the way to planning, as long as you have got adequate legislative power for the purpose of giving the necessary directions and control. I therefore submit to my noble friend Lord Latham that, whether he is right or not in his strong denunciation of the Uthwatt and Scott Reports, it is a mistake to suppose that there is a happy alternative round the corner, and that all you have got to do is to nationalize the land, put a rate on site values, and then you will be well on the way to achieve your purpose. I do not think so. Though I must say it would require a very long examination to satisfy every reasonable man that every recommendation in the Uthwatt Report is right, there is good common sense in the view that Lord Samuel and Lord Geddes expressed to-day, that if it is decided that we must take action on this subject, and take it promptly, it is a mistake to suppose we may still hesitate among a large number of alternatives, because I fancy that these Committees have addressed themselves to the heart of the matter and have exposed, with all their difficulties, what in substance is involved if the thing is going to be done.

The only other observation I have to make is this, because I do not desire to delay the House, and my noble friend will no doubt wish to say a word before he withdraws his Motion. I think it is a pity that the discussion on this tremendously difficult and important matter should, every now and then, evoke from an enthusiastic planner the reproach of Procrastination. I hope I have as honest a wish to see desirable changes in the law promptly made as any man, but really, if you consider what is involved, I see no ground whatever for impeaching the Government as though they were guilty in this matter of undue delay. It is very natural to say so, because it is one way of getting things done, just as every schoolmaster is tempted to tell a pupil that if he has not finished his lesson in five minutes he will be kept in for an hour. Admittedly, this is one of the most complex and difficult questions that could be conceived. My noble friend Lord Geddes just now, going in for the whole Report, said we ought to get legislation adopting it all. No one knows better than my noble friend that that is not the way to legislate. We cannot just let the Uthwatt Report become "Exhibit A." it involves an enormous amount of detailed and careful consideration, clause by clause. I am very glad indeed to think it is not suggested that we cannot legislate about anything unless we legislate about everything. There are some things that come first, but it is bound to be a most tremendous business, and while, of course, that is a good reason for urging that there should be no waste of time, I must associate myself with what my noble friend Lord Portal said, and repeat that I cannot accept the statement that there is any undue delay.

My noble friend Lord Samuel, in the only part of his speech which did not exhibit that restraint which he usually shows, found it a matter of surprise, if not of grievance, that in the King's Speech there was no announcement that legislation on this subject was about to be introduced. Is the suggestion that the Government in these circumstances should announce legislation first and plan the legislation afterwards? That seems to me a most dangerous view. I think I remember a Government before the war which in the King's Speech announced that proposals would be made to deal with the problem of unemployment, and at the time the Session came to an end (not entirely owing to the Government's fault), the fact was that unemployment was much worse than it had been at the beginning. I really think in a matter of this importance and complexity it is only right for the Government to have reached a conclusion as to what they propose to do, on perhaps a large number of the most difficult questions, before they announce that there is going to be legislation.

Such a matter surely is one which would hardly be dealt with by any Government without the deliberate and mature consideration of the most important Ministers and members of the War Cabinet. I would draw your Lordships' attention to the date of the Report of the Uthwatt Committee. I am speaking of the Final Report. It was published on the 1oth September. I do not know that it appears from the document but it is the fact that it was only received in the previous month is there really any ground for saying there has been any procrastination or any ground for reproach because the Government between the 1oth of September and the present date have not been able to reach those conclusions which we all hope it may be possible for the Government to announce very shortly? The 1oth September was the day on which British troops first landed in Madagascar, it was in the week in which very heavy fighting was going on at Stalingrad and appeals of all sorts were being made to us, it was just at the time when the enemy had carried out a major offensive in Egypt against the Eighth Army, and the Eighth Army to their eternal glory had just held them up. Can any noble Lord or any citizen say in those circumstances what procrastination or what delay has occurred because the War Cabinet were not in a position to authorize legislation about planning? it would almost appear from what I have stated as though the War Cabinet had had something else to do. The same reflection occurs and must occur to all of us to-day in regard to some of the rather light-hearted clamour on the subject of the Second Front. It is just possible that the War Cabinet even to-day may be necessarily involved in the most continuous labour upon even more immediate objects in those circumstances I do think I may fairly claim that on the statement of Lord Portal the Government should not be regarded in this matter as having been wilfully or negligently wanting in diligence.

