Lords Sitting of 2 June 1943

Preamble
The House met, The LORD CHANCELLOR on the Woolsack.

BATTLE OF THE ATLANTIC.
LORD ADDISON: My Lords, I should like to ask His Majesty's Government a question of which I have given private notice—namely, whether any statement can be made as to recent progress in anti-U-boat warfare.
THE PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY OF THE ADMIRALTY (LORD BRUNTISFIELD): My Lords, I am obliged to the noble Lord for giving me this Opportunity of informing your Lordships about the progress of the battle against the U-boats. In December, January and February last, shipping losses were much lower than a year before. For a variety of reasons March was a poor month, though not the worst of the war; indeed, owing to the high output of new tonnage achieved in the United States, there was a substantial net gain in that month. In April and May losses have been reduced again to the level of the three months December to February, and even below it. In each of the first five months of this year there has been a substantial reduction on the figure of the corresponding period of last year, and a saving of inure than one-third of the losses over the whole of the five mouths. With the American merchant shipping programme nearing its peak, this improved level of losses has resulted in large increases to the tonnage available to the United Nations.
This improved situation in the Battle of the Atlantic reflects the growing size of our escort forces, both ships and aircraft, and the growing deadliness of our new weapons and devices. The increased escorts available make possible not only a higher scale of protection but also a higher general standard of training, and, this, in turn, enables our ships and the aircraft of Coastal Command and the United States Air Forces to reap, by the harmony and co-operation in which they work, a higher dividend from their constantly improving tactics. The escort carriers, of which several are now in service, have already
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proved their worth. By these means the curve of U-boat destruction has been kept steadily rising. During the last twelve months the number of "kills" exceeds that of the whole of the previous period of the war, and in the last six months the rate of destruction has been 25 per cent. above that of the previous six months. Large numbers have been damaged in addition. In the last two months the number of U-boats in the Atlantic Battle appears to have decreased. This has no doubt been due to more than one cause, but principally to the rising rate of kills at sea. From the provisional assessments it looks as if the number of U-boats destroyed in May will exceed the number which the enemy may probably have brought into service. Certainly May is the best month of the war for "kills" so far.
While the changed situation has thus been primarily due to the increased rate of destruction of U-boats at sea, there can be no doubt that the number of U-boats operating has also been affected by the bombing of the U-boat building yards and of the operational bases in the Bay of Biscay by both American and Royal Air Force bombers. As time goes on the bombing of the building yards and component factories should have an ever-increasing effect. We must no doubt still be prepared to encounter setbacks and periods of heavy loss. The enemy is bound to make great efforts to alter the present situation. Nevertheless, the report I have just made discloses a number of favourable tendencies, and I can give the unqualified assurance that the enemy are quite wrong in asserting, as they have clone, that the low rate of sinkings in April was due to the small amount of shipping at sea. In that month our imports were the highest since the beginning of 1942. The general improvement: in spite of the tremendous U-boat efforts against us, is in itself a tribute to all concerned, including officers and men of the Royal Navy, the Fleet Air Arm, the Royal Canadian Navy and the Merchant Navy, the pilots and crews of the Coastal Command and the Bomber Command of the Royal Air Force, and officers and men of the Allied Navies and Air Forces. I would also mention the work of the training establishments, the technicians, the scientists, and the staffs and all sections of workers in the shipyards and aeroplane factories. I feel sure your Lordships can

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rely upon all concerned to continue the good work, without any relaxation of their efforts in any respect until the U-boat menace is driven from the seas.
LORD ADDISON: My Lords, I am sure the whole House and the country outside will receive with gratitude and relief the encouraging report which the noble Lord has given us.
LORD STRABOLGI: My Lords, may I ask my noble friend, arising out of the very heartening statement we have just had, whether the Government have reconsidered their policy with regard to publishing actual figures? I suggest that the publishing of the actual sinkings of merchant shipping and the destruction of U-boats, as was done in the last war, might well be considered.
LORD BRUNTISFIELD: My Lords, if the noble Lord will allow me to say so, that hardly arises out of the question which I have answered, and I really do not wish to add anything to the statement I have made.

CONSOLIDATED FUND (No. 3) BILL.
Brought from the Commons, endorsed with the Certificate from the Speaker that the Bill is a Money Bill within the meaning of the Parliament Act, 1911; and read 1.
SUNDAY ENTERTAINMENTS ACT, 1932:

  TOWNSHIPS OF ORMSKIRK AND BURSCOUGH IN THE URBAN DIS TRICT OF ORMSKIRK ORDER.
  THE PARLIAMENTARY UNDER-SECRETARY OF STATE FOR INDIA AND BURMA (THE EARL OF MUNSTER): My Lords, I beg to move the Motion which stands in my name on the Paper.
  Moved, That the Order made by the Secretary of State for the Home Department under the Sunday Entertainments Act, 1932, and laid before the House yesterday, be approved.—(The Earl of Munster.)
  On Question, Motion agreed to.

GERMAN ECONOMIC DESIGNS.
VISCOUNT MAUGHAM VISCOUNT MAUGHAM had the following Notice on the Paper: To ask His Majesty's Government, in view of the
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evident intention of the Axis Powers, in anticipation of their own defeat, to destroy the means of industrial competition in the countries which they have occupied, whether they intend, in co-operation with their Allies, to use all possible means to prevent this result; and to move for Papers.
The noble and learned Viscount said: My Lords, on the 7th April last I had a Motion before the House relating to the question of restitution and replacement of looted property. I am afraid I occupied your Lordships some little time in considering that matter, and I would not have ventured to put down another Motion on part of the same subject unless I thought that there was something quite new that I had to say to your Lordships. I also believe that on the last occasion I failed to some extent to make good the case which I was presenting before you. The noble and learned Viscount on the Woolsack, who replied for the Government, told us that there had been a Declaration on the 5th January this year, under which questions of what I call restitution were being considered, and as regards which the Government were taking steps to ensure that articles which could be identified would certainly be returned as a result of the war. But I think I failed—at any rate as far as we can tell I failed—to impress upon the noble and learned Viscount, or perhaps on this House, the enormous importance of the doctrine of replacement by equivalent articles, in the widest sense, of those things which the Germans have taken.
The inadequacy of restitution in specie will be perfectly plain to anyone who considers the cunning of the Teutonic mind. As soon as it is said that a vast number of all sorts of things have to be returned, in the first place it will be very difficult to find them—Germany is a very large country and there are lots of good hiding places; and, in the second place, the marks of identity will be destroyed. But, beyond that—which is only by the way—the question of replacement is of enormously greater magnitude and importance than the question of restitution in specie. I shall, before I sit down, be able to give your Lordships some first-rate evidence to show the enormous value of the articles which have been taken away by the Germans, especially the articles which are being taken away from adjoining countries with the deliberate intention of

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making it impossible for those countries to compete with the Germans after the war.
Before I say anything more I should like to observe this, that I have the disadvantage in addressing this House in that I am known, I am afraid, as a lawyer. No doubt a number of your Lordships may consider there is something technical in what I have to say, and that you cannot be expected to follow it closely or to understand more than a small portion of it. I wish to say at the outset that, except for perhaps two sentences, there is nothing technical in what I am going to say. I am not really speaking on the whole as a lawyer at all. I am forgetting everything I have learnt as a lawyer, except the enormous importance of justice. There are two circumstances which make it absolutely necessary, as a matter of elementary justice, that replacement should be effected after we have the Germans thoroughly beaten. The first is the scale on which the plundering has proceeded in no fewer than ten countries, and the second is the fact, as I conceive it, that no other method of giving these devastated countries a reasonable hope of restoring their economic and industrial welfare for years is possible except the method of replacement of the things which have been taken.
The position I was in on April 7 was that had obtained information with regard to the loot from all, or nearly all, the Embassies and Legations in London, and had therefore been able to ascertain a good deal about what had been looted in those countries. Since then the United States, through a body which has been at work in that country, have been able to obtain a much greater and more recent amount of information even than the Embassies themselves. That is occasioned by the circumstance that, as your Lordships will remember, the United States were not at war with Germany until December, 1941. Until that time they were in the position of having Embassies in the countries which are now occupied by the Germans, and were able to obtain the most ample information from those countries as to what had been going on.
The United States, through a body called the United States Board of Economic Warfare, have recently published some fairly detailed accounts of the position in those various countries. In
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particular they have summarized the whole position in statements which have been published here, though the full documents have not yet reached this country—at any rate not up to yesterday, when I had the pleasure of visiting the Embassy of the United States in London. They have produced the facts up to the end of 1941, which is eighteen months ago. Some of the most important of the statements were published in a résumé in The Times a week ago. I obtained these documents from the Embassy, and though I cannot put my hand on them at the moment, I am able to tell your Lordships the substance of them. The most singular and striking fact is that the loot from those countries amounted at the end of ro4r to no less a sum, according to the view of this Board, than £9,000,000,000. In order that your Lordships may get some idea of what this astronomical figure indicates, I would remind you that after the last war our experts, including a very eminent member of this House, came to the conclusion that Germany could not possibly pay in cash, currencies, and goods an amount exceeding £2,000,000,000. In other words, the Germans at the end of Top had managed to get, according to the view expressed by this Board, more than four times as much as the whole sum which the experts said the Germans could possibly pay at the end of the last war.
I do not want to repeat what I said on the last occasion, but the German system of looting has enabled them to take practically everything they wanted from all these countries. They have driven away cattle, they have taken away works of art—I am not concerned to go into that to-day—they have taken away the equipment of scientific bodies, they have taken books from the libraries, the whole equipment of numerous factories, all such things as machinery for textile production, machinery, in fact, for every possible industry which could compete with the Germans after the war. All these things have been placed on trolleys, wagons and so on, which have rumbled along the roads to Germany, or it has taken hundreds and hundreds of railway wagons to take them to that country. I wish I had the papers here to read, as I had intended to read, a list of some of the things which these people have taken from the devastated countries. It is inconceivable. But at any rate I can say that, according

