HL Deb 26 June 1952 vol 177 cc508-18

6.12 p.m.

Debate resumed.

EARL DE LA WARR

My Lords, before the adjournment I was saying that there was no immense profit available and that I should be as critical as anyone if there were. I should like to add to that the reaffirmation of what I think one noble Lord said—that cheap communications are essential to trade and industry and, in fact, to national morale. That really brings me to the next point—namely, our increases in charges. The main increase in our Post Office budget is on telephone rentals. That increase is to 50 per cent. above pre-war. I do not know how many of your Lordships are engaged in trade or industry, but I should like to know how many of you are selling goods at only 50 per cent. above pre-war. I regret even that increase most deeply, but I should like to put before your Lordships certain facts and figures to show that it just could not be avoided.

The total increase to the public for the whole Post Office is about £9,500,000. There was also about £8,500,000 last year, imposed by my predecessor. Over the last two years increased costs have amounted to between £49,000,000 and £50,000,000. Wages, salaries and pensions account for £33,000,000 of that, and my own view is that those increases were inevitable unless Post Office workers were to be asked to drag behind increases for other workers. It would have been unjust, and I think it would have made our recruitment position impossible. Perhaps I can give your Lordships two instances of other costs. Poles which used to cost just over 30s. now cost £8 15s. Cable that used to cost £2 12s. now costs £11. The noble Earl, Lord Lucan, mentioned the question of concrete poles, and we have that possibility in mind. Rises just could not be avoided in all the circumstances. But even after our rise of 50 per cent., I think we shall find that we still compare well with charges in other countries. It is fair to make comparisons, because it is the only way in which we can judge our efficiency. I would say to the noble Lord, Lord Barnby, that if we were prepared to have our charges as high as those of other countries we could improve some of the services which he now thinks inadequate. But are the public prepared to pay? There is a good deal of complaint, with which I feel very sympathetic, about even the present rise in charges. If we charged as much as other countries for rentals or trunk calls we could greatly increase our staff, and the whole service would naturally improve. But what would the public say about the cost?

Let me give your Lordships a few comparative figures. After July 1—that is, after we have raised our charges—the charge in Cardiff for a residential telephone, plus 100 free calls, will be £6, and in London it will be £8. Incidentally, there was an interesting letter in the Daily Telegraph this morning asking why there should be differences between London and the Provinces. The answer is very simple. The charge for local calls is 1½d., and in most provincial areas the distance they cover is about five miles. In London it is generally ten miles, and when it is across London it may be up to fifteen miles. Therefore, the Londoner does get infinitely greater value for his rental. We have it, then, that the figure for Cardiff is £6 and the figure for London is £8. What is it in Paris? It is £13 15s.; in Sydney it is £9 12s., and in Wellington it is £13 5s. I have not been able to work out figures on the 100 free calls basis for America, but I have some other figures. In London, for a shared line with just over 700 free local calls, the payment would be £10 7s. and in the United States it would be £17 3s.

You may say: "Yes, but what about a comparison of actual trunk charges?" I should like to give your Lordships some interesting figures there, because I have had them taken out, and I find that not only are we cheaper in rentals but cheaper on our charges for trunk calls. Take, for example, a charge for a call of 50 miles. In Great Britain it is 2s. 3d., in Canada it is 3s. and in the United States 2s. 10½d. For 100 miles the British charge is 3s., the Canadian 4s. 4d. and the United States 3s. 11¼d. For 200 miles our charge is 3s. 9d., the Canadian charge is 8s. 4d. and the United States charge is 5s. 8d. For 300 miles our charge remains at 3s. 9d., because we cannot charge more than 3s. 9d. in this country. Mark you, 300 miles means ringing from London to a little north of Newcastle, shall we say. The Canadian charge for this is 11s. and the United States charge 7s. 2d. I think the noble Lord, Lord Teynham, said that charges in other countries were cheaper. He will forgive me if I say that on that point in his excellent speech he did make a slight mistake.

LORD BARNBY

Would it not be well to remember that the wages paid in Canada and particularly in the United States are about three times what they are in this country?

EARL DE LA WARR

We know that these comparisons are difficult in view of differences of exchange, and naturally we base our figures on the official rates of exchange.

