THE CIVIL SERVICE.

HL Deb 18 December 1946 vol 144 cc1078-129

2.38 p.m.

THE MARQUESS OF READING rose to call attention to the continued expansion in the numbers of non-industrial civil servants, the difficulties in the way of obtaining suitable recruits, and the increasing strain imposed by the current policy of His Majesty's Government upon the present members of the Service, especially in the higher grades; and to move for Papers.

The noble Marquess said: My Lords, may I begin by expressing regret, which your Lordships in general will share, that the noble Viscount the Leader of the House, who I understand was to have replied to this Motion, is unable, I hope because of only minor indisposition, to be present this afternoon. Let me at the outset relieve those noble Lords who will be replying from the Government Benches of any necessity to devote any part of their speech to a defence of the ability, integrity and loyalty of the Civil Service. That ability, that integrity and loyalty are as incontrovertible as they are invaluable. The sensation that accompanies a very occasional lapse is perhaps the best tribute to the rarity of any such occurrence. But one can have too much of a good thing, especially if one cannot afford to pay for that superfluity.

I express no contrition for raising this question a second time, after a debate in March of this year on a somewhat similar Motion also standing in my name. If justification be required it is found, I think, in two aspects of the matter: the first that the situation has certainly not improved in the interval, and the second that my previous Motion received an extremely scant answer from the Government. The noble Lord who then replied for the Government, having charged me with using reckless and unsubstantiated words, if he will forgive my saying so, then proceeded to get out his blue pencil and to mark my entire essay gamma minus, a process which, had it emanated from the noble Lord, Lord Lindsay, would have had all the reminiscent charm of the familiar. This is a matter of increasing seriousness to the life of the country as a whole. The Motion, as I have framed it to-day, falls into two parts. The first is to call attention to the number of persons employed in the Civil Service, and the second is to call attention to the strain imposed, chiefly upon the higher grades of the Service, upon whom the main weight rests, by the policy of the Government, and especially by the rate of its present implementation, by which increasingly measures come before both Houses of Parliament, often in ill-digested form and at ill-considered speed.

One is sometimes tempted to think that every Government Department must be at the moment plastered with the injunction, "Stick no bills." It is said that every individual has his guardian angel. At the present rate we are approaching the state at which every individual will have his civil servant as well, although the two will probably remain distinguishable. We have had recently a number of figures given in another place by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and there are also the figures shown in the frequently appearing Statistical Digest published by the Government. The most recent figure in the November issue of that Statistical Digest puts the number of national Government servants, which, I agree, includes, or presumably includes, industrial as well as non-industrial grades, at no less a figure than 1,007,000. Add to that—and it is not an unfair addition—the number of local government officials, the figure for which is 1,019,000, and you get a total of persons employed on this type of duty which amounts to no less a figure than 2,026,000. Recently both the Lord President of the Council and the President of the Board of Trade have made important speeches urging upon the country the overwhelming need for greater production and at the same time pointing out that the greatest single impediment to the increase of production is to be found in the shortage of man-power. If man-power is required (and no one will doubt that it is), there surely is a field for research as to what steps may be taken to reduce this formidable total of nonproductive man-power employed in the Civil Service and in the local government service. There is a reservoir which at least should be worthy of some investigation.

That is not the end of the matter, however. Looking at the measures which represent the realization of the Government's progress up to date, and looking still more at the measures which we understand to be contemplated in the immediate future, how can we doubt that the whole trend must be still further to increase this already alarming total? We have had the National Health Act, the National Insurance Act—which was accompanied by a statement from the Minister of National Insurance as to the large number of extra civil servants which would be required for the administration of this Act, and the difficulty with which we were likely to be confronted in procuring that additional staff—and other Acts, which can only result in an increase of Civil Service personnel. We shall have in the not very distant future an Electricity Nationalization Bill, we have a somewhat remote and wavering outline of steps to nationalize the iron and steel industry, and we have at this moment in another place the Transport Bill under discussion. Taking only the Transport Bill for the moment, can any of your Lordships doubt that the coming into operation of the scheme outlined in that Bill is going to result in a very substantial increase in the number of persons in Government employ? I have always understood it to be a fact that a scheme, not unlike this one, which required the issue of permits for journeys over an arbitrary limit, was part of the very systematic national control of transport which was carried out in Germany during the war and that one of the main contributory factors leading to the breakdown of the German transport system (which, happily for us, took place) was that the mere machinery for carrying out the system was so overwhelmingly burdened that it caused great delay and obstruction. If we are going to introduce a similar system it is not easy to see why we should escape the consequences of that system to which Germany fell a victim.

In the same class, but of a minor category when compared with that measure, is an interesting and unobtrusive little Bill called the Statistics of Trade Bill, which, so far as I can gather from a fairly cursory examination of it, might just as well be called the Legalization of Snooping Bill. It seeks to give to various Government Departments authority to make inquiries of firms and companies upon practically every aspect of their activities; indeed, the Schedule to this interesting little Bill seems to cover everything which any commercial firm could possibly be expected to do. Those inquiries again cannot be carried out without additional staff, not only in the Government Departments but at the other end. It is no use saying "This increase in the Civil Service merely represents a transfer from private industry to Government Departments; these are the people we have taken into the Government service." That is not so. The moment you start off a new Department or a new branch of a Department, the first thing that happens is that the head of the Department, not unwilling to increase his own status and importance, adds as quickly as he can to the number of people under his immediate control.

The second thing that happens is that the Department begins to work out forms. Forms have both a receiving and a dispatching end. It is no fun for people to send out forms if every form disappears into the blue and produces no return. It is like a game of tennis in which every service is a winner. The fun only begins when you start a rally, and you can only start a rally if you have got not only a server in one court but a striker in the other. The principle is exactly the same. These forms pour out and people are required to fill them up at the other end and return them. When you get these forms returned you have the immense business that you get under a Bill of this kind, the Statistics of Trade Bill, if the Bill has any value, of collating for the information of the Government Departments concerned the wealth of material which is being gathered in from all the firms in the country.

Another argument which is very often used is: "Oh, but these people are all clerical workers; they are not the sort of people who are adapted for industry." Has not our experience during the war disposed of that argument? It was surely proved one hundred fold, time and again, that with not such a lengthy period of probation as had often been thought necessary before, it was possible 'to adapt people with no previous experience to produce very adequate work in factories, and to make themselves of extreme value to the country in those capacities. The same conditions would surely apply in peace-time if we could dispose of a certain number of these unproductive persons and turn them towards the production drive, which is as much the ambition of Ministers as of anybody else, and perhaps more, because upon its failure would depend a good deal of their future. Yet we go on with this unbroken stream of legislation which can only result, as I say, in increasing the number of employees of Government Departments in order to carry out the consequent administration of these schemes.

If one may adapt very slightly a very familiar phrase, the Government seem to be "intoxicated with the exuberance of their own velocity." They cannot stop, and they cannot stop possibly for the reason that it is their desire to produce a completely socialized country in what they seem to regard as the very limited time available to them for the purpose. But it is the country in general which suffers from this hasty and ill-considered legislation, and will continue to do so. One of the ways in which it suffers is by this constant aggregation of the Civil Service. Figures are not a very exhilarating embellishment of a speech, but at the same time there are some figures in connexion with this matter with which I think I must very briefly trouble your Lordships.

I gave you earlier, from the Monthly Digest of Statistics for November, the total employed in national Government Services as 1,007,000 and in local government service as 1,019,000. It is not uninteresting to compare those figures with the figures of persons otherwise employed. In agriculture, which is, after all, one of the most basic industries of this country, there is only a total of 1,052,000 employed, as against the 1,019,000 employed in local government service—very nearly the same figure. In mining—and I think nobody is likely to deny the essential character of the miners' occupation—as distinct from the figure of just over i,000,000 for national Government Service, there are only 802,000 persons employed, which is considerably less than the total of those employed in national Government Service. In transport, shipping and fishing—and transport anyhow is a matter in which the Government are greatly interested—there are only 1,411,000. If you take the whole of manufacturing industry there are 6,845,000 employed, as distinct from over 2,000,000 employed in national and local government services together, a figure of 2,026,000, or only slightly less than the whole figure of 2,254,000 employed in the whole of the distributive trades of the country, and a figure greater than the total of those employed in commerce and finance, professional and personal service, entertainments, catering, laundries, etc., all lumped together.

Those are very formidable figures, because so far as commerce and finance, professional and personal service, entertainments, catering, laundries, etc., are concerned, they are all combined in these figures. You have got more than one civil servant to each individual man or woman employed in the aggregate of all those trades, and you have one civil servant to very nearly every three persons employed in the whole of the manufacturing industries of the country. I suggest that we cannot afford that prodigality indefinitely. The Chancellor of the Exchequer has recently given a number of illuminating figures. It began a little while ago, when he was asked in another place whether steps could be taken to prevent the then figure of 950,000 overstepping the million mark. He replied, perhaps without that extreme relevance that is characteristic of him, that the figure at July 1 was 709,000.

As that question was asked in December it did not seem a complete answer, and the matter is now being followed up. Yesterday some further figures were produced. I hope that your Lordships will look at the statistics given in Hansard of yesterday's answers to questions, where these figures may be discovered. They show the breakdown of the figure into the various classes of employment, what are called staff groups of the Civil Service, some of which I confess are of a somewhat novel character to me. I see there is a heading "Clerical and sub-clerical." I do not profess to know what "sub-clerical" may be. It sounds like the lowest form of clerical life. Apparently there is a lower grade, because we get down to "Minor and manipulative" before we finish. These figures are illuminating from this point of view, that they are divided into three periods of time. The first period is April 1, 1939, the second period July 1, 1945, and the third period of time October 1 of this present year. So you get the pre-war figure, the figure at the peak of the war just after V-E day, and the figure relatively at the present moment.

What the totals of all these various figures show is that in 1939 the total, including part-time staff, was 425,000. At the peak of the war, the middle of 1945, it had risen to 763,000. We should all expect that during a period of war-time there would be a very large increase in figures of this kind; that is inevitable; but we should also expect that fifteen months after these figures were applicable there would at least have been some perceptible decrease, and yet the figures for October, 1946, are still 750,000. The decrease appears to be largely represented by the difference between the 96,000 part-time workers in July, 1945, and the 72,000 in October, 1946. Although there are 13,000 fewer civil servants now than at the peak of the war, there has been a decrease of some 25,000 part-time civil servants, which means that the full-time strength of the Civil Service is now greater than at the peak of the late war. That is a state of affairs which we cannot, in the present conditions in which we live, contemplate with anything approaching equanimity. During the war one accepts these things as a necessity, but that war passed into history fifteen months ago, and one might, at least, have expected some substantial diminution in the permanent staff of the Civil Service.