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to the evidence before me coming from the statements of the United States Board and from the reports which I have obtained from the various Embassies and Legations here, they have taken every imaginable thing of any industrial use, and unless something is done the adjoining countries will not be able for years to be put upon the footing of industrial and economic power which will enable them to manage their lives in the way in which they managed them before the aggression by Hitler and his myrmidons.
I now want to say something on the point of the inadequacy of Reparations as we know the word and as we used it after the last war. And I propose to give, with your Lordships' indulgence, a very brief history of what happened to the Reparation clauses in the Treaty of Versailles. We had an elaborate clause in that great Treaty under which Germany, after having admitted her guilt, proceeded to promise or to become bound by the Treaty to make Reparations. In the first instance the amount of Reparations was left vague and uncertain, but in the month of May, 1921, just about the time when Germany started making Reparations, the amount to be paid was fixed by the Allies at the sum of £6,600,000,000. Now the cost of the war to the Allied countries was certainly not less than £48,000,000,000, so that the amount was fixed, as the result of sympathy with Germany, at a fraction of the cost of the war, and payment of that sum of £6,600,000,000 was going to be spread over a large number of years. I may add, as the sort of figure which may be compared with it, that the restoration of Northern France alone cost £830,000,000 sterling.
Germany organized sympathy all over the world, especially in the United States, and as against that figure of £6,600,000,000 some of your Lordships will be interested to be reminded of what Germany ultimately paid in cash and foreign exchange and what she ultimately paid in the total of deliveries of goods plus that cash and foreign exchange. She paid in cash and exchange sums amounting altogether to £253,000,000. That was the total amount she paid in cash and the total amount she paid including deliveries of goods was about £1,038,000,000. Those are the figures according to the reports of the Reparations Commission
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which, as your Lordships will remember, included a number of people from various countries. Germany as against that got £100,000,000 in loans under the Dawes and Young plans, and if you take what they got in cash from the £250,000,000 there is left £153,000,000. About the same time as the Dawes plan she managed to obtain loans from bankers and others in the United States and Great Britain amounting, roughly, to £1,000,000,000. She has never repaid that and the net result is that in effect Germany, if the figures of our Reparations Commission can be trusted, escaped any large Reparation payments at all, taking into account the loans she obtained from Great Britain, the United States and other countries. By the Lausanne Agreement of July, 1932, this country gave up all claims to further repayments on a final payment then of £150,000,000 which I have reckoned in the figures that I have already given to your Lordships.
I tell that story because it is material to bear in mind that Germany, when she is beaten to her knees, will no doubt be just as clever as she was before, if she is able to, and will try to find as many dupes as she found in this country and America about 1932 and thereabouts. What was the result? When this present war was declared, Hitler in 1939 stated in the Reichstag that from the years 1933 to 1939 he had spent 95,000,000,000 gold marks on rearmament which, translated into sterling, is £8,000,000,000. That is many times as much as Germany had ever handed over to the Allied countries in Reparations. By 1928 the German national income was 75 per cent. higher than it had been in the year 1913. She had not suffered by the war except in men and loss of prestige and things of that sort. She was the richest country in Europe and she had managed in one way or another to prevent any economic suffering notwithstanding one of the biggest defeats in history.
If your Lordships have any doubt about this being the effect of the way in which the Versailles Treaty was operated, and the way in which we were deceived, you can find it if you like in a little book costing eighteenpence called The Greatest Swindle in the World, produced under the auspices of the Czechoslovak Government during the last month or so and written by Mr. Borsky, with a preface by my noble friend Lord Vansittart which does

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not err on the side of being wanting in vigour and character and determination. It is well worth the money, and I hope your Lordships will take the opportunity of buying it. You can see it on the book-stalls; it has a nice striking cover. But you will find these facts everywhere if you care to look at any recent work. You will find the beginning of them in substance in Mr. Lloyd George's most interesting book The Truth about the Peace Conference. I venture to say that the facts I have stated are not controverted except with regard to one figure, the figure which I gave you of £1,038,000,000 which Germany paid us by way of Reparations. That figure was disputed in the United States. It all depends on what we include in Reparations. My case, if I may so express it here to-day, is so good that I do not mind if you say it is £1,000,000,000 they paid us or £2,000,000,000. The result is just the same. In the end they gave us a sum, and we were duped into accepting a sum, so small that Germany was able to spend at once vast sums upon armaments and to begin this war with incomparably better equipment of all kinds than we had at that period.
I told your Lordships I would embark on law in about two sentences and I am going to do that now. There are people who think that the question I am raising to-day is a question of International Law; that it depends on definitions. I say that is complete nonsense. We are fighting a country which has paid not the smallest regard to any doctrines of International Law. It began on the first day by an act of piracy on the high seas and has continued ever since with acts which can only be explained as acts of brigands and swindlers and murderers. For anybody to suggest that we have a difficulty in getting back these articles which Germany has stolen because of International Law, is to my mind absolute and complete humbug. This practice of Germany in waging war of this kind, involving widespread robbery, is a new technique of warfare which requires a new answer. Of course you will not find anything about it in the works of Grotius or any of the eminent people who have written down to the time of Oppenheim and Lawrence and the rest, because the system which Hitler has adopted has not before been adopted in any European or, as far as I know, any civilized war whatsoever. The result is
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that a lack of precedents ought not to deter us in the least.
If a doctrine of International Law were required the only one we could call in aid, if necessary, would be the doctrine of reprisals. When another country does something contrary to the doctrines of International Law while engaged in belligerent warfare, obviously there is a system of reprisals, a justifiable measure in answering the illegality of the other side. When all is said and done, International Law is based upon reciprocity; it is based upon the fact that the enemy is going to comply with certain rules if you comply with them. What are we to do? I say it is not a question of International Law at all unless you call it a reprisal. De-looting Germany seems to me an absolute necessity in the interests of justice. It is the only thing which we can possibly do to prevent Germany—however much she is defeated and whatever losses of men she suffers during, it may be, the next year or longer—from making a profit by keeping these goods, this equipment and the multitudinous things she has taken from adjoining countries.
Unless we restore them the other countries will remain in a state of misery for years. Germany, for instance, has taken all the machines for the making of tools. What is going to happen to Belgium and Holland, to take only two examples? How are they to get other machinery? It is true America may be able to help to some extent, but we cannot help, and. America cannot provide machine tools for the whole world except over a lapse of time during which Germany will be prosperous because she has these things while other countries will be absolutely in a state of semi-starvation. If we can take articles, and equipment and plant, and all the other things I have referred to, similar to the things which have been looted from other countries and send them back without delay—and time is of the utmost importance in the case—then, I think, Germany will suffer by this war and will at last have got the idea that neither looting nor aggressive war pays.
I may mention in passing that there is not the smallest doubt in my mind that the Soviet Republics, as they advance, will certainly do what I am suggesting should be done by our people. I am also certain that the Russians will repay