There is one quotation with which I will conclude. I am not sure it is not the same quotation that in part was referred to by one of your Lordships. I would say that anybody who endeavours at this moment to form a fair and just judgment of the situation is entitled to ask the Government whether they do or do not accept what is the basis of the Uthwatt Report printed on page II and in paragraph 17. I will venture to read the words. This Committee said: The first assumption we have made is that national planning is intended to be a reality and a permanent feature of the administration of the internal affairs of this country. We assume that it will be directed to ensuring that the best use is made of land with a view to securing economic efficiency for the community and well-being for the individual, and that it will be recognized that this involves the subordination to the public good of the personal interests and wishes of landowners. Unreserved acceptance of this conception of planning is vital to a successful reconstruction policy, for every aspect of a nation's activity is ultimately dependent on land. My Lords, I am not perhaps saying anything very new, but I am none the less stating what is important when I conclude by assuring your Lordships that that assumption is the assumption on which Government policy is based.

LORD LATHAM

My Lords, at this late hour I will confine myself to just a few remarks. I would say first of all, having been informed that certain animadversions were made as to my late arrival at your Lordships' House to-day, that it was due entirely to circumstances beyond my control and ought not to be taken as indicating any discourtesy or any lack of respect for your Lordships' House. The fact is I had a public appointment which had been arranged before I knew that this debate would go over till to-day, and it was impossible for me not to keep in part that appointment. I have listened with some surprise, if I may say so, to the interpretation given by the noble Lord on the Woolsack to my speech yesterday. I can find no authority in what I said for the statement that I offered, as an alternative to the proposals of the Uthwatt Committee, nationalization. I only introduced a reference to nationalization, with which I said in principle I agreed, as I do, in contrast to the piecemeal nationalization which would issue from the operation of the development rights scheme, but nowhere did I put forward nationalization as a contribution at this stage to the solution of planning problems.

Nor did I put forward the rating of site values as a solution of the problem. What I did was to express a preference for the rating of site values to the proposal in the Uthwatt Report for a periodic levy upon an increase in values, and, if I may say so, a fair representation of what I said is this, that the problem of planning consists of three factors: one, the control of development; another, payment of fair compensation; and the third, catching increases in value which arise from betterment or from general community influences. Now the members of the Uthwatt Committee were not appointed to consider primarily planning. The reference to the Uthwatt Committee, as I understand it, was to consider the problems of compensation and betterment in so far as they related to planning. I offered as an alternative to the proposals of the Uthwatt Committe of (a) the development rights scheme, and (b) the periodic levy, the following: (1) control over the development of all land with the reservations as to compensation which the noble Viscount on the Woolsack has correctly repeated; (2) the rating of site values which, in my view, would solve the problem of compensation and betterment in a fairer, more efficient and more desirable way than would the periodic levy.

Those were my submissions and I hope that I developed them sufficiently accurately to make them understandable at all events to most of your Lordships. The relation of the rating of site values to planning is very close. One of the problems of planning is that there is not sufficient land for planning at places where it ought to exist, and to the extent that the application of the principle of rating site values fosters development it would be a contribution to planning and development. The purpose behind my Motion was to urge upon the Government the consideration of these important problems. After the statement made by the noble Lord, Lord Portal, and the supplementation that was made by the noble and learned Viscount on the Woolsack, having their assurance that the Government are giving urgent attention to these problems, I beg leave to withdraw my Motion.

Motion, by leave, withdrawn.

House adjourned.