Lest it should be thought that this Motion, and the state of affairs which it seeks to disclose, is merely the obsession of one man, I would refer your Lordships to an extremely interesting letter which was published in The Times on the 12th of this month. It was from the National Union of Manufacturers to the Prime Minister, and the Prime Minister's reply is also published. The National Union of Manufacturers wrote a letter to the Prime Minister in which the case that I am trying to make to-day is most admirably expounded, although there has been neither telegraphic nor, so far as I know, telepathic communication between that very representative body and myself. What they said was this: The National Union must at the same time point out that the ever-growing personnel of the Civil Service is now well over 700,000 at an annual cost approaching £400,000,000. To this must be added the personnel and cost of local government. The matter is extremely serious for two reasons. First, the national administration alone already absorbs at least 4 per cent. of the working population, and industry cannot be further denuded if our industrial recovery is to achieve the rate of progress envisaged by the Government. Second, the country cannot afford any further increase in the cost of the Civil Service, which must be borne by industry—that is, by production—since there is no other source from which the money can come, and which is a contributory cause of our taxation being at a level that is throttling the enterprise of employer and employee alike. That expresses in very powerful terms the gist of the case on this aspect of my Motion that I am endeavouring to make to your Lordships to-day, and on that aspect I merely want to add one footnote. When we are thinking in terms of the number of civil servants employed we think not only of the expenditure of man-power and of money, but also of the accommodation which is taken up by the employment of these swollen staffs to the exclusion of people who require it on far more urgent grounds That is substantially the case that I desire to make on the first aspect of the Motion.

I need say less on the second aspect, which deals with the strain imposed upon the senior members of the Civil Service-by the pace of present legislation, for I have already adumbrated the point that I desire to make. In the previous debate I had the temerity to say that it seemed to me that if this strain were allowed to continue a breakdown was not an impossible event, and it was for making that statement that I received a pontifical rebuke about reckless and unsubstantiated—

THE PARLIAMENTARY UNDERSECRETARY OF STATE FOR WAR (LORD PAKENHAM)

Since the noble Marquess has been kind enough to refer to some remarks of mine, would he care to remind the House of the precise words he used on that occasion?

THE MARQUESS OF READING

I think they were substantially the words I used to-day.

LORD PAKENHAM

You said "threshold of a breakdown."

THE MARQUESS OF READING

Very well, I do not run away from that in the least. In fact, if it is any satisfaction to the noble Lord, I am prepared to repeat it, and I will reinforce it in a moment. But what I want to point out is this: that that again was not entirely my own reckless and unsubstantiated statement, because here again I can bring in the letter from the National Union of Manufacturers to which I have already referred. They say there: From its day-to-day contact with Government departments, the National Union is aware of the very great burden which new legislation has imposed on the Civil Service, and it fears that the task of preparing further legislation and its subsequent administration will strain the present Civil Service almost to breaking point. Having read that—and it seems to be not dissimilar from the statement I had ventured to make before—I turned to the Prime Minister's reply expecting to find him in one of his more Zeus-like moods, striking down the National Union of Manufacturers with a thunderbolt for having made a statement of that kind. Curiously enough, I found, in such portion of the reply as is published, no reference at all to their statement as to the strain imposed upon the Civil Service. I leave it for a moment at that, but I do want to call this attention to the Prime Minister's reply in which it is said: But Mr. Attlee agrees with the National Union of Manufacturers that it is vital that the national administration should not make excessive demands on our total man-power resources. He agrees also that this can only be secured by positive measures, and steps have already been taken by the Government with a view to the 'reduction of numbers, as soon as possible …. I hope that the noble Lords who reply for the Government this afternoon will inform the House what those positive measures are and will assure us that they are not merely taken with a view to something happening, because views are often of very distant prospects.

I suggest that it is not sufficient to leave this question of reducing staffs to the good will of the various Departments of Government themselves. There must be imported into this matter persons from outside who will deal with it drastically and promptly, who will have authority to carry out a proper investigation and the assurance that their recommendations will be put into practice without delay. Many of us have seen, in another context, orders issued from the top in the Services saying that staffs must be reduced. A Conference is held at which every branch of the staff is represented, and the representative of every branch persistently proclaims the excessive numbers of individuals employed by every other branch and the absolutely indispensable character of the numbers employed in his own branch. It is only when you get an outside body looking into these matters that you get any finality and any drastic action worthy of the name. Therefore, I suggest that it is not enough to leave this vitally important matter to the good will of the various Departments concerned. The life of a nation, social, economic, industrial and commercial, is, after all, not very unlike a town, the various buildings in which depend for their stability upon the soundness of the foundations underneath them. Those foundations, in the case of the nation, are man-power and money. If you remove those foundations and use the material to build a skyscraper town hall, the only result is that the buildings gradually subside and yon are left in the end with a town hall but without a town. I beg to move for Papers.

3.14 p.m.

LORD CHORLEY

My Lords, the noble Marquess has drawn your Lordships' attention to a situation of which the Government are very well aware, and with which the Government are taking steps to deal. The noble Marquess—as he has reminded your Lordships—moved a Motion of a similar kind as long ago as February 18 of this year. It was not in March, but in the middle of February. He complains that my noble friend Lord Pakenham awarded him a gamma minus mark, which I am quite sure was not in my noble friend's mind at all, because, as the noble Marquess is very well aware, when the Master of Balliol, or any other Don, marks essays, one of the matters to which he attaches considerable importance is that of style. The noble Marquess's speeches are always couched in such a delightful and witty style that it would be impossible to give him, on the ground of style alone, anything but an alpha mark. What my noble friend complained of was that this brilliance of style is calculated not so much to dazzle the eyes—and indeed the ears—of the audience as to obscure fundamental fallacies which would be very obvious, if I may say so, if one could get away from the brilliance of the Roman candles in the noble Marquess's speech.

What my noble friend Lord Pakenham really took exception to—and I must say I entirely agree with him—was the alarmist statement at the very beginning of the noble Marquess's speech. He says that he does not want to run away from it. I must say that the phrases he used this afternoon seemed to indicate that, at any rate, he had realized, before he was challenged, that he had been unnecessarily alarmist in the middle of February, when the actual words that he used at the opening of his speech were: I believe, without any language of exaggeration, that at the present moment the Civil Service machine is on the threshold of a breakdown, the consequences of which may well be catastrophic. That was to all intents a year ago, and if the machine had been on the threshold of a breakdown then surely it would have been over the threshold by now. When challenged, the noble Marquess calls in aid a body which, if I may say so with great respect, is even less qualified to speak on the subject of whether the Civil Service is on the verge of collapse than is the noble Marquess himself. If he would himself go over the threshold and into any Government Department in Whitehall and consult with those holding responsible positions, he would find that they would tell him that nothing was further from the truth than that the Civil Service was upon the threshold of collapse.

The noble Marquess really, I suggest, brought forward this Motion not so much with a view to making an impartial investigation into the conditions of the Civil Service and the undoubted difficulties which confront it at the present time, as to develop a sideways attack on the policy of the Government, a policy which received an absolutely outstanding mandate from the electorate at the General Election in 1945. The whole substance of his argument is that the Government and the Party which came into office pledged to carry out a certain line of social progress should run away from their pledges and should in effect repudiate the mandate which they received.

THE MARQUESS OF READING

I am sorry to interrupt the noble Lord, but really he must not go upon that line. It does not represent what I said. Nobody expects the Government to rim away from their pledges. All I was suggesting was that they should pay a little attention to priorities and to the rate of introduction of their measures.

LORD CHORLEY

With respect to the noble Marquess, I am quite sure that any objective observer of the political situation in this country would agree that the Government were, in fact, paying attention to the matters to which the noble Marquess has referred, these matters of national insurance and others. All these Bills which have been passed through Parliament in the last year are very largely measures which were worked out by the National Government during the war years, and the very Departments, or some of them, the staffs of which have had to be increased during this period are very largely the Departments concerned—the national health service, for example, which has been set up and very properly set up, with the unanimous support of all political Parties in this country and which is founded upon the Report of a most distinguished member of the noble Marquess's own Party.

Now, my Lords, if I may turn for a moment to the actual situation, the figures which the noble Marquess gave envisaged that the peak of the Civil Service was reached in July, 1945, just at the end of the war. Actually, the peak was reached in 1943, and there was a quite substantial decline between 1943 and 1945. It is true that from 1945 to the present time, in certain respects, there has been an increase, because at the present time the Civil Service is having to deal with the very big job of winding up the war effort. That cannot be done in a short time, and it requires a very large number of people if it is to be done efficiently and effectively. The Civil Service is also having to work that system of controls which was necessarily introduced during the period of the war, and which it is agreed by everybody has to be continued for a period into the peace years. For example, the Ministry of Food absorbs perhaps the largest number of non-industrial civil servants who are employed in the Government service.

The Civil Service also has the responsibility of making provision for the reconstruction of the country's industry, and for all the measures of social progress which have been carried through during the past year, and will be carried through during the months to come. Obviously, there are very considerable difficulties, and indeed dangers, attending this business of reconstruction and building up. The Government are very well aware of them and welcome the opportunity to discuss them, because the more carefully they are brought out into the light of day, and the more carefully they are discussed on a scientific and objective basis, the better it will be for everybody concerned. The trouble, of course, is that those who dislike the whole of the policy which the Government are pledged to carry out naturally dislike the methods and machinery which have to be brought into existence to put that policy into effect. Those who support this policy realize perfectly well that the numbers of civil servants must be kept within reasonable bounds, and must be kept under constant review the whole time.

There is also the question of recruitment. The noble Marquess has referred to this in his Motion, although he has not given it a great deal of attention this afternoon; I think perhaps he referred to it more in his earlier speech. But this matter of recruitment is also appreciated by the Government, because obviously the question of the recruitment of effective civil servants in sufficient numbers is a matter of fundamental importance. On July I last the total number of nonindustrial civil servants was 709,500; and it is very much the same now. I believe, in point of fact, there has been a slight increase, but nothing very much. This figure which I have given represents an increase of 13,500 over the figure at April 1, 1946, which in its turn shows an increase of 5,000 over the numbers employed on January 1, 1946. This increasing tendency, which followed a gradual reduction from the war-time figure of 740,000, is largely due to the points which I have already mentioned.

The noble Marquess to-day—and more particularly in his earlier speech—emphasized that the schemes of nationalization and Government control require, and will increasingly require, enormously increased numbers of civil servants. Although he did not actually give the figures, the noble Marquess suggested that these increases of which I have spoken were due to this particular matter. Actually, that is not so. For example, if the noble Marquess will refer to Cmd. Paper No. 6926, which gives the broken-up figures for the various Departments for the quarter from April to July of this year, he will see that the increase of 13,000, to which I have already referred, is very largely accounted for by an increase of 9,395 at the Ministry of Food. That was a temporary increase, the largest part of which was due to the fact that new ration books were being issued during the summer and there was also bread rationing—which had nothing to do with nationalization, and which it is now generally agreed was essential. Whatever Government were in office, the same figures would have occurred at the Ministry of Food as have in fact occurred.