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the German system of sending people to do forced labour in Germany by making Germans work in Russia. Whether we can do that or whether we care to do it is a thing I pass by to-day. But at any rate I am perfectly certain that, having regard to the enormous amount of things looted from Germany, there is no hope for these other countries, at any rate no hope in a life-time, unless we make up our minds that the equivalent of things looted shall be taken, as our troops advance from the respective zones of occupation, by the British and Russian troops and those of the other Allies, and returned without delay to the countries which have been despoiled. Cattle, locomotives and rolling stock, ships which were largely designed for the invasion of Britain, fishing boats, barges for the same purpose, wireless apparatus which in these days is a necessity for a country suffering from the kind of misery which is suffered under the Germans in order to preserve order and tell people what they are to do during the period of reconstruction: all these things must he returned as far as possible.
I must add this. After the last war the principle adopted was to obtain money and goods for Reparations, and the experts said that we could not get more than £2,000,000,000 worth of Reparations because the total amount must not be so great as to interfere with the economic and industrial life of Germany. I ask the question: Are we to keep to that condition? I am perfectly sure that we cannot keep to it consistently with justice to our Allies. It will not be justice if the economic and industrial life of Germany is to remain and to be preserved at the cost of the industrial and economic life of Belgium, Holland, Poland and the other seven countries who have suffered in the way I have mentioned. So we must make up our minds, I think, instead of giving way to any feeling of compassion, a feeling which a Briton will always have for the under dog, to insist on replacement, and restitutions being effected whatever the results may be in Germany. We must be prepared for a cry, as I know a number of your Lordships heard it in the last war, from people holding up their palms and shouting "Kamerad". We must be prepared for the whines of Germans all over the world, and the plea that this principle of restitution and replacement is
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going to cause them misery and despair. I do not believe that it is. They will suffer no doubt, but they deserve to suffer if ever a nation did.
The story of the ruthless looting on a large scale of all these countries to which I have referred must be read and considered against a sombre and a sanguinary background of the most horrible treatment of these European countries—with the exception of one or two who are treated a little bit better in the German interest. It must be considered, remembering the losses which have been inflicted; losses of irreplaceable lives which cannot be the subject of the sort of remedies I am suggesting, irreplaceable lives of men, women and children, lives which have been destroyed by the methods of the concentration camp, by slow starvation, by transferring people in icy weather huddled together in masses of 70 or 80 in a single open truck so that at the end of their journey most of them were dead, and by absolutely deliberate, inexcusable murder. That was the system of horror deliberately adopted by Hitler and his gang in waging aggressive war. And, if we cannot, by some such steps as I have mentioned, restore to these unhappy countries the goods of which they have been deprived so that they can start in the shortest possible space of time to restore their economic lives, we shall see, in quite a few years, a brutal, arrogant and triumphant Germany in the midst of a number of miserable nations on the verge of starvation. If we are such fools as to allow that to happen our children, or our grandchildren, will see successors of Hitler, regardless of the history of the last 75 years, preparing again in secret for a third world war, by which, indeed, the civilization of this country may be completely destroyed for at least a century. My Lords, I beg to move.
LORD STRABOLGI: My Lords, I hope your Lordships will permit me to add a few comments to the very valuable speech which we have just heard from my noble and learned friend Lord Maugham. If he will allow me to say so, I think that he has performed a great service in drawing attention to this problem and its immense difficulties and complexities. My noble and learned friend is proud of his legal position in this country, and justly proud of it. He was exercising his high functions as a Judge when I and the noble and

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learned Viscount who sits on the Woolsack and others of your Lordships, including my noble friend and Leader, were going through the hurly-burly of politics, fighting elections, and debating these matters in the Houses of Parliament. I can assure my noble and learned friend, the mover of this Motion, that we really were not deliberately fooled by Germany at that time. We did our best to solve this very difficult problem, but one of the great troubles was that no preparations had been made beforehand to deal with it. We were faced with a state of emergency in 1919.
In the 1918 Election one of the great slogans used throughout the country—it was first used, I believe, by the late Mr. Horatio Bottomley—was to the effect that the Germans were to pay for the whole cost of the war and the Kaiser was to be hanged. Now in fighting, as a Liberal, an absolutely safe Liberal seat—a seat which had been Liberal for a hundred years—in Yorkshire, I raised some question as to the practical difficulty of making Germany pay the whole cost of the war, and because of that I lost that perfectly safe seat. In the following March I contested another Yorkshire seat which had never been Liberal at all. I again pleaded for the adoption of practical measures, for a certain amount of sanity, and spoke against exaggerated hopes. The result was that I won that seat—which had been Conservative for a hundred years—for the Liberals. I mention this because the mood of the country at the time of the 1918 Election was exactly as described by the noble Lord. (In a few months' time the mood was more sober.) It was a mood of great indignation, of great and justifiable anger and of complete oblivion as to means to be adopted for making the Germans pay the whole cost of the war. That did not enter into the matter. They were to pay. They were a rich country. Lord Cunliffe, then Governor of the Bank of England, and his colleagues, produced astronomical figures of the capacity of Germany to pay. Everybody was happy about it. Everybody indeed thought that the Germans were going to pay, and that all that remained was to make sure that they did so.
I pass hurriedly over what happened at Versailles, and come to another eminent lawyer, M. Poincaré, the Premier of France, a very patriotic Frenchman, whose views were on all fours with those
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of the noble and learned Viscount who has just addressed us. When everything else had failed to get more out of Germany—and I do assure my noble and learned friend that it was not out of tenderness for Germany that we did not get more; the late Viscount Snowden, in particular, was as hard as any Chancellor of the Exchequer could have been on the matter—M. Poincaré marched an Army into the Ruhr and said: "We will take the goods," exactly as the noble and learned Viscount has suggested should be done in this case. His Army was accompanied by Italian Engineers. The Government of the day in this country—I have forgotten what the complexion of that Government was, and whether the present Lord Chancellor was an ornament of it, and it does not matter—with the connivance of the British people, refused to have anything to do with the Poincaré adventure, which failed.
I mention these things not because I do not support what the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Maugham, has said as to the justice and desirability, from every point of view, of getting full restitution from Germany, but because I want to emphasize that we have to think in advance of the exact way in which we are going to do it; otherwise we shall have another failure and muddle. That is why I am so grateful, as I am sure all your Lordships are, to the noble and learned Viscount for directing our attention once more to this matter. It is one of those problems the solution of which has to be worked out beforehand, and I presume that those members of the Government who can be spared from the active prosecution of the war, as well as those civil servants and others who can be spared for the work, are making certain preparations.
I want to draw attention to two practical difficulties, which are not insuperable, but which have to be faced. I see in his place my noble friend Lord Hutchison of Montrose, and he will not deny what I am now going to say. One of the clauses in the Treaty of Versailles provided that Germany was to restore the cattle, including the milch cows, stolen from France. War has been a Germany industry for 150 years, as the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Maugham, has rightly said, and so far the Germans have succeeded in making war pay. We have to find means to make it a losing proposi-

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tion for them. When it came to delivering these milch cows, there was a great shortage of milk in Germany, and great hunger and suffering among the children, and our own officers and soldiers of the Army of Occupation on the Rhine protested. They protested against the milch cows being taken away. They were giving their rations to these starving children. I do not care whether a child is German or Japanese, no British soldier will allow a child to starve if he has food in his haversack.
I should like to remind your Lordships of the fact that the conduct of the Germans in the First World War, the war of 1914–18, was just as bad as in this war. That was certainly the case at sea. The crimes of piracy mentioned by Lord Maugham were committed in that war with the same brutality as in this war, and in some ways the Germans behaved even worse at that time. Yet when it came to the point it was not possible, as a matter of practical politics, to starve the children in Western Germany by driving away the herds of milch cows; it could not be done when it came to the point. What we had to do was to send milk to Vienna and to the devastated parts of France from our own stores. That is one practical difficulty. When the Germans are beaten, there will be great devastation and distress in large areas of Europe. There will be great areas of hunger, and the first necessity will be to relieve that hunger. If you start driving back great herds of cattle, you will merely add to the confusion.
Now I come to the other practical difficulty, and this is a difficulty which is going to confront us again unless we think out a plan in advance. Before I bring my brief remarks to a close I shall make a very humble suggestion for dealing with it. The other practical difficulty is the effect on the economic system of Reparations in kind. The Germans have plenty of coal, but, the moment that large shipments of coal began to be made from Germany last time, mines were closed down in France, in Belgium, in South Wales, in Northumberland and elsewhere. That is no reason why coal should not be delivered by Germany to the countries which need it after the surrender of Germany, but we have to consider the effects on the coal-mining industries of the other countries. It is the same with ships. The
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German shipyards were intact last time, and of great capacity, and as soon as the Germans began to build Reparation ships, if I may so describe them, there was a slump in shipbuilding in all the other countries. Our own shipbuilding industry never properly recovered from the effects of the payment of Reparations in the form of ships and the building of ships in German shipyards. Some of the great corporations in this country deliberately placed orders in German shipyards, because they had frozen marks in Germany and could not get them out in any other way, although it was a disgraceful thing to do at a time when our own shipyard workers were out of employment. I need not enlarge upon that; the noble Lord, Lord Barnby, knows all about it and will agree with my condemnation.
It was the same thing with foodstuffs. The rich agricultural districts of Germany can provide great quantities of foodstuffs, and can be made to do so in order to relieve immediate distress; but, if there is going to be a continued process of receiving tree shipments of foodstuffs from Germany in large quantities into various countries, those countries will begin to consider the effect on their own agricultural economies. I can image the noble Lord, Lord Hastings, and others coming to your Lordships' House, ten years after the armistice which ends this war, to protest against the continued shipments of German wheat, and to complain of their effect on our farmers. These difficulties met us last time, because the problems had not been thought out in advance and prepared for, but I hope that this time they will be foreseen, so that we can deal with them properly.
I am wholly in favour of the "de-looting" of Germany, as the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Maugham, put it, and I hope that the Germans will be made to disgorge everything that they have stolen, from works of art down to the cotton-spinning machinery to which the noble and learned Viscount referred. I hope also that they will be made to hand over everything else useful which they can give to the countries which they have robbed and impoverished. But it must be done in such a way as not to make the immediate post-war position of Europe worse than it is when the guns cease fire. And I would remind my noble and learned friend Lord Maugham that a great deal of