Now we come to the quality of the service. As regards the speed of answer for trunk and toll calls, the last figure that I can give is for March. In March, 1951, the speed of answer on trunk or toll in any part of the country was 10.1 seconds. In March, 1952, it was reduced to 5.6 seconds. Before I assumed office the time it took when one dialled "Trunks" or "Toll" between 6 o'clock and about 8.30 in the evening seemed to me almost scandalous. I cannot give the actual figures of improvement yet, because these figures take some time to calculate; but I never go into a friend's house if he is on a different exchange from mine without dialing and timing the speed of answer. I hope your Lordships will take note of this claim of mine when you are seeking to make a cheap call between six and eight in the evening in London. I am confident that you will find that the improvement has been even more sensational than the difference I have given—that between 10.1 and 5.6 seconds, the overall figures.

There are one or two other points that the noble Lord, Lord Barnby, raised. He complained of the fact that when we ask for a trunk call we are asked to hang on. During the war we went over to the other system, and there were many people who complained about it. It meant a much lower standard of service; it meant a much larger staff. The operator, instead of putting you straight through, had to book the call, get your line and then call you back. The system, which we have gone into very carefully, means increased staff for an inferior service. The noble Lord then suggested cheap Sunday calls. I must say I looked at that with a very friendly eye, as I think other Postmasters General have. But I find that there does not seem to be any public demand for it, and there is no doubt that it would cause considerable staff difficulties. Staff are not anxious to work in increasing numbers on Sundays, and I am sure the noble Lord will agree that unless there were a strong public demand it would not really be justified.

Now I come to a point that is obviously worrying your Lordships as much as it is me, and that is this terrible waiting list. First, I should like to give the noble Earl, Lord Lucan, a full assurance that we certainly are not putting up the charges in the hope of reducing the waiting list. The reasons I have given for putting up the charges are conclusive in themselves. That waiting list is, as the noble Earl said, somewhere in the neighbourhood of 500,000—actually 480,000. It is about 50,000 less than last year, but there are new demands all the time, You may put in 100,000 or more new telephones and find that you are in exactly the same position as before, with the waiting list no smaller. I can at any rate give the noble Earl this encouragement. My honourable friend the Assistant Postmaster-General gave recently in another place the figure of 100,000 new telephones this year. We have looked at that again and I hope and believe that we can get it up to 150,000. This is a net increase, in that it does not include 100,000 or possibly 200,000 transfers caused by people changing their addresses, and so on.

The position in which we find ourselves at the moment should be a lesson to us all. What has happened is that the expansion since the war has been very great. There are two and a quarter times as many trunk calls being made as before the war. There are 2,000,000 more telephones than before the war. What I think has to some extent been happening—and this is no criticism: it is just the difficulty caused by control over capital expenditure, which affects so many things—is that there has not been a long-term policy in the provision of fundamental equipment, such as exchange equipment. Meantime, more and more people have been put on the telephone, and nearly all our resources have been eaten up.

There is another lesson, and this concerns not only equipment but the long-term policy which enables one to provide these needs on a balanced basis. I find I have a considerable amount of cable that could be used for connecting new subscribers—but frequently in areas where there is no spare exchange equipment. At the same time I have spare exchange equipment, but, all too frequently, in areas where I have not got the cable. That is the lesson which it is my duty to impress upon my colleagues to the greatest extent possible. We are bound to get that lack of balance when we are driven to work on a day-to-day basis. There have been shortages of money and of materials; and when we have been able to get hold of anything, cable or equipment, it has all gone in. That is not what we want for a properly developed telephone service. Sometimes we find that there are perhaps only a few people in a street who want to be connected; the street is not developed; and it would be necessary to take individual lines to each one from a point a long way away. But if cables can be taken down a street which is to be developed and the houses connected to points on this cable route, that is much better.

And there is something else, even more important. We must keep up the development of the main trunk system all the time. It is no good putting more and more people on the telephone and thereby cluttering up the lines, if this would lead only to a worse trunk service. Unless we get our development going and a balanced basis there is bound to be a hold-up in the comparatively near future. Therefore I ask noble Lords, when they judge the efforts of the Post Office Telephone Service, not to judge it only by those people who have been actually connected. The most important work has to go on behind the scenes, and underground, and in the exchange buildings. There is one other point—that of priorities.

THE EARL OF LUCAN

For new exchanges.