The noble Marquess referred particularly in the course of his speech to the Ministry of Fuel and Power, and to the taking over of the mines, and the consequent increase in February. He was going on, but possibly he looked at these figures. At any rate, if he had done so he would have seen that between October, 1945, and July this year the number of civil servants employed in the Ministry of Fuel and Power actually declined and declined by a figure in the neighbourhood of 200. That may be the reason why he rather chose to prophesy what would inevitably occur when the nationalization of the transport system is carried through. He drew a gloomy picture of what happened in Germany, and said that something of the same sort was very likely, if not inevitable, in this country. It would be rash to prophesy about this sort of thing, because it is extraordinarily difficult to forecast what will happen, but the whole object of nationalization of transport is to integrate the transport system of this country which, from some points of view, is in a chaotic condition at the present time and, from other points of view, does entail an enormous wastage of people who are at present occupied in dealing with licences. There are thousands of people occupied, in one way or another, dealing with freight weights and licences under the system which had been carried out by the Governments before the war. When this system is rationalized, when those schemes are in full operation, it may well be that the number of civil servants—employees of the Regional Transport Control and that sort of thing—will be reduced to a figure considerably below that which it now is.

The noble Marquess referred to a letter addressed to the Prime Minister by the National Union of Manufacturers—a letter which they were entitled to send, because this matter is obviously one of considerable interest and importance—and to the Prime Minister's reply. The Prime Minister made it perfectly clear that this is a matter which is very much in the thoughts of His Majesty's Government, and that action is being taken to deal with it. I can inform the noble Marquess, and your Lordships, that that action is being taken at the very highest level, at Ministerial level itself. Ministers are dealing with this matter. It is for the Government to deal with it and not some outside body brought in to deal with a matter which is essentially the responsibility of the Government. The noble Marquess, Lord Reading, apparently would like to wield a Geddes Axe or see a modern Geddes wielding a Geddes Axe. We on this side of the House regard the work done by that Geddes Committee as being one of the worst things that happened between the two wars. The last thing which we want is a Geddes Committee. The Government accept responsibility for dealing with their own house, putting their own house in order, and they are carrying on that work at the present time.

With regard to the question of recruitment, recruitment of established staff in the Civil Service was suspended during the war, but it is now in full swing again and is being handled through the agency of the Civil Service Commission in the usual way, on the lines laid down by the important White Paper, Command 6567 in 1944. That was one of two outstanding White Papers on the Civil Service—one on training, which is also being put into operation, and one on recruitment. My noble friend Lord Pakenham dealt with this matter in some detail in his reply to the noble Marquess in February, and I do not propose to go over all that ground again. I would remind your Lordships that there are two main types of competition being held concurrently for the recruitment of the necessary civil servants, one being what is called the reconstruction recruitment of more elderly personnel, people who have been in the war or otherwise are experienced in the sort of work which is necessary and who will be submitted to a test of a very general character. A substantial quota has been set aside for ex-Service men. At the same time, concurrently with that, normal recruitment is going on broadly in the pre-war way, with certain modifications which I think were referred to by my noble friend, and which we think are an improvement on the pre-war methods.

Then a considerable number of "temporaries" are being recruited in ways which were indicated by my noble friend. The period over which this major recruitment will go on is a period of some two years. That is necessary in order to be fair to all the candidates who wish to enter. I understand that the volume and the quality of the candidates are reasonably satisfactory, and the operation, although a very large one, is taking place reasonably smoothly and successfully. The candidates selected are of pretty high quality, and there is no reason at all to suppose that the general quality and effectiveness of the recruits will in any way fall below that which was attained during the pre-war years, and to which the noble Marquess has himself paid a well-deserved tribute.

The yield on current recruitment from that source amounts to date to over four hundred entrants to the administrative class, which is something like ten times the yearly average of the recruitment to that class in the years before the war; seven hundred and fifty to the executive class and 15,000 to the large clerical class. These are permanent recruitments. In addition, "temporaries" in all the different classes are being taken on from time to time in fairly large numbers. These additions to the established staff are very large numbers and no doubt there will be a certain creaking in the machine as a result. One cannot take in a large number of recruits in this way and expect the whole thing to go completely smoothly, but those who are responsible are well satisfied with the progress that is being made in these difficult conditions.

There can be no doubt at all that the Civil Service is confronted with a very substantial task. It is working under very great strain—I entirely accept what the noble Marquess said with regard to that matter. On the other hand, it must be remembered that the mere confrontation with tasks of this enormous magnitude does call out the best in these men, who are men of very great ability. As one of them said to me: "It gives one a certain feeling of exhilaration." A great deal of frustration was felt in the Civil Service in the years between the wars, but that I think has now been left behind, and the members of the Civil Service feel that they are taking part in a really great task, the task of reconstructing their country.

No doubt in many ways time could be saved. For example, a great deal of time is put into the answering of Parliamentary questions, work which has increased enormously in the years between the wars. While it is quite impossible to work out any figure to show how many civil servants are occupied every day in making preparations for answering Parliamentary questions, it would no doubt be a very substantial number. There are ways in which time can be saved, but that is one in which it would be exceedingly difficult to save time, because Members of Parliament are entitled to that information, and a great deal of it is of the greatest value to the community. The intake of these new entrants in due course should enable the Civil Service to cope, without any feeling of strain or overstrain, with the situation with which it has to deal, and effect the implementation of all the legislation which has gone through and will go through during the next months and years.

It was said by a famous statesman, who was famous not only as a statesman but, as a political scientist—the late President Wilson—that no part of any Government is better than the men to whom that part is entrusted. I am sure that your Lordships will agree that the government in so far as it is entrusted to the Civil Service of this country, is entrusted to a body of men of outstanding ability, intelligence and integrity, and, in so far as it is entrusted to them, we can look forward to their work and depend on their work with absolute reliance.

3.37 p.m.

LORD CHERWELL

My Lords, I am sure that the House has listened with great interest to the speech of the noble Lord who has just sat down. I hope that the noble Marquess, Lord Reading, was pleased to hear that a large number of new entrants into the Civil Service is on the way, and that there is no question that we shall run short in the coming years. I think the country as well as the House will welcome the Motion of the noble Marquess drawing attention to the extraordinary increase in the Civil Service during the last years. I remember very well about thirty years ago how we used to laugh at the foreigner who was hag-ridden by officials, how we used to smile at the Germans kow-towing to their Beamte and at the French being ordered about by their fonctionnaires. We little thought that our generation would live to see the people of England in the grip of a bureaucracy more numerous and more powerful than any which infested those foreign countries which we used to ridicule. After all, two million civil servants, two million people out of twenty million of working age, is a very large number. It is one in every ten, or one in every nine if we take into account the fact that nearly two million are in the Armed Services, which means we have got nearly four million people drawing their weekly pay nowadays directly from Government sources, with only about ten or eleven million males of working age in the whole country. It is really a most remarkable fact that this country has accepted without a murmur all this regimentation which is far beyond the dreams—perhaps I should say the nightmares—of the foreigners at whom we used to smile in my youth.

I should like to join at once with the noble Marquess in making it perfectly plain that whatever I may say has absolutely no semblance of an attack upon the Civil Service. I had the advantage of working with them for five years, and of admiring their capacity and loyalty, and I would be the last to cast stones at those devoted public servants. As I said six or eight months ago, it is the responsibility of the Government. If they will keep interfering more and more with our daily lives, then they will require more and more civil servants to do it. Indeed, I do not think from what I hear that the numbers of the Civil Service have kept pace with the greatly augmented duties which have been imposed upon them with all these weird, wild and wonderful schemes which the Government have introduced, all of them intended, of course—although I think the road we are being forced to tread, like its prototype, is paved with good intentions—to improve and increase the happiness of the citizens of the country. I must confess that the methods of increasing the happiness are mildly reminiscent of Doctor Grimston, the headmaster in that great book Vice Versa, who at one stage said that he intended to make his a happy, contented school if he had to flog every boy in it as long as he could stand over him. But that is by the way.

I do not propose to-day to talk about the great curtailment of our liberties involved in all this increase in bureaucracy. On this side of the House we attach great importance to that, but I do not think it would appeal very strongly to noble Lords opposite whose paragon is the "economic man," and I shall confine myself to the economic consequences of this enormous proliferation of people engaged in telling other people how they ought to behave. We have had some facts and figures from the noble Marquess who opened this dedate. I must confess that I shall have to use a few figures, too, and I take them from the same source. I am somewhat hampered in this, I must say, by the fact that within the last three months the Government seem to have discovered about 186,000 civil servants of whom they had no previous knowledge. In the June Statistical Digest we got a set of figures of the number of civil servants employed in local and central government, and in the latest edition of the Statistical Digest I observe that there has been a sudden jump, 57,000 extra in the central government service, and 129,000 extra in the local government service, an error which I believe was discovered when the unemployment insurance books were exchanged. I think when one can have a doubt about 186,000 it is a little difficult to argue too much about figures. However, I will do my best, using the Command Papers which the noble Lord, Lord Chorley, himself employed.

The noble Lord told us with some pride, or, at any rate, satisfaction, that the numbers had only risen very little—I think it was from 701,000 on October 1, 1945, to 709,000 on October 1 of this year. He said: "After all, what is 8,000 or 9,000?" I do not know, but I do not think he could have seen that there was a certain fallacy in that. Let us analyse these figures a little. During that period the Fighting Services had diminished to one-third, and obviously the number of civil servants coping with the Fighting Services had also been reduced. They were not reduced by two-thirds, as some people might have hoped, but they were reduced by one-third in this process of winding up to which the noble Lord referred. They were reduced by 53,000. That means that although the Fighting Services were reduced by 53,000, the civil servants ministering to the needs of the civilians increased not by 8,000 but by 53,000 plus 8,000, that is to say, 61,000 or 62,000.

The Post Office accounts for one-third of the Civil Service, and if the increase had been due to an increase in postal facilities we might have welcomed it, but I do not think anyone would claim that that has happened, although the Post Office has gone up by 18,000. But of all the rest of the people, who are not really doing something immediately, obviously useful, or, rather, not doing anything immediately, obviously conducive to our comfort, there were 45,000 extra. In the Ministry of Food, we have an increase of 30 per cent.; the Inland Revenue was increased by 14 per cent.; the Ministry of Fuel and Power, we are told, has not increased—nor did our coal supply. But I notice that the Board of Trade increased to very nearly double, and I rather suspect that this failure of the Ministry of Fuel and Power to increase may have marked some transfer of responsibilities, or something like that. If not, the doubling of the Board of Trade numbers is a very remarkable phenomenon.