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the machinery which the Germans have stolen from Belgium, Holland and elsewhere has been and will be destroyed by our own aeroplanes. That will be another difficulty. The Germans will not be able to restore in all cases the actual machines which they have taken, but we can make German industry produce new machines for these people as long as it is done in such a way as not to dislocate the trading economy of Europe.
Moreover—and this is a point to be borne in mind—it is no use merely skating over these difficulties, and saying that the Germans are a wicked people and must be punished. We shall have on our hands in Germany 80,000,000 people whom we have to get working again, so that they may help to produce wealth and make good the damage which they have done, and we shall have to give them the means of working. We have to prevent chaos in Germany and in the other countries of Europe. That does not mean that the Germans must be let off lightly and mollycoddled, but it does mean that account has to be taken of the realities of the situation.
I come now to the suggestion which I venture very humbly to make to the noble Viscount opposite, who, I understand, is replying for the Government. Looking back, our mistake after the last war was in trying to continue or return to an economic system of scarcity, instead of adopting the economics of abundance. In time of war we have always to adopt the economics of abundance. I am very interested indeed to see that a large and influential section of the Republican Party in the United States has now pronounced itself in favour of an economy of abundance after the war. That is most encouraging. If we can continue after the war the economy of abundance, which we always have to adopt in time of war, instead of the economy of artificial scarcity, we can take everything that Germany can give; a country which is devastated can receive anything which German industry and wealth and natural resources can provide. We need to have the same sort of economy of abundance which is necessary in order to wage war. If you try to go back to the old-fashioned economy of scarcity, and if you try to go back—saving the presence of certain noble Lords—to a rigid gold standard and deflation and old-fashioned financial methods, then
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you cannot take Reparations in kind from Germany or from Japan without doing injury to that economic system
If that fact is grasped, and if it is agreed—I do not know whether it is agreed—but if it is agreed and we work on that basis, I do not think the great difficulties we experienced in the years after the last war need be repeated. I make that suggestion very humbly because it is a most complicated and difficult problem that we have to face, and the more study that is given to it in advance and the more agreement between the belligerent Powers of the United Nations that can be reached, the greater the chance of avoiding the mistakes of the last war. I therefore repeat that I think we should be most grateful to the noble and learned Viscount for once more drawing our attention to this vitally important subject.
VISCOUNT ELIBANK: My Lords, I agree with the noble Lord who has just sat down that we are greatly indebted to the noble and learned Viscount for drawing attention to this very vital issue again. But it seems to me that Lord Strabolgi has gone a little bit outside the Motion on the Paper, although personally I do not take any exception to that, because there are many matters ancillary to it. This Motion deals specifically with the destruction and removal of the means of industrial competition in the countries concerned, and not with the question of foodstuffs directly, as was mentioned by the noble Lord.
I should like to deal specially with the Motion as it stands on the Paper. The noble and learned Viscount in his original Motion dealt with loot—as I understand it, art treasures and things of that sort—and the return of all those articles, or compensation therefor. This particularly deals with plant and machinery. But, as the noble and learned Viscount has stated, Germany set out deliberately in this war to create a New Order in Europe. That was Hitler's idea, and under that New Order Germany was to be the industrial centre; she would create all the machinery and make the manufactured goods, and the rest of Europe—at present the occupied countries—was to be the granary of Germany. Up to the present she has been very successful. She has achieved her particular object to the extent of having removed

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and destroyed all the machinery necessary for that purpose after the war, if she were to win it. But we all know she is not going to win it, and that is why it is so important to-day for us to make plans and see what we can do to arrange for the restoration of that plant and machinery, or for compensation to be paid for it.
But I think that the last war showed us that it was not possible to impose any conditions upon Germany which she would fulfil, because there was no force behind us. We are told that at one stage troops were marched into the Ruhr and held the Ruhr. But they did not go far enough. The Ruhr is only the fringe of Germany, and the first absolutely essential step—which has been, I am glad to say, adopted as the policy of this Government by our Prime Minister as well as by President Roosevelt and Mr. Stalin—is the unconditional surrender of Germany. The second step, which is equally important, is the occupation of Berlin and other important centres in Germany, until such time as the steps which have been suggested this afternoon can be carried into effect. On the question of Reparations, I was not clear from the noble and learned Viscount's speech whether he really believed that a sum for Reparations should be stated.
VISCOUNT MAUGHAM: As the noble Viscount asks me, I see no objection at all to getting the greatest sum for Reparations which you can out of Germany, as well as taking the steps I have mentioned. But I know very well that the economic experts will tell you the limits of the amount you can get from the State, because they reckon on the basis of the income of the country and give you so much per cent. of it as representing what the State can possibly pay.
VISCOUNT ELIBANK: I am glad to have had that explanation because, personally, I am absolutely opposed to any particular sum of Reparations being laid down. What happened after the last war was that a certain sum was fixed for Reparations. As the noble and learned Viscount has said, it was too large and it was gradually reduced.
VISCOUNT MAUGHAM: No, in the first instance there was none; we had just the
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vague phrase which I think my noble friend wants.
VISCOUNT ELIBANK: Well, sums were stated.
VISCOUNT MAUGHAM: Not in the first instance.
VISCOUNT ELIBANK: During the Versailles Conference I think that the sum of £6,000,000,000 was stated, and the present Lord Keynes got into hot water in this country because he suggested that Germany could not stand the figure of more than £2,000,000,000.
LORD STRABOLGI: £6,600,000,000—that was the Treaty figure.
VISCOUNT MAUGHAM: No, there was no Treaty figure in the first instance. I have got the book here and I could read it to you. A figure of £6,600,000,000 was fixed in 1922, and Professor Keynes, as he then was, had always said it was too much, and he thought £1,000,000,000 was enough, but he said the maximum was £2,000,000,000. His articles were collected in a little book and you will find it all there. It is called Essays in Persuasion and it is well worth reading.
VISCOUNT ELIBANK: I venture to suggest that it is better to fix no figure at all, because what happened was that as soon as a figure was fixed financiers from this country and from the United States came forward, a loan was arranged, the amount was sent to Germany, and that amount, instead of being paid back in the form of Reparations, was used for the purpose of rearmament in Germany. Therefore I feel that in the first instance after the occupation of Berlin and other centres in Germany, we should have an Inter-Allied Council of Control that would go into all these questions and decide how far Germany can restore this machinery or, if it has been destroyed, what compensation she should pay for it. But the idea that advancing troops going through Germany can take control of machinery and send it back to the occupied countries is, I believe, quite impracticable.
First of all, it takes quite a long time to unfix machinery and to send it wherever you want it to go and have it set up again. The question which is of great importance is to which country that machinery belongs. You cannot tell that merely by going into a factory, because

