POST OFFICE AND TELEGRAPH (MONEY) BILL (Hansard, 1 December 1953)

THE EARL OF ONSLOW
My Lords, on behalf of my noble friend, Lord De La Warr, who unfortunately has been called away, I beg to move that this Bill be read a second time. The object of the Bill is to enable money to be provided for the development of Post Office services, the actual rate of expenditure in any one year being, of course, subject to Treasury approval. The previous Money Act, which provided for the issue of up to £75 million, received the Royal Assent in July, 1952. As your Lordships will see, the present Bill provides for £125 million, the increase being needed partly because the Post Office programme in the next two years will be higher than in recent years, partly because the capital provision in the Bill is intended to last for a longer period and partly also because of the general increase in price levels.
Of the total amount provided for by the Bill, my noble friend expects to spend £116 million on the development of the telephone service. At present, there are 383,000 people waiting for telephones, as compared with 485,000 people when this Government assumed office, and I hope that the number will be down to 350,000 or 360,000 by the end of the present financial year. If it had not been for the storms in Scotland and the East Coast floods, we should, of course, have been able to do much better. That waiting list has got to come down a 853 great deal further. On the other hand, I must tell you that the size of the waiting list is not the real criterion by which the success of telephone development should be judged. It is not always realised that new applications for telephones come along all the time. In the past quarter alone, over 100,000 fresh applications were received. A year's new demand is, in fact, as large as the present waiting list. Like the Red Queen, we have to run very fast to stay where we are. That is the real measure of our problem and the number of exchange connections provided each year is, in many ways, the real measure of our achievement. This year, we hope to provide 50,000 more exchange connections than we did last year, and the total number supplied this year will be as many as 365,000. The rate of installation is 50 per cent. greater than it was before the war.
We are catching up, though we still have a long way to go. Excluding what we are spending on defence (a little over one-quarter of the total), the figure this year will be about £4 million more than last year. Next year, it will be up by another £5 million, and my noble friend looks forward to a steady improvement—but he emphasises the word "steady". When new exchanges are needed they take a considerable time to provide. Where new cables are needed they also take time, though less than do exchanges. Above all, we must get back to orderly development, instead of the piecemeal development to which we have been driven by the war and the shortages after the war. But, taking all factors into account, with larger financial resources at his disposal, he is looking forward to a progressive stepping up in the number of telephones put in, although the actual waiting list must depend very largely on the rate at which new applications continue to come in.
There is one further point that my noble friend asked me to emphasise. It is, of course, no use putting people on the telephone and then not being able to handle their calls. The number of telephones is now nearly double what it was before the war, and two and a half times as many trunk calls are made. We have therefore, in the first place, to devote some of our additional resources to developing our 854 basic equipment for carrying the constant and ever-increasing traffic. The quality of the trunk service, I think noble Lords will agree, is at present high, and it is my noble friend's earnest intention to keep it so, in view of how much efficient and quick trunk communications mean to the business and industrial community. There are also considerable arrears of building work to be overtaken, not only for telephone exchanges but also for the postal service.
The present Money Bill is required to provide the additional capital needed to finance these important developments in the next two years. That is the broad outline of the intention of this Bill. I do not think it is in any way contentious and I hope that your Lordships will agree with me that this is a suitable and convenient time to pay tribute to the very good work that has been done, and is being done, by the staff' of the Post Office in difficult conditions. I beg to move that this Bill be read a second time.

§ THE EARL OF LUCAN
My Lords, We should be grateful to noble Earl for his remarks in moving the Second Reading of this Bill. Our first reaction is to congratulate the Minister, the Postmaster General, on having secured a larger allocation of capital for the development of his service. We hope that that will be devoted, as he says, to overcoming the arrears of capital works which will enable the telephone service to continue the steady expansion that has marked it ever since the war. This is not the time, your Lordships will agree, for anything like a general review of the work of the Department, but I suggest—and I think many of your Lordships will agree—that there should be a day, in the year which we can devote to a full debate on the subject of the Post Office and a fuller review than is possible at the moment or than that which the noble Earl has given us of the work of the Department. Many things came out in the speech of the Assistant Postmaster General in another place dealing not only with the details of the working of the Post Office but with matters of general policy. So I hope that the Postmaster General will agree that we should have a full debate, with fuller information than we have at the moment. I should like 855 to associate noble Lords on these Benches with the congratulations to the staff of the Post Office on the way in which they have carried out their duties. Subject to what I have said, we agree to, and shall not oppose, the Second Reading of this Bill.

THE EARL OF ONSLOW
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Earl far the way in which he has received this Bill. As he says, the speech with which the Bill was introduced was a short résuméof the Bill itself, and not a discussion of the general workings of the Post Office for the last year. That is what my noble friend intended it to be on this occasion, but he has authorised me to say that he will be only too pleased to have a full debate on the Post Office at a time convenient to your Lordships.