Anyhow, the total overall increase was I7½ per cent. At that rate, the Civil Service not ministering to our immediate needs will double in five years. I think that is a very gloomy prospect. In 1938 we had 130,000 civil servants, if we exclude those dealing with the Services and the Post Office. In 1946 we have 298,000. We had an increase between 1938 and the end of the war of 95 per cent., and between 1938 and to-day we have an increase of 130 per cent. Moreover, the curve is rising. In the last quarter of 1945 the numbers only increased by 3,300, but in the first quarter of 1946 they went up 18,000, and in the second quarter 22,000. Where is it going to end? Surely 2,000,000 in 17.8 million working is really rather excessive. As the noble Marquess pointed out, there are only about 6,000,000 people employed in manufacturing industries, yet we have got something like 2,000,000, one for every three working, telling us what to do, how to behave, and how to manage our affairs. You can always make cut a case that this may lead to some improvement. If you had double the number of traffic policemen, the traffic might go a little faster. However, the question is whether it would pay to have more traffic policemen for the very small increase and improvement in the traffic. After all, no one would say that we ought to have one traffic policeman to every ten drivers, and that is what we are coming to in the Civil Service.

As the noble Marquess has said, numbers are not the only measure of the total loss of productivity involved in these very large numbers of civil servants. There is a very great imposition of non-productive work on the ordinary civilian in answering and dealing with all their letters and forms. After all, they are there to enforce certain regulations and controls and if they are going to enforce them they have got to get some written document saying that something has happened. As we all know, a great proportion of them spend most of their time writing letters and sending out forms to the public. As the noble Marquess has said, every letter has to be answered and every form filled in. It takes the ordinary citizen a good deal longer to fill up a form than it takes a civil servant to send it out. The unhappy man probably finds himself immobilized for a considerable period each week in trying to cope with these various documents. I know what it is like myself, in a small way, in my own laboratory. One would normally expect a laboratory to be fairly immune from Government investigation and inquisition. We have only thirty people receiving wages there, yet there is one full-time clerk engaged on P.A.Y.E., insurance stamps, Ministry of Labour certificates, and all the rest of the paraphernalia without which we are told we should not be able to live. In the distributive trades, I am told, something like five per cent. of the personnel is engaged with coupons, ration cards, dockets, forms and all the rest of it. I would not be at all surprised to learn—in fact I think there is every reason to believe it—that one person in ten of all clerical workers in the United Kingdom is really engaged in dealing with a sort of snowstorm of documents, coupons and forms which descend upon us. I do not know whether "snowstorm" is a good word for the dirty buff coloured things that come down on us; they are more like a fall of autumn leaves.

It would be very interesting to know how many forms are sent out. I have not been able to make any estimate, but I notice that every year £13,000,000 is set aside for printing and stationery. That make me think there must be a good deal of printed matter going the rounds. £13,000,000 would be enough to supply every man, woman, and child in this country with one page of the increased six-page Daily Herald every day. I do not know whether we really get that number of forms, but it must be something of that order. If we say that ten per cent. of the population is in the Civil Service and that five per cent. of the time of the rest of us is occupied in the filling up of forms, then about fifteen per cent. of our time is occupied in this way. That is seven hours a week in a forty-eight hour week. How can we hope to increase our standard of life when that sort of thing is going on? I reckon that the ordinary person probably spends two hours a week dutifully assuring officials of his submission to their wishes and giving them evidence of his complete obedience. I wonder whether the Government really appreciate that.

I am sorry to see that the noble and learned Lord, the Lord Chancellor, is not here at the moment. The other day when my noble friend Lord Cranborne mentioned a very small point connected with a musical instrument which we were told was cailed a recorder, he pointed out that some friend of his who wanted to buy a recorder was told he had to get a licence to do so; that he spent half a day in finding the right official from whom to get the licence and that when he had found him the official said he had never refused a licence. The noble and learned Lord, the Lord Chancellor, with the omniscience which we expect from one holding his office, not only had heard of a recorder, but knew a man who wanted one—a man who was lying on his back with a broken spine and whose only hope of enjoyment and comfort in this world was to play the recorder. He told us, with all his forensic persuasiveness, that if these things had not been rigorously controlled this unhappy man lying on his back might have been short of a recorder and that would have been too bad. The argument was, of course, invalidated by the fact, as the noble Viscount, Lord Cranborne, pointed out, that the official said he had never refused a licence for a recorder.

Be that as it may, the point I want to make is a different one. What the Lord Chancellor did not seem to appreciate was the loss of man-hours involved in getting the licence. It does not take much more than half-a-man-day to make a recorder, and if this man had not spent all his time in going about trying to get this licence and had saved that amount of time, the recorder could have been made. Take the civil servant who has to hand out the licences. On the average one man could make several hundreds, or probably nearly a thousand, recorders a year. Of course I shall be told that the civil servant involved had to deal with a lot of musical instruments, but presumably there is more than one man doing it. Suppose those civil servants licensing recorders were not there, the amount of man-power could make all the recorders the country wanted and a good deal more. The Lord Chancellor said, "But think of the wood and the metal." The amount of wood used to kindle a civil servant's fire on one day would make at least six recorders, and as for the metal, one single man could make enough metal in one day to produce hundreds of recorders.

Qualitative arguments of that sort do not hold water when you look at them from a quantitative standpoint. The whole point is whether the effort of control is worth the saving you thereby achieve. We have got 2,000,000 civil servants. If only half of them could be turned on to the export trade—there are only some 2,000,000 people in the export trade—you could increase exports by 50 per cent., redress the balance of trade and improve our whole standard of life, instead of using them to enforce all these petty restrictions. Surely it is that aspect which ought to be considered. The question is not whether or not the restrictions do a little bit of good but whether or not more good could be done by turning the men on to do something else. As the noble Marquess pointed out, it is said that £380,000,000 goes in salaries to these civil servants, and presumably another £380,000,000 goes to the almost equal number of local government servants. We are told that £380,000,000 is the equivalent to 3s. in the pound on Income Tax.

LORD CHORLEY

I ought to remind the noble Lord that that figure includes all the industrial civil servants, many of whom are actually making things with their hands.

LORD CHERWELL

The number of industrial civil servants is about a quarter of the whole. Let us deduct a quarter and say £285,000,000. If we take the million local government officials, we can say that they receive approximately £380,000,000 as well because I imagine the rates of pay are not vastly different. So we get in all something like £700,000,000. We are told that £380,000,000 represents 3s. in the pound on the Income Tax. That of course is the popular way of putting it. Most people do not pay Income Tax and they all think "What does it matter if the Income Tax goes up a bit more?" But that of course is not a very fair way of putting it because it does not really give the facts. A much less popular way of putting it would be this way. One third of the Budget is paid by the rich people, by the Income Tax payers, and two thirds of it has to be found from the poorer classes. Everybody agrees that you cannot get much more out of the rich, so every additional pound that is added comes out of the pocket of the poor man. £380,000,000 is £19 a year per head of the working population, or 7s. 3d. a week. If you take the other £290,000,000, representing about 6s. a week, that means that something like 13s. a week comes out of the poor man's pocket in order to pay people many of whom are engaged in telling him what not to do, how he ought to behave, what forms he has to fill up, what rations he has to draw and generally snootering him about.

I quite agree with what the noble Lord said: the Government do begin to realize the cost of this sort of thing to the nation. It would seem as though the noble Lord who answered had obviously been in close contact with the Civil Service. He explained to us that the question was "under constant review"—a phrase which I seem to have heard very often! But whether or not the questionnaire to the various Departments demanding economies will lead to anything I must confess I am very doubtful. The real point is this: Will the Government give instructions to cut down all these niggling, petty regulations and restrictions? I am not asking them to change their whole policy, but really to try and cut down this detailed intervention in our affairs. With the broad strategical controls we none of us quarrel, because we mostly recognize that something has to be done. It is these petty regimentations of which I complain. Now perhaps it may be unpopular to suggest that they should be cut, but there seems to be a process, I gather from a Government spokesman, of what is called "shedding the load". It is said that you cannot call it a cut, but that from time to time in some parts supplies are reduced at certain periods so that in the end there is nothing. All I ask is that the Government should try to shed the load which lies upon the poor unhappy, frustrated citizens of this country.

4.2 p.m.

LORD SHEPHERD

My Lords, I am only going to speak quite briefly to your Lordships to-day, because the major part of what I had intended to say has already been put before you by my noble friend Lord Chorley. There are, however, one or two points I should like to bring to your Lordships' attention in the hope that I may convince you that the Government after all is on the right track, and that it is not ignorant of some of the difficulties which are bound to arise where large numbers of people are employed. First of all, the number of men and women employed in the Civil Service full-time at this moment is very much smaller than I myself expected. I say that quite frankly and I am not afraid of ridicule, because I have attempted to visualize the problems involved in unwinding the great war machine which embraced not merely the whole of the people of this country but most of the people in the world at large. As we are all linked in one form or another, events in this country and abroad are really part and parcel of the same problem.

We have not only had to wind up the war in so far as the demobilization of soldiers is concerned; we have not only had to bring to this country those great stores of war material that we accumulated, but we have had to provide for their disposal and resale in this country. Moreover, we have had to engage in world-wide discussions involving the employment of considerable staffs in reaching the peace itself. In war we are told that the most difficult operation is that of retreat. It is equally true to say that the most difficult operation that follows a war, is in winding up the war after the first fit of public enthusiasm has been burnt out. But we have not only had to do that. We have also had to consider the population at home, and look after its interests. This House has been involved, with another place, in putting upon the Statute Book a large number of measures which have meant the employment of more civil servants. They relate to health, to unemployment insurance, to sick benefits, to pensions, to family allowances and to the development of education.

Now it is no use indicating that these measures were introduced by a Labour Government fresh from an electoral victory. The measures I have mentioned have been jointly approved. They were under discussion, and they were under promotion, by the Coalition Government who conducted the war. During the passage of those Bills through this House I have heard it repeatedly claimed that what the Government was now proposing were common proposals, accepted by all parties in this House. I will therefore ask this question: Are we to discharge the civil servants whom we have now recruited for the purpose of the administration of these services, which would mean the scrapping of the services, or are we to continue the services and, at the same time, maintain the necessary staffs to see that they are put into proper operation?