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machinery comes from this country or that country. But I do agree that plans should be made for restoring such machinery, or, if it is not there to be restored, compensation should be paid. I would emphasize that it will be necessary to set up a proper organization in the centre of Europe, backed by Allied troops in occupation, in order to force the Germans to hand over these things or to compensate for the robberies they have committed. I am extremely grateful to the noble and learned Viscount for having raised this issue. I hope when the noble Viscount replies for the Government he will be able to tell us they have got this matter under consideration, and that they do not intend that Germany this time shall get away, as she did last time, with her ill-gotten goods and so be in a position once more to set up fresh armament factories to wage another world war.
LORD BARNBY: My Lords, I cannot refrain from a very brief intervention. In the first place I wish to associate myself emphatically with the reasoning of the noble and learned Viscount who has moved this Motion. I also wish to express my admiration of the courageous way in which my noble friend Lord Elibank continuously recommends the administering of the severest punishment to Germany. In his remarks he complained that in occupying the Ruhr we made the mistake of not going far enough in that we did not occupy Berlin and convince the Germans that they were defeated. That brings me to the reason for my intervention. The noble Lord, Lord Strabolgi, pointed out that the contractionist policy which was pursued in the early 'twenties was the cause of our inability to impose the recommendations the noble Viscount has made. I was among those who at the 1918 Election were returned on the cries, "Hang the Kaiser" and "Make Germany pay for the war." The noble Lord, Lord Mottistone, shakes his head, but those of us who were elected on that cry sincerely believed in it. When the French marched into the Ruhr that produced an economic position throughout the world which resulted in a catastrophic rise in the price of coal, to the advantage of some but to the misfortune of most. The economic machinery of the world was thrown out of gear. I remember well that those who made speeches in their constituencies protesting against what was then taking place were branded as pro-Germans. They
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were neither pro-German nor anti-French, but pro their constituents because the event produced a great deal of unemployment and dislocation throughout the world.
The object of my intervention is to express the hope that my noble friend the Leader of the House, when he comes to reply, will bear in mind that this requires preparation in advance. The House would willingly support the noble Viscount, the mover of the Motion, but the achievement of his purpose will require preparation. That supports what was recently debated in this House—namely, the conviction that an overriding monetary mechanism under which the world can function is essential, and should be produced during the war, so that it can be dovetailed into the recommendations my noble friend has made and with which I am in entire agreement.
THE LORD PRIVY SEAL (VISCOUNT CRANBORNE): My Lords, the extremely interesting and important speech by my noble and learned friend this afternoon may be regarded, if he will forgive the sporting metaphor, as a second barrel to his speech in your Lordships' House on April 7. His Motion asks His Majesty's Government,
"in view of the evident intention of the Axis powers, in anticipation of their own defeat, to destroy the means of industrial competition in the countries which they have occupied, whether they intend, in co-operation with their Allies, to use all possible means to prevent this result."
The answer to that question is "Yes," purely and simply. Of course, the United Nations intend to take all possible measures to prevent the Axis Powers from destroying the means of industrial competition in occupied countries. The real question which is raised in this Motion is not whether the United Nations want to do this, but what exact steps they intend to take, now and later, to achieve that purpose. It was accordingly not to the means but to the practical measures that the noble and learned Viscount himself devoted the larger part of his speech. There are, of course—though he did not stress this particular aspect—obvious limitations to any immediate action we can take until we control Axis territory. Until the Axis forces are driven out of the countries which they have occupied, it is hardly possible to devise any very direct remedy against the malicious actions

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which the noble Viscount had in mind in framing his Motion.
Until the war reaches that point when the Axis is driven out, it is extremely difficult for us to ascertain with any accuracy the exact scope of the problem with which we shall be faced. It may be greater than we expect, it may be less, but it is likely to be very large, as is shown by the figure of £9,000,000,000 quoted by the noble Viscount. It is likely to be a colossal problem, in any case. This I fully recognize, as does, I know, my noble friend Lord Maugham, who has made a deep study of this subject. One immediate step which he suggested—he suggested it the other day and repeated it to-day—is that the Allies should make a declaration immediately, in flat and uncompromising terms, that for everything the enemy take or destroy in occupied territories they should be compelled to make immediate restoration or replacement in kind. If, for instance, they remove or destroy the equipment of a factory, they are to replace it with equivalent machinery; if they remove a locomotive, they are to replace it with an equivalent locomotive; if they remove a cow, they are to replace it with an equivalent cow. That is the proposition. I think we shall all fully sympathize with the broad objective—inherent in his proposal—that it is our enemies who should suffer as a result of the war and not the unhappy peoples they have martyrized. There is no difference of opinion about that. But I could not help thinking, as I listened to my noble and learned friend, that he did a little bit, if he will forgive my saying so, over-simplify the problem.
We shall all agree with him that the Germans do not deserve any protection from International Law. They have violated it as it has never been violated before and they cannot claim the protection of that law. We should also agree that they deserve no sympathy even from the tender-hearted people in this country. The things they have done in this war have been too terrible. But full and immediate replacement in kind may be physically impossible. There may not be sufficient locomotives in the Axis countries for them to be able to replace those they have taken. There may not be sufficient cattle; the cattle may have been eaten. The means of replacement in kind in fact may not exist. Apart from every-
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thing else, there may be such chaos on the continent of Europe at the end of this war, both as to methods of transportation, rolling stock, and so on, that it may be impossible immediately to carry out so vast and intricate a scheme, in addition to feeding the peoples of Europe, which must be our first care. I do not say that will be the position; I say it maybe the position.
Indeed, the Allied Governments, including the Governments of the occupied countries themselves, clearly recognize this difficulty. For in the Declaration of January 5 this year, to which the noble Viscount has referred to-day in his speech, while they issued a formal warning to all concerned (and in particular to persons in neutral countries) that they intended to do their utmost to defeat the methods of dispossession practised by the Governments with which they are at war against the countries and peoples who have been so wantonly assaulted and despoiled, they added at the same time—and this I think is the essence of the whole matter—
"It is obviously impossible for a general declaration of this nature to define exactly the action which will require to be taken when victory has been won and the occupation or control of foreign territory by the enemy has been brought to an end. Dispossession has taken many forms and all will require consideration in the light of circumstances which may well vary from country to country."
That, of course, is profoundly true. Certainly, I think we should not rule out the possibility of replacement where it is possible and where it is appropriate, but to try and tie ourselves here and now to a hard-and-fast scheme which may turn out to be entirely inapplicable in circumstances which at present are entirely unknown would surely be a futile waste of time and labour.
What we can do, and what we should do, is to complete the necessary preparatory work, so that we may be able to ascertain, as far as we can, the nature and scope of the problem. That, as my noble and learned friend on the Woolsack said in the last debate, is already being done. The Expert Committee set up under the Inter-Allied Declaration of January 5 to which I have just referred is actually in process of collecting information as to the methods used by Germany and her accomplices for the acquisition of all kinds of property. This preparatory work will undoubtedly be immensely valuable in establishing those

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acts done by the Axis during this war which are calculated to hamper the competitive power of our Allies in the postwar years. And the compilation of this information will no doubt go on from now until the end of the war, so that it may be as complete as possible. His Majesty's Government, for their part, have accumulated a considerable knowledge of conditions in enemy occupied countries and of the administrative actions and policy of the Axis Powers, and this, of course, will be thrown into the common pool when the time comes for taking decisions as to the positive remedies which must be applied.
From what I have said, I hope the noble Viscount himself and the House will rest assured that this problem, to which he has very rightly drawn attention, is not being neglected. His Majesty's Government are fully alive to its importance. So are the Allied Governments—and, after all, these Governments are, many of them, more directly concerned than anyone else in finding a satisfactory solution. The ground is being prepared in every practicable way, so that when the time comes action can be taken. But—and this is one word I would like to say in conclusion—though clearly we must do all we can to ensure that the Axis countries do not benefit by their misdeeds, it is not on such measures alone that we must rely to repair ravaged Europe. That is the lesson which we must learn from the sad tale of Reparations after the last war, of which the noble and learned Viscount spoke himself this afternoon. If the occupied countries are to be restored not merely to their former prosperity but to a higher standard still, and that is what we all want, that can only be done—I would add this especially in view of the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Strabolgi—by the adoption by the United Nations of a wise and expanding economic policy, as envisaged in the Atlantic Charter. It is to that wider aspect of this problem that the Allied Powers, as noble Lords know, are now bending their minds, in order that, when the present troubles are over, the occupied countries, which have suffered so grievously may be able to rebuild their shattered economies and play their full part in a new era of prosperity based on peace and security.
VISCOUNT MAUGHAM: My Lords, I confess I have been a little surprised by some of the observations I have heard to-day, but it may be my fault. I abstained completely from any attack on the people who were in charge of the Government of this country from the date of the Treaty of Versailles to modern times. I have not in the least sought to criticize them because nothing seems to me to be more useless than to attack politicians or statesmen for their past acts at such a moment as the present, if only for this reason that, speaking as a non-politician, it seems to me that they are all equally to blame if they have acted during the period of some twenty years or so with a great lack of foresight for the future. But that there were dupes during that period can be well established by anybody who chooses to read this book before me which happens to be called The Greatest Swindle in the World, or who chooses to read Chapter 10 of the work of my noble friend Lord. Vansittart, called Lessons of my Life. You will then, I think, be unable to say-that there was no dupery on the part of Germany and you will also be equally unable to say we do not suffer from it now.
The next thing I want to say is this As my noble friend Lord Elibank pointed out, I have not in this Motion really sought to deal with such things as the sending of foodstuffs and so on after the war to the countries who are our Allies. I have been concerned to-day simply and solely with that vastly important point, the prevention of Germany getting any success by taking away from Belgium, Holland, Poland, the Ukraine, some of the Baltic Provinces, Greece and so on, the means of industrial competition in order to prevent such competition taking place after the war. That being my idea I have confined myself to that aspect of the case. The noble Viscount who leads the House said that I over-simplified the problem. Like many lawyers I have a simple mind, and it may be that I have, I should have thought the fact that full replacement may be impossible is a circumstance which is comparatively obvious. If there are not enough locomotives to go round it is quite plain you cannot give all the nations from which locomotives have been stolen the locomotives to which they are entitled; but I