EARL DE LA WARR

I thought that the noble Earl meant priority for individual applicants. I shall certainly see that I let him have this information. But priority does not always settle the question. It is very important to get this fact over to the public, because so often people think that injustice is being done. They hear of a neighbour going on the telephone who they think has not very much of a claim, while they have been waiting for two or three years. They may be in a priority class whilst the neighbour may not be in a priority class. The answer is that we may have spare line equipment going down one street but not the other; and it may be that the priority person is living in a street where there is not a line to spare. I wanted to make that point clear.

LORD HAWKE

This is a very important point in public relations for the consumer. Will the noble Earl take steps to give it a little more publicity? The consumer cannot understand the state of affairs in which a person in one street can get on the telephone while another in the next cannot. It is a matter of public relations.

EARL DE LA WARR

We have been able to get it over more effectually in the provinces than in London. These are technical points. They do not always interest the Press a great deal. If I go to the provinces and make a speech I can get very good publicity for what I say, but in London there are many other things interesting the national Press, and it is not always easy to get this point publicised. It is most difficult to get it over to the public. Yet there is often a deep sense of injustice.

In the meantime, we are adopting a number of expedients. I refuse to think of them as anything more than expedients, important though they are. The noble Earl, Lord Lucan, referred to perhaps the most important—that is, the shared line. He is quite right in saying that there is much less public objection to that system now than there was, for the simple reason that there are now 490,000 people (that is, just under half a million people) on shared service. They are finding it very much less tiresome than they thought it would be; but of course one instinctively has the feeling that it is an invasion of one's privacy. People resent it, and I sympathise considerably with that feeling. On the other hand we have been able to put well over 200,000 more people on the telephone than we should have been able to without this system. We have separate meters now, so we do not get quarrels about the bills. There are also separate ringing arrangements so that each party to the shared line—there are never more than two—is rung only for his own calls. Therefore, public objection is getting weaker and weaker all the time.

There is another service, which I admit I myself have rather "pushed," not because it is very attractive, but because we must look for every point which will help: I refer to the "restricted" service. There are a limited number of exchanges (Oxford is one of them; that is where I first came to grips with the problem) where this service is in operation. I was told that there was enough underground cable to allow more people to be put on the telephone, and enough exchange equipment, but that there was no capacity at the switchboard for dealing with more calls during the peak hours—that is, from half-past nine to half-past eleven and from half-past two to four o'clock—when all the business people make their telephone calls. We have said: "If you are prepared to go on the telephone subject to not being allowed to use the telephone for trunk or toll calls during those hours, we can put you on." It is admittedly second-best, but it enables people to do their shopping by telephone, to call the doctor and to have conversations with their neighbours. Then they can get their trunk calls outside the busy hours.

There is one other device that I should mention. I am trying to help the farmers in the remote areas with another admittedly limited scheme. To put farmers, particularly those in some of these outlying areas, on to the telephone is a very difficult problem for the Post Office, owing to the amount of wire, poles and labour so often required. There are a great many farmers who are so far from the nearest exchange that we shall be unable, with our limited resources, to provide telephones for them for a very long time to come. But I am anxious to meet their needs wherever we can. Therefore, I propose to introduce a scheme of self-help, under which the farmer will be able to lay and maintain his own line from his farm to connect up with the nearest point on the existing Post Office pole route leading to the exchange. The farmer will buy insulated wire of approved standard from the Post Office and will be given a rebate of rental, based on the length of line he provides. The Post Office will be ready to give him full advice on methods of laying and securing the line. The scheme will be useful to farmers for whom there is spare exchange equipment and a spare line to the end of the Post Office pole route. The scheme has been discussed with the National Farmers' Union who recognise, as I have told your Lordships, that it is limited in scope, but I think they welcome it for trial in individual cases. I want to make it clear that this is not intended to be a substitute for putting as many farmers as possible on the telephone by normal methods. It is an addition, not a substitute.

I have mentioned those three devices because I want to convince your Lordships that we are trying in every way to meet the difficult situation with which we are faced. We must try to get a human picture in our minds of the housewife, perhaps living on the outskirts of a town, having to tramp off to do her shopping when she might be doing it by telephone; of someone being unable to get the doctor, or of the farmer forced to leave his farm to do his marketing, when he ought to be on the farm doing his farm work, or unable to get labour because he lives in an isolated area.