Reference has been made already in this debate to the fact that the Board of Trade is employing a very much larger number of persons than hitherto. The same could be said truly of the Ministry of Labour and all other Government institutions. But I suggest that it is entirely wrong to say that these men who are being recruited into these services, are not contributing to the productive welfare of our country. There was a time when the Board of Trade merely supplied information. Nowadays a Board of Trade of that kind would be of no use to us at all. The Board of Trade is an institution which must take the initiative in the development of industry, and which must become a partner in industry. I venture to say that practically every service rendered by the Board of Trade at this moment is of direct assistance to the productive power of this country. I suggest that it is wrong that we should try to convince people that the persons who are employed by the Board of Trade are actually making no contribution to our welfare.

The Ministry of Labour at one time had very little more to do than the establishment of labour exchanges, where employers of labour could send notices of their requirements and where workpeople could go to find out what positions were vacant. That was the beginning and the end of the services of the labour exchanges in those days, but we would not be satisfied with services of that kind at this time. The Ministry of Labour is now an active force in the industrial life of our country. It is a great labour provider for all the industrial undertakings, and in that respect I suggest again it would be entirely wrong to say that the men and women employed by the Ministry of Labour are making no direct contribution to our welfare. That statement would be entirely wrong and would mislead the population of this country if it were to be believed.

LORD CHERWELL

Nobody on this side has said that they made no contribution. The question is whether the amount of contribution per head from these people is equal to the contribution that could be made by direct production.

LORD SHEPHERD

I am sorry if I misunderstood the noble Lord.

LORD CHORLEY

The noble Marquess used the phrase "non-productive manpower" quite definitely.

LORD SHEPHERD

I understood the noble Lord to say that these people were not making a contribution to our immediate welfare. At any rate, Hansard tomorrow will bear it out.

LORD CHERWELL

You will find that I am right.

LORD SHEPHERD

I will, of course, apologize if you are right, but I am speaking under the impression I have gained. The Ministry of Labour is, in fact, making a direct contribution to the welfare of our country. The Ministry of Labour staffs are bound to increase in the near future. The noble Lord smiles, but this House recently expressed a view that the Labour Government was doing the right thing in proposing to introduce compulsory military service. In consequence the whole recruitment for the Army in the future will be one of the responsibilities of the Ministry of Labour, as it has been during the war period.

LORD CHERWELL

Why should it increase?

LORD SHEPHERD

Why should it increase? If the supposition is that the men and women in the Ministry of Labour are not now fully employed, one would say it ought not to increase. But I have not gathered from noble Lords opposite that the men and women in the Civil Service are not doing a full day's work. Indeed, in the Motion itself—

LORD CHERWELL

I am sorry to interrupt again, but if the present staff were capable of recruiting an army of over four and a half million men why should they have to be increased in order to maintain a conscript army of the order of a million?

LORD SHEPHERD

Probably the noble Lord has missed the point: that in many of the Ministries there has been a great reduction in their staffs. Indeed, the figures from which he has quoted indicate that. But the real point is this, that in future the Ministry of Labour, as compared with pre-war days, is going to undertake responsibilities that are bound to call for the employment of more labour than heretofore. Not only that, but the Ministry of Labour is probably going to be faced with the fact that when men are brought into the Army, they are not merely to be taught to be soldiers. They are going to be given a training, whilst in the Army, to fit them for civilian life when they leave it. The great probability is that responsibility for that work will either fall upon the Ministry of Labour or some other public institution.

LORD CHERWELL

In order to get the figures straight, because the noble Lord said the numbers of the Ministry of Labour had decreased, may I quote from the statistics? I find that there were 35,965 on October 1, 1945, and there were 48,947 on July 1, 1946. That is certainly not a decrease since the war, and if they are going to increase still more in order to keep a smaller number of men in the service that fact will require a little explanation.

LORD CHORLEY

May I be permitted to point out that the note to the statistics to which the noble Lord, Lord Cherwell, has just referred make it quite clear that this substantial increase was due to the setting up of training centres which, I think everybody will agree, was one of the best things the Minister has ever done.

LORD CHERWELL

Why should they increase still more now if the training centres have been already set up?

LORD SHEPHERD

Really I think we have got to be reasonable in these matters. You cannot place upon these institutions many fresh jobs of that character without having to foot the bill in the employment of men and women to make them effective. It is not the Labour Government alone that proposes legislation which calls for the employment of civil servants. All parties and all Governments have done their share of it during the course of time.

There is just one other point that I would like to deal with, a point that has not really been dealt with fully to-day. I think it is good that there should be a constant review of the ranks of the Civil Service to see whether the staffs are being employed in a way that give credit to themselves and service to the nation. I understand that at the moment there exists within the Civil Service a machine of that kind. I myself would not object to attaching to that machine either members of this House or Members of Parliament who, in association with the Ministers, could make quite sure that proper arrangements are made, but I would strongly object to bringing into Civil Service matters representatives of industry from outside. I do not think that the experience that they have gathered in their own industries is of the kind that would be beneficial to the Service with which we are concerned. I am glad to note, from the figures that have been published to-day, that there have been reductions in many directions. Where there have been increases, I believe those increases can be amply justified.

4.16 p.m.

LORD DERWENT

My Lords, in rising to support, as I most heartily do, the noble Marquess's Motion, I feel inclined to express my sympathy with him in that his re-opening of this all-important question to-day coincides visibly, as it happens, with one of the present Government's attempts to put the brake on. In other words, having observed, rather late in the day, the deleterious effect on production and on the national economy as a whole of this plethora of functionaries it is engaged in imposing on us, it has given instructions to the Treasury to review the whole position and is itself engaged in doing so. What I wish to draw attention to is the fundamental hopelessness of thus attempting to change horses, or, rather, to ride two horses simultaneously in mid-stream.

Thanks to the potency of the Marxist myth, the basis of the mandate with which His Majesty's Government insatiably repeat they have been entrusted by the people of this country was, and remains, an economic one. It has been pointed out lately by more profound thinkers than I am, notably by Dr. Edward Glover in a remarkable article in the November Horizon, that to centralize a policy on an economic point is to incur the accusation of being a latter-day reactionary, for the simple reason that it thus only tackles one aspect of man's nature, his acquisitive instincts, and that this is just as narrow a point of view as anything that the extreme Right could advance. So far as I am concerned, I consider it completely out of date. But my criticism is not so much that all these nationalization projects, which are the main structure of State Socialism, are presented to us as a panacea for the many ills from which we suffer, but that the Government are under a complete illusion—in fact, are acting in probably unconscious but really bad faith—if they imagine they can really modify and tone down these projects now that they have progressed so far. They want to have their cake and eat it. That is to say, that having decided to byzantinize the political life of this country, and to act according to the tenets of pure Socialist doctrine, they desire to show England that she is England still, that she can continue to compromise on these matters as she has very sanely contrived to do in times past on others.

If I may, I will quote a recent political writer. He wrote: The fundamental problem with a Government which puts doctrine above practical politics and converts temporary emergency measures into the permanent laws of the land is that it may utterly destroy the way back to any other farm of political life. The cruel necessities of the last war and the present emergency are taken over as golden rules, only to become the yet more cruel necessities of later generations. It seems to me that that is the basic difficulty. The present Government cannot afford to be false to its own real nature; it is pledged to nationalization, as it admits, and thereby to turning the double screw of driving people out of private enterprise—thus destroying the spirit of individual initiative which has proved so precious a quality over so many years—and driving them into the ranks of the paid employees of the State, paid incidentally, with money levied from the results of the very private enterprise whose existence is rendered so difficult. The vicious circle, it seems to me, should be obvious to a child.

If the official staff is cut down now, efficiency is inevitably impaired. The Civil Service, whose competence and integrity while its representatives were not only kept numerically within due bounds but had work imposed on them which they could satisfactorily do, was a by-word throughout the world, is already grossly overworked, and at the same time the cost of its upkeep has become so obvious a burden to an already impoverished community that it is clear, even to the Government that is obliged to increase it, that it must be cut down—all this because that Government, in the most un-English of ways, has decided to put theory before practice. The situation, if it were not tragic, would be worthy of Alice in Wonderland. The noble Marquess's Motion has received, and will doubtless continue to receive, the soft answer that is supposed to turn away wrath. I suggest that we should not deceive ourselves. The Government, as at present constituted, can give nothing but a fundamentally hypocritical answer; it has made its own bed, and it can toss and turn as much as it likes but it has got to lie on it. In Dr. Glover's words: What the Left does not recognize is that it cannot have it both ways. And that is what the present Government is trying to do.

4.24 p.m.

LORD BROUGHSHANE

My Lords, I will not detain your Lordships for very long because the case put forward in the Motion, as illustrated in the speech of the noble Marquess and other speeches which have been made this afternoon, seems to me to be quite unanswerable. The issue before your Lordships to-day is really a very simple one. There is one matter, at any rate, on which all parties, all classes of the community and all sections of political thought are in agreement. That is the necessity for increased output to enable us to export sufficient goods to pay for essential raw materials and also for the necessary foodstuffs which we are not able to provide ourselves in this country. I call in support of that assertion very many speeches which have recently been made with great urgency by the President of the Board of Trade.

In these circumstances it is difficult to understand the policy of the Government at this moment; and I emphasize the words "at this moment," because I have no desire to urge that the Government should be unmindful of any pledges they gave to the electorate. But I say that it is difficult to understand the policy of the Government in changing at this moment the management of so much that is essential to production. As a result of this change of management, large numbers of persons who would, in the normal way, be employed as workers in the essential industry of the country are being transferred into the Civil Service to administer the various undertakings which are being assumed by the Government. I understand that no less than 4 per cent. of the workers of Great Britain—that is to say one in every twenty-five workers—are now civil servants and concerned in the administration of one or other of the many Government schemes. Industry after industry is crying out for additional labour which, notwithstanding the demobilization of large numbers of men and women, still seems to be short in every kind of employment.

I raised this matter in your Lordships' House as long ago as October 23. I see here to-day the noble Lord, Lord Walkden, who answered me then. I received on that occasion a very full but most unsatisfactory reply. Referring to that reply, I see that I said that from the statistics given (which were rather difficult to understand on the spur of the moment), I gathered that the number of persons in Government employment in the immediate future would be in the neighbourhood of 1,000,000. I gather from the debate to-day and from various statistics that have been submitted that that statement of mine was not beyond the mark, although, on that occasion, my noble friend would not admit it was near the mark.

LORD WALKDEN

May I point out that the question which the noble Lord raised was in respect of clerical employees in His Majesty's Civil Service and was limited to them? The information I gave was strictly correct. Then the noble Lord made the assumption that the number would soon he 1,000,000 and I said we could not agree to that—or words to that effect.