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thought it was not worth my while to mention that.
It may be that there would be chaos on the Continent which would cause delay. Well, we must do the best we can to be quick. Speed, as I have said, is of the essence of the matter. There may be, I agree, great delay, but I cannot see that the mere replacement of the sort of things I am speaking of is impossible. It may have the effect of interfering with the industrial life of Germany, and that is a point I have put before your Lordships as clearly as I can. If it be so, and if either Germany or, for instance, Holland must suffer from a particular factory having its machinery taken, then all I can say is that to my mind, as a simple creature, it is Germany that should suffer and not the country from which the machinery was taken a year or two years ago.
The noble Viscount, Lord Cranborne, mentioned something which certainly ought not to be forgotten in another aspect—namely, the fact that it is obviously impossible to make a general declaration defining exactly the things which will require to be taken when victory has been won. I hope the noble Viscount will pardon me for saying that he did not seem to appreciate that this is paragraph 4 of the Declaration, and that it does not relate either to restitution or replacement. It is concerned with a thing which the Germans have done to a vast extent, but which I have not mentioned to-day—namely, bogus transfers and dealings with property and rights by fraudulent systems such as compulsory sales, taking these things away and giving in compensation occupation marks which are valueless. It is in respect of these things, as the Declaration says, that the parties reserve all their rights—a blessed phrase—to declare invalid transfers of, or dealings with, property, rights, etc., which have taken place during the period of enemy occupation or control of the territories in question.
Then a little lower down we are told that dispossession has taken many forms and all will require consideration. I quite agree that that is a sound principle, but it was not laid down with reference to this. Suppose you discover in Germany a place where there are valuable scientific instruments, to give one example, or a stock of radium, to give another example, which, of course, has been stolen from the occupied countries, or microscopes, or factory
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equipment which happens to be capable of removal, there is nothing which says you should not do as quickly as possible—
VISCOUNT CRANBORNE: If the noble Viscount will pardon me interrupting him, there was nothing in my speech which said you must not do that. I did not rule out the possibility of replacement where it is possible or proper. That seems to be exactly what the noble and learned Viscount is saying.
VISCOUNT MAUGHAM: Then I will not pursue my comment, because we are agreed. That is all I have been asking to-day. It is the replacement of things of that kind which can be replaced that I have been urging upon your Lordships, and taking up, I am afraid, quite enough time, in this debate. It is because these things can be replaced and can be sent back to the countries from which they have been taken—not always, of course, the exact things but the equivalent of the exact things—that I do not think the problem is so complex as some noble Lords seem to think. To my mind it is comparatively simple. But I am quite at one with those who say that it does require planning, that it requires Committees to be formed, that it requires transport, and that a multiplicity of things are necessary before it can be done. The noble Viscount tells me he agrees. I hope your Lordships think it is possible. All I say is that if machinery is needed in order to get these things done as soon as possible after the occupation of Germany, then let us get on with these things and let us do what I think everybody agrees should be done and can be done. In the circumstances, of course, I am happy to ask leave to withdraw my Motion.
VISCOUNT FITZALAN OF DERWENT: My Lords, may I ask the noble and learned Viscount on the Woolsack whether it is not the rule or at any rate the custom in this House that when a noble Lord is replying on his own Motion he is not entitled to make a second speech?
THE LORD CHANCELLOR (VISCOUNT SIMON): My Lords, that, I think, is not a matter on which, from the Woolsack, I am called upon to make any reply. It is not the custom of the House that I should.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

POST-WAR BUILDING INDUSTRY.
LORD BALFOUR OF BURLEIGH LORD BALFOUR OF BURLEIGH rose to call attention to the White Paper Cmd. 6428 on training for the building industry and to ask His Majesty's Government whether they are prepared to make a statement amplifying the contents of that Paper; and to move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords, the White Paper, which is referred to in the Motion in ray name, is one which was received, I think I can say, with general approval from every quarter of the country. I very much hope that the noble Lord, Lord Portal, in replying to the Motion, will be able to give us some more information as to the progress of his plans for the reconstitution of the building trade. I think that is a section of post-war planning which does command universal approval. It must be right that the noble Lord should continue his creation of a great engine which will be ready for the reconstruction, at all events in a physical sense, of the better Britain. The White Paper foreshadows a building trade numbering in a few years no less than one and a quarter million operatives, and that is, I think I am right in saying, a larger building trade than we have ever had in this country. It will be capable of a tremendous amount of physical construction.
One aspect of the matter does afford me some concern, and I would like to direct the noble Lord's attention to it. This enlarged building trade, in addition to all the other building that it will have to do, will be capable, I have seen it stated in the Press, of turning out 500,000 houses a year. That is a very admirable thing and might well fulfil the prophecy of the Minister of Health of a house-building programme of 4,000,000 houses in eight or nine years. What fills me with concern is the fact that we have not yet been told by the Government where all these houses and where this great mass of industry is to be put. Your Lordships will hardly need reminding that in the years before the war, when a tremendous amount of building was done, all was not well with the direction in which the new buildings were put up. I think most of us will agree that our large towns were getting too large, and that a great deal of countryside was unnecessarily spoiled. Are we going to drift on into the same lamentable position?
Four years ago we had the Barlow Report, and, partly as a result of that, we have since had the Uthwatt and Scott Reports. The Uthwatt Report has been in the hands of the Government now for about a year. I really do view with great concern the lack of progress in arriving at a decision on these matters. My noble friend can, of course, reply to me that it is not his concern because he is no longer Minister of Planning. I venture to think that the noble Lord heaved rather a sigh of relief when the Ministry of Planning took itself off from under his wing and went elsewhere. But I venture to put the matter to my noble friend because, although he no longer has departmental responsibility for planning, he is one of the Ministers who really know something about location of industry. When he was concerned with what were called the Special Areas he really did locate industries. I doubt if there is any other Minister who knows so much about this matter, and I hope he will use all his great influence to secure that a decision is reached soon on these subjects.
I really do look forward with dread to the day when peace is declared if that is to come before the Government have settled and put into effect their policy about the location of industry. The time lag in connexion with matters of that sort is very great. It cannot be less than a year or eighteen months before effect could be given to the Government's policy, even were it decided now. The excuse that we have to win the war before we can attend to such matters as this, is, if I may say so, wearing a little bit thin. We are winning the war. Not only have we had the great victory in Africa, but even to-day we have been told that one of our great remaining anxieties, the U-boat campaign, is being very successfully coped with. It terrifies me to look ahead and visualize the chaos and frustration which will result if some effective policy is not settled and put into effect. These matters may be controversial matters, but if that is to rule out any decision then I feel that the war will indeed have been fought, not in vain, but with the result of bringing us much less substantial fruits than we might have hoped for. Demobilization will be upon us perhaps sooner than we think, and I cannot sufficiently press upon the noble Lord the need of an early decision on the

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matters underlying this big question of location of industry. My Lords, I beg to move.
THE MINISTER OF WORKS (LORD PORTAL): My Lords, the terms of the Notice which my noble friend Lord Balfour of Burleigh has brought before your Lordships' House are: "To call attention to the White Paper on training for the building industry and to ask His Majesty's Government whether they are prepared to make a statement amplifying the contents of that Paper." I know my noble friend will excuse me if, in trying to deal with his Motion, I keep to the part of it which concerns my own Ministry. The points he has raised on the question of the location of industry and the kind remarks he made about my experience of that, concern, as he knows, another Department at the present time. But I will say on behalf of the Government that I will see that his remarks are brought to notice in the place where these questions are dealt with.
The White Paper which is referred to in this Motion originated from the Report drawn up by the Central Council which was appointed by Lord Reith. I want your Lordships to realize that while there has been a great deal of praise of the White Paper—which was introduced by the Minister of Labour and myself—the Committee or Council whose work led to that Paper was initiated by Lord Reith. It consisted of representatives of the Ministry and members of the building industry outside the Ministry, while many others from the industry were invited to state their views. They were an advisory body. One of their chief problems was post-war building—namely, the consideration of the building force necessary after the war. This had to be related to two other factors: (1) work available; and (2) labour conditions. They, therefore, considered the entire organization of the industry for post-war programmes. Their Report covered the subject of recruitment, which, if your Lordships have read the Report, you will see they went into with great thoroughness.
What I wish to stress is my view—which I have always stated since I have been Minister of Works—that it is essential to avoid casual labour, if possible, in that great industry, the reason being that if you are going to get good apprenticeship and choose the right people for the
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industry you must have an industry worth living in and an industry into which it is worth people's while to go. People must be able to go into it with the feeling that they will have a certain amount of security. That is why the authors of this Report show anxiety that casual labour should be done away with, if possible. The Report presumed that there would be continuous work. It recommended that there should be a guaranteed week, and that the intake of labour at all stages after the war must be scaled nationally on the basis of expectation of work ahead. It was thought that it was not much good arranging for 1,250,000 people to work in the industry unless work for them for the next ten or twelve years ahead was in prospect. The conditions mentioned, it was felt, would make the industry attractive to the best type of recruit.
The Committee asked for a national programming of building work in postwar years. In the White Paper, which was jointly sponsored by the Minister of Labour and myself, you will see that a guarantee for twelve years is asked for. I think that perhaps that twelve years can be divided into two periods, one of ten years, the other of two years. The two years would be a sort of interregnum after the war. I think you will find in this and other industries that controls will possibly have to go on for a certain time after the war. The interregnum period is the period you want to look at first. The White Paper deals with plans for building up the necessary labour force for the postwar years and suggests three main schemes. The first is for education in the industry, to enable up-grading to take place. The second is for intensive courses for training men, chiefly in the Forces, as craftsmen during the years immediately following the armistice. The third is for the permanent national direction of technical education and apprenticeship of boys. The second of those schemes, which relates to getting men out of the Forces, etc., and training them, is in the hands of the Minister of Labour, while the third, the apprenticeship scheme, is in the hands of my Ministry. That is the division between the two Ministries on the question of training.
The Minister of Labour, who has followed this Report closely and taken a great interest in it, suggested, in agree-