I come now to a point raised, I think, by the noble Lord, Lord Sempill—that is, the question of future technical developments. This I will deal with briefly, because time is getting on. Before the war it needed two pairs of wires between, say, London and Birmingham to conduct a speech in each direction. Even before the war, by means of what we call "repeaters" (I shall not attempt to explain "repeaters" to your Lordships for I do not really understand them myself, and I am quite sure that your Lordships would not either) it was possible to multiply the conversations on those same pairs of wires by twelve. With coaxial cable plus repeaters, we have been able to take up to 600 conversations on one coaxial tube. It is hoped in the near future to increase that number to 960. This device has immensely reduced costs and has been a great saving on ducts and cables.

The noble Lord mentioned the possibility of radio relay links where no ducts or cables exist. Already we have made considerable development in this direction and the television network may be not a competitor but a help to us in working along those lines. We are also developing long-distance dialling for trunk purposes by operators; and those in London and all the main provincial trunk centres are now able to dial into houses in our great provincial centres, say from London to Manchester, or from Cardiff to Liverpool. They dial straight into the house. It is a great speeding-up of service and a great saving of staff. There is no real technical reason why we should not dial trunk numbers from our own houses to other people's houses. It would mean immense engineering work and equipment, and my own opinion, and I am sure that of your Lordships, is that we must put first things first and accommodate these unfortunate people who are still waiting for telephones.

The noble Lord, Lord Sempill, mentioned the question of electronic exchanges. My advice is to the effect that they are some way ahead. But let me assure him that there is no question of the scientists and experts being held back by the Postmaster General. It is the other way round, in that the Postmaster General, who does not understand the technical difficulties, is continually bothering the scientists and experts as to when they are likely to be ready to proceed. Quite naturally, and rightly, they say that they feel they need more information than is available at present. I can assure your Lordships that we are in no way behind other countries in this development. We are in fact in the closest touch with all other countries in regard to their research work in this field. I have myself seen the work at Dollis Hill, where we are making great progress. Not only is there a small model of an electronic exchange at Dollis Hill, but at the moment we have in operation at the Richmond exchange a number of directors for steering calls to the exchange required. But that is on a very small scale, and reluctantly I am convinced that we cannot go faster than we are doing at the moment. The advantages of the system are obvious. It will mean a great saving in building, in that the weight of the present exchange equipment is so colossal that we need a very large amount of steel for it.

My Lords let me, in conclusion, come back to the main problem. I warned your Lordships that I should be long, but I felt that I must say some of these things. The position is serious, but I do not believe that it is yet too late to avoid a breakdown. We are handicapped by defence requirements and by the shortage of capital and materials, and we have to fight for the limited amount of what is available. But other public services are being cut too. I can assure your Lord-ships that the Government see this particular problem as affecting a vital part of the capital equipment of this country. Communications are not a luxury. In answer to a question raised by the noble Earl, Lord Lucan, we are concentrating our building efforts this year on completing existing buildings, and the new work that we are doing is mainly on extensions; but I am confident that we shall be able to start new building next year. I have also been able to come to an arrangement with my right honourable friend at the Ministry of Works whereby we can forgo the usual rule that his architects cannot prepare plans for new buildings until financial approval has been given. Therefore, I hope that I shall actually have my plans ready, and that may save anything between six and twelve months.

My Lords, in the difficult economic times in which we live, the efficiency of trade and industry is the only real solution to our present dilemma. We believe that telecommunications are an essential factor in that efficiency, and I want to assure your Lordships that the Post Office is being regarded and treated as essential national equipment. Finally, because I believe that it is almost the most important thing that I can say, I want to close by repeating that the Post Office must never be used as an instrument of taxation. I am justified in saying this by the fact that to-day I have the lowest expected surplus that there has been, with the exception of one year, since 1927.

6.44 p.m.

LORD TEYNHAM

My Lords, I think your Lordships will agree that this debate has been a useful one. It has certainly covered the telephone services very thoroughly, and there is no doubt that a great deal can be done to improve them. I should like to congratulate the Postmaster General on the points he has put before us. I think the proposed farmers' service and also the restricted telephone service—of which I had never heard before—are excellent. I am certainly pleased to hear that Her Majesty's Government intend to bring back the cash basis for payment of telephone services in certain Government Departments. I cannot help feeling that in the end that will be of great assistance. I should like to thank the noble Earl for his helpful and informative speech, and I beg leave to withdraw my Motion.

Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.