LORD BROUGHSHANE

I also went on to say—which quite rightly the noble Lord disclaimed, saying that it was not within the question—that in addition to this continual rise in the numbers employed in the administration of the Government services, there were also very large increases in the municipal services. He very rightly said that that was no concern of his except as a citizen of the country. I pointed out that, one way or another, production, a matter which we all have at heart, was being interfered with as the result of this wholesale increase in the numbers of non-productive civil servants. As an example of this—and I only heard of it last week—may I tell your Lordships that two very efficient land girls, who had been employed in clerical work prior to their going on the land, in consequence of the high pay now being given to shorthand-typists and other women holding positions as clerks and so forth, recently gave up their land jobs, which they had been performing very satisfactorily, and went into either Government or municipal employment. It just shows how these administrative duties which are being assumed by the Government in larger and larger measure are draining the country of labour which, I suggest, would be far better utilized in the creation of goods or services in order to pay for our imports, or for things which this country cannot produce itself.

Since that occasion I have had brought to my attention an example of the enormous increase in this administrative work. It was pointed out that when the Transport Bill becomes law more than 150,000 C licence holders will require licences to carry their own goods in their own motors should the carriage be over forty miles. Just imagine the forms in that one trifling part of the Transport Bill. Imagine the waste of time that will be caused. The Ministry will have to select the form required for a particular haulage contractor. They will have to find the right form, and will have to make a note that they have sent it to this particular individual. They will also have to make a note of any comments as to whether he is doing, or has done, the work for which he is applying for the licence. Then the form reaches the individual. He has to fill it up, and in any forms which I have seen there is generally at the bottom a quantity of very small print which it is necessary to read. I require my second pair of spectacles to read it. If you do not read it you may be told you have not looked at it; you may be told to fill it up in another way; or you may get it back. There are endless forms, and endless labour, about a trifling object. That is the point of my remarks, and that is the purport of the Motion before your Lordships this afternoon.

Under the Transport Bill, the State 's to become the employer of over 1000,000 people. They will be responsible for the management of railways, shipping, hotels, docks, haulage and many other matters. All these matters are to be under the direct control—assisted by committees, by expensive organizations of various kinds—of the Minister of Transport. I wonder; is there to be found in the country one man who is capable of conducting this work and checking any section which is not pulling its weight? The fact that this is political, or will be political, reduces the scope of he persons from whom selection can by made. In any business concern you can select the best men in the country, but if you have a political organization you are restricted to people holding the views of that political party. My noble friend shakes his head; but I should have thought that it was so. I cannot see the present Minister of Transport selecting, for example, Mr. Churchill or Mr. Eden to administer any branch of the transport services. Therefore you are restricted; you have not the great scope which you would have in a non-political organization.

The same remarks apply to electricity. I need not go into the ramifications of the electrical industry; it is a highly technical industry, with large numbers of subsidiaries of all kinds. That industry will have to be managed through the Civil Service. It was wittily said the other day that the British people cannot live, much less increase their production, simply by taking in each other's forms. There is a great deal of truth in that.

My Lords, I have been led away by the noble Lord, Lord Walkden, shaking his head. That caused me to speak a little longer on one or two matters than I had intended. I am told that the Government themselves are getting alarmed at the ever-continuing increase in the numbers of civil servants and are asking Departments for reports which would enable a curb to be placed on this increase. That is a hopeful sign, because I like people who have made errors to be prepared to rectify them. I can only say that I trust that as a result of their inquiries the Government will deem it advisable to postpone some of their ideological schemes to a more favourable occasion. I do not say leave them alone altogether; merely postpone them to a more favourable occasion, and so allow all classes of the community to concentrate on the increasing production of goods for export and for home consumption which is essential if a national catastrophe is to be averted when the American Loan comes to an end. I would seriously warn the Government to take heed before it is too late, and to remember that no mandate was given by the people of this country for anything which would involve national disaster.

4.37 p.m.

LORD HAWKE

My Lords, the boundary between pest and prophet in your Lordships' House is a narrow one, and in speaking twice on the same subject within a year—and moreover speaking on successive days—I know that I am running a risk. But I am fulfilling a longstanding promise to support the noble Marquess, and I would like to put in a plea for my Civil Service friends with whom I worked for six years. The noble Lord, Lord Charley, was having some debate with the noble Marquess on the question of whether or not there had been a breakdown. He claimed that there had not. I think the question is one of degree. If the noble Lord were to go round the manufacturers of this country I think they would give it as their opinion that there had been something which is almost a breakdown. Where Government Departments have assumed the responsibility for providing raw materials for an industry which they know will need them, and those raw materials do not in fact eventuate, then I maintain that that is something very near a breakdown of the administrative machine.

When I last addressed your Lordships on this subject my theme was that the multiplication of Government agencies inevitably produced a slowing down of Government business. The multiplication which was in progress then, and which has not, I think, slackened, was not the wish or desire of the civil servants themselves but was forced upon them by the policies of the Government, to many of which the civil servants (as individuals) were not particularly sympathetic. I think that in the outcome my remarks have been justified. Business has been deplorably slow and shows no signs of increasing in tempo. I am afraid that that is quite inevitable. I did not then give a mathematical formula of stagnation and it would be an exaggeration to say that business slows down in geometrical proportion to the increase in Government agencies, but it certainly slows down at a far greater rate than mere simple proportion. The Scylla and Charybdis of administration are uncoordinated action and co-ordinated constipation. A reasonably-sized administration can be kept firmly between these two extremes by proper control from the top, but when the administration becomes vast and unwieldy, then it tends to wobble from one of these perils to the other.

Every manufacturer in the country could give instances of uncoordinated action and coordinated constipation. The proper tradition of every efficient administration is, of course, to co-ordinate policy with all its agencies before taking action, and, of course, the Civil Service attempts to do this to-day. It is not only the tradition of proper administration. It is also a matter of expediency. As your Lordships are aware, the administrative handling of any matter can most easily be considered in Parliament. It is, as a general rule, difficult to defend in Parliament uncoordinated action. It is, on the other hand, not nearly so difficult to defend coordinated constipation or complete lack of action, provided there has been the appearance of co-ordination. It is always possible to plead the weather, or say that world forces have been too strong, and it is very difficult for anybody to prove the contrary.

I do not believe that a nation with representative institutions responsible to Parliament has ever attempted to do so much by central Government as we are now trying to do. Other countries may have been more completely administered by their Governments, but they have not had the same responsible institutions. Moreover, in those countries the populace has been used to the most surprising actions by their Government, arising usually from lack of co-ordination. Generally speaking, in fact, it seems that if you must have a really large administration, you cannot reconcile representative institutions with coordinated action. You will almost inevitably get coordinated constipation and less often uncoordinated action. It is useless to blame the Civil Service for this. They are only obeying orders and trying to reconcile the irreconcilable. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Dement, who came to very much the same conclusions. It is Government policies which are to blame. These policies envisage such wide control of all the activities of the nation that I doubt whether even the most ruthless tyrant, responsible to no one but himself, could put them into force without grave loss of efficiency. Any Civil Service responsible to Parliament certainly cannot do so, and in the attempt we are tied in knots of frustration.

The Civil Service suffers much in the process. The head is called upon to do the impossible in taking over ever-growing burdens; the middle is harassed by having to co-ordinate more and more subjects with more and more Government agencies, while the tail is acutely short of the typing ladies without which the whole machine cannot function. The administrators are helpless without the means of putting their words on paper. Apropos of this problem, I was told some months ago of one of the smaller Government Departments which complained to the Treasury that they had not enough typists and that it took up to eleven days to type their letters. The reply came back:" You are lucky. Ours take up to thirteen days." I do not altogether believe that answer. I suspect it to be the stock Treasury reply to unfortunate Departments, but, nevertheless, there is an acute shortage of typists," and I am a little doubtful in my own mind whether perhaps the shortage of these ladies is not one of our main bulwarks of liberty at this moment. I am afraid that the Government are quite incorrigible in the spate of highly controversial legislation; but it is galling to think of the very many measures which one would regard as the more proper province of the Government which are unable to find a proper place in the programme. I certainly believe that years could be spent in repeal, revision, and consolidation, and, in the result, we should have fewer laws, and the need for a smaller Civil Service. There is no hope of obtaining this so long as the spate of vast new legislative products continues and forces the Civil Service to sprawl in all directions.

4.45 p.m.

LORD SCHUSTER

My Lords, your Lordships are always extremely indulgent to anyone who makes his maiden spech, and I think I have some right to claim a special measure of indulgence. Most noble Lords when they make their maiden speeches here have previously learnt the art of oratory in another place, or perhaps from a professorial chair. I, on the other hand, for nearly fifty years have been paid to hold my tongue, and although the reward was inadequate the obligation was peremptory. I claim indulgence also on another ground. No one could have served your Lordships, as in a sense I have done for such a space of years, without acquiring a very great respect for your Lordships, and for the customs of this House, and being interpenetrated by a sense of awe in at last making a speech other than the speech which I have so often made from that Table, which was, in fact, written for me by somebody else, and consisted of only a few words. Perhaps in those circumstances it would have been better if I had not spoken at all to-night.

In a foreign land, dealing with the troubles of a country almost as troubled as this country, I have solaced my weary hours sometimes by reading Hansard, and I have noticed that the custom has grown up in this House of referring to ten minutes to five in the afternoon as "this late hour." Therefore, I feel a certain shame in detaining your Lordships still further, and that all the more so because what I am going to say cannot be very agreeable to any of those to whom I am speaking. I have been (I am sorry for this autobiographical detail) as I have already suggested, a civil servant for nearly fifty years, a much longer space of time, I should think, than that occupied by anybody else now living and in receipt of a salary; not only that, but I have become very old, and, no doubt, have acquired the habits of mind which one does acquire if one spends fifty years in one occupation. That might have kept me silent. But, on the other hand, it has forced upon me, as I thought, the necessity for speech.

For a very long time I have been accustomed, from time to time, to hear people here and to read of people in another place attacking the Civil Service as an institution, and attacking, by inference, particular civil servants for their personalities. No one has done that to-night, and therefore it is unnecessary for me to defend the Civil Service or civil servants as a whole. Everybody has agreed that, as a class, they are intelligent, honest, and zealous, and to that I should like to add that for nearly the last two years I have been engaged in a conflict, which was sometimes friendly and sometimes hostile, with civil servants from other lands. While nobody would attack their intelligence or their honesty, there can be no doubt that the Civil Service of this country comes far better equipped to the tasks with which it has to deal than the civil servants who are sent out from other countries. That claim I make quite boldly and I care not who contradicts it.