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ment with myself, that these proposals should be put up to the Government. This was done and the Government issued them in the form of a White Paper last February. This White Paper states that, on the basis of the facts available, a postwar building programme designed for ten to twelve years will require a labour force in the building industry of about 1,250,000 men. That makes no provision for civil engineering or public works; those men are entirely for the building trade. If there are to be 1,250,000 men in the building trade, it will mean that there will be about 500,000 craftsmen. The White Paper rightly points out that the expansion of the labour force must be planned in relation to a long-term programme of construction. It would not be fair to those who are already building operatives in this country to expand the labour force unless it is possible to see work ahead for them to do. The White Paper states that the nature and scope of guaranteed employment should be negotiated within the industry itself, and promises Government support. By this means casual labour will substantially be abolished. With Government support, the industry itself is now going to try to arrange a guaranteed week, and that, as I say, will substantially abolish the problem of casual labour.
The White Paper then outlines a plan for the special training of up to 200,000 men during the first three or four years, the training of the men to be under the Ministry of Labour, with a headquarters advisory panel and local advisory committees on which the Minister of Labour has given representation to the industry and to the Apprenticeship and Training Council and to my Ministry. The training of all those men who will come back from the Forces will be under the Minister of Labour, but he has arranged that these other bodies shall have representation. The Apprenticeship and Training Council will be under my Ministry. This Council is fully representative of the industry, and will secure that all parts and sections of the industry all over the country will be directly concerned. With these training schemes and apprenticeship schemes, with the training of the men who will come from the Forces by the Ministry of Labour, and with the regional committees which are being organized by the Minister of Labour, we shall have the whole of this industry tied up region by region or area by area, and
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that is something which has never happened before in the building industry of this country.
This Apprenticeship Council, which I have already appointed and which will be meeting during the next few days, will advise on apprenticeship in the building trade; but I have been fortunate enough to have, during the past six months, an Advisory Council of the Building and Civil Engineering Industries, which meets every Monday and which is representative of every element in the building industry—civil engineers, builders, operatives, architects, quantity surveyors and so on. There are sixteen of these gentlemen who meet every Monday and give advice on all questions of importance in the building trade.
If we have 1,250,000 men who are to be allocated to the building trade after the war, it is imperative for us to see that there is work there for them to do. During the last three months, we have obtained from nine Government Departments their programmes, and we have put the work on a twelve-year basis. We are already able, from the first survey which we have made, to say that we have balanced the figures of men employed with the programme over the first twelve years, so that now all that we have to do is to go on breaking that programme down. We can already see that work is available for the first twelve years, as suggested in the White Paper. Having this programme, we have to remember that the first two years after the war—what I call the interregnum period—are going to be the difficult years, and for that period at least I imagine that we shall have to have priorities for the different types of building work required. If one takes the programmes which have been put in by the various Departments, almost half the work outlined is for housing, under the Ministry of Health. As soon as the war is over, there will be some essential matters to be dealt with; and therefore, during the first two years at any rate, and probably thereafter, it will be necessary to have some system of priorities which will ensure that the most essential things come first, having regard to the amount of labour available.
It will readily be seen that to reach a ceiling of 1,250,000 men, which means 500,000 craftsmen, the most intensive training will be necessary, and, even so,

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it will not be possible to reach such figures in two years. During this interregnum period, therefore, it will be necessary to see that the priorities are carefully allocated. I imagine that housing will come very high in the list, and the work of allotting the priorities will have to be done very much as it is done in connexion with the allocation of priorities for other commodities at the present time. In dealing with this programme for the next ten or twelve years, it is not a matter merely of saying that there is a certain amount of work to be done for different Government Departments; all this has to be turned into man-hours, so as to tally with the number of men employed. I am sure that your Lordships will agree that if any post-war planning is to be done at all, the most practical way of doing it is to tally up the work with the men who will be available to do the work after the war, and, if you tally up the men, you have to tally up the man-hours as well.
I should like your Lordships to understand that the question of materials is going to be very important after this war. All building materials at the present time—bricks, cement, roofing, building glass, sand and ballast and so on—are under the Ministry of Works, and they are all under different forms of control. Some forms of control are stricter than others, but all the materials come under our supervision. It will be realized that at the present time bricks are not being used as much in this country as in time of peace. Brickworks are continually being closed down, but we have to be ready to start them up again later, and steps are being taken to see that these brickworks are maintained in such a condition that they will be ready to start again as soon as possible after the war. We are keeping the wheels oiled, so to speak, for the brickworks to start up again. As your Lordships know, cement is still being used in large quantities, and there is still a large demand for building glass for certain purposes, and for sand and ballast; but the position with regard to these materials is being watched, because we do not want to be short of any material when building operations are started again after the war. I can tell your Lordships that no part of the enormous amount of Government building work which
has been done during the war has ever been held up by a shortage of build-
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ing materials, so that from that point of view the position is satisfactory.
For more than two years my Ministry has been controlling the use of labour and materials, as well as being responsible for the production of war-time standards of building for all Departments. As far as actual building is concerned, we are responsible for the whole of the building work of the Ministry of Aircraft Production, for a large part of the work of the Ministry of Supply and the War Office, and for almost the whole of the building work of the Civil Departments. The Air Ministry and the Admiralty carry out their own building. All the building materials are allocated from the Ministry of Works. It will be of interest to your Lordships to know that the number of Nissen huts erected since the beginning of the war is over a quarter of a million. When timber and steel became in short supply, we had to change over to some form of hutting which did not take the same amount of timber and steel, and six or seven types were chosen and proceeded with. We call them pre-fabricated huts, and of these 53,000 have been produced by my Ministry. If you translate that into terms of Nissen equivalents, the figures would be approximately 100,000 Nissen huts. We have now found our standard but the most efficient and adaptable. This enables nearly every building material to be used—brick, concrete, asbestos cement sheets, plaster boards and so on.
As your Lordships are aware, the cost of building has gone up very considerably since the war commenced, both in materials and cost of labour. Before the war building costs consisted as to 60 per cent. of material and as to 40 per cent. of labour—the proportion may have varied a bit one way or the other. If you take the cost of housing now, you will find that it has gone up approximately by 105 per cent. over the pre-war cost. There are certain considerations which arise during war-time which should not arise afterwards, but that figure is approximately right. It is necessary therefore for us to look into the question of economies which can be effected. I say that because, as your Lordships will remember from the experience of the last war, high costs of building will kill building. If you have to look for economies you must not secure them at the expense of the operatives; you must do it by more efficient use of labour and materials.