There is, however, another side to it. During all those years I have seen the growth of the Civil Service. I think it took its spring very largely from the magnificent personality of Sir Robert Morant breathing the breath of life into a somewhat rigid machine, and it went on continually increasing in zeal and efficiency up to the outbreak of war. Shortly before that it was greatly strained by the necessity of bringing into force the National Insurance Act. The team that brought that Act into operation was the finest that ever has been or ever will be engaged on such a task. Then came the war and that again imposed a strain. And the years between the wars, which one noble Lord from the Benches opposite referred to as years of frustration, were at least years of great difficulty. You must not think of the civil servant during those years as frustrated in any way. He knew that his task was all but impossible; he knew that many of the burdens placed on his shoulders could not be carried to their destination with grace or with a sense of pleasure, but he worked very hard. The trouble was that as the tasks increased the number of men fit to perform the tasks did not increase. Many had died in the 1914–18 war, and many others had gone through the war and come out strained and unfit to bear further burdens. Then came the final blow of the war through which we have, I suppose, just passed, though we have not passed through it technically, and I doubt whether we have passed through it effectively.

Unquestionably, to my mind, the Civil Service as a whole at this moment is not so effective a service as it was in 1914. Yet it has to bear a far heavier load and to discharge many tasks which are foreign to its organization and foreign to the experience of those who conduct it. I am very sorry, if I may humbly say so, that in the course of this debate there was always a tendency to slip into politics—it can hardly be avoided—and to regard it, as my noble friend the Marquess of Reading said, as a political attack on the Government or a political attack on what are called the Government's ideologies. I do not think it ought to be looked upon like that. We cannot tell how much longer the country will, whichever way you like to put it endure or welcome the presence of this Government, but, whether it does or does not, what has happened during these last years will mean that a very great burden has got to be discharged somehow, and the means which are now used to discharge it axe not effective for the purpose.

I do not mean that the Civil Service is not effective for the purpose, although I have already said it is not as effective as it was. It is not possible from the reservoir of strength which we now possess to recruit sufficient people fit to bear the responsibilities and discharge the burdens which lie before us. That seems to me to be a matter which has got to be treated not as a political matter at all, and not as a matter involving any ideology or casting discredit on one or giving credit to the other party. I do not know how it is to be done. The noble Marquess, Lord Reading, said that whatever inquiry was to be made into the existing state of things must be from without. There I differ from him with very great vigour. I remember the Geddes Committee—I am not going to say what the noble Lord opposite thinks I am going to say. In a sense it was effective, and I had some dealings with it. But I should have thought myself even more unfit to hold my post than my great master thought me if I had not been allowed freedom of action. That, I think, is true of every permanent secretary of a Government Department. He knows far better than any outside committee can possibly know where are the weaknesses. He may not know how to cure them; he may know how to cure them but yet be unable to reach the means which he knows are necessary. Outside intervention by an uninstructed committee is not going to cure it.

That is all I have to say, and it may not be very helpful. Coming back like this, I did not think I could keep quite silent while these problems which have engaged my whole energies for so many years were discussed. I did not think I should be doing justice to the memory of my many friends who have lived, worked and given their lives to the service of the country in the Civil Service, if I did not rise to say what I thought. I did not think that I should be doing justice to those who are, working now if I did not take the noble Marquess, Lord Reading's view of the situation rather than that of the noble Lord, Lord Chorley. It is a desperate situation. I do not know where the men and women are coming from. When we talk about the typewriting young ladies, I would like here to put in a special word for them. I would like, at least, to prevail over the Treasury's view of this matter. The typewriting young ladies are insufficient in numbers because they are insufficiently paid, and until there is a properly paid service in which these women receive the money to which they are entitled for the services which they render there will be one further obstacle to the discharge of the duties of the Civil Service. It is not the whole matter, but it is a matter which can be examined and put right.

I have one last very unpleasant word, and I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Pakenham, is not here to hear it. I have tried to sketch in very broad terms the evolution of the Civil Service during my experience. I would like now to turn for a moment to the evolution of the Treasury and the Treasury spirit as I have seen it for many years from about 1912 onwards. The Treasury began with a different view, and in the Treasury there prevailed a different atmosphere from that which I encountered when I first entered the Service. The bleak, cold wind which tried to destroy every comfort had ceased to blow, and those there sympathized with the work of the Departments and tried to help them on. It seems to me that in the last few years the thing has swung round again.

I am sorry for continuing on personal experiences, but if one is to speak one must be personal. For the last few years I have been engaged solely in service overseas, and I hope on an official occasion to bring before your Lordships some history of the way that service has been organized and discharged, and to bring the responsibility where it should lie, and that is, I think, partly with the financial side of the War Office and partly with the Treasury. Nobody has a greater admiration, as a civilian who has served for rather more than two years side by side with serving soldiers, for the magnificent manner in which the Army got into the field, reached the fighting line and fought its enemy. No doubt that was due to the War Office. But all the rest of it seems to be going back to the old, rigid views which prevailed forty years ago. If those were views of economy, or views of saving man-power, there would be something to be said for them, but they are not. Dilatoriness, quibbling, the continual raising of a question and not answering it, the writing of letters backwards and forwards, apparently for the sake of writing them—those are the vices of a Civil Service which is not controlled. With the lack of power of leadership and guidance, due to the scarcity of people at the top with experience and knowledge, there is a grave risk that all the great schemes of the noble Lords on those Benches will come to naught. I have talked for much longer than I intended, and, I am sure, much longer than I am entitled to do. I apologise to your Lordships for that and thank you very much indeed for listening to me.

5.01 p.m.

LORD AMMON

My Lords, I am sure it would be your Lordships' wish that I should congratulate the noble Lord who has just spoken. He speaks with the authority of very long experience and as one of our most distinguished public servants. He served for a long time, I believe, in the Lord Chancellor's office as Permanent Secretary. I trust that in the future we shall again have the benefit of his valuable advice. He had no need whatever to apologize for the fact that he had not had a certain amount of training which he alleged others had. One did not discover, as he went on, any of that sense of awe with which he started. Evidently he got one or two things out which had been boiling up for some time, and we are grateful to him. The criticisms he has levelled will, I am sure, be noted. We shall all rejoice to hear the noble Lord again, particularly on the subjects on which he can so well advise this House. I have to apologize to the noble Marquess for the fact that my noble friend Lord Addison is not here to reply to him. I am sorry for that in more senses than one. I wish he were here, because then I would not have to undertake this task. I am sure, however, the noble Marquess and other noble Lords will forgive me for my shortcomings.

There was one phrase in the speech of my noble friend Lord Chorley which was not noticed as much as it should have been but which does indicate the spirit which has largely animated this debate. He said that those who were more conscious of the administrative difficulties were often those who did not very much like the policy with the execution of which the Civil Service was entrusted. I gather that the real concern of the noble Marquess and of noble Lords who have supported him is not with the increase in the numbers of the civil servants but rather with the policy of the Government which has given rise to it. From the interruption and the reply that the noble Marquess made to my friend Lord Chorley, I gather his complaint is the speed at which we are proceeding; he said then it was the time he was concerned with and that he was not very much concerned about the Government withdrawing from their pledges given at die Election. One has to admit right away (and I would not insult the noble Marquess by suggesting that he does not realize it) that if the Government are to proceed with their policy and to put it into effect, it necessarily follows that there will be an increase in the number of civil servants, and I make no apology in that respect. The noble Marquess referred to, among other Departments, the Statistical Department. I gather that that Department is very highly valued by the Civil Service. The noble Lord, Lord Cherwell, bears a very large share of the responsibility for its inception. He was the bead of it at one time and, I believe, the father of it.

THE MARQUESS OF READING

I do not want to interrupt the noble Lord, but I must say that I never said anything about the Statistical Department at all. I talked about the Statistics of Trade Bill, but that is quite a different matter. That concerns a number of Departments.

LORD AMMON

If I have misinterpreted the noble Marquess's remarks, I apologize and withdraw. I gathered that the Statistical Department was one of the Departments to which he was referring, but if I have misunderstood him, then I withdraw. Although my noble friend Lord Shepherd has dealt with this point, I want to join issue not only with the noble Marquess but with other noble Lords, and to question whether civil servants are non-producers in the real sense of the term. They contribute to the flow and organization of our national life. To say that the question of productivity is only to be measured in terms of the amount of manual labour performed or of the quantity of certain articles manufactured is, I suggest, an exaggeration of language and a statement which will not, bear scrutiny.

I want to pass now to some of the points that were raised by the noble Lord, Lord Cherwell. I intend to deal only with the specific points he raised, because on the main issue, the policy of the Government itself, the case has already been presented to your Lordships by my noble friend Lord Chorley. The noble Lord, Lord Cherwell, said we are now in the grip of a bureaucracy and that there is an interference with the life of the citizen which is unprecedented in our history. Is not that bound to be so, having regard to the circumstances and the tunes through which we have just passed, and is it not justified by results? It does not require very much reflection to realize what would have happened had we not had rationing and had we not had a good many restrictions that were put into force in order to ensure the even distribution of goods and the necessities of life and to prevent the trouble that might otherwise have occurred. I venture to say, without fear of contradiction, that had it not been for those rationing schemes and those restrictions there would have been trouble unprecedented in the history of this nation.

The noble Lord mentioned the increase in the staff of the Board of Trade. I find that that increase is mainly, if not wholly, due to the fact that no less than 6,000 civil servants on the raw materials side of the Ministry of Supply were transferred to the Board of Trade. That means there was no net increase so far as the Civil Service was concerned. The noble Lord mentioned one or two matters with regard to the Service itself. I think at this point I might deal with the question raised by the noble Marquess as to what are sub-clericals, minor manipulative staffs and so forth. For his information, perhaps I may say (although I rather think he already knows it) that the sub-clerical grade is a grade inferior to the grade of clerical officer and which carries out the more repetitive duties, such as filing, etc. Then there are shorthand typists and other typists who are engaged in this work. The minor manipulative grades are largely concerned with the Post Office. I spent a good deal of my life in the Post Office and I have looked rather with envy on the improved conditions, hours of work, and so on now as compared with what they were in my day. I doubt whether any noble Lord will object to better conditions, better hours of work, and so forth, being granted to the servants of the State employed in the Post Office, who are carrying out very hard and difficult work. To a large ex-tent the continuance of our national life is largely bound up with the efficient ad-ministration of that particular Service. Sorters, postmen, telephonists, etc., are all included in the Service to which I have referred.

Now I think the noble Lord, Lord Cherwell, also wanted some of the figures, and I can give them to him. Out of all those employed, 282,000 are employed in the Post Office. One has to remember that every time a new Department is started it throws fresh burdens on the Post Office. One has only to think of pensions to mention just on thing, to realize that it must have placed a tremendous burden on the Post Office, and is bound to call for increased services. From my own experience of them they are not likely to be over staffed so that there are people with no work to do.

THE MARQUESS OF READING

May I ask the noble Lord a question on the figure he gave of 280,000? Are those part of the 750,000, or the difference between 750,000 and the 1,000,000 odd?

LORD AMMON

They are part of the 752,000. They are included in that, and that is why I am producing the figures. I do not know whether the noble Lord wishes me to break them up still more, but I think probably the round figures will satisfy him. The noble Lord, Lord Cherwell, raised another question on that point as regards figures which, I am sure, goes further to emphasize the answer I have just given to the noble Marquess. The noble Lord raised the question as to the number of persons employed on what one would call the industrial side. Of the 709,449 already mentioned, no less than 415,505 are industrial workers, which, I venture to think, considerably reduces the criticism on that particular point. One does not expect the noble Lord, Lord Cherwell, of all people, to slip up in any way, and I have never known him to do so yet. However, he stated that there are over 2,000,000 now in the Armed Forces. That is not quite accurate. It is less than 1,500,000. The Prime Minister stated in another place on November 21 that the strength of the Armed Forces at the end of December, 1946, will be about 1,385,000. That is the ultimate figure, and at the moment there are just about 1,800,000 in the Armed Forces.

LORD CHERWELL

May I interrupt the noble Lord for one moment? I think I said that there were nearly 2,000,000 in the Armed Forces. I took my figure from the latest edition of the Digest for September, which I think gave the figure of 1.75 million. Of couse, it is probably less now, but if I had not used the figures coming from the same Digest they would not have been comparative.

LORD AMMON

Of course, nobody questions the noble Lord on that, but what we do want to know just now, is what is the figure of the Civil Service at the present time, and the number of per-sons in the employment of the State. In that connexion they are the actual figures so far as the Armed Forces are concerned.

The noble Lord, Lord Derwent's contribution was mainly concerned with saying that the Government had made its bed and therefore must lie upon it. That, of course, the Government is quite pre_ pared to do, and is not very much disturbed about its slumbers. So far as the noble Lord, Lord Broughshane, is concerned, he took an opportunity of making an early speech on the Transport Bill, which is not yet before your Lordships' House, and I do not think I am called upon in any way to discuss that. But I am rather intrigued at his glimpse into the future and what happens when Departments are set up, as he put it, under political auspices. Unfortunately for him, that is not borne out by the actual facts. He stated that what would happen would be that certain persons of political trends were likely to be appointed. Let me look at some of the people who have recently been appointed. There is Lord Hyndley of the Coal Board, Lord Ashfield of the London Passenger Transport Board, and Sir Arthur Street and Sir Charles Reid are also employed. I do not know, but I certainly would not claim any of them—and I think they would not thank me if I did—as belonging to the same political party as myself. All those people were appointed by this Government, and that fact does indicate that the only concern they have, and which any State Department must have, is to get the very' best men who are available.

LORD BROUGHSHANE

What I said was that the head of this vast industrial department was the Minister, who had these ultimate powers in his hand. Of course he will be assisted by the best people he can obtain throughout the country, many of whom have no politics one way or the other. But what I pointed out was that the head of this vast organization was the Minister of the day, and that the head of a great concern should be the choice of the whole country, whereas in the particular case he must have the same kind of political persuasion.

LORD AMMON

I am sorry but the noble Lord is quite wrong. The Minister is not the head of the Department. He appoints the proper heads to carry it forward and he may be responsible for policy. Another point was raised, I think, by the noble Lord, Lord Hawke, who made some reference to our export trade, and indicated that we could be doing very much more to expedite it.

LORD HAWKE

I do not think I ever mentioned the word "export" in the whole of my speech. I certainly had no intention of mentioning it.

LORD AMMON

I think some reference was made, and if it was not by the noble Lord, then some other noble Lord did raise that question. I would take this opportunity of pointing out that as recently as 1946 the value of our export trade was 117 per cent. of the average in 1938. I suggest that, although it can be argued that the figure in 1939 was not higher than 1938, the increase would of course appear to be more favourable. That is the actual figure and the actual position. I do suggest, having regard to all these difficulties and circumstances, not only here but in the rest of the world, that that is something of which this Government can indeed be proud. When facilities are better, both in the export market and in transport, then we may have even a better story to tell than we have at the present time.

So far as I can tell from my notes I have answered all the specific questions that were put. There is no doubt whatever that there is an increase—and nobody denies it—in the Civil Service. That increase is bound to be more accentuated at this particular time when, as it were, we are clearing up the aftermath of the war, preparing for the future and getting into shape our new organization and new Departments. That is in strict line with the policy of the Government, a policy which was approved, as has already been said, by the electorate. If there is any complaint about the speed with which these things are being done, that is an unusual complaint to be made against the Government. This Government are going forward in the hope that as things improve we shall be ready to meet all the circumstances that might arise, and by that means we shall have civil servants quite competent to carry out their duties. There will be, and there must be, certain reductions when we proceed with the clearing up of the various Departments and we begin to get the machinery running at full speed. The inference we have got to face is this: that you cannot run these Departments without these people coming under the control of the Government, and there seems to me not much point in complaining about that.

Are we too largely staffed for the work we have to do? That is the only question this House is called upon to consider at the present time. A large number of the staff can be accounted for by one or the other of the Departments that are in close touch with the people themselves. They are all of vital importance to the smooth running of the machinery of Government and, therefore, their number would probably have to be increased in any circumstances. I venture to say that had the various organizations of limitation and direction not been set up by this Government, then, indeed, we should have a very sorry tale to tell now. We have no apology to make for this. Housing, food and a number of other things that will readily occur to your Lordships' minds, have called for a large increase in the number of our civil servants. Some of these will pass out when we get the proper machinery set up and the need for these restrictions passes away. Therefore, in that respect, I hope that, having endeavoured to answer the questions, I have given satisfaction to noble Lords. At least they will see that there is a case to put forward on behalf of the Government.

5.22 p.m.

THE MARQUESS OF READING

My Lords, I am very grateful to those noble Lords who have given me their support on this Motion. Perhaps I may be allowed to say I am particularly appreciative o1 the participation by Lord Schuster, with his very great experience on these particular matters, in a debate which I had the privilege to institute. I am equally grateful to the Government for having discharged two barrels in our direction on this particular subject. I did not think it was necessary to go over the ground again of pointing out to the Government that the case we were making was not to urge them to give up the whole of their programme indefinitely, but merely to apply to it the test of priority and see whether the country could afford, either in man-power or in money, to implement at the earliest possible moment all the promises which they had made at the Election. It might be very desirable that everybody in this country should have 5,000 a year and a motor car. It might be that at the next Election the party of the noble Lords opposite will put that in their Election address. But even they will have to pause a few months before they can implement that promise, because there would not be the money nor, probably, the motor cars.

What I am suggesting, and I have suggested it before and I shall probably suggest it again, is that they should not be in this overwhelming hurry to try and do everything at the first moment, whether or not the economics of the country—either in wealth or in man-power—can bear the extra load imposed. The noble Lord gave us some figures in the course of his reply which, I am bound to say, I found a little difficulty in understanding. In this Statistical Digest the numbers of non-industrial staff employed in the Civil Service is given on page 15 as 709,000. I am still not clear whether that non-industrial staff includes the Post Office workers or whether it does not. I am still not clear as to what constitutes the difference between the 709,000 and the 1,007,000 which is given as the overall figure at an earlier stage. If the noble Lord has in his mind, or in his hand, the answer to that question I would be quite prepared to give way to him and have it explained.

LORD CHORLEY

If I might answer. The figure in the Statistical Digest is a figure which contains both clerical and industrial civil servants, but in regard to a number of industrial civil servants these have been allocated to other parts of the table with certain other manual workers. Unfortunately it is not a very accurate figure in that sense. The total build-up of the civil servants is 700,000 clerical workers and 400,000 industrial workers, which would come to a figure larger than that shown in the Digest. A section of these industrial civil servants have been transferred to another table. The figure also includes the men employed by the Control Commission and by U.N.R.R.A., so it is rather difficult to explain it.

LORD CHERWELL

As I understand it, about 300,000 of the 1,007,000 are industrial people, the workers at Woolwich and places like that. The 709,000, as I understand it, include the Post Office and all the rest. That was why I could not understand the noble Lord, Lord Ammon, when he said there were 480,000 industrial civil servants included in the 709,000. If that is right, then clearly the Statistical Digest is wrong, because it states specifically that the 709,000 are non-industrial.

LORD AMMON

The noble Marquess asked me a specific question. He asked me if the Post Office workers were included in the 709,000. The answer is Yes."

THE MARQUESS OF READING

If I may ask another question, the answer to it might not be uninteresting. What constitutes the difference between the 700,000 in July—now 750,000—and the 1,007,000 which is given as the number of national Government employees? Who has deducted the 250,000?

LORD AMMON

The answer is, docks and dock-yards and others are also included in it. The figure for all Government industrial workers, docks and so on is 415,515, making a total for both nonindustrial and industrial civil servants of 1,124,954. That was what the noble Marquess asked me for.

THE MARQUESS OF READING

The Post Office workers are regarded as nonindustrial and the others as industrial. There seems to be some other page or column with which the noble Lord, Lord Chorley, was concerned, but perhaps we had better not confuse ourselves still further. I confess that what surprised me a little about the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Ammon, in winding up, was that he said that Lord Chorley in his earlier speech had informed the House as to the Government's policy on the subject. I listened with great attention to the noble Lord, but I think that all he said was that the heads of Departments were taking a hand in the matter.

Looking back to this letter of the Prime Minister in The Times I see that he says that he agrees that the reduction can only be secured by positive measures, and steps have already been taken by the Government with a view to a reduction of numbers. I should have thought that this House had, in the past and to-day, shown sufficient interest in this subject and made an adequately strong case to entitle it to ask—or at least, perhaps, in some degree to justify it in asking—that it should be taken a little into the confidence of the Government and told what these "positive measures," which the Prime Minister says have been taken, in fact are. I should imagine that they are something more than just telling the respective Ministers to chop off a few outlying branches—a little more drastic felling was necessary than, was likely to proceed in that way. But we have not been told, and I must therefore regard the Government reply as, in that way, not a satisfactory reply.

As regards the suggestion I made about an inquiry from outside, in view of what the noble Lord, Lord Schuster, said, with his very great experience, I would personally not pursue my original suggestion. But, at the same time, I do suggest that it should not be left to each individual head of a Department to deal separately with his own Department, and that, if necessary, something in the nature of an authoritative Cabinet Committee with executive powers should be set up within the machine to deal with the very urgent problem that, no doubt, does exist. The debate has, I think, been useful, certainly from the point of view of those on this side of the House who feel strongly on the subject. I cannot regard the Government answer as satisfactory, because they seem with one hand to pat themselves on the back at the prospect of an increased Civil Service, and with the other hand to indicate that steps are being taken to reduce it, and we are left in the dark as to which hand is likely to prevail. In the circumstances, however, I can only ask your Lordships' leave to withdraw my Motion.

Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.