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I have recently appointed a Controller of Experimental Building Development, whose business it will be to co-ordinate all the ideas and new methods put forward by any firm or individual interested in building or the manufacture of building materials and equipment. He will have the advice of an Inter-Departmental Committee on House Construction which was appointed by the Minister of Health, the Secretary of State for Scotland and Lord Reith, who was then Minister of Works. The importance of that is that it will link up the people who are experimenting with those who are actually engaged in building operations, because if you want to reduce the figure of 105 per cent. above the pre-war cost of housing to, say, 50 per cent. you will have to do it either by working at greater speed or by different methods. I understand from people who have been to America that this same question arose in America some time before this war, and they adapted themselves to the situation there. In the same way we must adapt ourselves to the situation. Now that we have a Controller of Experimental Building Development we hope that everybody will know where to come with his new ideas and by this means a great step forward can be taken. My view is that the results of the work of this Controller will have to be measured by the use that is made of material and labour, and to effect this check a costing section has been established with practical experience to form what I term a yardstick. Your Lordships in the conduct of your own businesses would have a costings section which would use a yardstick to show exactly where costs went up or down as the result of the use of alternatives or substitutes. No new proposal will have the backing of my Ministry unless it shows an improvement.
I come to the question of alternatives and substitutes. I have had a good deal of experience of them because of the work I have done, first of all with raw materials and then with allocations and priorities. There are two different sorts of alternatives and substitutes. There are those which are being used in this country to-day owing to the lack of raw materials. They may not be the best possible alternatives or substitutes, but during the war they are the only ones you can use. That is one kind. There is the other kind, the alternatives or substitutes which in any case will make for greater
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efficiency. Take the question of timber which has been one of the foundations of the building trade. At the present time we are short of timber. You may have to find a substitute for timber, but while doing that, unless you can get something more efficient, you must not rule out the question of timber ever being used again. Those two points are totally different from one another. We do not want people in this country who are interested in the commercial side to obtain an advantage over rivals who cannot at present obtain the materials they require or who have been engaged in producing other things for the war effort.
This is the second war that some of your Lordships have experienced. You will probably never beat the old Nissen hut. The soldiers and the Admiralty are used to it, but at the present time you cannot get Nissen huts, and you have to have plaster board and standard huts. When the war is over the Nissen but will probably still be preferred, and your present alternative is only an expedient which you have to adopt. I have spoken of the control of new building development. We already have all the help and assistance from the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, of which the Building Research Station forms an important part. Even closer co-operation is being arranged with them on all scientific aspects of building. With a view to obtaining greater efficiency in post-war building, an investigation is taking place into the methods of placing and managing contracts.
The word "standardization" is a very distasteful word to many people, but standardization need not mean a limitation of individual expression in anything that matters. When you are building a house you may save a great deal of money over such things as central heating, plumbing and taps by standardizing them, which will make a vast difference to the total cost of the house. I am not speaking of the outside of the house, but if you look at the costings of the inside of the house you will find that it is there that the cost mounts up. Besides the word "standardization" there is another word which ought never to have been invented—"pre-fabrication"—but I am not going into the question of pre-fabrication to-day. I wish somebody had thought out a better word; it might have helped us to get

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over our difficulties. All the elements of building under the supervision of the Ministry are making a concerted investigation in their respective spheres. We are dealing with paint, plastics, heating, ventilating, plumbing, steel structure, timber structure—all these and many more. Some of the reports have already come in, some will be coming in, and in about three months' time they will be available and will be translated into standard codes of practice. In this way we shall be able to take advantage of all these reports, which study the important elements in building.
I am very glad that my noble friend Lord Balfour of Burleigh brought forward this Motion because I did not feel there was any great use in having a White Paper unless we showed we were making that White Paper into a practical proposition. That is what we are here for, and that is what my Ministry is striving to do. We are able now to see signs that the building industry will come into its own and receive fair treatment after the war. It is obvious that it will have a great role to play in the future of this country. If we are going to make a success of it, we must see that efficient, economical, and practical measures are taken so that high costs do not kill building. It has happened in many industries in the past that there were two things which were cut down directly there was a slump. One was wages and the other was paper. I was only concerned with paper in the past. To-day I do not mind what happens to paper, but it will be necessary after this war to show that we can adapt ourselves to the situation and bring down costs in such a way that we shall have a thriving building trade which will be alive to the situation that faces it.
LORD BALFOUR OF BURLEIGH: My Lords, I should like to express my warmest thinks to my noble friend for his statement, which has obviously greatly pleased the House, and beg leave to withdraw the Motion.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

DEHYDRATION PLANT.
LORD BARNBY: My Lords, I beg to ask the question that stands in my name.
[The question was as follows:
To ask His Majesty's Government whether the plant with large dehydration situated on Metheringham Heath, Lines., which is understood to have been virtually unused for dehydration of fresh vegetables for the past two seasons, is now to be used for that purpose; if so, what is the acreage contracted for locally for the supply of appropriate fresh vegetables for the current season.]
LORD TEMPLEMORE: My Lords, on behalf of my noble friend the Minister of Food, who is unable to be present this afternoon owing to a long-standing engagement, I have been asked to say that the plant to which the noble Lord refers has been used during the last two years chiefly for drying home-grown grain and salvaged foodstuffs, and partly during the 1942 season for the experimental drying of vegetables for re-constitution as fresh. It has not been possible to include this plant in my noble friend's Department's vegetable-drying scheme because the large quantity of labour which would be required for the pre-processing of material and to operate the plant to capacity is not available in the district. Certain constructional work is, however, now being carried out and, subject to this being completed, it is hoped that the plant will be used shortly after the end of the present month for the drying of potatoes. As these are surplus owned by the Ministry of Food, the question of contracting does not arise.
LORD BARNBY: My Lords, arising out of that answer, it is evident that the plant referred to is capable of dehydration of fresh vegetables but that no intention exists to use it for that purpose. Instead it is to be used for surplus stocks of existing potatoes. We cannot forecast what the next harvest is going to be. The noble Lord stated that it is not possible to use it because of lack of labour. Arising from that, it may not be within the Minister's knowledge that at a very short distance from that plant buildings are at the present time being erected for the housing of workers at another factory concerned with agricultural products. May I ask my noble friend if he would be good enough to pass on the suggestion to the Minister of Food that he might see his way at some early date to make a statement to this House on the whole question of dehydration of fresh vegetables, which

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he foreshadowed was part of the Government's policy, and that he might include in it an assurance that other Departments concerned are collaborating in whatever programme he is developing?
LORD TEMPLEMORE: My Lords, I take it that the remarks of my noble friend were really intended to be a supplementary question. I beg to inform him that I shall bring them to the notice of my noble friend.

FRENCH WARSHIPS AT ALEXANDRIA.
LORD WINSTER LORD WINSTER asked His Majesty's Government, what is the position regarding the negotiations reported to have been begun in February concerning the French warships interned at Alexandria. The noble Lord said: My Lords, the question on the Paper has been twice postponed because it was represented to me that the negotiations to which it refers were in an interesting condition. Now that an announcement has been made in the Press I feel there can be no harm in putting it, and it is probably desirable that an official statement should be placed on record. I had no wish at any time to cause any embarrassment by putting this question, but I felt that a situation which had drifted on for three years should be cleared up, because it was not exactly good for the prestige or dignity of anyone that it should drift on. At any time it might have caused a very ugly situation because at the time of our reverses in Egypt, when President Roosevelt made the proposal that these ships should be moved to an American port and restored to France after the war, M. Laval gave orders to the officers and men that they were to resist any action that might be taken by ourselves. He described the President's offer as insulting. If anyone can tell me how you can insult such a reptile as Laval I should be very glad to know, because it would give me great pleasure to do it.
There is one particular point to which I hope the noble Viscount will direct his reply. Vichy is now saying that we starved the officers and men in these French ships into submission. The agreement under which the men of these ships have been paid and provisioned was entered into by Admiral Cunningham,
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under whose command they were at one time serving. I am sure that Admiral Cunningham would be pained by such a suggestion, and I am sure that his successor, or the Government, would never have dreamt of abrogating in any way the agreement he came to with Admiral Godefroy. I feel sure that there is not the slightest truth in the suggestion that these officers and men were starved into submission. The ships will take some time to refit and re-man, but when this is done I am sure the Navy will not only welcome the accession of very useful vessels, but will also welcome to its side comrades who will be fighting, as we are fighting, to restore France to that position in the world to which her historic struggles in the cause of liberty entitle her.
VISCOUNT CRANBORNE: My Lords, first of all I wish to thank the noble Lord for being ready to postpone his question on two previous occasions until an answer could properly be given. The House will be aware from statements which have recently appeared in the Press that Admiral Godefroy has now decided to bring the French ships under his command in Alexandria back into the war on the Allied side, and has rallied for this purpose to the French High Command at Algiers. As noble Lords will know, the squadron which Admiral Godefroy commands was stationed at Alexandria at the time of the Franco-German armistice, and was under the orders of Admiral Cunningham as Commander-in-Chief, Mediterranean. After the armistice the squadron was immobilized in virtue of an arrangement whereby Admiral Godefroy undertook to refrain from all hostile action against British interests in return for provision for the maintenance of his ships and their crews. When Vichy lost its last semblance of independence after the total occupation of France last November, the basis for this arrangement disappeared. We did not, however, take any immediate steps to bring it to an end, since we hoped that, as a result of negotiations initiated by the new French authorities at Algiers, the Admiral would rally to the Allies of his own accord.
His Majesty's Government were kept fully informed of these negotiations, and were glad to give the French authorities at Algiers every facility for establishing friendly relations with the squadron at Alexandria. The expulsion of the Axis

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forces from Tunisia was finally chosen by Admiral Godefroy as the moment for him to abandon his attitude of neutrality. General Giraud however decided to defer a public announcement. I would emphasize that in deciding to join forces with General Giraud, Admiral Godefroy has acted of his own free will. The report broadcast by Vichy to which the noble Lord, Lord Winster, has referred, that the French sailors at Alexandria had been
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starved into submission, is completely untrue. It has evidently been inspired by their German masters, who have typically chosen this way of giving vent to their anger at the prospect of these valuable ships being used once more in active service against them.
LORD WINSTER: My Lords, I beg to thank the noble Viscount for his reply.
House adjourned.